Sorry but you’re take is quite the retarded. People have lot of obvious reasons to despise bastards, all quite logical from their society viewpoint. Bastards are born out of cheating, as in the case of catlyn. In any case. Out of wedlock or they were abandoned by their parents. None of that is good for society. (Even our society, i would say). So in westeros naturally they don’t like the idea of being a bastard although they also understand that it’s not the bastard fault.
"Americans would rather exile a peaceful, hard-working foreigner than a native-born violent criminal. Indeed, most would strongly favor the former and strongly oppose the latter."
I challenge anybody to test this hypothesis. If exiling violent criminals was a possibility, I personally think it would be a great idea. Unfortunately, there's nowhere to put them.
Was coming here to say the same thing. I would love to have the option to exile violent criminals. Would be happy to grant amnesty to 10 illegal immigrants for every criminal exiled. Bonus points if they have spent some time in prison, but still have an extended prison term that we can save money on (not sure I like the incentives of only having to go to the "next australia" if you commit a violent crime). Maybe give it as an option for prison time for crimes like drunk driving injury or other non-premeditated violence or habitual violence to make sure there are some people with marketable skills included in the exiled population.
I don't know what options there are for the "next australia" and suspect with the lack of practical skills most criminals have (just because of industrialization, not because they are particularly different than in the past), the next australia would look much more like New York in escape from new york than Australia at the beginning of colonization.
But I think you could get a pretty strong support for this. Maybe not 50%, but I'd think north of 30%? I suspect you'd have more than half of people wanting deportation also happy with exiling, provided it was sending them somewhere with some infrastructure for living and not just dropping them on an island somewhere for a grown up lord of the flies experiment.
I work with both legal and illegal immigrants every day and what you are saying here is completely false. not even close.
since Texas has the largest border with Mexico and we have been dealing with this problem from the beginning. I’ve never seen the scapegoating you describe.
that’s because the real world doesn’t behave like the ones you read in fantasy novels or in internet discourse.
If we didn't have scapegoating, then why not Ellis Island style borders, amnesty and citizenship for the vast majority of immigrants in various documentation statuses (or not), and a recognition that a type of law that only applies based on unchosen luck of birth is inherently suspect on a moral level?
well, the way the powers that be have been doing it for decades is to import a peasant class of wage slaves in order to keep pay for working Americans as low as possible so the boomers can afford cheap landscaping and house cleaners.
or we can go with your suggestion and give everyone amnesty and citizenship based on the inherent unfairness of fate and being born inside a specific geography.
Borders restrain governments not people. Our border with Mexico exists so Mexican cops can't enforce Mexican laws here, not stop peaceful trade between American and Mexican civilians.
There are studies showing that liberals have in-group preference flattened or even reversed.
Are you familiar with the trinary division ingroup, outgroup, fargroup? Essentially everyone has an ingroup that is considered morally superior to an outgroup. But then there are fargroup peoples, too distant and unknown to have any real experience with, but liberals have optimistic positive thoughts about fargroup peoples whereas conservatives tend to have guarded and suspicious opinions about fargroup peoples.
How does in group preference remotely explain an in group that is based on being born anywhere inside an arbitrary line of 3000 miles or to people with a vaguely shared ancestry if you go back several thousand years?
Would I prefer a neighbor who is an illegal immigrant who has no criminal record and who is gainfully employed, or a citizen who has a criminal record? The former, by a long shot.
That’s the test of content of character.
But there still has to be some consequence for how that person came to be here. Mind you, that consequence doesn’t necessarily have to be a visit by ICE or getting herded at Home Depot.
On the one hand, but for the unearned good fortune of birth is one a (birthright) citizen here, vs not. OTOH, any country has more duty of care towards its citizens than to those who are not.
Why would I trust someone more because they grew up 2000 miles away, but inside of a border we share, and watched a few of the same TV shows? Or whatever?
