Wednesday 24 November 2021

Politically Expendable Deaths

There is a hierarchy of racism in this country, and this is underlined by the death of 31 people in the Channel on Wednesday. Rather than a scintilla of sympathy, we see rightwingers taking to social media to do what they do best: blame the victims. They would not have died, they intone, if they had simply applied for asylum in France. The completely unsubtle implication that the dead have no one to blame but themselves. Boris Johnson went a step further, blaming the French for what happened, with his faithful henchwoman Priti Patel deploring the tragedy that took place in French waters.

There is blame to be apportioned, and it gathers about the steps of Downing Street. Their 11 years in office has seen the Tories grubbing in the linguistic sewer to portray anyone seeking sanctuary in this country as part-scrounger, part-terrorist. Unless they hail from Hong Kong and are politically convenient, of course. Having framed asylum seekers as unpeople, the Tories are effectively in a race to out do the extremism of the right wing press. Patel, herself a daughter of refugees, insults her own parents' suffering by promising to do her best in doing the worst. Her Nationality and Immigration Bill sets up fortress Britain, and will punish anyone deemed to help somebody seek asylum, refuse to provide safe routes into the UK, holds out the fantasy of setting up refugee camps offshore for asylum processing, and promises the multiplication of bureaucracy as successful asylum applications are checked and rechecked - a measure designed to make the system costly, inefficient, and miserable for those on the receiving end of it.

Patel and Johnson are grotesques for redoubling their cruel efforts. But they're aided by oppositions who never contest the substance of demonising refugees, and they dig a pit previously excavated by decades of governments playing politics with the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable. This is a responsibility shared by past Prime Ministers, Leaders of Oppositions, politicians who've lied about immigration and asylum seekers for a few minutes on television, and every single editorial office and hack who've belched the toxins of racism into politics like the four chugging towers of Battersea Power Station during its prime. It's an ugly politics. It's an utterly cowardly politics.

If Johnson and the rest of his gang truly cared about "evil" people smugglers and human traffickers, his government would set up multiple safe routes into the UK, so thousands aren't left at the mercy of criminals, nor have to risk their lives in trying to reach these shores. The gangsters exist, the smuggling across borders exist because Johnson and the Tories are supporting the conditions in which this blackest of markets can thrive. There's the small matter of many fleeing to the UK because of the consequences of what the UK is doing overseas, either directly as was the case in Iraq and Afghanistan and what is happening now in Yemen at the hands of its Saudi allies. Or indirectly by curbing aid, or people living in societies scarred by the broken legacies colonialism left in its wake. As last year's Black Lives Matter/decolonial protests remind us, a proper reckoning with the British empire cannot be entertained.

What truly saddens about those 31 unnecessary deaths is that they won't make a blind bit of difference. The opposition won't contest the premise of Tory asylum policy. No mass circulation title or broadcast media commentator will make the obvious points and defend the right for people to come here. Instead, it's an opportunity for whetting authoritarian appetites and bedding down the hostile environment. An avoidable human tragedy repurposed for more dehumanisation and, inevitably, more deaths.

Image Credit

39 comments:

Jenny said...

The absolute idiocy of these racist policies is illustrated by the simultaneous shortages of hospitality,care, medical workers, hgvdrivers etc. They’re so determined to be racist they will trash the economy to indulge their obsession.

Dipper said...

So for clarity, you believe in unlimited immigration with full housing, education and health benefits for anyone from anywhere?

Dipper said...

... and France? Does France not have some responsibility in this? Because just in case some of you who moan about how hard it is in their native countries and how I personally am responsible blah blah they are not fleeing their native countries, they are fleeing inhuman suffering and persecution in France.

If life under British rule is such a fantastic thing, then perhaps instead of bringing millions here to experience it, we could just export our system to their countries? Would seem a lot easier.

But we all know what the game is here, as you state in your penultimate paragraph. This is just another chance to punish the white working class for being white and working class. That they have been born into a race and a class that requires them to be punished for life because of things that their ancestors had no part in, and their children to be punished thereafter.

This is all part of the 'anti-semitic style' analysis that now is accepted in almost totality by the modern left. that history is about races exploiting other races, and those races that did the exploiting have to be punished.

Blissex said...

