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6 hours ago, CartsBeforeHorses said:

How it is my responsibility to pay for her abortion through tax dollars? If she wants to pay for her own, then fine, but it's not the duty of immigration enforcement officers to provide her with one, or with a doctor who will give her one. We're not Kantians last time I checked.

No, actually we need to give it full voting rights from age 12. That's Mexico's age of consent; they're clearly a better country than we are.

Its not an issue of money.  Even if it was, infant care while in custody is still way more expensive than any abortion.

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40 minutes ago, Grames said:

Its not an issue of money.  Even if it was, infant care while in custody is still way more expensive than any abortion.

 

So who should get the bill in an ideal "Objectivist" world? The American taxpayer (AKA me and you), or the government of the country where she comes from?

3 hours ago, softwareNerd said:

Are you seriously claiming that this is an issue of money? 

Even if it were, she's in custody: her legitimate healthcare is the responsibility of her jailer -- i.e. you. But, you obviously know that money and tax-dollars are not the issue at all. Trump is trying to keep his hardcore-Christian voters happy by appointing some of their team to federal positions. And, being hardcore-Christian they are anti-abortion. So, one of them is trying to impose his hardcore religion by force of law.

Trying to shift this responsibility onto me is a form of altruism. Her healthcare should be the responsibility of her home country, or her, or anybody but me because I'm an Objectivist and I don't believe in self-sacrifice for others.

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4 hours ago, CartsBeforeHorses said:

 

So who should get the bill in an ideal "Objectivist" world? The American taxpayer (AKA me and you), or the government of the country where she comes from?

Trying to shift this responsibility onto me is a form of altruism. Her healthcare should be the responsibility of her home country, or her, or anybody but me because I'm an Objectivist and I don't believe in self-sacrifice for others.

You continue to make this an issue of money, when you should know that it is not. Money has nothing to do with this case. It is about hardcore Christianity. It's not as if the government is asking her to pay, or asking some other government to pay. They simply aren't allowing a procedure.

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Trump's ICE agents enter private property without a warrant, and dressed in civilian clothes. 
An American citizen tries to remind them of the law, and rights, and they back down for a bit, but then decide that such niceties aren't going to stop them. 

It is White Caucasians who voted Hitler into power and thus gave the Gestapo their power.
And regular American voters -- not Mexicans or Asian -- will give up their rights one by one, until they finally find themselves with no recourse.

Edited by softwareNerd
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10 hours ago, softwareNerd said:

Trump's ICE agents

Those are civil service employees of the U.S.  govt, they will be around long after Trump is gone and most of them especially the senior ones were in place long before Trump arrived.  Here's a NY Times article from 2007:  No Need for a Warrant, You're an Immigrant   There is no trend here.

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15 hours ago, softwareNerd said:

So you're saying Trump is bad, but no worse than Obama?

It depends on what you think is bad.  Immigration law remains unchanged so far. 

It is not established within Objectivism that every human right ought to map to a formal legal right or that every formal legal right maps onto a human right.  In my opinion ethics and law are two different fields, different enough that there cannot be such a correspondence.  A big one is that ethics should strive to make universal claims, but law (not politics, law and particular codes of law) is for specific sets of people and specific geographic domains.

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9 hours ago, Grames said:

It is not established within Objectivism that every human right ought to map to a formal legal right.  In my opinion ethics and law are two different fields, different enough that there cannot be such a correspondence. 

Your opinion is factually wrong:

"The answers given by ethics determine how man should treat other men, and this determines the fourth branch of philosophy: politics, which defines the principles of a proper social system. " - Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs it.

There is no room in Ayn Rand's philosophy for racism. Or national socialism. Or nationalism. Or whatever other name you want to give it.

Edited by Nicky
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14 hours ago, Grames said:

It is not established within Objectivism that every human right ought to map to a formal legal right or that every formal legal right maps onto a human right.

As you can see from the two reactions to your post, this seems out of left field. Do you think that phrasing is accurate, or is there a better way you could conceptualize it ? Are you stressing "formal"? 