Keep working the problem. You'll eventually figure it out. UK today gives some pretty good instruction (if you're still open to learning). Here's some food for thought on the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vcHTYtm7mo
No. I am for extremely high immigration, and a huge welfare state. A brotherhood of man with total equality as goal, but at minimum equality and freedom (mostly the same thing, since freedom without resources is meaningless) for all people, regardless of sin of birth.
And however close we can get to either or both of those goals, the better.
On what basis do we have a stronger duty of care to someone here inside our jurisdiction if the only difference is the unearned status of birth? Why not just grant citizenship easily and radically expand our immigration quotas?
Because if we are going to endorse concepts such as “countries”, then the people of said home country (ie. its government) should owe a higher duty of care to the people of similar status (ie. its citizens) than to those who do not share that status. Just as any club owes a higher duty of care towards its members, than to non-members.
Now, I do have qualms about birthright citizenship, the dumb luck of birth, etc. So if you said natural born “citizens” need to pass a citizenship test , at age of majority, just like naturalized citizens do, I’d be down with that (god knows a lot of citizens could use the civics lessons).
Expanding immigration quotas would be a policy decision that current voters would have to endorse. Ie someone could run on that platform and try to get elected etc.
I think Caplan’s penchant for “open borders” is silly as it renders borders, and countries, meaningless.
The U.S. had no immigration restrictions for 100 years from its founding, and the first restriction was the shameful Chinese Exclusion Act, but after that it remained otherwise de facto unrestricted until 1918.
The change happens to coincide with the rise of progressive and populist antagonism to classical liberalism. To alcohol and drug controls and a far more authoritarian government. Also, to eugenic sterilization, of course. America became the place that that the Nazis and Mussolini admired.
Still don’t know what you mean by “liberal immigration”.
How does the quality of any version of immigration map onto birthright citizenship?
My discomfort with birthright is the unearned/nepo baby aspect of it. But that’s a huge continuum with many consequences for which there are no solutions.
In a patriarchal society a rule is needed against having children out of wedlock. In a matriarchal society that is not needed because the mother’s brothers serve the role as a father, providing and protecting. But Westeros is patriarchal. But how would such a rule be enforced? Yes they can punish the woman who had a child out of wedlock, and they were. But what people care about even more are their own children. So to incentivize both men and women from having children out of wedlock the society puts shame upon the bastard. The child suffers for the sins of the father. People can’t consciously be aware of what social function their hatred for bastards is serving, they need to genuinely believe it. But it is also true. Even today children raised without a father in the home are statically less likely to do everything good and at an increased risk of doing everything bad. This is most definitely a combination of genetics and how they were raised. Even today when women earn as much as men, single mother households are more likely to be in poverty. The children have less supervision, care and discipline. Also the parents have shown themselves to not think through the consequences of their actions, a trait likely to be passed to their children. And if the child was conceived in rape, the son has a higher chance of being a rapist himself. So if all you know about someone is that they were a bastard, you would have reason to be weary. This doesn’t mean that all bastards are evil or anything, but statistically, they are more likely than non-bastards to do bad things. But regardless, the big reason for the shame of bastards on a patriarchal society is to disincentivize sex outside of marriage.
Now this brings us to America and illegal immigrants. If we are going to have a rule against immigration without permission it needs to be enforced. And we do need a rule against it because we provide everyone even illegal immigrants with free healthcare and k-12 education to their children, and all the other goods that taxpayers pay for. Even if they commit fraud to pay taxes under someone else’s SS number, they are unlikely to pay in as much as they take out of the system. People like to claim that they actually contribute more but they are not taking into account all that they cost the system. It’s not just cash welfare payments, it’s every 911 call they make or cause, every car accident they cause without insurance, every one of their children in school, every unpaid uninsured trip to the ER, etc. If we re-ordered society to make citizenship more like a club membership, we wouldn’t need a rule against immigration without permission. I think that would be a better solution but I seem to be in the minority. So how should this law be enforced? Well, by deporting illegal immigrants. There is no other punishment that makes sense if they aren’t supposed to be in the country to begin with. Any other punishment that allowed them to stay in the country wouldn’t work. Even the children that came in illegally, they will have to suffer for the sins of their parents. Otherwise we will get unaccompanied miners coming across the border in numbers that we can’t deal with. Even if a family is nice, isn’t causing any trouble, and don’t seem to be hurting anyone, they still have to be punished in order to enforce the rule against immigration without permission. Or else we will have no rule against it at all, which is what many people want, but they are in the minority.
