The Refugee Crisis - a crisis of conscience - The Something Awful Forums

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > The Refugee Crisis - a crisis of conscience

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Ernie Muppari posted:

i also don't take anyone seriously ever

so your contribution to this debate is what, ironic implied moral outrage?

that's really cool and valuable imo, it's not like people are dying and we don't have a solution

# ¿ Sep 4, 2015 07:12

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 05:13

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Hm, what if everyone in Europe just became a rational humanist all at once? That would solve a lot of our problems today. Politics is pretty easy, if you think about it.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2015 10:49

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Speaking of numbers, are there any dataviz like this for migration? Would be very handy.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2015 13:15

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

There are really only three options, and only one isn't terrible:

Implement comprehensive EU-wide immigration policy funded by a percentage of members' GDP.
Sea mines and barbed wire, shoot on sight.
Try really hard to ignore it.

There's a lot more where this is coming from when climate change really starts setting in, and I can't imagine having millions of poorly integrated refugees feeling unwelcome around is going to be very cost-effective on a 20-30 years time scale to begin with. Have there been any attempts to model the cost of not solving this problem?

# ¿ Sep 4, 2015 15:17

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Disco De Soto posted:

Yeah gently caress those people right? I'm not defending them, if they even exist, I'm saying focusing on them is distracting people from the real issue.

Which is what? The lack of sufficient immediate relief, our historical role in engendering the things people flee from, the EU's general incapacity for rapid adaptive response, the lack of even a hypothetical long-term viable immigration policy, or the clusterfuck of crisscrossing political preferences that make any one of these virtually impossible to solve in practice?

The 'real' issue is that there is no single real issue. It's context all the way down, and nobody seems to agree on where to start, let alone what to do. We can't pay or vote our way out of it because no one has a solution we can pay or vote for. This was a foreseeable, even mechanical problem. Best case, we can't control everything in the world, so eventually we were going to have to deal with a migration based on people fleeing bad conditions, for whatever reason. We failed to prepare for a predictable event, and now we're failing to deal with that predictable event. That's the only thing that matters. It's not a crisis of conscience, it's a crisis of competence.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2015 16:58

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Ernie Muppari posted:

yes

incompetence

surely there's no way there could be people, much less those in positions of privilege and power who could directly influence state policy on matters like this, who stood to benefit from the deleterious effects of western imperialism on the rest of the world while also being callous enough to scapegoat the people harmed by it

and it's even less likely that there're everyday people in the imperial core who, in spite of the fact that they're harmed by this hypothetical policy of brutal oppression and exploitation, also buy into the fascist mythos promoted by the western elite

and the idea that there could be well educated, ostensibly cynical and humanist citizens of the imperial core who uncritically accept pro-imperialist propaganda is just right out

So, what, the real solution is actually locked away deep under Brussels and no-one can independently produce it because ... ? Makes sense, let's spend many hours operating under this assumption.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2015 20:33

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Ernie Muppari posted:

no i agree with you

everyone's just dumb

hmm, that checks out

# ¿ Sep 4, 2015 20:43

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Ernie Muppari posted:

but at least we can rest easy secure in the knowlege that isis is surely a grassroots popular movement whose rise to prominence was clearly inevitable because of arabic culture and barrel bombs and not the quite visible hand of western imperialism

baghdadi is a cia puppet

# ¿ Sep 5, 2015 06:40

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Ernie Muppari posted:

you're telling me that the central intelligence agency, the same agency that gave us bin laden and pinochet...

meet me at the central station in Brussels in exactly one hour. we'll find the secret immigration policy plans in the underground EU complex and save the world before bob page becomes an immortal ai god. it's just you and me buddy, just ernie and zodium against the imperial machine, ernie and zodium forever and ever for a hundred episodes ernie and zodium forever

# ¿ Sep 5, 2015 08:57

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Ligur posted:

Yeah if most of the stuff she writes isn't true at all or made up, she probably isn't an authority on the subject. If what she writes is true or on point, then she is "an authority" on the subject. The rest is quite beside the point, yeah.