In pieces like this blog post the always missing detail is the reason why these refugee candidates are trying to escape from the political persecution and threat to life they suffer in France (a notoriously vicious dictatorship and failed state) to come to the UK instead of another country, for example escaping overland from France to Spain, Italy, Germany, Benelux.
Many voters are not as stupid as our blogger seems to hope.
Priti Patel and her accomplices know that many voters are not that stupid, and they make politics out of it.

Blissex said...

«perhaps instead of bringing millions here to experience it, we could just export our system to their countries?»

That is an old debate between immigration and offshoring.

The only hypocrisy greater than that of "leftoids" as to "refugees" from France is that about the self-interest of tories: between offshoring and immigration the tories in the end much prefer immigration because while both create competition for the local working classes, it is only population increases that puts lot of pressure on local housing costs and other costs that benefit the tories. Sure they rant about immigration, but they also love how an increasing population helps to make living costs boom.

Blissex said...

«the 'anti-semitic style' analysis that now is accepted in almost totality by the modern left»

That is the modern "whig" right, according to which society is a collection of identity groups based on (several) races and (many) sexes and orientations, interacting through the markets, rather than divided in a hierarchy of estates ordained by the deities, or a set of classes shaped by the interests arising from their role in production.

«that history is about races exploiting other races»

Ground zero of that is the book "The racial contract" by Charles Mills, and the story is there is that history is about the white race exploiting other races. You can test your fortitude by reading:

https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2021/11/charles-mills-once-again.html
https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2021/10/mills-continues-to-delight.html
https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2021/09/a-story-about-charles-mills-and-plea.html
“It was a racial and ideological reading of The Lord of the Rings, in which Mills demonstrated with great wit that Tolkien’s famous trilogy was built on a racially encoded hierarchy of European peoples in which the highest position was occupied by the tall blonde Scandinavians (the elves), and the lowest was occupied by the swarthy short southern Europeans (the orcs.) I read the paper with delicious pleasure”

Racialism can be used to "decode" *anything*.

McIntosh said...

Goodness Dipper, did you read the the blog or just use the headline as an excuse to vent your anger? What is 'anti semitic style' analysis? Never heard of it. Does it mean you accuse someone of it, without evidence but with the knowledge that there is a stream of associated meanings that make you virtuous and the perp evil?
Did you miss the bit about the need for the UK to put in place an efficient system that allows people to apply to come to the UK?
And I missed the bit about punsihing the white, working class. I thought the thrust of the blog was about getting Britain's rulers to take some accountability and action. Do you think all white people in the UK have a common interest?

Dipper said...

@ Jenny. there is no such thing as a labour shortage. Just a failure to provide decent wages and conditions.

I for one am shocked that after decades of restricting entry to Nursing and Medicine and turning away enthusiastic and suitably qualified young people we should now have a 'shortage'. Online browsing would indicate that again to my surprise a large state monolithic institution organised on Soviet lines should turn out to be a horrible employer that most employees spend much of their time trying to leave.

Mark said...

Re: Dipper

"So for clarity, you believe in unlimited immigration with full housing, education and health benefits for anyone from anywhere?"

Yes. I'd like to hear an explanation why that shouldn't be the case where you don't assume profit and accumulation of money to be more important than life itself.

This has nothing to do with punishing the white working class and your false victimhood narrative to hide your out right racism is pathetic and vile. Nothing the west does has consequence? Nothing? We tried to civilize the world, did we, but it just didn't take. Oh poor us and our whiteness surrounded by such an uncivilized world knocking at our door.

Our ancestors raped and plundered the and enslaved the world. I don't feel guilt for that, I wasn't involved. I can however see that was bad and has consequences especially as our foreign policy continues the racism and plunder of colonialism.

These were people, people who died needlessly the fact you would rather throw blame at anyone but ourselves for that than find a solution and then knee jerk your way into arguments which mean these people are less than your people sickens me, and it should you too.

AgeOldTale said...

Safe legal routes for people dreaming of a better life. It's that simple. Then the deaths and drownings will stop. But don't expect the Tories to do the humane and moral thing. If only communities of colour had voted in the last election, we'd have Jeremy as leader right now with a massive majority. That's why our Conservative friends prefer people to die rather than be welcomed here. It's that simple.

Blissex said...

