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Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

Not American and my culture is all about massive childbirth, but this sentiment seems strange to me. How does that solve the problem?

If your panda bears are failing to breed, surely the solution is not to just import grizzly bears and pretend the panda bears never existed there? I guess it's a type of solution to the problem of "lack of bears", but is it really a good thing?

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As a child of an immigrant to the US and a native-born American (who herself came from a long line of mixed immigrant/native-born American families), I find this rather insulting. My parents are not different species, nor were my great-grandparents, nor my great-great-great grandparents.

are you a little shaky on how metaphors are employed or the difference between figurative and literal speech?

I think it's pretty obvious that I was extending the metaphor to make my point. It was the intention and the meaning behind the metaphor that was insulting. Do you take exception to that?

I think people are missing the point being made by RyanZAG, in that you are not really fixing the problem of -->childbirth<-- by having mass immigration. Imagine if these new immigrants then a few generations down start also not having a high birthrate, and the problem continuous... It's not about the damn bears...

No, they certainly get the point. They just don't like it for political reasons. The downvotes are political, not because they don't understand the issues.

So, given the chance of a graceful way to walk back your implication that people from different places are analogous to different species of animal, you are choosing to double down on that? It is not a political perspective that people are not like different species of bear: we can talk with each other, understand each other, love each other, marry each other, start families with each other. Not only can we do these things, we constantly do. If you're making a different point and just chose a particularly ... inelegant analogy, then please do clarify.

That’s exactly the point I understood, too. But for some people we are all equivalent so it’s a non-issue; for some others it’s an edulcorated form of ethnic cleansing. There are rarely be topics of greater divide where these two opposite ends cannot debate without feelings.

Because we're all people, not different kinds of bears.

Yet different groups have different cultures, religions, customs, languages, etc. It's idealistic to act like everyone is the same, when in reality, different groups are quite different, and often don't interact well together.

That you're being censored for simply pointing out a very simple truth goes to show how utterly toxic our industry has become.

I think it's stupid to downvote your parent comment (and I upvoted it in hopes of de-graying it), but 1. downvotes are not "censorship", and 2. the behavior of a few individual voters here has nothing to do with "our industry".

1. You're right and I originally had "downvoted", but after returning to the main thread and only being able to see who posted and not what they posted (in this sub-thread) from there I changed it to censored.

2. With regards to here, yes you're correct. If anything I should be calling the people in question out for using HN like Reddit (i.e. I downvote that which I disagree with).

That's true, but it doesn't contradict what I said. Cultures mixing and changing over time at different rates and with varying degrees of success is not analogous to different species of bears coexisting. We're all people.

Well, pandas and grizzlys are both mammals, not different kind of genus.

Your analogy would work if grizzly bears turned into panda bears by living among them.

Culture is not fixed at birth. People both adopt the surrounding culture and change it.

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