LL condemn the recent Executive Order on Immigration

[Pamela Galli]

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sally Parkes wrote:

Bravo Lindens, amazingly amongst all the posts only one Sour Puss Meow16. dont let the door hit your behind, Ta Ta.

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The Trumpeteers are not the only ones who dont value diversity.

[ChinRey]

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Perrie Juran wrote:

And for the record, I do believe in tough imigration rules.  But I don't support what Thump is doing with his executive order.

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The number of illegal immigrant in the USA has been estimated to 12 million, about 4 percent of the nation's total population. Something has to be done about that of course. But sometimes it can be a good idea to check the water for any stray babies before you throw it out.

I think I've said too much in this thread already so I better stop. If anybody wants to know the story about the Iraqi immigrant who turned out to be worth more than half a trillion dollars, do a search for Farouk Al-Kasim.

 

My final words here are a ancient traditional old Chinese saying that I made up myself a few minutes ago. It's not quite on topic but close enough:

Demonstration of strength is usually proof of weakness.

[Alwin Alcott]

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ChinRey wrote:

Demonstration of strength is usually proof of weakness.

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ohh.. that line is also used in neflix's Revolution... in the scene general Monroes  lost son was caught for freeing his dad from jail...... telling that to his stephdad...

[ChinRey]

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Alwin Alcott wrote:

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ChinRey wrote:

Demonstration of strength is usually proof of weakness.

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ohh.. that line is also used in neflix's Revolution...

in the scene general Monroes  lost son was caught for freeing his dad from jail...... telling that to his stephdad...

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Oh no! they stole my idea before I had even had it myself!!!

[Alwin Alcott]

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ChinRey wrote:

Oh no! they stole my idea before I had even had it myself!!!

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doesn't make the words less true

 

 

[Klytyna]

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ChinRey wrote:

Oh no! they stole my idea before I had even had it myself!!!

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I once spent hours making a 3d scene in povray, of the statue of liberty slight6ly tilted, embedded in an ice field and set it on the slow task of rendering... went shopping and saw some guy putting up a poster for some new movie with... yup you guessed it...

 

Still I have had a new and original idea to make the Mainland better... Build the Wall and make the mainlanders pay for it...

 

Oh what? He did? Damn him all to the netherhells of the Dark gods of the Grid, he stole my idea before I had it!

[Pussycat Catnap]

It is always the right thing to do to take a stand against hate. It is always the right time to fight oppression. It is always the right time to work for social justice.

Good move on Linden Lab's part. No action, no matter how small or how big - is wasted when it is against hate.

More words on this:

https://catnapkitty.wordpress.com/2017/02/03/linden-labs-statement-against-the-hateful-bigotry-of-the-us-president-is-a-good-thing/

 

[sirhc DeSantis]

With respect I do think your resonse falls hook line and sinker as a false analogy. Context was a nice try.

[BilliJo Aldrin]

The more the Cultural Marxists whine and cry, they more they show they are losing.

Thank you President Trump for putting America first.

[Klytyna]

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Conall DeCuir wrote:

It's funny. I dreamt about LL doing this statement 2 nights ago.

Let me ask this: When LL would have a constant hacker problem which would cause danger for the average player base (datas, money, scam), would it be so bad to do a HALT for 3 months for people who would want to join ... till it was figured out how to ensure the playerbase and their servers can be kept safe? Or would LL just shrug about the problems, having their platform slowly dying out?

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Only untill the "Fearless Banhammer Investigators" figured out the tiny minority of imigrants to Sl who were causing problems were all "close relatives" of Mad Mainland Casino Kingpin "Don Bastardo Tortellini" (bastardo.tortellini rez date 2005), Capo de tutti Capi of the whole Mainland Mafia...

 

Then they'd throw the oaf out, confiscate his massive lindex investments and land portfolio, and reopen imigration to howls of protests from the bigots in the "No Last Name No Entry" campaign...

[Aethelwine]

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BilliJo Aldrin wrote:

The more the Cultural Marxists whine and cry, they more they show they are losing.

Thank you President Trump for putting America first.

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Have you ever read anything from the Frankfurt school? Is Adorno or Habermas really so widely read in the USA and globally that their influence can be said to have anything whatsoever to do with resistance to Trump's ridicululous mean spirited policies that are threatening the lives of real people and will help recruit more terrorists?

The principle of asylum goes back into antiquity, and was incorporated formally into the Christian Church in 511AD at the Council of Orleans.

Claiming Cultural Marxists are responsible for something that was happening millenia before them is ridiculous.

[Pussycat Catnap]

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ChinRey wrote:

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Rya Nitely wrote:

And I understood it to be a refugee swap deal. If it isn't a swap, why should America do it? I agree that it would be 'dumb'.

