Illegal Immigration: Which is a fairer statement?

[Yollam]

Illegal Immigration: Which is a fairer statement?

[laureloak]

1. None of the above.

[Che_Nuevara]

2. "All generalizations are bad."

I didn't vote. I didn't like the question.

[Yollam]

3. The third choice is not a generalization.

IMO

[Che_Nuevara]

6. No, it's not, but

the two statements above it are so incredibly slanted that, in my opinion, they invalidate any reasonable discussion of the subject.

[Yollam]

7. Exactly - that's my point.

I was shocked when a poster here told me that I was allied with nazi filth because I believe in the border. I said that a comparable argument from my side would be the second choice, but both of them are exactly as you describe - totally unreasonable.

[Che_Nuevara]

8. I'm not sure that a poll was the proper way

to go about proving your point.

[Yollam]

11. Actually, I was tempted to only use the first two choices.

...Since that's the two corners our media culture forces us into, but as framed by the media, the choices are:

1. Get the damn dirty illegals out
2. I don't care about America, let the country be overrun.



The framing on all sides is just shitty.

[sam sarrha]

13. that is because you have reduced it to a Moral issue and i cant debate it.

when you moralize you deny my input, and all generalizations are not untrue.

[Che_Nuevara]

15. It's funny, get it?

Because the statement "All generalizations are bad" is a generalization.

[sam sarrha]

18. i covered that below, calling my view a generalisation to invalidate me is

denys my view, it is cheap and Rovish

[Che_Nuevara]

20. I didn't.

I was poking fun at the poll, not at anyone who answered it.

[zonmoy]

4. could it be that both statements have at least a grain of truth.

[Yollam]

5. (Insert Dictator's Name)'s rhetoric probably had a "grain of truth" in it.

The question is whether the statements are fair.

The top two are not, IMO.

[Che_Nuevara]

10. Which part of his rhetoric?

The part about the rebirth of the Aryan (a real people) nation?
The "Lebensraum" talks?
The impurity of 'modern' Germany?
His anti-Marxist politics?
Naitonal Socialism as a philosophy?


I fricking hate it when people namedrop Hitler without saying anything. It's the #1 sign of a weak / lack of argument.

[Yollam]

14. I don't know - maybe that he got the trains running on time...

...even the worst propaganda usually has a grain of truth in it. It wouldn't resonate with anyone if it didn't.

That's all I'm saying. It doesn't matter if it was Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao or Bush. There's always a "grain of truth". That doesn't mean it isn't BS.

[Che_Nuevara]

19. The "What about all the good things Hitler did?" argument

doesn't really work, because, well, he really didn't do anything good. He didn't revolutionalize transportation in his country, like Mussolini did, he didn't consolidate economic power, like Stalin did, and he didn't integrate modern political conditions with a traditional lifestyle, like Ho Chi Min did.

Adolf Hitler is the #1 person who comes to mind when I think of the sentence "Name a person who only ever did bad things." Even the war mobilization that raised the economy out of its depression wasn't his idea: it was mostly on account of Eichmann. Eichmann, by the way, was brilliant; evil, but brialliant. Hitler was just plain evil.

The "German trains running on time" stereotype is thanks to the organizational technique of Otto von Bismarck. Regularity was his shtick. Got nothing to do with Hitler. Of course, German engineering isn't really as brilliant as everyone thinks it is (for reference, see the Schlieffen Plan). Take it from someone who lives in Germany.

My personal philosophy is based on the Rule of H-to-Oh: The closer to a Hitler comparison an argument gets, the more likely it is that the comparer has no actual argument.

[Yollam]

23. The point is not about Hitler.

THe point is that all rhetoric has a grain of truth.

I'm not comparing anyone to Hitler.

I removed his name - it's irrelevant.

[Che_Nuevara]

25. Yes, it is.

The dictator you choose IS relevant.

If you choose, Hitler, then you're building a house of cards inside a house of mirrors, and the rhetoric doesn't mean a damned thing.