So this explains why there is shame against bastards in Westeros and Illegal Immigrants in America: rules need to be enforced, shame is an effective enforcement mechanism, even if it’s against the innocent children of those who break the rule.
Do you think that the very long and widespread stigmatization of Jews is also necessary for some reason? My brother-in-law, a Brit from an intensely antisemitic family, is prone to saying, "There must be something they did to cause such a reaction."
Feudal societies don't care about the individual at all, it's what their "claim" means. If some random serf who will inherit nothing has a bastard, no one will care that much. But a noble bastard can mean bloody civil war because of what other people will use that person for, even if they personally may not even want to press it. Early on in the story, they run around killing potential bastard heirs not because they don't like them (some are infants), but because they fear what they could be used for. A more informative analogy would be if there were some hypothetical highly communicable disease that was passed down on the Y chromosome.
For me the reason bastards are despised in Westeros is that it is a society where family honor is a ubiquitous heuristic for personal character. Having a family name provides a form of accountability, a "permanent record" that disincentivizes immoral behavior, whereas bastards have no such accountability; in this context it is rational to mistrust bastards, and bastards, knowing that they are mistrusted regardless of their behavior, are thereby incentivized to indulge in said behavior in a kind of Pygmalion Effect. In our world, it is precisely because of this death of the idea of family honor that we no longer look down on bastardy in the modern world. It is a consequence of the transition from weberian Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft.
And in the modern US, there are many different groups that serve this role depending on the ideological viewpoint of the person being asked. Many on the left would have their opinions of someone improved upon learning they were illegal immigrants.
Well, yes, every person who came here, by any means, has done more to earn and choose their place in the U.S. than those merely born here without earning or choosing it.
While I agree with the notion that we need more legal immigration, let’s not forget that all crime describes actions that violate processes. A person who wants money can work for a willing employer (following the established process) or can rob or embezzle from said employer (not following the established process). Same with drunk driving vs. regular driving, paying to enter the theater vs sneaking in, etc. Maybe we should not hold anyone accountable at all who violate established processes? I know Dr. Caplan does not believe that.
I think your idea that law is just law for law's sake, rules for rules' sake, would provide a perfect foil for anarchists to tilt at and then justly destroy. If rules are just rules for the sake or order, not for utility or freedom or balancing rights, then I would say bring on the flames and burn it down.
Moreover, the original "sin" involved in immigration is the unearned luck of birth, nothing more or less.
Children born to low-conscientiousness parents are almost surely lower in conscientiousness on average themselves.
Sorry but you’re take is quite the retarded. People have lot of obvious reasons to despise bastards, all quite logical from their society viewpoint. Bastards are born out of cheating, as in the case of catlyn. In any case. Out of wedlock or they were abandoned by their parents. None of that is good for society. (Even our society, i would say). So in westeros naturally they don’t like the idea of being a bastard although they also understand that it’s not the bastard fault.
"Americans would rather exile a peaceful, hard-working foreigner than a native-born violent criminal. Indeed, most would strongly favor the former and strongly oppose the latter."
I challenge anybody to test this hypothesis. If exiling violent criminals was a possibility, I personally think it would be a great idea. Unfortunately, there's nowhere to put them.