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I haven't read the details but of course it's a give-and-take deal both parties thought would benefit them at the time they agreed on it. Now the current US authorities don't think it's a good deal for them and they want to renegotiate or cancel it. That raises the first two of several questions:

1. Which other agreements do the current US leadership want to run away from?
2. Can other nations trust them at all?
3. Which state leader wants to have a one-on-one talk with Trump knowing that he's likely to tweet details about the chat the next day?
4. If this is the start of a new US immigration regime, where is it going to end?

I think the last question is the one most relevant in this discussion. According to the 2016 Silicon Valley index, 74% of the computer and mathematical workers aged from 25 to 44 are immigrants. 52% of the Silicon Valley companies were founded by immigrants.

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People driven by smart policy rather than Jingoism know that the take here is simple: people who bring new ideas and potential innovation.

Something above 40% of our tech CEOs are immigrants. As you note, 52% of the founders are. Some of them, like Steve Jobs, where children of refugees. Syrian Refugee in his case.

The workforce has an even higher percentage. 74% seems higher than I would have thought, but it does make sense.

The world's braintrust mostly works in the USA in coastal tech hubs or with firms that have close ties to Silicon Valley.

- That is what drives the American economy. Without those people, given the USA's constant problems with incurious bigotry and jingoistic adventurism, we'd be a third world nation.

So the trade with "being willing to take in immigrants" is winning the human lottery in your labor pool.

 

What these incurious bigots don't like - is the tech jobs that go to Americans don't tend to go to stupid backwater bigots. They go to smart people. Smart isn't a racially specific trait - which infuriates them. And smart people tend to quickly learn the value of diversity even if they started out as 'backwater bigots'. That then starts turning them into either liberals or libertarians. I'm not a fan of libertarians in the least - but they're at least open to the idea of having a brain and recognizing the value in a person who likewise has one...

So you get the coastal "libtard" cities getting richer and richer, and more and more into the age of the Jetsons and science fiction, while the inland is starting to look worse than central Africa used to (before it started getting tech investment from China and India).

And that just drives the backwater types to entrench themselves even further into bigotry as if a solution that stopped working a century ago was going to suddenly save them.

 

 

[Klytyna]

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

So you get the coastal "libtard" cities getting richer and richer, and more and more into the age of the Jetsons and science fiction, while the inland is starting to look worse than central Africa used to (before it started getting tech investment from China and India).

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Try researching the official figures for average IQ in each state, and compare the results to support for parties in your elections, it's kind of scary noting which states have average IQ's over 100, and which ones roll in at 85...

[Pussycat Catnap]

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Klytyna wrote:

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Pussycat Catnap wrote:

So you get the coastal "libtard" cities getting richer and richer, and more and more into the age of the Jetsons and science fiction, while the inland is starting to look worse than central Africa used to (before it started getting tech investment from China and India).

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Try researching the official figures for average IQ in each state, and compare the results to support for parties in your elections, it's kind of scary noting which states have average IQ's over 100, and which ones roll in at 85...

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That data doesn't surprise me. Note that it is also inconsistent. Some websites list California as low, others as average.

California is also a huge state. Most populous in the USA I "think" and is split into some very distinct regions. The 'Bay Area' is the tech hub, Los Angeles is entertainment and formerly industrial. San Diego military. Much of the rest is rural - but central and northern rural are very different industries (agricultural in central, northern is wooded, drugs, and wine - to the point that California's #1 cash crop is/was actually marijuana).

Most of these websites suggest the trend for IQ breaks north to south (high to low), and not east-west or coast-inland.

- That is because it's just looking at geography as a large picture and not at things like urban vs. rural and what kinds of industry.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

If you are at all interested in such matters, you might be interested to read this analysis of Trump's Executive Order by Benjamin Wittes, who is normally considered pretty much of a hawk on security matters rather than a "cultural marxist": Malevolence Tempered by Incompetence: Trump’s Horrifying Executive Order on Refugees and Visas.

It is, he suggests, both wildly over-inclusive, in that it catches hundreds of thousands of people who have no connection whatsoever with terrorism, and simultaneously completely under-inclusive,  in that none of the terrorists who have killed people on US soil this century would have been affected by it.

It is, he argues, nothing to do with making America safe and everything to do with making like difficult for hundreds of thousands of people because of their presumed religious background, simply to please his supporters:

Put simply, I don’t believe that the stated purpose is the real purpose. This is the first policy the United States has adopted in the post-9/11 era about which I have ever said this. It’s a grave charge, I know, and I’m not making it lightly. But in the rational pursuit of security objectives, you don’t marginalize your expert security agencies and fail to vet your ideas through a normal interagency process. You don’t target the wrong people in nutty ways when you’re rationally pursuing real security objectives.