After all, the concept of "rights" is primarily a legal one. In the Objectivist framework, individual rights are the bridging concept between Ethics and Politics. So, at very least rights are about action within a social context, and arise because we want a principle we can use to live among other human beings without ditching self-interest.
 

If you think your phrasing is the right one, my follow-up questions would be:

  1. Is "human right" the same as "individual right"?
  2. Could you give a couple of examples of a "human right" that is not a "formal legal right", and vice versa?

Are you talking about something like "right to a jury"? i.e. are you talking about concrete implementations -- in law -- of individual rights that would be more abstract (and which could have alternative concrete implementations)? If so, there's still a correspondence -- not a one-to-one, but perhaps a many-to-many -- between the two. And, one would hope that a good legal system will have a list of concrete laws that -- as a whole -- cover the gamut of individual rights.

Edited by softwareNerd
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18 hours ago, Grames said:

... ethics should strive to make universal claims, but law (not politics, law and particular codes of law) is for specific sets of people and specific geographic domains.

This is the key point. 

I should have used the term individual rights to stay within the established jargon for Objectivist discourse on rights.  And yes i do stress the "formal".

Rights are a principle from Objectivist ethics.  

4 hours ago, softwareNerd said:

After all, the concept of "rights" is primarily a legal one. In the Objectivist framework, individual rights are the bridging concept between Ethics and Politics. So, at very least rights are about action within a social context, and arise because we want a principle we can use to live among other human beings without ditching self-interest.

The concept of rights is most often used in a political and legal context, but it should not be forgotten that rights are an ethical principle.  You say rights are primarily legal (perhaps because of usage?), I would say rights are essentially ethical because of the epistemological derivation and justification.  I agree that rights are about action within a social context.

"Social context" is not equivalent to "legal context".  It is wrong to obtain values by lying, but not every lie can be made illegal.  The reason for that is law ought to have strict requirements for objectivity.  A man might maintain multiple girlfriends by lying, girlfriends who would not agree to be one of a harem if they knew of the others.   A man may not maintain multiple wives by lying because there is an explicit legal agreement of monogamy in marriage.  In the first example, who is a girlfriend or not and who is regarded as a girlfriend or not and even what it means to be a girlfriend are all subjective mental states of the participants.  The law cannot sort out what should be done in this case because there are no objective facts to work with.   The law can work in a case of multiple marriages because the status and obligations of the participants are objective.  This is an example where ethics can say what is right based on rights but the law must remain silent.

The range of situations and contexts which are amenable to legal rulings on rights is necessarily less than the range over which ethical judgements can be made based on rights.  This is because of the more stringent requirement of objectivity for a legal context, and also because legal systems have jurisdictions, defined finite geographic regions of power and of citizenship.

With respect to warrants, they are a procedural limitation on law enforcement actions with the goal of protecting rights.  Warrants are not themselves rights in any ethical sense.  It is necessarily valid that different procedures may apply to citizens and non-citizens if the idea of citizenship and jurisdiction means anything at all because in a reduction-to-concretes sense those differences are what it means to be a citizen or not.

 

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On 10/22/2017 at 8:25 AM, softwareNerd said:

 

Regarding this video, I found an official webpage of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers with a podcast and transcript covering ICE Administrative Removal Warrants.  After reviewing the above, what makes the action in the video valid is either that the location is being construed as a worksite not a home since the homeowner is absent and the person of interest is not the homeowner, or that since the agents are in the door already there is enough consent to complete the arrest.  

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8 hours ago, Grames said:

... what makes the action in the video valid is either that the location is being construed as a worksite not a home since the homeowner is absent and the person of interest is not the homeowner, or that since the agents are in the door already there is enough consent to complete the arrest.  

Well, that was their story in the video and they're sticking with it. And -- to those who think Mexicans will vote away our rights -- white voters voted for the government that gets away with this.

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On 10/24/2017 at 11:53 AM, Grames said:

"Social context" is not equivalent to "legal context".  It is wrong to obtain values by lying, but not every lie can be made illegal.  The reason for that is law ought to have strict requirements for objectivity.  A man might maintain multiple girlfriends by lying, ...