«these racist policies is illustrated by the simultaneous shortages of hospitality,care, medical workers, hgvdrivers etc.»

I guess then that brexit was a racist project because polish plumbers are a race, just like romanian cleaners are a race, or czech dentists or italian doctors or greek nurses are also races, or that EU university students are another race too, and the goal of brexit was to exclude those races from immigration to "white supremacist" England :-).

BTW those shortages also happening in China and India, I guess because of racism there too... :-)

BCFG said...

This article shows the whole problem with the stinking world vision of centrists, and why these people are the worst human beings ever to grace planet Earth, even worse than people like Dipper.

These centrists operate on a superficial ‘political’ level, as in party political. The systematic reasons for refugees dying at sea have to be conveniently erased from the argument because, and lets be clear about this, centrists like PhilBC are every bit as in love with bourgeois capitalism as are Trump, Dipper, Lord Boffy, Jim Denham, Boris Johnson, etc. Therefore, they have to pretend that if Yvette Cooper became the elected leader all such problems would vanish!

But it isn’t just right wingers who sicken at the superficial level is it? I mean would footballers take the knee for refugees drowning at sea, or Palestinians being mown down like ducks in a duck shoot? Well the answer is a resounding no, they didn’t!

Do woke hysterical get more exercised by the use of improper language on twitter than refugees dying at sea? You bet the fuckers do. Woke hystericals of course would have you believe that improper language or blackfacing for example, results in refugees dying at sea, but this shows how much those idiots know.

The other angle on this is why are the refugees happening in the first place? Two main reasons are imperialist wars of domination and theft (packaged and sugar coated by centrists/liberals as liberation and sending girls to school) and Western values of rampant consumerism, which is literally killing the planet (I can provide the science to prove this if you need it, but it does come in terabytes so get the appropriate hard drive). These destructive and dangerous values, the most dangerous the world has ever known, are fully endorsed and supported by the far right, the far left and everywhere in-between.

In Europe today 4 migrants in a dingy is painted as akin to an alien invasion, but one which will send the value of your ISA’s tumbling (a weird but interesting idea for the next Hollywood blockbuster!). Imagine the scenario when the Western value chickens really come home to roost and instead of 4 migrants in a dingy we have hundreds of millions. At that point Europe, centrists included, will turn to our old friend Hitler for guidance, and footballers will proudly take the knee while making the salute!

Incidentally, on the destructive nature of Western values, tragically being spread to all corners of the Earth (something that seems to have escaped Dippers attention, he is more asleep at the wheel than Solskjaer), maybe one way to reduce coal production would be to claim that coal miners are being racist by blackfacing? This will get the hystericals all worked up at least.

Dipper said...

@ Blissex. whenever I wonder why I bother wasting my valuable time on educating the ungrateful you pop up and make some serious points with which I sometimes agree and sometimes don't. Worth the price of entry for your comments alone. thank you.

@McIntosh "Goodness Dipper, did you read the the blog or just use the headline" the latter

"Did you miss the bit about the need for the UK to put in place an efficient system that allows people to apply to come to the UK?" we have that. And @ AgeOldTail "Safe legal routes for people dreaming of a better life" but that isn't being requested. All this stuff about legal processes presupposes that everyone has a legal right to come here. But any legal process short of completely open entry will reject some people, who then get in a boat ... and why not dream of a better life in their native countries? Have we just accepted that other nations can persecute and discriminate against their own people and we will co-operate with their persecution by guaranteeing those persecuted a right to live wherever they like.

@ Mark "Our ancestors raped and plundered the and enslaved the world" well, a close reading of imperial history would reveal it was a bit more complicated than that. That the arch imperialist Cecil Rhodes tried to introduce the vote into South Africa, that the empire established the notion of legal rights, courts, constitutions in places. That's not to 'whitewash' it, but if you are going to assess empire you might as well do it properly and put plusses against the minuses.

But if we are going to find a race that raped and plundered and enslaved the world, that would be The Vikings, who did that and not a lot else. To the extent that chromosomal/mitochondrial analysis shows Icelandic men are largely viking and Icelandic women largely Irish. Maybe I'm just unobservant but I haven't seen the Irish government demanding reparations for enslavement and raping of its women, or Scandinavian politicians taking the knee to Ireland. That is just reserved for the likes of me.