When do you do these things? You do these things when you’re elevating the symbolic politics of bashing Islam over any actual security interest. You do them when you’ve made a deliberate decision to burden human lives to make a public point. In other words, this is not a document that will cause hardship and misery because of regrettable incidental impacts on people injured in the pursuit of a public good. It will cause hardship and misery for tens or hundreds of thousands of people because that is precisely what it is intended to do.

It's the sort of measure that has America's friends and allies shaking their heads in despair and disbelief, while Daesh and similar terrorist organisations are delighted that the President of the USA is acting as a recruiting sergeant for them.

Vladimir Putin must feel well pleased in the performance so far of his preferred candidate.

[Callum Meriman]

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Rya Nitely wrote:

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And I understood it to be a refugee swap deal. If it isn't a swap, why should America do it? I agree that it would be 'dumb'.

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Well, they heavily vet the 1296 on Manus and Nauru and cherry pick a few, maybe the few Sri Lankans, as a one time event. As well, Mr Obama did not set a time, so it can be in 6 months, 9, 12, 18.... 

On our side we agreed to take 6000 of theirs from central and South America, no vetting, starting 2017, every year forever. The USA saves money to the order of 6K refugees a year and their camps are a little  lighter.

Of course now Mr Trump has Mr Turnbull by his short and curlies and will ensure that Darwin houses and stages B1-Bs, in addition to Guam. At the moment Darwin is just used for rotation.

Mr Turnball is spineless as well as a waffling waste of space. Should have closed Pine Gap and a few other things.

 

[NevaehHeartstrings]

 

 

I disagree with the choice Linden Lab has made.

[Rya Nitely]

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Callum Meriman wrote:

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Rya Nitely wrote:

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And I understood it to be a refugee swap deal. If it isn't a swap, why should America do it? I agree that it would be 'dumb'.

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Well, they heavily vet the 1296 on Manus and Nauru and cherry pick a few, maybe the few Sri Lankans, as a one time event. As well, Mr Obama did not set a time, so it can be in 6 months, 9, 12, 18.... 

On our side we agreed to take 6000 of theirs from central and South America, no vetting, starting 2017, every year forever. The USA saves money to the order of 6K refugees a year and their camps are a little  lighter.

Of course now Mr Trump has Mr Turnbull by his short and curlies and will ensure that Darwin houses and stages B1-Bs, in addition to Guam. At the moment Darwin is just used for rotation.

Mr Turnball is spineless as well as a waffling waste of space. Should have closed Pine Gap and a few other things.

 

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Yes, the very first time we heard about the deal in Australia was that it was a refugee swap. We take asylum seekers from a centre being set up in Costa Rica to help cope with a mass exodus of people fleeing poverty and violence in neighbouring countries and in return America takes our refugees, and the purpose of this is to 'send the strongest possible signal to the people smuggler' that "Those passengers will never settle in this country."

[Rya Nitely]

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Perrie Juran wrote:

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ChinRey wrote:

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Rya Nitely wrote:

And I understood it to be a refugee swap deal. If it isn't a swap, why should America do it? I agree that it would be 'dumb'.

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I haven't read the details but of course it's a give-and-take deal both parties thought would benefit them at the time they agreed on it. Now the current US authorities don't think it's a good deal for them and they want to renegotiate or cancel it. That raises the first two of several questions:

1. Which other agreements do the current US leadership want to run away from?
2. Can other nations trust them at all?
3. Which state leader wants to have a one-on-one talk with Trump knowing that he's likely to tweet details about the chat the next day?
4. If this is the start of a new US immigration regime, where is it going to end?

<snip>

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I've been through a half dozen articles now and can't find anything about a swap or a give and take.  Just simply that we'd take some of these refugees.  If there is some kind of swap I'd appreciate if someone can point me to it.

 

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http://www.skynews.com.au/news/top-stories/2016/09/21/australia-to-join-us-refugee-program.html

you can read between the lines

[Callum Meriman]

It's been in the news since September.

Here is just one of them from Australian Newspapers:

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/australia-to-take-central-american-refugees-as-malcolm-turnbull-pledges-to-do-more-at-obama-summit-20160920-grkcq9.html

 

And from the USA Newspapers:

 

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In terms of absolute numbers, the US agreed to a one-off transfer of up to 1,250 refugees from the Pacific, while Australia didn't commit to specific numbers, saying only that it would accept refugees from the Central American program as part of an overall annual refugee intake that will hit almost 19,000 by 2019.

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http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/02/us-australia-refugee-plan-really-is-the-worst-deal-ever-commentary.html

[Feldspar Millgrove]

Say that Linden Lab has users from about 1,000 areas of the world. Of those, there are about 10 places that are known to be dangerous (to themselves, their neighbors, and SL). Most of the griefing comes from those 10 places. There are even lost of people who are trying to escape those places, it's so bad there. Now, out of those 10 places, Linden Lab's previous administration identified 6 of them as being the worst. (The other 4 might even be worse in some ways, such as being the source of a major attack, but they have certain political and economic ties.) So the incoming CEO of LL implements a policy where users wanting to create new accounts from those 6 areas are put on hold and given special review for 90 days, Users who already had accounts from those areas are still allowed to log in but they have to go through several extra login screens and may feel like they are being picked on, since they were already vetted.

