Non-IT News Thread
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@art_of_shred said:
One point here, that is foundational. I am an American citizen. I am NOT a global citizen.
Huh? How is that? You are a citizen of NY, that does not make you less American. How does being American make you less of an Earthling?
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So, I hear there's a Super-Bowl gonna happen, or something. I've got my money on Buffalo! ...not to be there.
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@dafyre said:
I personally think that if they come over here, then they should be offered the help they need to secure a future for themselves. I believe that they should be integrated into our society. However, they should integrate with OUR society and not try to force us to adopt their theocracy.
Sure, but our society is religion neutral. How many come over and try to force their religion on us? Any? One or two? More than we've done to them? I totally agree, they should want to integrate - but they have been. There hasn't been any issue with this yet.
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@dafyre said:
How many times does it take before we say enough is enough? How many times is too many?
Depends, enough that it is not us causing the problems, that's one way to look at it.
But more importantly it is, from a safety perspective alone, is when the risk of taking them is greater than the risk of not taking them. Which from what we've seen so far, is a huge number. The risk of turning them away to Americans is dramatically higher than the risk of taking them in. The safest move is to accept them. As long as that fact is true, no number is too many. It's like asking "how safe do you want to be?" The answer is, "As safe as possible."
From both a "how do we protect Americans" and "how do we protect people" perspectives, I believe that the answer is the same: accepting, helping and integrating protects the most Americans AND the most refugees. It is a win/win.
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One important point is that we are talking about Syrian refugees here and Syria is not, say, China. Even if the US took the entire country it would be a drop in the population bucket. So even taking all Syrians, not just refugees, the number would not be something the US could not rapidly absorb and Europe, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, Canada have been taking them too. So the "Max" number is still small, even if we talked about taking them all.
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I'm honestly surprised that, other than Delaware, rust bucket states are not clamoring to get the refugees, NY especially. Educated, thankful workforce ready to accept federal aid dollars and fill empty houses. Many northeastern states could benefit greatly from the influx, especially NY which has the "refugee city" already in it ready with a pipeline to get people from refugee status into the workforce with a huge success rate. NY knows what it is doing, although Syrians are far more educated than the normal refugees that are taken in so that presents a challenge to some degree, but a small one.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@dafyre said:
How many times does it take before we say enough is enough? How many times is too many?
Depends, enough that it is not us causing the problems, that's one way to look at it.
But more importantly it is, from a safety perspective alone, is when the risk of taking them is greater than the risk of not taking them. Which from what we've seen so far, is a huge number. The risk of turning them away to Americans is dramatically higher than the risk of taking them in. The safest move is to accept them. As long as that fact is true, no number is too many. It's like asking "how safe do you want to be?" The answer is, "As safe as possible."
From both a "how do we protect Americans" and "how do we protect people" perspectives, I believe that the answer is the same: accepting, helping and integrating protects the most Americans AND the most refugees. It is a win/win.
Wrong. It's not a mathematical equation.
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@art_of_shred said:
Wrong. It's not a mathematical equation.
Why not? More safety good, less safety bad? More is better than less. What makes it not an equation?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@art_of_shred said:
Wrong. It's not a mathematical equation.
Why not? More safety good, less safety bad? More is better than less. What makes it not an equation?
Because geopolitics does not boil down to simple math.
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@art_of_shred said:
Because geopolitics does not boil down to simple math.
Of course not, but we are talking about a pretty simple question: when does taking people in become bad?
And the answer, if the only factor you care about is the safety of American lives, is very simple math. No way around that that I can see. How do you reduce that number? Statistically, by taking in more and more refugees.
Of course there has to be a cap number to that, a billion is far too many. Which is why I pointed out that I felt that the potential number if very small compared to the theoretical cap number. Syria has a total of 17m people. Only a fraction of which can be refugees. Millions of which have already been absorbed elsewhere. Leaving relatively few for any one country to take.
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@scottalanmiller said:
It's like asking "how safe do you want to be?" The answer is, "As safe as possible."
That is never my answer. I am unwilling to give up my freedom to be safe. So again, no, no where near as safe as possible.
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I find myself very much on the fence on this discussion. I definitely don't want suicide bombers sneaking with with the refugees, but at the same time we have home grown versions right here. So I have to consider what is more likely - bombers coming from there, or being grown here?
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@Dashrender said:
I find myself very much on the fence on this discussion.
Helping thousands of people create new lives here and contribute to our culture >> danger.
What's to think about here, really?
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All of this is a silly discussion, what we need to talk about is how to best integrate them into our society and how many we can take in per unit of time.
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@MattSpeller said:
@Dashrender said:
I find myself very much on the fence on this discussion.
Helping thousands of people create new lives here and contribute to our culture >> danger.
What's to think about here, really?
Having thousands of new mouths to feed, jobs to find for them, etc. and those are the easy to pick things.
Integration, acceptance by those who they are forced upon, healthcare, etc...
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@Dashrender said:
I find myself very much on the fence on this discussion. I definitely don't want suicide bombers sneaking with with the refugees, but at the same time we have home grown versions right here. So I have to consider what is more likely - bombers coming from there, or being grown here?
As much as this does not support my personal pro-refugee stance, I don't think that the "chances" of one or the other mattes unless we believe that one modifies the other. For example, if there are 1,000 bombers already here and we import 1,000 more.... the only part that really matters is that the action adds 1,000, right? Sure we'd love to depart the ones we don't know about that are here, that's a given.
But I think the number that are here is a red herring. Unless bringing them in from the outside changes how many are here already, in which case does it modify it up or down?
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@Dashrender Your whole country was founded to do this. What's the plaque on the statue of liberty say again?
What if they were Irish Catholics and Protestants who were seeking refuge. They were busy for YEARS, no DECADES! blowing up each others children, torturing people with power tools and generally being really horrific.
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@MattSpeller said:
All of this is a silly discussion, what we need to talk about is how to best integrate them into our society and how many we can take in per unit of time.
I don't know, in the US we are still deciding if we will take them. Having a plan for integration is pointless if we don't take them.
In Canada where you are definitely taking them you need to figure out how to best integrate them and how to curtail racial violence beginning to spring up in Toronto.
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@MattSpeller said:
@Dashrender Your whole country was founded to do this. What's the plaque on the statue of liberty say again?
Well we were founded to avoid paying our share of war costs from the French and Indian Wars.
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@scottalanmiller said:
In Canada where you are definitely taking them you need to figure out how to best integrate them and how to curtail racial violence beginning to spring up in Toronto.
An embarrassing and small minority of ignorant fuckwits exist everywhere unfortunately.
