If you keep posting ideological flamebait to HN we will ban you. We've asked you this several times already.

Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and following the rules when posting here? Note that they include: "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

Judging by the tone of the democratic primaries debates, even professing support for such a benighted concept as the sovereign right of your nation to control its border is enough to 'shock' at least a reasonable portion of the public. If you refuse to use someone's chosen pronouns you're going to generate some 'shock' too. The current status quo may like to consider itself having shrugged off the prudishness of the West's Christian tradition, but they remain as easily shocked and offended as ever.

I think people are like machines that execute a few basic behaviors, but that can have ideologies and allegances slotted in to color their execution.

IMO there's a big difference between shock and intolerance. Shock may usually (but not always) lead to a negative reaction, but intolerance seems more like a default position.

To put it another way, shock is someone who jumps when you scare them; intolerance is someone standing with their arms crossed who's already made up their mind.

they're just taboos for different sets of values. nothing in a john waters movie ever 'scared' anybody.

Asking someone to be tolerant of intolerance seems like some weird thing where you ask a Turing machine if another one will halt. It's kind of paradoxical.

Supporting sensible controls on immigration hardly constitutes 'intolerance'. The framing of anything short of open-borders as 'intolerance' has perverted the entire modern political discussion.

"Imagine there's no countries." -John Lennon.

I heard an interview of him where he explained that statement. He said it referred to before the rise of the modern nation-state, where you could walk somewhere and suddenly it was another country, and it just sort of worked as a continuum of places. The idea of passport control came out of World War I. Your boundary-heavy "sensible" version is a very small part of human history.

I am aware of what people say will happen if we erode those boundaries. It's overblown. I recognize this is a minority position. But maybe let go of your fear.

Anyway. I don't think you're intolerant for believing this. But when there is subtext that immigrants are subhuman, or one nation or subgroup is preferential, which seems to go around a lot these days, then yes, I have a problem.

Bizarre to combine "immigrants are subhuman" with "I prefer my own nation".

The first of these statements is mindless hate supported by a fringe of a voiceless fringe.

The second is a common belief within nearly every human group ever. It is evolutionarily inevitable given how groups outcompete atomized individuals. It is justified within a reciprocal altruism framework. It is evident in everyday behavior where people from San Francisco to Milwaukee form social groups with others like them.

The issue occurs when you prefer your own nation so much that you spend an inordinate amount of time building cages to store members of other nations, or doubting the birth certificates of people whose names look a bit like they might have come from a different place as yours, or, one that shocks me but is "accepted wisdom": you believe that another nation's citizens should not be entitled to civil rights of your country. These are things that occur in the open, with increasing frequency, and I have problems with.

At that point and many similar ones I would stop calling it "I prefer my own nation to exist and it differentiates itself in ways I appreciate" and more of a "hangup".

Also, the suggestion that John Lennon's 'Imagine' was written before the rise of the 'modern nation-state' is complete and absolute rubbish. By the time John Lennon wrote that incredibly asinine song, India and Pakistan had already clashed at least three times over Kashmir. Israel had already fought wars against the surrounding countries five times, and the Soviet Union had already violently annexed many of its neighbors. I'm attacking this so vehemently to combat the risk that anyone might be tempted to believe such foolishness. Even if your statements were in any way factually correct they would be meaningless in the context of today's world.

> Also, the suggestion that John Lennon's 'Imagine' was written before the rise of the 'modern nation-state' is complete and absolute rubbish.

When did I say that? I said he said in an interview that ideas of another time inspired that particular line. Not that he lived to see such a time or that 1971 was such a time. I wasn't too shocked at your previous reply even if I disagree, but now you are attributing insane comments to me. Slow down. Relax.

Perhaps I misread your initial comment, I posted it quite late. My apologies, I'm willing to delete my last post there for the sake of remaining civil if that helps.

No need to apologize or delete, friend. (We are outside the time limit for the latter anyhow.) These topics rile us up and I was also concerned I took it too far or rushed too much. So please accept my apologies too.

You must be joking. Just FYI, I'm not an American and nor am I a supporter of Trump. In the recent Democratic Primary debates a majority of candidates supported state-sponsored healthcare for 'undocumented' ( sic, the newspeak term ) immigrants. On a humanitarian level I support this. I would hate to think that a person in need of medical treatment would ever be denied essential treatment. On a financial level, this is ludicrous. When coupled with the democrat candidates' majority stance of supporting decriminalisation of illegal border-crossing, this would be analogous to directly paying American tax dollars overseas. You can't look at this issue on purely social terms, it is economic in nature. If there is no disincentive for illegally breaching a country's borders to obtain access to that country's welfare system, it will inevitably attract the immigration of indigent populations from other nations seeking welfare that their own country cannot or will not provide. How could it be any other way? We've already seen this to be true. The migrant caravan from South America is already proof of this.

When you mention that 'passport control came out of World War I'. This is incredibly disingenuous. The politics of pre-WWI Europe can not be compared to the modern day. You are talking about an era where ideas that would be considered radically nationalist were completely normal. You may have been able to cross borders, but your ability to integrate economically into a new country may have been limited. Not to mention the fact that the entire economic landscape of this point in history is not comparable to our current era. There was no globalism, global trade and global industry would have been extremely minimal compared to today.

We do pay American tax dollars directly overseas it's called foreign aid.

Of course. Individuals on the receiving end do not play a role in deciding when/where that money is spent though. Foreign aid is something entirely different, it is something decided upon by congress. An individual illegally crossing the border with the express purpose of seeking treatment for a pre-existing medical condition is an entirely different thing.

Calling someone an idiot because they express an idiotic viewpoint isn't "shock", it's calling a spade a spade.

As somewhat of a hyper-lefty progressive (and someone whose wife is an immigrant), I don't actually have any issue with someone merely supporting some level of immigration control, and I don't think I'm particularly weird about that; it's not an inherently unreasonable position to want to keep bad people out of the country. People start getting upset when the rhetoric gets borderline racist, or when they refuse to talk about anything else except some shortsighted, dogwhistling rhetoric that they read off of Breitbart the previous morning.

Intolerance of dogwhistling is what people refer to when they say that intolerance of intolerance is bad. The problem is that when you start judging people based on what you think are dogwhistling instead of their stated opinions you start getting very close to creating an oppressive regime.

Example problems: Many racists use anti-immigrant rhetoric, so an anti-racist might take all anti-immigrant rhetoric to be dogwhistling for racism. Many man haters use feminist rhetoric, so an MRA might take all feminist rhetoric to be dogwhistling for man haters.

Both sides then starts seeing the other side as rabid haters sending subtle signals of hate all over the place. As a result both sides gets attacked for having valid opinions and can thus justly declare the other side irrational. Do you see how that can easily make things escalate out of control?

Do you think such escalations leads to more tolerance? I don't. The only way to get a tolerant society is to accept a bit of intolerance, similar to how we have to accept that there are sometimes insect parts in flour, while those insect parts are bad the measures we would need to implement to get them out would force us to throw away tons of perfectly fine goods.