Comment by qrendel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qrendel | Hacker News Reader

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> Wouldn't it be better to spend those billions of dollars and take on some inevitable loss of life and annihilate them forever. From where did we all start believing in the defeatist mentality that world cannot take on ISIS?

You're grossly oversimplifying this. Remember Iraq? Afghanistan? It's easy for a large army to topple a government or kill some leaders. But groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda are basically ideologies that rely on guerilla warfare (al-Qaeda moreso than ISIS, since ISIS at least wants to establish a caliphate).

These wars have been going on for decades and are guaranteed to continue for decades more. Even if ISIS was completely wiped out, there would still remain the ideologies and history that making recruiting for such groups possible. Knocking over governments like in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, just creates even more power vacuums for these groups to grow and recruit in.

I'm not sure what the best solution would be. The U.S. and NATO seem content to just keep fighting proxy wars for the upcoming decades. Personally, I'd rather accept refugees and put the effort into successfully integrating them in Western culture. This would probably be much easier in the U.S. which already has a long history of immigration and serving as a "melting pot" of cultures. Maybe more difficult in Europe. Another big problem is the xenophobic and racist attitudes towards immigrants, and it's hard to successfully integrate people when they're forced to live amongst those kinds of people.

I'm not saying immigrants should be forced to abandon their cultures, just that leaving them to fester as an outgroup in impoverished countries lacking strong institutions can't possibly help win an ideological war. Many Western countries are already suffering from population decline. Offering a new home where the influence of toxic ideologies is weaker seems a better solution to me than indefinite war with no plan for what happens afterwards.

"I'd rather accept refugees and put the effort into successfully integrating them in Western culture."

We can't. Western culture has decided Western culture is toxic and asking others to conform to it for any reason is imperialistic, racist, and xenophobic.

Until Western culture stops the virtue signaling competition to see who can slag their own culture harder than the next person, and acquires even minimal self-confidence, there will be no assimilation possible.

"Another big problem is the xenophobic and racist attitudes towards immigrants,"

But is that cause or effect? Immediately after you basically state that these immigrants are not assimilated into Western culture, you complain that some members of the Western culture don't want to live next to them. How do you expect to "successfully integrate" people even as you just told them about how the culture you expect to integrate them into is xenophobic and racist against them and everything else? Would you integrate into a culture constantly telling you how much it sucks and how it's wrong about everything and how sorry it is to you about that?

> there will be no assimilation possible.

While I can't speak for Europe, in America there are approximately zero second-generation immigrants who aren't thoroughly Americanized.

If by Americanized, you include become Native English speakers, then I'd have to disagree with that 0 number. There are huge swathes of NYC neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens where second generation immigrants would be mistaken for first generation in most of the rest of the country.

I'm not saying this is good or bad, just that we're not so superior to Europeans with regards to integration as we think we are. I think we tend to care less. Of all the xenophobic stuff some of our politicians say, I don't notice the word integration come up a lot.

"Successfully integrate" = "live peacefully in this country under a single government and set of laws," not force them to abandon their culture. Stuff about making immigrants abandon their religion, outlawing their traditional dress, forcing them to shake hands, whatever, is (imo) disgusting and not what I mean by "cultural integration." That stuff will work itself out over time by regular culture processes and a two-way exchange, the same as it did for all the previous immigrant groups (Catholics, Irish, Chinese, Africans, etc). No, things still aren't perfect, but over time things do become more integrated just through natural processes.

> Would you integrate into a culture constantly telling you how much it sucks and how it's wrong about everything and how sorry it is to you about that?

The people acting that way (e.g. Donald Trump) are not helping. They're an obstacle. They're making things worse for everyone. There would need to be strategies to mitigate that, finding ways to convince them to be more accepting of immigrants, or reducing contact with the most hostile people as much as possible. But I still think allowing immigration, and having programs to facilitate it, is a better strategy than what has been happening so far, despite the obstacles.

'"live peacefully in this country under a single government and set of laws," not force them to abandon their culture.'

Government and laws are culture. They aren't all of a culture, but they are culture.

May I assume, for instance, that one of the laws you'd like to see them adopt is equal treatment of women? For the specific set of immigrants in question, that is a major abandonment of culture. Do the immigrants have a responsibility to culturally integrate here or not?

"The people acting that way (e.g. Donald Trump) are not helping."

Could you find me, say, five quotes where Donald Trump tells other cultures of the world than ours is racist, sexist, xenophobic, and toxic, or where he apologizes for all the things that Western culture has done?

I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb here by guessing you don't like Trump. Isn't exactly the reason you don't like him precisely that he doesn't do those things, like all proper public figures do?

Actually, never mind, I don't really care about how you feel about Trump, I just needed some textual distance before this paragraph. A few paragraphs ago I asked you if immigrants have a responsibility to culturally integrate or not. I'm also not too worried about the answer to that either. My point is, did you notice how that made you feel? I bet you find you didn't want to answer that question. You certainly didn't want to answer it with a resounding "Yes, immigrants absolutely should conform to basic Western standards of how women should be treated equally." I bet there's a part of you that wants to just go ahead and copy and paste that into a reply, just to show me.... but there's another part of you already writing the "but ...". And that's the proof of what I'm saying here... that sort of confidence is not in our culture. You don't need to go out into the culture to find this truth, you merely need look honestly inside yourself. How is that culture supposed to assimilate anything?

> But groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda are basically ideologies that rely on guerilla warfare (al-Qaeda moreso than ISIS, since ISIS at least wants to establish a caliphate).

The group that later decided to call itself "The Islamic State in Iraq" used to be "Al-Qaeda in Iraq", and both it and its parent organization had the goal of establishing a caliphate then; this has always been an al-Qaeda goal.

Yes, but al-Qaeda existed for years as just a decentralized terrorist network, whereas the legitimacy and appeal of ISIS partially depends on their establishing a caliphate (i.e. formal government and controlling territory). Otherwise they just go back to being another random terrorist group.

Which is both why it's slightly more plausible to "defeat ISIS" using a standard military, but it still wouldn't solve the underlying problems. More likely some other group just takes up the ISIS flag again a few years later.

> Yes, but al-Qaeda existed for years as just a decentralized terrorist network, whereas the legitimacy and appeal of ISIS partially depends on their establishing a caliphate

Prior to the post-9/11 period, during which, after a brief spike, the value of al-Qaeda's brand fell, the Taliban in Afghanistan wasn't so much a government sponsor of terror as a government sponsored by al-Qaeda, and a key part of al-Qaeda's appeal and legitimacy. Success at establishing territory with a formal government of the style promoted by the ideology has been as much a part of al-Qaeda's appeal as it is for the Islamic State (and the failure of al-Qaeda central to maintain that is a big part of the reason that al-Qaeda in Iraq, with its greater success at that, broke away and became, through a number of steps, "The Islamic State".)

The US could simply let the Kurds in northern Syria wipe out ISIS. They have the track record as the world's best ground force against ISIS.

But Turkey, the ISIS-friendly NATO partner that's bombing its own cities, wants to obliterate them. It does everything it can to keep the Kurds from closing the Turkey-ISIS supply line. Turkey's government is such an embarrassment that "Obama now considers [Erdoğan] a failure and an authoritarian." (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obam...)

The US government can easily end ISIS. But they have other priorities and agendas too. They want certain outcomes.

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