Was coming here to say the same thing. I would love to have the option to exile violent criminals. Would be happy to grant amnesty to 10 illegal immigrants for every criminal exiled. Bonus points if they have spent some time in prison, but still have an extended prison term that we can save money on (not sure I like the incentives of only having to go to the "next australia" if you commit a violent crime). Maybe give it as an option for prison time for crimes like drunk driving injury or other non-premeditated violence or habitual violence to make sure there are some people with marketable skills included in the exiled population.
I don't know what options there are for the "next australia" and suspect with the lack of practical skills most criminals have (just because of industrialization, not because they are particularly different than in the past), the next australia would look much more like New York in escape from new york than Australia at the beginning of colonization.
But I think you could get a pretty strong support for this. Maybe not 50%, but I'd think north of 30%? I suspect you'd have more than half of people wanting deportation also happy with exiling, provided it was sending them somewhere with some infrastructure for living and not just dropping them on an island somewhere for a grown up lord of the flies experiment.
Didn't the Brits use Australia quite productively for the purpose? And to the considerable benefit of both countries, I believe.
'Jun 17, 2013'
"George R.R. Martin still has two Game of Thrones books left to write."
13 years later and still true!
I’m a contractor in Texas.
I work with both legal and illegal immigrants every day and what you are saying here is completely false. not even close.
since Texas has the largest border with Mexico and we have been dealing with this problem from the beginning. I’ve never seen the scapegoating you describe.
that’s because the real world doesn’t behave like the ones you read in fantasy novels or in internet discourse.
If we didn't have scapegoating, then why not Ellis Island style borders, amnesty and citizenship for the vast majority of immigrants in various documentation statuses (or not), and a recognition that a type of law that only applies based on unchosen luck of birth is inherently suspect on a moral level?
well, the way the powers that be have been doing it for decades is to import a peasant class of wage slaves in order to keep pay for working Americans as low as possible so the boomers can afford cheap landscaping and house cleaners.
or we can go with your suggestion and give everyone amnesty and citizenship based on the inherent unfairness of fate and being born inside a specific geography.
but then we will essentially have an open border.
which means we no longer have a nation.
what would be your choice Kristin?
Borders restrain governments not people. Our border with Mexico exists so Mexican cops can't enforce Mexican laws here, not stop peaceful trade between American and Mexican civilians.
I would argue that we have never had a truly open border. all countries have borders.
just different levels of enforcement and regulation.
How would that mean we no longer have a nation, when we had de facto open borders for the vast majority of our nation's history!?
You persist with this immigration fantasy that flies in the face of human nature: in-group preference. It’s as delusional as communism.
There are studies showing that liberals have in-group preference flattened or even reversed.
Are you familiar with the trinary division ingroup, outgroup, fargroup? Essentially everyone has an ingroup that is considered morally superior to an outgroup. But then there are fargroup peoples, too distant and unknown to have any real experience with, but liberals have optimistic positive thoughts about fargroup peoples whereas conservatives tend to have guarded and suspicious opinions about fargroup peoples.
How does in group preference remotely explain an in group that is based on being born anywhere inside an arbitrary line of 3000 miles or to people with a vaguely shared ancestry if you go back several thousand years?
Would I prefer a neighbor who is an illegal immigrant who has no criminal record and who is gainfully employed, or a citizen who has a criminal record? The former, by a long shot.
That’s the test of content of character.
But there still has to be some consequence for how that person came to be here. Mind you, that consequence doesn’t necessarily have to be a visit by ICE or getting herded at Home Depot.
On the one hand, but for the unearned good fortune of birth is one a (birthright) citizen here, vs not. OTOH, any country has more duty of care towards its citizens than to those who are not.
Being an American is an accident of birth. I feel no more affinity with a citizen than I do with a diligent person from Haiti.
If not affinity, perhaps the concept of trust based on common cultural priors might illuminate things better for you.
No, I'm not tribal.
Problem (for you) is that the other 99.99999% of humanity IS...
If you prefer, consider yourself a tribe of one. You won't last long.
Individualism is not isolation. In fact, it opens me up to far more experiences than a tribalist could enjoy.