Dipper said...

@ Blissex "I guess then that brexit was a racist project" the Venn diagram of nation states and races has a significant overlap. But IMHO the case for nation states as the best vehicle for advancing right of all citizens is a strong one, and just to point out what you already know this ethno-nationalist white state has Asians as Chancellor, Home Secretary, Health Minister, and an Iraqi as the Education Minister.

Dipper said...

@ McIntosh "What is 'anti semitic style' analysis? it's an analysis that regards race as the primary motive force in politics and history, seeks disparities between races, and regards all evidence of one race doing poorly to active discrimination by the races doing well, and apportions the blame to all members of that race. My definition.

Jenny said...

It would be good to see housing, education, welfare and health benefits for all british citizens, for a start. And, no , I didn't say I supported the straw man of unlimited immigration for everyone, but we could certainly accommodate more rather than let them die in rubber boats.

Dipper said...

I'm an ex left-wing person and current Tory because the left has given up worrying about the cost of things.

Society is a complex interaction of incentives and disincentives, of rights and responsibilities, of taxes and subsidies. You cannot simply consider actions in isolation. A proposal to give money to this or that person has a cost directly in taking money from other people, and incentivises the behaviour that gets the money and disincentivises the behaviour that earns money for taxes.

Every experience we have is that individuals and groups react very strongly to incentives. Freedom of movement for instance turned out to be massively more attractive than anyone predicted. Not only was it orders of magnitude more attractive than the people who proposed it said (6 million vs a few tens of thousands), it was even more attractive than alarmist anti-immigration group Migration Watch warned it would be.

This tragedy is a great example. Saving a life in the channel and taking the individual into safe custody in the UK and all that is entailed in that doesn't just affect that individual. It creates an incentive for more people to turn up in the channel requiring their life to be saved in expectation that will happen and they will get free board and lodgings. And thousands of people are responding to that.

So I guess the answer to the title 'Politically Expendable Deaths' is yes. that's exactly correct. Because the cost of the consequences of erecting a sign in the channel that says anyone who turns up here will be saved and given board and lodgings in the UK is absolutely enormous.

To give one example, single men of any ethnicity and circumstance are dangerous. Much of traditional codes of behaviour are about finding a way to deal with young men and their tendency to violence. To bring large numbers of young men, isolated from their friends, family, culture, hence with very few restraints on their behaviour, often traumatised by wars and strife, and let them loose will inevitably result in violence and deaths. Will those deaths be politically expendable to your views?

Blissex said...

«Safe legal routes for people dreaming of a better life. It's that simple. Then the deaths and drownings will stop. But don't expect the Tories to do the humane and moral thing.»

I thought that it should be *the french* who should be doing “the humane and moral thing” and offer “Safe legal routes” to the people they have on their territory looking for “a better life”. Unless the migrants in the "English" Channel are trying to escape political persecution and brutal oppression by Generalissimo Macron :-).

«the Venn diagram of nation states and races has a significant overlap»

Ha! fallen in the trap of racialism with such ease. I guess that there is no longer any need to distinguish between "racial", ethnic, kinship or cultural (e.g. linguistic or religious) groupings, never mind income, wealth, or functional class groupings.

Anonymous said...

Blissex,

The governments of both Britain and France treat refugees very badly. That one country does it hardly justifies the other.

Anonymous said...

I don't think that couching the issue in racist terms, as Phil does, is the right way to go about critiquing the causes of this disaster. Yes, the Tory government (and Labour governments before it) uses racist attitudes to justify this sort of behaviour, and no doubt that needs to be criticised. However, it seems to me that the main issue is economic -- making sure that the working class can't move across borders while capital and the ruling class can -- and political -- maintaining the legitimacy of a repressive apparatus which is able to kill civilians without compunction and thus retain control over the majority which does not benefit from the current socio-political order. If all the victims had been middle-class whites and the boat had been deliberately swamped by a British aircraft carrier, the situation would surely have been the same (and the media and the political establishment would probably have behaved similarly, unless any of the victims had actual contacts with the establishment).

Dipper said...

