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I mean no, not really, for the reason I described. If someone said "I want oppressed and persecuted people to immigrate here," which is a more natural interpretation?
"I want oppressed and persecuted people to immigrate here, and I want them to be moral people"
"I want oppressed and persecuted people to immigrate here, and I hope they're really bad"
Yes, that is what this conversation is about.
Sure I didn't ask.
"I want them to be immigrate and I want them to be moral" carries the connotation that enough of them aren't moral that you need to take that into consideration rather than just assuming the opposite. It doesn't just mean its literal words.
I mean, he could have made immigration law take morality into account but didn't, suggesting it wasn't really that important to him as a matter of policy. Is the claim "not everybody in the world is equally awesome" really relevant to anyone but Bryan Caplan? Few people genuinely imagine the entire earth should move into their country.
"I think by his actions he would have sympathized with the position in the misquote" is not an excuse for a misquote.
My argument is that the longer quote doesn’t change the meaning at all. You’re trying to argue the longer quote means something different, that actually Washington would have reservations about poor immigrants. The fact that he pursued the most maximalist open borders immigration policy conceivable is a hint to which interpretation is more likely correct.
That doesn't excuse a misquote. If you leave out the words, you're being deceitful. If you leave out the words and they "don't change the meaning", you're still being deceitful, because the claim that they don't change the meaning is not an objective, undisputed, fact, it's something you have to explicitly argue. You can't just assume it to be true, and edit the quote silently.
Given that I have been explicitly arguing that, what exactly are you complaining about?
Someone who read your post would have no idea that you removed the end of the quote, let alone that you thought you had good reason for removing it. That's deceiving them as to what the quote actually said. Your readers wouldn't even have known that you cut it off at all if someone else hadn't noticed it and called you on it.
I didn’t remove the end of the quote, that’s how I found it. Since you’re commenting on the tail end of a long conversation of me repeatedly arguing the addendum doesn’t change anything, either semantically or when we look at the actual immigration policy the quoted speaker pursued (or his other quotes on the issue), and you aren’t bothering to try to counter, do you have any point of substance to make? If not, let’s end this.
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