Non-IT News Thread
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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.
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Thankfully it is all Toronto and not the US in this case. Two or three just yesterday!
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@scottalanmiller Hard to expect much from a city that elected a crack head for mayor
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@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller Hard to expect much from a city that elected a crack head for mayor
Makes us feel a little better for razing it for you
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@scottalanmiller there are days when I lived there that I would have considered similar actions to be warranted en masse.
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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?
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.
The difference is that the Irish weren't reaching out to the rest of the world to grow your ranks in those countries to blow those countries up, at least not the rate that ISIS is. From my EXTREMELY limited scope, that happens almost solely in Ireland/United Kingdom, not Europe as a whole and definitely not over here in North America.
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@scottalanmiller said:
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?
I think the belief is just that, it will change the number that are here for the worse. They will come here and recruit, etc.
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@Dashrender said:
@MattSpeller said:
@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.
The difference is that the Irish weren't reaching out to the rest of the world to grow your ranks in those countries to blow those countries up, at least not the rate that ISIS is. From my EXTREMELY limited scope, that happens almost solely in Ireland/United Kingdom, not Europe as a whole and definitely not over here in North America.
There are two major universities in the US that sprung up connected with that "far away" conflict. Today even people who attend them (and like AJ who roots for one without even knowing what their mascot is) often don't realize that they are going to "faction" colleges. They fly religious war colours without thinking. But that war spread quite a bit outside of their region and while we think of it as an Irish conflict, that was just a localised conflict within a bigger one. Just like how the French and Indian War was just the American view of a huge European conflict.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
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?
I think the belief is just that, it will change the number that are here for the worse. They will come here and recruit, etc.
And I'm not saying that that isn't true, although I'd argue that I find that incredibly unlikely and far more likely to do the opposite - that we would soften them by giving them something to lose and a reason to avoid violence, but just that the opposition argument had made seemed like it was "if this one is large, does this other one matter."
If the concern is "they come here and the violence grows through recruitment" I agree that that is a real thing to worry about happening. But I also say that I think it is a trivial number compared to the huge number that we encourage by giving them nowhere to go. Recruitment is hard in the US, it is easy in Syria.
The thing is, when in Syria, these kids have nothing to lose. So why not join ISIS, save themselves from being murdered, protect their families and maybe get something out of it too? They've got nothing to lose. But if the US takes them, suddenly joining ISIS doesn't gain them something, it costs them something. The tables turn.
