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Discussion on: Why is GitHub supporting Child Separation Agency?

 
dmfay profile image
Dian Fay • Edited
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dkamer profile image
David Joseph Kamer • Edited

"a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution. The term is most strongly associated with the several hundred camps established by the Nazis in Germany and occupied Europe in 1933–45, among the most infamous being Dachau, Belsen, and Auschwitz."

They aren't this. Word games aside, they aren't designed for extermination or even penal purposes as was with the Japanese Internment camps.

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dmfay profile image
Dian Fay • Edited

Large numbers of people, check; deliberately imprisoned, check; relatively small area, check; inadequate facilities, check. If you look, "concentration" doesn't mean or even necessarily suggest punishment or extermination.

You may additionally want to investigate the distinction between "penal" and "penile", while you're at it.

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dkamer profile image
David Joseph Kamer • Edited

Thank you for correcting my spelling. That could cause me a lot of embarrassment in a less forgiving environment.

Right, but all of those boxes are also checked for any prison that currently exists or has existed. So we're in a discussion about connotation.

Do you personally believe these are camps equivalent to the ones found in Nazi Germany?

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dkamer profile image
David Joseph Kamer

To be clear, I wish ICE would spend more time and resources on busting sex trafficking, but it's a political thing in my view point. If you can successfully convince me that these are literally death camps, then I'll be the first to rise up in force and the first willing to give my life to stop it.

But that's not what it is. It's just finding and recording people who didn't stop at customs from what I've read.

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dmfay profile image
Dian Fay

Again, you've gone from saying that there's a problem worth organizing against if our immigration system has a human cost to insisting that there's only such a problem if we're overtly attempting genocide on the border. This is not the strategy of a reasonable person open to being convinced. There isn't much more I could or would say without being openly contemptuous of a worldview which insists that the vote is the one and only legitimate exercise of political pressure (as the old saw goes, if voting changed anything they'd outlaw it; and it bears remembering that this was happening under Obama, too) and splits hairs about how much concentration camp is too much concentration camp.

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dkamer profile image
David Joseph Kamer

Depriving "concentration camps" of resources will make the lives of the individuals within better or worse?

You seem to mix the practical with the political issues. Voting is the only legitimate way to interact in a democracy. Anything else: the few attempting to govern the many.

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andreirusu_ profile image
Andrei Rusu • Edited

Hey everyone. I'm jumping in here a bit later, but I hope you will still consider this. It is deeply troubling that in a forum such as this one here, we are still debating if we can call ICE "a democratic institution".

It is beyond any dispute that it is an organization with a blatant disregard for human suffering. The question to be asked here is not if we should abolish it, it is how we can influence that decision. And publicly calling out Github for its association is a start, a step in the right direction.

Whether or not the detention centres are at the same level or comparable with Nazi "concentration camps" is also beside the point. It would take a committee of Holocaust historians and other experts to draw that conclusion. But there is ample evidence of appalling treatment of the detainees and horrible incidents, including deaths due to negligence, that have occurred in those facilities, something which is in open violation with international law.

You don't have to link those incidents to atrocities that have occurred in the Nazi concentration camps in order to validate their evilness. And you don't have to wait for the ICC or the UN to issue a statement before condemning them as facilities which operate on a policy of subhuman treatment. And regarding the defence of the "duly elected" democratic system, please keep in mind that some of the most horrendous authoritarians have risen to power also by "democratic" means.

For us, as software professionals, the question still remains why is Github, indeed, so enthusiastic about this contract. Also, it should be pointed out that voting isn't the only legitimate way to interact in a democracy. For example, citizens of Switzerland can at any point request a referendum and ask that specific laws which they don't agree with should be revisited.

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shushugah profile image
shushugah

Indeed, and even despite the massive pushback and campaigns, GitHub is doubling down, and at the next Git Merge conference, they invited Palantir to speak....just why? git-merge.com/#elijah-newren