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Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 9, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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But they don't see immigrants to the West as people, as agents, as adults, as fully human. They see it as something like a shelter dog rescue that makes messes on the floor (even if they'd quietly have such a dog returned and euthanized). It's hard to escape the conclusion that they're just the most insanely racist people on Earth.

I can't really make sense of it and land on whether they are incredibly racist in favor of anyone who's dark skinned or from a different culture/religion, or against them, as you say.

Both kinda make sense. If you don't view someone as being an agentic human, you don't make any demands of them. In fact in that framework it would be wrong to do so, in the same way that you don't put children in jail for punching someone.

But on the other hand - if you really favor someone, in the way that a person without a moral conscience would stick up for a close friend even if that friend killed an innocent, then you'd let them get away with all sorts of wrongs and breathlessly make excuses for them. This interpretation matches more closely with the following: The strong need (among a majority of Westerners) to be the polar opposite of a colonialist slave-owner or a nazi. And the need to 'balance things out' in some weird Marxist way, between large groups of 'oppressors' versus the 'historically oppressed' or 'underrepresented' people, even if the current generations or specific individuals weren't guilty of the wrongdoing or weren't a victim of the wrongdoing, respectively.

incredibly racist in favor of anyone who's dark skinned or from a different culture/religion, or against them, as you say.

As in they implicitly assume third worlders to be subhumans who aren’t responsible for their own behavior.

To be fair, it's not only third-worlders. They oppose criminal justice, on the premise that the criminals are never responsible for their own actions - it's the society that formed them and the circumstances that the external oppressive powers put them in. Since the society, in their ideology, is hopelessly broken, nobody can be held accountable for their crimes. They would apply it to the neighbor next door as readily as the third-worlder - provided that the neighbor belongs to one of the privileged categories. Of course, this instantly dissolves once the subject is of the disfavored category - then the script flips and it's the inherent evil always present in people of such category that is the reason.