Sun Tzu wrote on Jan 15^th, 2016 at 12:12pm:



What needs forestalling is the freaky insidious racism in your weird single issue mind

Bias_2012 wrote on Jan 15^th, 2016 at 12:58pm:


You exemplify my argument. You are incapable of independent thought because of corruption of your genes.

Sun Tzu wrote on Jan 15^th, 2016 at 1:00pm:



That's correct, my independent thought is that you are a freaky insidious racist

Bogie, my only question is where refugees should go when they can't live in their country of origin. To be honest, I'm not that interested in Austrian gun ownership or people being harassed at train stations.

The question for me is what we do with people who've had their homes and their livelihoods taken away. I think the best thing for Syrians is to return to Syria, but that's impossible while there's a massive civil war going on.

I'm not in favour of non-refugees heading off to Europe to move in and call Europeans racists. This isn't fair. As far as I can tell, Europe has done everything in its power to accommodate those escaping war. It has definitely been nicer to refugees than Australia.

My other argument here has been about the historical importance of immigration. Refugees and immigrants have become two separate categories, when throughout history this has never been the case. We never distinguished between refugees and economic migrants after WWII, for example, but those were different times. We needed the people.

Borders are a very new phenomenon. In the past, people were subject to monarchs as opposed to states. Serfs were owned by their lords, slaves were owned by their masters, and all were subject to the crown or emperor. Citizenship in ancient Rome had distinct advantages, including free bread, but the borders were porous. Up until the 20th century, people could travel anywhere. Until only very recently, it was quite common for entire classes of people, such as merchants, to live and travel freely. The passport - and the border - is a very new phenomenon.

Things changed with the Cold War and the introduction of the welfare state. I understand there are limits, and I believe these need to be spelt out. I also believe we need to distinguish between genuine refugees and economic migrants. Europe, it seems, is only starting to come to terms with this. With 50 million refugees in the world today, I don't think it's fair for them to suffer while ambitious people from poor countries join them in seeking asylum.

But those refugees need to go somewhere. We do not close the borders to war zones and watch civilians being killed as a result. You might be in favour of this, but to my knowledge, no country in the world would accept this. As an example, there are about 6 million Syrians accommodated temporarily in Lebanon and Turkey. As another example, there are over a million Afghan and Central Asian refugees accommodated in Pakistan.

Oh, and they're all Muslim countries.

If poor countries can take in huge numbers of people, temporarily or permanently, then we definitely can. It seems to me that if the choice is between people being harassed at train stations or people being killed by bullets and mortars, I'd be going with option 1.

Being European or white does not exclude us from protecting fellow humans. Having nice, rich countries does not mean we should exclude people who aren't nice and rich. I'd say the opposite is the case: we have an even greater responsibility to help. Having a different culture to those seeking refuge doesn't work either. Turkey is accommodating Arabs. Pakistan is accommodating a host of different tribes and ethnicities. All these people speak different languages and have different customs to their host countries.

Security is important, but it just goes to show the importance of screening. We haven't had a Paris attack (or Lebanon or Turkey or even Jakarta attack) in Australia. This is to do with screening, but also good policing. Bomb plots can be prevented - bomb ingredients are carefully monitored. Semi automatic weapons are restricted. Sure, a 15 year old kid with a pistol can hurt or kill someone. A crazed guy with a rifle can kill three people and even get the Sydney CBD shut down for a day.

Ultimately, of course, there is no way to prevent such crimes. People would still murder and hold people to ransom even if you did ban all refugees, immigrants or even tourists. Many of those who've left Australia to join ISIS were born here. Some were Muslim converts. Banning religion is impossible - banning extremism even more so.

I can see no sensible or humane reason to prevent civilians fleeing war zones, and I can see no reason to prevent them coming to the West. If you can provide one, I'm all ears, but the "we don't want them here" argument is pointless. That's not a reason at all.

The reason that we must have refugees is because our society has entered into a stage of pathological altruism.

Pathological altruism
by Judith Curry

Pathological altruism can be conceived as behavior in which attempts to promote the welfare of another, or others, results instead in harm that an external observer would conclude was reasonably foreseeable.

http://judithcurry.com/2013/12/09/pathological-altruism/

being nice most certainly does mean we should exclude those who arent nice.