If you choose Castro, then you're choosing a man who had no idea, but who had one of the most brilliant revolutionary advisors in modern history (Che Guevara). He had no idea what the rhetoric ACTUALLY meant, but he repeated what he thought he heard, and thereby f'cked it up majory -- but there was MORE than a tiny grain of sense in kernel of the idea.

If you deconstruct any rhetoric, you can find things that, in some interpretation, can appear reasonable to the ordinary person. That doesn't mean jack.

[Yollam]

26. Ahem.

"If you deconstruct any rhetoric, you can find things that, in some interpretation, can appear reasonable to the ordinary person. That doesn't mean jack."


That is all I was trying to say.


Yes, there are racists who want to clamp down on the border, and yes, there are oligarch pricks who want more illegals brought in for slave labor.

But the vast majority of people on either side are not like this and it's contemptible to say that they are.

[Che_Nuevara]

29. If that was all you were trying to say,

then why didn't you bring in a dictator whose rhetoric was malleable to reasonable ends? Hitler is, in my opinion (as a scholar of modern European history) the #1 LEAST sympathetic leader there is; i.e., the leader whose rhetoric is least able to be interpreted as reasonable.

It's funny to me that both your "racist" and "slave labor" opinons both smack of leftist stereotypes of the right. Why didn't you inlcude any options that were "booby-trapped" for leftist thinkers? (That's not a slander term, by the way: I consider myself a "leftist thinker".)

Your claim that "the vast majority of people ... are not like this" only proves further that this whole business in this thread is set up to say "Hey - my opinion is right!" There should have been no survey attached to this thread.

[IselaB]

9. I think you forgot the most obvious option

"Something nobody should be terribly concerned with when the fucking government is setting fire to the US Constitution right before our fucking eyes."

[sam sarrha]

16. and creating a divisive moral wedge to distract the Fascist takeover

[MazeRat7]

12. Option3: Both are insulting and dishonest.

They both reflect a lack of understanding for the depth and width of the issue.

edit: changed subject line to not skewer those that support option 1 or 2. You know.. play nice and all that.....

MZr7

[Che_Nuevara]

17. Where's option 4?

"This poll is a ruse, created not to garner opinions but simply to prove a point"?

[MazeRat7]

21. How about options 4-10 ?

I dont know what option 4 is since I didn't post the poll. Do you have a suggestion ? Certainly I could have come up with at least 6 more options all of which would be flawed. Why? Because this is not a binary situation. Its not thing A vs thing B. Its a complex, multi-dimensional problem that deals with the human condition, economics, and politics. Gez... people have written PhD dissertations on such topics and we are trying to discuss this in a web based message board poll... HA!!!! The liquor must be flowing tonight.

MZr7

[Che_Nuevara]

22. That was my point.

And I suggested an answer #4 in the body of my post. The quoted text for an answer was:


"This poll is a ruse, created not to garner opinions but simply to prove a point"

[Yollam]

24. Hardly a ruse.

It measures how many people actually hold these extremist opinions.

I was hoping that the results would more heavily favor the last choice.

If I'm trying to prove a point, it's that calling people you disagree with "nazis" or "corporate tools" is pretty sleazy, especially if you are ostensibly on the same side, politically.

[Che_Nuevara]

27. It doesn't measure crap.

No DU poll accurately measures anything. Period.

And your second sentence beginning with "I was hoping that the results ..." only reinforces my claim that it is a ruse. IE, it is a poll with a single intended result, not in the interest of actual discovery.

[Yollam]

28. Can't argue with you there.

If DU polls were accurate, Dean would have been our nominee in '04...


But that doesn't make it a "ruse".

"only reinforces my claim that it is a ruse. IE, it is a poll with a single intended result, not in the interest of actual discovery."

That would apply to the majority of polls posted here, IMO.

[Che_Nuevara]

30. I agree.

Unforunately, I can only be actively watching DU a very limited percent of time to say "your survey is crap".