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Protecting one's borders is no more violence than locking the door to your house is violence to your neighbors. The left's position on this topic is, frankly, nonsense. Understanding it does not justify it.
Of course it is. Unless nobody ever contests your borders in the first place, of course you need violence to protect the border. Whether you beat, shoot or tie people up to stop them from crossing illegally, it's still violence. Necessary, advisable, ethical and desirable violence, but violence nontheless.
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Well, it's less locking the door and more that one resident continues to invite guests in, only for them to find another resident trying to throw them out, cycling ad-infinitum.
Not that I support the former here, but a fair characterization would mention it.
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The actions you must take to physically remove someone who's already in the country when they explicitly do not want to leave the country are violent however.
You may argue this violence is justified (I agree, somewhat), but if the ruling people are extremely averse to violence of government agents being televised, there we are.
Putting someone out who is in my house without permission is violence, in that the intruder is the one committing it. This is a basic axiom of English common law. I have already suffered an injury. It doesn't matter if the intruder is a beggar or the King of England, if he doesn't leave then I am justified in defending myself from the harms already committed.
"Violence" is not a term defined at English common law, and the ordinary English meaning of the term has always included legally justified violence as "violence" and excluded non-violent crimes, let alone non-criminal torts like simple trespass. Breaking into premises has always been a marginal case.
There is a reason why the Libertarian Party pledge avoids the word, and instead talks about "initiating force"
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Of course, it's trivial to cheat at that simply by declaring the entire nation in violation of that law, then proceeding to selectively enforce it only against those that improved the place.
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I don't know why I keep getting replies which assume that I agree with this position when I specifically began my second paragraph with "Let this not be mistaken for a pro-open-borders argument on my part". I am not trying to justify it. I am only trying to get people to understand it. But I don't think OP did understand it, with that baffling talk of "for no other reason than he wanted to".
It’s famously difficult to get someone to understand something when they don’t want to understand it.
Some of it has to do with it being very easy to ignore and talk past someone once you’ve pattern-matched them to “the Enemy”, even if you’re on ‘their side’…
…And some of it has to do with them thinking that they already understand the doubtlessly-malicious real motives of the Enemy, and not particularly being interested in being corrected- after all, how can you be sure that it’s not just Enemy action to try and sow uncertainty about the truth of their sinister motives, and attempt to sway your mind with their propaganda?
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I recognize the steelman, I really do. I just really, really hate this argument. It boils my piss. The leftist framing of what is violence against them and what is violence on their part is always a definitional game that somehow excuses terrorism on their part but prevents speech on my part and thus I have an allergic reaction to the violence-discourse.
Isn't using men with guns to do something part of the standard definition of violence? How do illegal immigrants get removed from the country?
I'm actually a little surprised by the people pushing back on this one, as I don't consider it a "leftist framing." It's certainly compatible with a libertarian analysis as well.
Except for literal pacifists, basically every person on Earth agrees violence is acceptable under at least some circumstances, whether it be self-defense, carrying out a just/honorable war, defending ones property or whatever. The police and federal agents use violence to enforce the rule of law in society. I think the vast majority of ordinary people consider ordinary instances of police force/violence to be completely justified and necessary. Without that, you don't have the rule of law at all, you just have a bunch of suggestions and no means of enforcing them.
I agree that walls are not violence, though. But I don't think physical barriers are the primary way we prevent people from getting into or out of the country, or get rid of them once they get here.
I'm not. In the US, at least, right-wing political violence is usually carried out under the guise of law enforcement. Violence by law enforcement is presumed justified and classified as not-actually-violence because it is (mostly) regular and (usually) socially sanctioned. To point out that law enforcement is, in fact, violence is to give left-wing critiques an exploitable breach in the intellectual firewall.
(One can still defend having laws and law enforcement with all of the above, but the point is to not have to in the first place)
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"Worst argument in the world" people, when someone wants to have borders....
Did you read the rest of my comment? I'm not using "violence" in a pejorative sense here, I'm using it because within the linguistic resources of English it is the most general word available, unless I am very much mistaken.
Do you have a better word for that category of human activity that is more neutral? Because I personally don't think the neutral use of the word "violence" should be considered an attempt to try to sway an argument one way or another, because there are many instances where "violence" is morally acceptable and justified, maybe even necessary for the functioning of society.
Yeah, I know. This is exactly how "taxation is theft is used", and yet it was dubbed "the worst argument in the world". I haven't kept track of names and dates, but I'm pretty sure there's a strong overlap between people agreeing with Scott's "worst argument in the world", and proponents of "immigration enforcement is violence".
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Probably because people suspect you are a liberal, and as a liberal, you don't have to agree with the position of an open borders progressive (or true libertarian) to help ensure that massive amounts of immigration happens. Progressives can just use the moral framework that you believe in to wedge in an argument that you can't reject, and therefore immigration that you can't stop. The only way you can stop it is by abandoning your liberal principles. Stopping peaceful migrants requires force that liberals aren't comfortable with. Even though they don't want that much immigration, they ultimately waste their energy on criticizing the only methods that actually work, which are the ones that involve use of force.
Borders and liberals coexisted for a long time before everyone lost their minds. And conservatives were equally useless at arguing against progressives on this topic, as the US demonstrated.
Yes, but their existence wasn't because of the liberals.
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Not doing this is surprisingly hard. But also, people just want to state their objections for the record, it's not necessarily aimed at you.
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Expectations versus reality moment. Important lesson. This is one of the, if not the, best places on the web for this too.
Back when we were on reddit I'd occasionally get bored and post in some other sub and pretty soon my blood pressure would spike and I'd crawl back here and be grateful for the levels of hostile and incompetent reading comprehension we somehow manage to maintain.
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