Okay, I can buy that. If one of my girlfriends says she had the right to know about the others, I agree she's using a concept of "right" that is coherent (given that I really led her on :)  ).

In Contract Law 101, one of the first lessons I was taught was that a "Contract" is a legally enforceable "Agreement", and but not all agreements were legally enforceable. Yet, I can see the term "contract" being applied to the more formally defined "contract" or agreement.

But, with that said, I don't see the relevance of this idea to government allowing or stopping people from doing something in contexts where the other parties to that something are willing participants (like the employer who willingly hires an immigrant). To use the broad social concept of right seems like an equivocation when I'm asking something like: do I have the right to hire this foreigner. I think we're strictly in the realm of legally-enforceable rights here.

So, what am I missing?

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Donald Trump has now made life more difficult for H1-B holders. These are people who earn a minimum of $60,000 a year, and typically closer to $80K. 

https://scroll.in/latest/855424/policy-change-makes-it-harder-to-renew-us-non-immigrant-visa-including-h-1b

The irony is that the anti-immigrant voter is also protectionist about "sending jobs to India". They do not understand the causal link between the lowered H1-B quotas and the rise of India's software-export industry. And this one-level-removed complexity is too much for Trump to grasp.

Despite this, America is still a huge draw. While Trump supporters are the cry-babies who think they have fewer opportunities with each generation; but immigrants see America through selfish eyes that is closer to the mythology of the American dreamer. Lots of people try  for the lottery repeatedly, putting their lives on hold for  years. The majority of H1-B folk then work in the U.S. at jobs they did not really like...sometimes for 7 or 8 years while they await the rest of the process. They hold the American dream in a way that Trump supporters definitely do not.

There is so much opportunity in this country. Yes, there are many Americans who fall foul of the system, and whose lives become nightmares when the government machine chews on them. But, the vast majority have ample opportunities to make their lives happy and successful. Blaming immigrants for their lack of success and happiness is an understandable but sad psychological defense mechanism.

Not every potential immigrant attempts the process though. Given that China and India and a few other such countries do have some decent opportunities, many very competent people figure they'll stay there for good...often "taking 2 or 3 American jobs" for every one they'd have "taken" if they'd immigrated. Often, they end up creating hundreds of jobs in India which they would otherwise have created in the US. All while Trump gathers up the votes of American cry-babies.

 

 

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20 hours ago, softwareNerd said:

Okay, I can buy that. If one of my girlfriends says she had the right to know about the others, I agree she's using a concept of "right" that is coherent (given that I really led her on :)  ).

In Contract Law 101, one of the first lessons I was taught was that a "Contract" is a legally enforceable "Agreement", and but not all agreements were legally enforceable. Yet, I can see the term "contract" being applied to the more formally defined "contract" or agreement.

But, with that said, I don't see the relevance of this idea to government allowing or stopping people from doing something in contexts where the other parties to that something are willing participants (like the employer who willingly hires an immigrant). To use the broad social concept of right seems like an equivocation when I'm asking something like: do I have the right to hire this foreigner. I think we're strictly in the realm of legally-enforceable rights here.

So, what am I missing?

The expectation that everything that should be ethical and within the rights of the people involved (such as an employer who willingly hires an immigrant) should also be a legal right is not correct.   There are multiple causes of this.  The first cause is that of legal objectivity which is why no girlfriend should be able to drag you into court for cheating on her but a wife can.  The second cause is the finiteness of any government and its legal system which by its nature is established over a certain geographic territory and nowhere else and over certain people and not others, which is why there are borders and citizenship.  Note that the first cause applies to the second: objectivity is also a requirement for the laws and procedural controls on borders and citizenship.  The third cause can be a kind of concrete bound mentality that cannot comprehend how an abstraction like government could ever possibly take an interest in the interaction between himself and another person standing in front of him.

The first party an immigrant should interact with is the government of the territory into which he immigrates.  If he evades that, then any other interaction is subject to being interrupted by inevitable government action to deport him.  It is the illegal immigrant who is responsible for getting deported by choosing to evade the lawful means of entering.

