View Single Post
Old 11-25-2015, 10:41 AM   #531
CorsiHockeyLeague
Franchise Player
 
CorsiHockeyLeague's Avatar
 
Join Date: Feb 2015
Exp:
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by undercoverbrother View Post
Corsi, my point is that much of the response has been disingenuous, IMO.

If these were such pressing concerns/issues where have they been for the past year, 2 years, 5 years.....
You might be right, but it's not really very productive to attack motives, first of all. Either it's a good idea or it isn't (I don't think it is) that we should be prioritizing these issues over refugees.

It's entirely possible that a person would reasonably take the position that, "look, until now (or maybe even now), I was opposed to spending a ~$700 million chunk of money helping disadvantaged people. However, if we ARE committed to spending that money, if I'm to treat it like a sunk cost anyway, here's how I think we should spend it".

Second, world events tend to get people thinking about a variety of issues. An attack on Paris gets people thinking about foreign policy all of a sudden. People suddenly care about a ton of different things following a mass shooting. "Maybe we'd be better off intervening in X place" is not suddenly a bad notion just because it was equally good or bad six months ago.

I just don't think suspecting peoples' motivations is relevant or useful, it's wasting mental energy on speculation and mind-reading, and undermines our ability to have a conversation about basically anything.
__________________
"The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
CorsiHockeyLeague is offline   Reply With Quote