The Calais people smugglers are already investigating how to “help” refugees from Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, etc to get from Rwanda to Dover.
No doubt. Along with estimating who’s pockets in Rwanda they will need to line.
France has its own challenge
It totally amazes me that if the refugees can find the smugglers, why can’t the intelligence services?
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More information about why the whole Rwanda idea is a very bad thing.
If anyone was still thinking things can’t get any worse
There needs to be a revolutionary change in how UK, its government and its populace regard and treat those human beings, who for some completely inexplicable reason seem still to hope they will find sanctuary on Britain’s shores.
The bill’s passed its first vote.
No surprise there then…
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Months go by and no improvements
How can treating human beings in this way have the people’s approval?
What does allowing such behaviour by those who govern UK say about the electorate?
What does it say to the world about who/what UK has become?
It’s interesting to compare this in the light of @David_Spardo 's comments about the truckers forum discussion:
My feeling is that if you can put the ‘problem people’ into a category that ‘must be dealt with, regardless of cost’ and tell yourself that they deserve it then you can do almost anything to a stranger. It can be very hard to overcome those feelings that ‘these people’ don’t matter and and to recognise they have a value too when that goes against ones culture and peers. This seems to be normal human behaviour, based on how quite different races deal with those they don’t want in roughly similar ways.
This is exactly my quandary!
How, as humans, have we, or are we not evolving to regard all humans as equal to ourselves? Why are people still pigeon holing and categorising others into groups, not essentially ‘Us’. Identifying by race or religion or hats is merely a way of putting people into a box. As though they are things, and not people.
When I hear people saying of refugees, collectively categorising them without knowing the background or personality of a single one, I just feel fit to scream - “May you too one day have to walk in sea sodden shoes and fear for your life with every wave!” Both literal and metaphorical.
It’s a way of coping, that allows us to manage the tremendous complexity of people en masse. Also it allows us to deal with problems in a way that allows unpleasant things to happen to others without becoming too upset by that. I may have mentioned before that people appear to have a need to be ‘right’ in what they do, and to make cruelty acceptable it has to be made so that the victims aren’t “people like us” so that their suffering is reasonable and acceptable.
I understand the ‘how’, it’s the ‘why’ that makes me despair.
Every philosophy and most religions began as ways to make humans better than their primitive instincts. How do we repeatedly fail to transcend?
I do now wonder, if AI manages to achieve some sort of sentience, might it perhaps intervene to change humanity for the better? Or, will AI just become another more efficient tool to select and subjugate ‘expendable’ human groups?
Maybe it already is…,
Really? Surely religion is just another form of tribalism to differentiate “us” from “them” and apply controls.
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Re: origins and purpose(s) of religion and religious ritual, one can do a lot worse than read Mircea Eliade. He was a mid-C20th anthropologist of comparative religion who’s no longer fashionable, but the factual aspects of his research still stand. Basically he looked for similarities rather than differences between religions around the world. See Patterns in Comparative Religion and The Myth of the Eternal Return
Many early and later religions’ ‘creation myth’ is that the world was created by a male ‘sky god’ who after having created man and everything else returned to the sky. Then the fertility goddess who controlled the harvest became the most immediately important deity and the rituals associated with fertility were intended to bring about a god harvest the following year. It’ the belief that ‘ritual sacred time’ is circular and that by re-enacting the ritual the celebrant is connected to the point when the event first occurred. A good Catholic example is the blessing of the wine and host during the sacrement of Communion.
Apologies everyone.
I’m lost somewhere in a conflict between excess compassion and empathic distress.
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Apart from what I feel is a philosophical need to change mindsets, a more urgent concern is that the planet is becoming uninhabitable in some areas. If this continues, no Rwanda deportation threat or wall will be high enough to stop the flow of humanity trying to save their lives.
https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/
People are still saying that climate change is inevitable and ‘we’ can manage. In that case, a very important thing to manage will be how to integrate people into the remaining habitable and fertile part of the world. Or, find ways of making the weather impacted areas liveable for the existing occupants.
All research and work being done on how to make Mars habitable should better be redirected into use on this Earth.
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I couldn’t agree more .
This is just the tip of the iceberg of refugees.
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I’ve thought for some years that climate change is inevitable given that we have ignored the warnings for 50 years and continue to do so.
To what extent we will “manage” is debatable. We will have little choice but I suspect that it will result in billions of lives cut short, and the present refugee crisis will pall into insignificance.
A part of the problem which is simply not mentioned is the gradual acidification of the oceans as they soak up much of the excess CO2, there has been a steady loss of ocean biomass due to this and overfishing for at least 100 years - if this continues the oceans will be sterile by the end of the century, billions will starve and the planet’s ecosystems might never recover.
We will only put serious thought into solving the problem when it is too late to fix it. Heck, it’s too late already and we are still arguing about it.
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