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On 10/20/2017 at 8:52 PM, Grames said:

Nothing is left unexplained about why they would prefer to stay the same, no additional theories or assumptions are needed including any racist ones.   

But immigrants choose to leave their home country. This makes them a different sort of person than the rest of the people who didn't leave. By and large, I doubt you and anyone else doesn't know which habits and memories are ingrained in an immigrant. Food, yes. Some attachment to a home country, yes. Yet they still left. They literally chose to change their life. Where are you getting "stay the same" from?

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On 10/20/2017 at 10:17 PM, CartsBeforeHorses said:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/08/03/la-made-1-3b-in-illegal-immigrant-welfare-payouts-in-just-2-years.html

"Illegal immigrant families received nearly $1.3 billion in Los Angeles County welfare money during 2015 and 2016, nearly one-quarter of the amount spent on the county’s entire needy population, according to data obtained by Fox News. The data was obtained from the county Department of Public Social Services -- which is responsible for doling out the benefits -- and gives a snapshot of the financial costs associated with sanctuary and related policies."

Considering that illegal immigrants are only supposed to be around 5% of the population, for them to take up a quarter of welfare benefits indicates that they engage in parasitism on a massive scale. Would Ayn Rand have supported this?

It's less that they are being parasitic, and more that most people think the welfare state is a moral good. Illegal immigrants are poorer than a lot of people so it makes sense. Only small numbers of people really qualify in the first place. This is just an issue of welfare statism.

Breitbart is not a reliable source for reporting. I don't know the GAO data; the GAO data they refer to is secondhand. Taken at face value, the numbers aren't so good, but it doesn't mean illegal immigrants per se are the issue. The issue is how poverty operates in the US and existing in the shadows to merely avoid deportation. Please don't think it's "The Left" doing anything to me. If I had my way, I'd be more deliberate about protecting rights and less emphasis on immigration specifically.

Why do you think I'm trying to shame you? I'm saying your argument was bad and depends upon tribalism. This is bad reasoning not based on any principle of individualism. Who says it's Chineseness that leads Chinese people to vote Democrat? Really though, is there anything about being a Chinese immigrant that makes them inclined to vote a certain way? How is it individualistic to aim for a homogeneous political environment and not even allow the country to speak for itself? I think you are missing out on deeper reasoning on voting patterns. I'd say American culture is a "middle-left" place, so you're observing assimilation. 

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23 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

It's less that they are being parasitic, and more that most people think the welfare state is a moral good.

So let's make the problem better by importing even more people who believe the welfare state is a moral good? Can you see why I'm confused?

24 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

This is just an issue of welfare statism.

Which America-born citizens would by and large reject. Obamacare, for instance, was hugely unpopular among people born in the United States, whose grandparents were born in the United States.

25 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

The issue is how poverty operates in the US and existing in the shadows to merely avoid deportation

The website I linked you to has plenty of journalistic integrity, and they weren't talking about "existing in the shadows." They were talking about violent crime.

26 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

If I had my way, I'd be more deliberate about protecting rights and less emphasis on immigration specifically.

So what sorts of people should we let into America, if you had your way

26 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

I'm saying your argument was bad and depends upon tribalism. This is bad reasoning not based on any principle of individualism.

Are there certain Chinese-American individuals who vote against Socialism? Sure. But as a group, they are far more likely to vote for socialism than Americans who were born here. That does not counteract individualism. That is stating a basic fact of reality.

27 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

Really though, is there anything about being a Chinese immigrant that makes them inclined to vote a certain way?

Being from a country that is Socialist and knowing nothing else for their entire lives.

28 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

I think you are missing out on deeper reasoning on voting patterns. I'd say American culture is a "middle-left" place, so you're observing assimilation. 

Assimilation is not voting 76% democrat, because America does not vote 76% democrat. Assimilation would be if they voted in the exact same proportions as native-born citizens. But they do not. Why?

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26 minutes ago, Eiuol said:

But immigrants choose to leave their home country. This makes them a different sort of person than the rest of the people who didn't leave.