@ Jenny. "It would be good to see housing, education, welfare and health benefits for all british citizens" well yes, but given this stuff is expensive, you cannot provide it to anyone who wants it wherever they are. The number of people around the world who would like to come here, have all that, and probably benefit from it and be productive members of society, runs into hundreds of millions if not billions. At some point you are going to have to turn away people for whom giving it to them would be a benefit for them and probably us too. " I didn't say I supported the straw man of unlimited immigration for everyone" and immediately we are back at denying entry to people, who get in a boat ...

Dipper said...

@ Blissex ":Ha! fallen in the trap of racialism with such ease" how so? It would be racialism if the sets were exactly the same. They aren't. There should be no distinction in 'Britishness' between those in the intersection of race and nationality and those outside it.

Blissex said...

«no longer any need to distinguish between "racial", ethnic, kinship or cultural (e.g. linguistic or religious) groupings, never mind income, wealth, or functional class groupings»

Whether intentional or not, the role of books like "The racial contract" is to erase the materialist view of history, that associated with that bearded guy from Trier, his name is, is, ... never mind, his views have been forgotten anyhow :-).

«full housing, education and health benefits»

The "refugees" who are trying to escape the dictatorship of Generalissimo Macron through the "English" Channel in dinghies instead of comfortably walking overland through the largely unpatrolled borders with Spain, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, are not doing so because of the luxurious welfare in England, as in many fantasies. But very few people on the left or the right are candid enough to mention the obvious...

BCFG said...

“proposal to give money to this or that person has a cost directly in taking money from other people, and incentivises the behaviour that gets the money and disincentivises the behaviour that earns money for taxes.”

Most people have no choice but to pay their taxes, it’s the law.
However, in this oh so ‘complex interaction of incentives and disincentives’, the rich can use their wealth to find loopholes, to avoid taxes. So along comes former leftist, now rabid far righter Dipper to tell us that the way to incentivise rich people to pay taxes is to allow them not to pay taxes! The logic of rich sycophancy!

“Freedom of movement for instance turned out to be massively more attractive than anyone predicted.”

Freedom of movement wasn’t a gift given by rich nations, freedom of movement was the default state of existence, it is why Europe is populated at all! The history of the bourgeois world has been the eradication of the freedom of movement both across borders and within borders. Capitalism is the erosion of freedoms.

“Saving a life in the channel and taking the individual into safe custody in the UK and all that is entailed in that doesn't just affect that individual.”

The biggest people traffickers in the world today are companies like Ryanair, who incentivise large groups of people to fuck up the planet, this in turn encourages more people to turn up in flights over the channel. Maybe we should start letting aircraft fall from the skies in an effort to disincentivise this behaviour?

“Because the cost of the consequences of erecting a sign in the channel that says anyone who turns up here will be saved and given board and lodgings in the UK is absolutely enormous.”

You seen what Dipper expresses here is what centrists refuse to express but supports all the same, support not by words but by lame centrist actions. What Dipper is expressing here, and let’s be 100% clear about this, is a holocaust that will put Hitler to shame. Here is the narrative, the people of the West continue to live way beyond this planets means no matter what, continue to make the planet uninhabitable for hundreds of millions of people, and the simple answer to this problem is to let those hundreds of millions of people die, one way or another.

“To give one example, single men of any ethnicity and circumstance are dangerous.”

And this is why the far right and the ruling class are so in love with woke hystericals! I even imagine PhilBC saying, yep I can’t disagree with that!

Decency really is the icing on the venality!

Dipper said...

One of the problems with an issue like this is the assumption of many on the left that every problem has an ideal solution, that there is a magic formula that delivers prosperity freedom and justice for all. Hence 'legal safe routes' etc. But in reality in problems like these there aren't. Its just choosing between different varieties of unsatisfactory outcomes. Which is why One Nation Toryism has been so successful in that it established processes that give all sections a voice and enables the minimisation of pain, rather than the maximisation of joy (for the special ones).

Dipper said...

@ Blissex "But very few people on the left or the right are candid enough to mention the obvious..." yourself included apparently.

Blissex said...

«"But very few people on the left or the right are candid enough to mention the obvious..."
yourself included apparently»

It is access to jobs. It is much easier to get black market jobs in the UK than in France for undocumented immigrants, and nearly the same for legit market jobs for documented immigrants or refugees. Those "refugees" are desperate for jobs, not benefits; even if there are categories of immigrants that work the system, those who have "insider" contacts, but those are usually documented immigrants.

