Not withstanding the wisdom of you resurrecting a heated discussion days after it had cooled off your idea that Jaffod got his facts wrong, apologised, but I still went after him like a terrier is a total mischaracterisation of the debate. And it matters because it’s a microcosm of the immigration debate.
First of all Jaffod did not track back and acknowledge his error. He admitted he was wrong, in the most grudgingly dismissive of ways while continuing to insist that he was broadly correct in his assertions, and those trivialities didn’t really matter. As shown below.
The second of those is particularly special, suggesting that I’m a prick for pointing out that immigrants don’t get free mobile phones - such a trope at this point it’s almost parody.
My arguments here with Jaffod are a microcosm of the immigration debate, and discussions like this always follow the same pattern. Person A makes claim about immigration. Person A is told that it isn’t true by Person B. Person A then whines that they are entitled to their opinion, claims to have seen immigration going wrong with their own eyes, and that Person B is a bully for pointing it out.
Throughout the discussion Jaffod put down a manifesto for all the ways he would tackle immigration, which is where the stuff on mobile phone, free cigs and driving lessons came from, but also declarations on denying access to healthcare, what do with people turning up undocumented etc. It was pointed out to him (not just by me) that everything he wrote was either completely untrue, already happening to some degree, or completely practically unworkable. Has this changed his opinion? I doubt it.
The frustrating thing about the immigration debate is that people are so misinformed and confused by a deliberate media agenda on immigration that they no longer seem particularly impacted by discovering the information they are basing their opinion on is not true. People are reflexing entirely on a gut feeling, and sense of general unease and dissatisfaction which is probably attributable to more factors that seeing more immigrants in their community.
Where we are right now is that it seems that for most people the issue they care most about is immigration, to the point where we are at risk of electing a government with a extreme neoliberal economic agenda, and their feelings on immigration, and specifically the grievance of the situation being unfair, are almost always based on things that aren’t true. That seems to me worthy of pushing back on when it crops up.
