Of course. News outlet conflates government policy with emotionally charged tear jerking story, in the hopes of swaying public opinion against said policy. Just because there exists such an angel of a man who would fall under this policy doesn't mean this policy is bad or should not be enacted.
Yeah. For every anti-ban anecdote about an exemplary human being who happens to Muslim, the pro-Muslim ban side can point to an anecdote like the Bowling Green massacre.
Actually it does. This is a example story that illustrates in concrete the argument that you can't blanket ban people by nationality without barring entrance to millions of amazing people who did nothing wrong.
Then you're agreeing that this story can be countered simply by creating another tear-jerk story about how someone died because of a person from that country being let in. Doesn't even have to be a "terrorist".
That's the problem with emotional arguments; in a world of seven billion people, anybody's emotional defenses can be trivially overwhelmed in either direction on any topic. Every second you've been alive there has been incomprehensible-to-you amounts of joy and sorrow. It's not a valid argument to selectively scoop some of that out in a particular direction that someone happens to like, and you are being played every time someone does it to you.
I agree with you up tot eh bit about 'you are being played every time' someone makes an emotional argument. Quantitative methods are very important, but so are qualitative ones.
To take an example of the latter, conservatives frequently cite the case of Kate Steinle, who was allegedly murdered in San Francisco a couple years back by an illegal immigrant who had been repeatedly deported but kept coming back. (I say allegedly because the defendant claims he stole the gun in a simple crime of opportunity and the fatal discharge was accidental. No motivation for the shooting was apparent at the time, so arguably it was a case of manslaughter rather than murder. Anyway...)
Now this case is frequently mentioned to highlight the supposed danger of allowing illegal immigrants to wander about freely. A quantitative analysis reveals that immigrants, even illegal ones, tend to commit fewer crimes on a per-capita basis than their legal neighbors, so hyping up this case to frighten people is misleading.
On the other hand, all that quantitative analysis isn't much comfort to all those who suffer when someone is killed, and ignoring that (because we can't easily quantify how sad a given tragedy is) undermines credibility in the quantitative approach because it runs counter to the fact of human experience. Soviet-style communism is a good example of crushing individual life through an unyielding adherence to the quantitative data preferred by bureaucrats, and we could find many other tragic examples from other political systems without having to look very hard.
tl;dr only looking at the aggregate data throws the baby out with the bathwater because we are emotional animals and emotional experience matters too.
>A quantitative analysis reveals that immigrants, even illegal ones, tend to commit fewer crimes on a per-capita basis than their legal neighbors
I'd be interested in the source on that. I'm also curious if they're taking a blanket average, or if they account for the fact that a huge proportion of American crime occurs within a few square miles of blighted urban terrain in Chicago, DC, LA and Baltimore. For most people, such 'average' crime stats are irrelevant in the same way that skydiving death stats are irrelevant to someone who never skydives.
>we are emotional animals and emotional experience matters too.
But which emotional experience matters?
There are millions of relevant emotional experiences being had. You can't relate to all of them on an emotional level. So, the only question becomes which emotional experiences you choose to privilege above all the others and synchronize your own emotions to.
As parent indicated, this ultimately means surrendering your own motivational choices to whoever has the power to put emotional imagery in front of your monkey brain.
You become a slave to power, used to fulfill the goals of others, tugged blindly toward the beliefs they choose by the leash of your own pathological empathy.
You can easily find stats on this issue on your own if you're interested, I'm tired of doing all the research work for other people and getting nothing in return.
As for which emotional experiences matter, you should evaluate a variety of them, including ones that make you uncomfortable. If you're not in a constant state of mild-self doubt or can't easily articulate opponents' line of reasoning then you're in a bubble.
As parent indicated, this ultimately means surrendering your own motivational choices to whoever has the power to put emotional imagery in front of your monkey brain.
No it doesn't. You are perfectly free to seek out other points of view and emotional experiences that you find unpleasant or distasteful. In the context of politics, one obvious reason to do so is to avoid being put on the defensive by an argument you haven't encountered before. I'm pretty far left but I probably spend more time reading conservative forums and blogs than liberal ones.
Just because there exists such an angel of a man who would fall under this policy doesn't mean this policy is bad or should not be enacted.
True, but the policy should be judged on its real costs and benefits. So far, the administration has consistently emphasized and exaggerated the supposed security risks of the status quo to make an argument from necessity for drastic changes. I'm trying to be neutral in describing this but I think it's fair to say that the claim that bad people are 'pouring in' to the USA is an exaggeration.
| So far, the administration has consistently emphasized and exaggerated the supposed security risks of the status quo to make an argument from necessity for drastic changes. I'm trying to be neutral in describing this but I think it's fair to say that the claim that bad people are 'pouring in' to the USA is an exaggeration.
You're being kind. As far as I can understand, the legal argument (i.e., the 'official' argument) is that they don't need to justify their actions in any way to a court.
Actually, I think you aren't wrong there. Of course, the argument in favor of the policy seems to rely on similar rhetoric. Except, rather than concrete examples of people who prove the benefits of the policy, there's just vague references to the kind of people who might exist in the target demographic, and references to emotionally charged tear jerking stories about people who fit that theoretical description, but wouldn't actually have been stopped by the policy.