BCFG said...

"Blissex "But very few people on the left or the right are candid enough to mention the obvious..." yourself included apparently."

I have to admit this is priceless from Dipshit! Worth the entrance fee, but thanks for clearing it up Blissex, Dipper probably wished he hadn't asked now! :D

Jim Denham said...

BCFG: seek help!

JN said...

Blissex,

To be honest, I'm a wee bit surprised at your glib sarcasm. I'd expect it from Dipper.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/e2-80-98this-is-no-life-e2-80-99-migrants-in-bitterly-cold-dunkirk-camp-ask-why-england-isn-e2-80-99t-doing-more-to-help/ar-AARbbR3?ocid=uxbndlbing

It seems pretty clear that the life of a refugee is very hard in either Britain or France. Personally, I don't think it's unreasonable that a person who has had to leave their own country would want some choice which country they end up living in (eg: because they have family or friends there, or are more fluent in the language, etc). Is a shred of empathy, or common sense, too much to expect?

BCFG said...

I knew that pointing out the destructive nature of capitalism would have Denham crawling from under his rock to spit out his ad hominems.

Like prodding a snake with a stick.

Dipper said...

@JN etc.

Once you lot have finished broadcasting your supposed moral superiority, should we have a look at what is actually in front of us and what the issues are?

Firstly, this is not an issue about whether the UK should take refugees. the UK government has a refugee policy. It takes a limited number of refugees who meet particular criteria. So what we are discussing is whether the UK should be required to take people who do not meet the UK government's criteria for taking refugees and beyond the numerical targets the UK government has set.

Secondly, refugees, migrants, illegals. whatever name you choose to give them, what they pretty clearly all are is paying customers of organisations that contract to deliver people to the UK in dinghies in the channel. So the issue is should the UK government be required to co-operate with people who advertise and take money to deliver customers to the UK in dinghies in the channel in the execution of their business.

so, enough of all the grandstanding nonsense please.

Why, after weeks of occasionally browsing this site, seeing more posts on internecine warfare in the left and moving on, am I bothering with this one? Well, my view is that politics is above all about power. And to a large extent that is the power of the UK electorate to determine who governs us, who makes our laws, who implements our preferred policy. So what I see here is a concerted effort to deprive me of determining who decides who I share an island with. It is a clear and obvious attempt to replace the policy of the elected government with a policy decided by people who have lost every election they have fought in recent times.

I know all people are equal, that all people should have equal rights, equal opportunities, and are of equal worth. But to me as a father, I care more about my children, want more for the, will work harder for them, than I will for other people's children. That's what dad's do. I don't expect other people's dads to put my children first, I expect other people's dad's to do for their children what I do for mine. I do these things because if I don't do them then no-one else will. I believe their lives will ultimately be worse; that chances, opportunities will go to other children whose parents who have pushed and worked harder.

And that's what I think about national governments. I want my government to be ambitious for all British people. Doesn't sound much to ask does it? But the left doesn't want that. It wants a government that puts other nations citizens first, that works hard to provide opportunities to other nations children at the expense of its own, that thinks UK citizens need to learn their place down the pecking order and work to put other nation's citizens higher up that order. I think that would be a disaster for many UK citizens, which is why this issue is so important to many.

Kamo said...

The wilful conflation of economic migration and asylum by some parties is why there will never be enough political trust to resolve the situation. It is an open secret that claiming UK asylum from France will not help most of the migrants who wish to cross, because no matter how horrible their old lives were, for most their primary motivations are economic and they do not qualify via the established economic migration channels. The UK knows this, France knows this, the left knows this, the right knows this, the general public knows this, and so the stalemate continues; all sides acting in bad faith and all sides claiming dishonesty on the part of the others.

BCFG said...

"what they pretty clearly all are is paying customers of organisations that contract to deliver people to the UK in dinghies in the channel."

Clear as mud! I think Dipper is so fucking cretinous that he really does think it us all this simple, no more to be said, its just a contract folks and that is 'pretty clear'.

They come on Dinghies because governments are hostile to their movement and have created policies to restrict their movement, so the conventional methods of transportation are off limits to them. Why are governments hostile? Well that would require, among other things, some sort of critique of European values and from far right to far left and everywhere in between that is a conversation strictly off limits!

