Trump on Immigration

 Trump has been attacking immigration recently at his rallies and implying that immigrants are "poisoning" American society.

This is of course causing howls of fascism and claims that he is using the precise language of Hitler in Mein Kampf.

That is essentially using Level 1 of Graham's Hierarchy of Argument. People are calling him a fascist and comparing him to Hitler. That's just "Name-Calling." That's appropriate for toddlers in the playground but not for political commentary. I think we need to move up the hierarchy and address the claim itself. In 2023, in the US, are immigrants having a positive or a negative effect? Are some immigrants having a positive effect and others a negative one? I honestly don't know although every immigrant that I've encountered recently seems to be having a positive effect. 

This is not the first time in American history that there have been people that were anti-immigrant. Refer to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. So, rather than attacking the guy who said it how about we address the claims being made? I know very little about immigration policy so I don't feel qualified to evaluate the question. I could be wrong but I suspect the quote from Mein Kampf people are mostly referring to is as follows: 

"What history taught us about the policy followed by the House of Habsburg was corroborated by our own everyday experiences. In the north and in the south the poison of foreign races was eating into the body of our people, and even Vienna was steadily becoming more and more a non-German city." 

 Hitler uses "poison" or its derivatives fully 56 times in Mein Kampf. He accuses anyone he doesn't like, including Jews, political opponents (Socialist and Marxist), writers, actors and intellectuals in general of poisoning either the German people, German society, the German government or the German military. 

 Hitler was an equal opportunity hater. But that doesn't automatically mean everything he said was wrong. 

Historically he was right about the House of Habsburg in Austria-Hungary although he was talking about an empire with essentially conquered peoples rather than immigrants so I don't really think it applies. The polyglot empire was doomed to fail because it couldn't balance all of the competing political and cultural agendas. 

After WW I it was dismembered into multiple countries along ethnic lines.

Why Amazon Rules

One of my smoke detectors started acting up. It was sounding three low chirps about every minute. I knew that wasn't low battery because that's one chirp.

I knew it wasn't a carbon dioxide warning because that's four really loud beeps repeatedly and smoke was three really loud beeps repeatedly. Besides there was no smoke.

I took it down, dusted it off and changed the batteries just in case. It was OK for about three days and then did it again at about 3 AM. I took the thing down and took out the batteries to shut it up.

The next day I pulled up the manual and found, buried near the end, that three low chirps every minute is an end of life warning.

Great, the detector I had was a First Alert, battery operated, CO and smoke detector that screwed into a ceiling mount. What I really wanted was the exact same detector so I could screw the new detector into the existing mount.

On to Amazon. I typed in First Alert and the model number into the search function and, as is usual with Amazon, I got a page of options. However one of them was marked "You Bought this Last in 2016." 

The problem of finding a compatible detector was immediately solved AND they delivered it that afternoon. I didn't even remember that I had bought it on Amazon.

But, Amazon knows all. All hail the great god Amazon.