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A Vancouver man was denied entry into the United States after a US Customs and Border Patrol officer read his profiles on the gay hookup app Scruff and the website BBRT.
[...] André, a 30-year-old Vancouver set decorator who declined to give his full name for fear of retaliation from US Customs, describes the experience as "humiliating."[He] says he was planning to visit his boyfriend, who was working in New Orleans. But when he was going through Customs preclearance at Vancouver airport last October, he was selected for secondary inspection, where an officer took his phone, computer and other possessions, and demanded the passwords for his devices.
"I didn't know what to do. I was scared, so I gave them the password and then I sat there for at least an hour or two. I missed my flight," André says. "He came back and just started grilling me. 'Is this your email?' and it was an email attached to a Craigslist account for sex ads. He asked me, 'Is this your account on Scruff? Is this you on BBRT?' I was like, 'Yes, this is me.'"
[...] "I could tell just by his nature that he had no intentions of letting me through. They were just going to keep asking me questions looking for something," he says. "So I asked for the interrogation to stop. I asked if I go back to Canada am I barred for life? He said no, so I accepted that offer."
A month later, André attempted to fly to New Orleans again. This time, he brought what he thought was ample proof that he was not a sex worker: letters from his employer, pay stubs, bank statements, a lease agreement and phone contracts to prove he intended to return to Canada.
When he went through secondary inspection at Vancouver airport, US Customs officers didn't even need to ask for his passwords — they were saved in their own system. But André had wiped his phone of sex apps, browser history and messages, thinking that would dispel any suggestion he was looking for sex work. Instead, the border officers took that as suspicious.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Zz9zZ on Monday February 27 2017, @09:24PM (1 child)
Found your problem: "How do you know that your evidence is factual?"
Cross referencing, research, critical thinking. You have to apply these, develop an arsenal of well documented facts. Reports from actual organizations that deal with whatever topic, quotes from politicians / legislation proposals (for the "taking our guns" stuff). But most importantly, you have to remove your own emotions. As soon as you get the tiniest bit upset you start the emotional cascade which shuts down all reasonable discussion. SO, they'll spout nonsense and you have to respond with facts. You also must understand that the shit you hate is done by the democrats as well, so conservatives have legitimate complaints too. You must acknowledge and not dismiss those complaints.
If you really care, then document the process, write down all the lies you got them to see, etc. etc. I don't have any go-to documents prepared so I can't provide you with some fact packet, but since you're worried about whethe
~Tilting at windmills~
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @05:41PM
I disagree. Facts really don't matter. There are so many cognitive failures in the human mind - like filtering where contradictory facts are simply demphasized, and there is also this funny effect where people acknowledge that the foundation of a chain of logic is in error but still retain their belief in the conclusion. Its like once the conclusion is made it stands on its own. Maybe because reasoning it all through again is a lot of mental effort, so people in general just keep track of the conclusions but not how they got there as a sort of mental shortcut.
If you want to change minds there are two ways - get the hater to see themselves in the position of the hated. [npr.org] The old "walk a mile in another man's shoes" thing. The other method is for someone they look up to tell them changing their mind is a good idea. That one is harder, but its rare for everyone that someone admires to be in exact lockstep so sometimes you can find records of one expressing an opinion that contradicts all the others.
To paraphrase, Jonathan Swift, "You can't reason a man out of a position he never reasoned himself into."