These are the same hostile governments whose criminal and supremacist policies created the need for them to take the journey in the first place!

The same governments who create theatre with events such as cop26 and at the same time positively encourage the worlds biggest people traffickers, such as Ryanair, to fly, among others, Brits desperate to get out of this shit-hole of a country until they are required back to their bullshit jobs to save up for their next escape from said shit-hole.

A process that is literally destroying the planet and resulting in biological annihilation (again I have the scientific data to back this up). My proposed policy is to force these desperate Brits to get in their own dinghies and paddle to fucking Spain. See how those fuckers like it.

The centrist/liberal idea of free movement might be as ill thought out as Dipper's far right, let them all die at sea attitude, but at least the liberals have a shred of humanity.

Dipshit is just a fucking monster, one that is not half as clever as it thinks it is. A rather dumb beast if you ask me.

Dipper said...

@ BCF "They come on Dinghies because governments are hostile to their movement and have created policies to restrict their movement,"

Everyone has a story, and everyone's is different, but the thing all these stories have in common is they paid someone to put them in a dinghy and take them into the English channel.

And what is being asked here is not that we should take people who are refugees, who have been discriminated against etc, what is specifically being asked here is that we take people who have paid traffickers to put them in dinghies and take the into the channel.

JN said...

Dipper,

You accuse me of "broadcasting [my] supposed moral superiority", "grandstanding", etc but to be honest, being morally superior to your Daily Express/Priti Patel crap is the lowest of bars, and I don't take any pride in clearing it.

JN said...

The way migration is discussed in mainstream British politics and journalism is a really good example of Arendt's "banality of evil" (see also: bombing or invading/occupying other countries, nuclear weapons, the arms industry, etc...). IE: just don't think of them as real people! If you can achieve that selective psychopathy then you can do whatever you want.

I suspect that's the psychological corollary to any society that's fundamentally unequal and exploitative.

JN said...

Dipper,

"Everyone has a story, and everyone's is different, but the thing all these stories have in common is they paid someone to put them in a dinghy and take them into the English channel."

So your objection is to the means they resort to (which would obviously not be anyone's first choice)? I'm sure they'd much rather choose a safer method if it was available to them. Like, Jesus Christ, are you an idiot?

Anonymous said...

"so, enough of all the grandstanding nonsense please."

You are clearly in the wrong place!

The immigrants come to the UK because it offers the best opportunities and it lacks any ID system, so the chances of living an untroubled and better life are extremely high - to someone from Kurdistan or Iraq it is a no-brainer. Even a reliable source of electricity is a no-brainer!

There is an inexhaustible supply of 'refugees' from poverty, and in contrast to the past, there are the means to get to the UK (at least until they get to the Channel).

The only logic to the Left's arguments is basically to open the door to the world. In a world where no amount of international development is going to change the facts on the ground, the preference will always be to settle on other ground.

Dipper is correct in identifying this as the prime impulse of the Left, not least because it has lost the argument to the people already in the country, regardless of their race.

Naturally, an 'open world' policy is utterly unrealistic and goes against the entire history of humanity, which is one of conflict over resources. And frankly, it's not as if one tends to see immigrants whole-heartedly embracing the values of the host culture - be they the British in France or Spain or immigrants in Britain, they tend to prefer their own company and culture, which is also natural.

But this is now what the Left stands for, having given up on the economic struggle - a sort of 'plague on all your houses'. As realistic and sustaining as 'the second coming' with a sort of Milwall 'they all hate us and we don't care' pride infused, as Dipper points out, with sense of moral superiority. It may win points at parties but it seems a pretty inauthentic mode of thinking.

And as for Dipper's 'for the children' remark, if he was being so hard-headed himself, he wouldn't have been a Brexiter, therefore shitting over his children's future, whatever rose-tinted lies he may tell himself. No one is immune to the bullshit, not even me, in my Omnipotent Anonymity.

Oh and BCFG's "My proposed policy is to force these desperate Brits to get in their own dinghies and paddle to fucking Spain. See how those fuckers like it."

At least gave me a laugh. He should try retooling as Bolshevik Comedian, at least there might be some mileage in that.