Yup, you got it made. Until...
Why would I trust someone more because they grew up 2000 miles away, but inside of a border we share, and watched a few of the same TV shows? Or whatever?
Keep working the problem. You'll eventually figure it out. UK today gives some pretty good instruction (if you're still open to learning). Here's some food for thought on the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vcHTYtm7mo
No. I am for extremely high immigration, and a huge welfare state. A brotherhood of man with total equality as goal, but at minimum equality and freedom (mostly the same thing, since freedom without resources is meaningless) for all people, regardless of sin of birth.
And however close we can get to either or both of those goals, the better.
On what basis do we have a stronger duty of care to someone here inside our jurisdiction if the only difference is the unearned status of birth? Why not just grant citizenship easily and radically expand our immigration quotas?
Because if we are going to endorse concepts such as “countries”, then the people of said home country (ie. its government) should owe a higher duty of care to the people of similar status (ie. its citizens) than to those who do not share that status. Just as any club owes a higher duty of care towards its members, than to non-members.
Now, I do have qualms about birthright citizenship, the dumb luck of birth, etc. So if you said natural born “citizens” need to pass a citizenship test , at age of majority, just like naturalized citizens do, I’d be down with that (god knows a lot of citizens could use the civics lessons).
Expanding immigration quotas would be a policy decision that current voters would have to endorse. Ie someone could run on that platform and try to get elected etc.
I think Caplan’s penchant for “open borders” is silly as it renders borders, and countries, meaningless.
The U.S. had no immigration restrictions for 100 years from its founding, and the first restriction was the shameful Chinese Exclusion Act, but after that it remained otherwise de facto unrestricted until 1918.
The change happens to coincide with the rise of progressive and populist antagonism to classical liberalism. To alcohol and drug controls and a far more authoritarian government. Also, to eugenic sterilization, of course. America became the place that that the Nazis and Mussolini admired.
Anyone is free to make such a proposal (to return to the immigration model you speak of) and take it to the voting public.
Have the periods of liberal immigration failed America? By what metrics?
I didn’t say it’s “failed America”.
But you’d also first have to define what you mean by “liberal immigration”.
So, you are for liberal immigration but not open borders? Then why object to birthright citizenship?
Still don’t know what you mean by “liberal immigration”.
How does the quality of any version of immigration map onto birthright citizenship?
My discomfort with birthright is the unearned/nepo baby aspect of it. But that’s a huge continuum with many consequences for which there are no solutions.
In a patriarchal society a rule is needed against having children out of wedlock. In a matriarchal society that is not needed because the mother’s brothers serve the role as a father, providing and protecting. But Westeros is patriarchal. But how would such a rule be enforced? Yes they can punish the woman who had a child out of wedlock, and they were. But what people care about even more are their own children. So to incentivize both men and women from having children out of wedlock the society puts shame upon the bastard. The child suffers for the sins of the father. People can’t consciously be aware of what social function their hatred for bastards is serving, they need to genuinely believe it. But it is also true. Even today children raised without a father in the home are statically less likely to do everything good and at an increased risk of doing everything bad. This is most definitely a combination of genetics and how they were raised. Even today when women earn as much as men, single mother households are more likely to be in poverty. The children have less supervision, care and discipline. Also the parents have shown themselves to not think through the consequences of their actions, a trait likely to be passed to their children. And if the child was conceived in rape, the son has a higher chance of being a rapist himself. So if all you know about someone is that they were a bastard, you would have reason to be weary. This doesn’t mean that all bastards are evil or anything, but statistically, they are more likely than non-bastards to do bad things. But regardless, the big reason for the shame of bastards on a patriarchal society is to disincentivize sex outside of marriage.