Yeah, it makes them the sort of person who would choose to leave their home country.  There is nothing else one can say about them except other trivialities such as that they were not previously Americans.  Their motivation could be avarice, desperation, fear, love, duty or a hundred others.  The individuals that emigrate are the same person before and after they traveled.  Unless they were already outcasts from their country's culture before emigrating they will bring that culture with them simply because it is the only culture they have.

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8 hours ago, Grames said:

...  ...  laws and procedural controls on borders and citizenship. ...

The first party an immigrant should interact with is the government of the territory into which he immigrates.  ... ...

I have no issue with the idea of an objective border control. Even within the "open borders" crowd, many are fine with border control. The vast majority of people who speak up for illegal immigrants are also okay with border control. The traditional position that has done the rounds among Objectivists is something like "the government should confirm that those coming here do not have highly communicable diseases and do not have criminal or similarly nefarious intent". 

At any rate, the wider political debate is not at all about whether the government should check immigrants. It is about what types of checks and controls the government is allowed to impose. Also, about when the government breaches the line so radically that it is ethical to break evade the law. These are the real issues: the existence / non-existence of some checks is a distraction.

Edited by softwareNerd
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13 hours ago, CartsBeforeHorses said:

So let's make the problem better by importing even more people who believe the welfare state is a moral good? Can you see why I'm confused?

It is not up to the state to evaluate the moral stature of individuals as far as government function or laws. We don't get to a non-welfare state by resorting to a violation of individualist principles even if this is an emergency. As long as a Chinese immigrant does not violate rights, it does not matter what groups of them do. That only means you know who to talk to and persuade. I don't think there is evidence that American-born citizens would reject welfare-statism, not to mention that you underestimate how unprincipled many Americans are as far as individualism. It's not immigrants' fault, it's the fault of citizens who are mostly all American-born. Any worry of "importing Communism" could properly be done with more stringent citizenship rules as opposed to tribalist/racist (policies can be tribalist) group-based rules.

China is Communist, not Socialist. People who leave China want to know something else (students from China are not citizens so they cannot vote) so they leave.

Anyway, that 73% was only the 2012 presidential election - it's safe to say this easily reflects how most voters preferred Obama to Romney.

Breitbart is not a reliable source. It just isn't. Either way my point is that -being- illegal immigrants puts them in the shadows, thus are in more dangerous situations where there is less law enforcement.

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15 hours ago, Grames said:

Yeah, it makes them the sort of person who would choose to leave their home country. 

This is a pretty big deal. The main idea is that there many reasons one may immigrate, but the fact is that desire to leave makes them notably different from people in their home country. There is no singular culture in a country as it is, it's not monolithic, so it's not as simple as  bringing another culture. You seem to be treating immigrants as culturally equivalent to their home country, but there's no good reason to do so. There's overlap of culture, sure - but historically immigrants develop their own subcultures just as anyone else does among similar people in new environments. And if people aren't hostile to immigrants, assimilation will happen at least for the next generation.

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On 10/26/2017 at 8:00 PM, CartsBeforeHorses said:

So let's make the problem better by importing even more people who believe the welfare state is a moral good? Can you see why I'm confused?

If you get between me and an immigrant/foreigner who I want to trade/associate with on my property, you can just plain fuck off. I don't care what philosophy or "objectivism" you think you've modeled, your "right" to force me can go to hell.

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48 minutes ago, 2046 said:

If you get between me and an immigrant/foreigner who I want to trade/associate with on my property, you can just plain fuck off. I don't care what philosophy or "objectivism" you think you've modeled, your "right" to force me can go to hell.

Yeah, it's nice to meet you, too.

Honestly, and people wonder why there aren't more objectivists when this is how we treat each other. Flaming is not fun at all. Who wants to join a philosophy where your own fellow compatriots treat you just as terribly as they'd treat a welfare parasite?

If you actually want to have a civilized discussion about this, then I'm all for it, but I don't think you're open to changing your mind anyway.

But for now I will say that whoever you import has no "right" to vote for a socialist party. Or, preferably, no right to vote at all.

Edited by CartsBeforeHorses
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