After the 90 days is up, things should go back to more or less normal, but better user verification procedures will be in place to filter out griefers -- new accounts from those areas will be more cumbersome to create due to this "extreme vetting". By the way, many new accounts (certainly all of the recent influx of users) from these areas are given free Premium accounts for their first 5 years. (This is subsidized by raising the cost of Premium accounts on all other users.)

Out of the 1,000 areas, the people in about 100 of them have a certain religion (either by choice, or because the rulers of the area willl cut your head off if you don't follow their relgion). People are screaming "religious persecution" because 6 of those countries are on the ban list, even though all the other 94 areas that practice the religion are totally unaffected by the ban.

Meanwhile, the rulers of the most obvious non-banned area (one of the 4 excluded from the 10 bad places), was, as part of this ban, coerced by LL into setting up their own OpenSIm system to give free accounts to people fleeing the worst neighboring areas, instead of them needing to come over to SL.

Because of this, the CEO of LL is called "Hitler",is said to be destroying SL and the rest of the Internet, is given death threars, and many sims are trashed by current outraged residents who exploit security holes to delete other people's objects (regardless of whether those people entirely agree with CEO Hitler or not), These people also grief the s&*&t out of anyone who ever wrote anything positive about the CEO or who suggests that these temporary emergency measures might be reasonable. Or if their svi  just "looks like" the "racist" and "intolerant" sort of "oppressive hater" who might have.

Meanwhile, AOL's CEO writes a public letter condeming the LL CEO...

[CassieMaia]

Wow!  I'm glad I decided to stop in here tonight.  First, I appreciated the response made by LL on the immigration executive order.   Second, thanks to Callum and Rya for the additional information regarding the other side of the story on Australia and the refugee situation - that helps fill out the bigger picture for me. 

[sirhc DeSantis]

That was an intersting take. Rambling, pointless but there again that sums me up.

And - is AOL really a thing still? You kids today make me feel all nostalgic

 

Talked with some refugees today. We complained about the price of veg due to some rather unusual

weather in Spain. I mean, equiv of 10 bucks for a lettuce!

Its the sort of thing we do, living next door to each other.

[ChinRey]

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Feldspar Millgrove wrote:

Say that Linden Lab has users from about 1,000 areas of the world. Of those, there are about 10 places that are known to be dangerous (to themselves, their neighbors, and SL). Most of the griefing comes from those 10 places. There are even lost of people who are trying to escape those places, it's so bad there. Now, out of those 10 places, Linden Lab's previous administration identified 6 of them as being the worst. (The other 4 might even be worse in some ways, such as being the source of a major attack, but they have certain political and economic ties.) So the incoming CEO of LL implements a policy where users wanting to create new accounts from those 6 areas are put on hold and given special review for 90 days, Users who already had accounts from those areas are still allowed to log in but they have to go through several extra login screens and may feel like they are being picked on, since they were already vetted.

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That is a very good description of how things should have been done. It's how actually LL tries to do it by blocking certain IP numbers and it's certainly something all RL governments do from time to time.

But there is one sentence in your description that makes it irrrelevant in this particular case:

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Feldspar Millgrove wrote:

Now, out of those 10 places, Linden Lab's previous administration identified 6 of them as being the worst.

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That is what the US authorities didn't do. As Innula pointed out, hey didn't identify the problem spots, they just picked a few based on their own prejudices without doing a reality check. I can't speak for others but to me that makes a huge difference.

On the positive side, I'm sure the terrorists get a good laugh out of it.

[Amethyst Jetaime]

A federal judge has now issued a restraining order against Trump's executive order until the law suits filed by a number of states can be heard.  It is effective nationwide.

"The states have met their burden of demonstrating that they face immediate and irreparable injury as a result of the signing and implementation of the executive order," Juge Robart wrote in the restraining order.

This judge was appointed as a "conservative" judge by George Bush.  So finally wiser heads have prevailed.

This will probably end up before the supreme court to rule on the actual constitutionality of using religion as a basis for discrimation against immigrants, not only in stopping muslims from certain countries entering the US but also giving 'preferential' treatment to 'christians' which Trump stated was his ultimate goal.  Clearly this is unconstitutional.

All the Trump supporters that agree with this in this country forget that most of them, going back to the earliest settler's during colonial times, wouldn't be here if they themselves or their ancestors were prohibited from entering the US due to their religion or even their preferred flavor of Christianity.  I know for a fact that I wouldn't be here.  Our open immigration policies from the earliest days has been what really has made America great.