Now this brings us to America and illegal immigrants. If we are going to have a rule against immigration without permission it needs to be enforced. And we do need a rule against it because we provide everyone even illegal immigrants with free healthcare and k-12 education to their children, and all the other goods that taxpayers pay for. Even if they commit fraud to pay taxes under someone else’s SS number, they are unlikely to pay in as much as they take out of the system. People like to claim that they actually contribute more but they are not taking into account all that they cost the system. It’s not just cash welfare payments, it’s every 911 call they make or cause, every car accident they cause without insurance, every one of their children in school, every unpaid uninsured trip to the ER, etc. If we re-ordered society to make citizenship more like a club membership, we wouldn’t need a rule against immigration without permission. I think that would be a better solution but I seem to be in the minority. So how should this law be enforced? Well, by deporting illegal immigrants. There is no other punishment that makes sense if they aren’t supposed to be in the country to begin with. Any other punishment that allowed them to stay in the country wouldn’t work. Even the children that came in illegally, they will have to suffer for the sins of their parents. Otherwise we will get unaccompanied miners coming across the border in numbers that we can’t deal with. Even if a family is nice, isn’t causing any trouble, and don’t seem to be hurting anyone, they still have to be punished in order to enforce the rule against immigration without permission. Or else we will have no rule against it at all, which is what many people want, but they are in the minority.
So this explains why there is shame against bastards in Westeros and Illegal Immigrants in America: rules need to be enforced, shame is an effective enforcement mechanism, even if it’s against the innocent children of those who break the rule.
Do you think that the very long and widespread stigmatization of Jews is also necessary for some reason? My brother-in-law, a Brit from an intensely antisemitic family, is prone to saying, "There must be something they did to cause such a reaction."
Feudal societies don't care about the individual at all, it's what their "claim" means. If some random serf who will inherit nothing has a bastard, no one will care that much. But a noble bastard can mean bloody civil war because of what other people will use that person for, even if they personally may not even want to press it. Early on in the story, they run around killing potential bastard heirs not because they don't like them (some are infants), but because they fear what they could be used for. A more informative analogy would be if there were some hypothetical highly communicable disease that was passed down on the Y chromosome.
A swing...and a miss!
For me the reason bastards are despised in Westeros is that it is a society where family honor is a ubiquitous heuristic for personal character. Having a family name provides a form of accountability, a "permanent record" that disincentivizes immoral behavior, whereas bastards have no such accountability; in this context it is rational to mistrust bastards, and bastards, knowing that they are mistrusted regardless of their behavior, are thereby incentivized to indulge in said behavior in a kind of Pygmalion Effect. In our world, it is precisely because of this death of the idea of family honor that we no longer look down on bastardy in the modern world. It is a consequence of the transition from weberian Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft.
And in the modern US, there are many different groups that serve this role depending on the ideological viewpoint of the person being asked. Many on the left would have their opinions of someone improved upon learning they were illegal immigrants.
Well, yes, every person who came here, by any means, has done more to earn and choose their place in the U.S. than those merely born here without earning or choosing it.
Here's a test for your own hypocrisy.
What do you think of someone who cheats on their taxes?
Taxation is theft right? They are probably honest and hardworking people.
Bah. Why then don't bastards simply adopt respectable family names? "Mya Smith".
I'm sad to see that many of the comments are proving your point.
There must always be scapegoats. Nobody explained that better than Tom Szasz.
https://archive.org/details/szasz-scapegoat
While I agree with the notion that we need more legal immigration, let’s not forget that all crime describes actions that violate processes. A person who wants money can work for a willing employer (following the established process) or can rob or embezzle from said employer (not following the established process). Same with drunk driving vs. regular driving, paying to enter the theater vs sneaking in, etc. Maybe we should not hold anyone accountable at all who violate established processes? I know Dr. Caplan does not believe that.
I think your idea that law is just law for law's sake, rules for rules' sake, would provide a perfect foil for anarchists to tilt at and then justly destroy. If rules are just rules for the sake or order, not for utility or freedom or balancing rights, then I would say bring on the flames and burn it down.
Moreover, the original "sin" involved in immigration is the unearned luck of birth, nothing more or less.