For example, I know a poo poo ton of people who majored in something, like, uhh, philosophy but are pretty awesome in the IT field. I have no formal education or degree in sports, but having done stuff for 20+ years I'm pretty sure I know what I talk about when I write a blog about it. I don't need to be a professor of sports in the state sports department for that, if you get what I mean.

The hallmark of a credible authority is really about metacognition: they know what they know, what they don't know, and what must be known in order to resolve uncertainty and move forward. Degrees and experience both frequently fail to confer this quality (e.g., Meehl's studies on clinical versus actuarial judgment), which is essentially integrity. Feynman was speaking about scientists at the time, but I think his is a perfectly good general definition of an intellectual expert or authority.

Feynman posted:

But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school--we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

...

I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

# ¿ Sep 5, 2015 11:38

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

SedanChair posted:

Do you believe that children can be considered "over" or "surplus" population when they are standing on one part of the Earth, but not when they are standing on a different part?

Of course. For example, if there are more people in an area than that area can feed, for whatever reason, then there is a surplus population, and we should move that surplus population (or facilitate/allow them to move autonomously) to somewhere with more resources, especially children.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2015 10:35

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

Main Paineframe posted:

In the age of globalization, that definition is obsolete. It's trivial to get food shipped to a place from halfway around the world, to the point where it's typically cheaper than eating locally-produced food. If people are starving, that is because of a failure in the distribution system, rather than a problem of excess population. Typically these failures are not logistical, but rather ideological - for whatever reason, the people in charge of bringing in the food don't want to feed those starving people.

beep bop

# ¿ Sep 11, 2015 18:25

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

SedanChair posted:

Ethnic cleansing? I don't agree. We live in a world where resources can be moved to people. People should have the right not to be uprooted or displaced.

We actually live in a dark parody of that world where resources are instead moved away from those people. I know that's not a popular opinion, but that's what I think.

This doesn't have anything to do with anything, but I want to throw out the prediction that Sweden and Germany will have the most growth in the EU over the next 10 years.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2015 22:41

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

VitalSigns posted:

Compared to 400 million Europeans, it is.

Providing houses for 2% of the people in Europe is not going to bankrupt anyone (well unless the EU just decides to make Hungary take them all), but people are talking like it's that You Give A Mouse A Cookie book and now we'll have one billion Indians and another billion Chinese show up next week somehow pretending to be Syrians or whatever slippery slope the xenophobes think housing homeless refugees leads to.

I also basically agree with you, but are you joking? On a "400 million people" scale, 2% is an absolutely massive percentage, not a rounding error; a rounding error has five or six decimal places. Even if the resources might exist somewhere in Europe, they exist scattered all over the place, not necessarily under central political control. It isn't sufficient that the resources might exist in some abstract economic sense. You have to find them, somehow extract them from whatever they're embedded in, transform them into something useful for what you want to embed them in, and only then actually allocate those resources to refugees. All this has to be done within current political and democratic constraints. Best case scenario, you would be acting through national governments + EU bureaucracy with some international institutions and NGOs mixed in. :psypop:

There is a limit, a soft limit, to how many refugees Europe can take, and that limit is largely contingent on our ability to solve the difficult practical, political and cultural problems that come with a massive migration wave. We can't and shouldn't shirk our humanitarian responsibility just because it might inconvenience us, but neither can we deny, ignore or underestimate these problems. The hard Right is on the wrong side of history in trying to kill the refugees with indifference, and the hard Left is on the wrong side of reality in falsely believing ideology is the hard problem. It isn't. Syrian refugees will overwhelmingly be a long-term economic benefit to the recipient countries anyway, so solving the hard problems will bring most of the moderate right on their side anyway.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2015 11:00

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 05:13

Zodium: Jun 19, 2004

VitalSigns posted:

Are you illiterate, I didn't say it's not a problem or that it doesn't take effort, I said it won't bankrupt Europe or America or even really affect our standard of living.

poo poo, America spent what $3 trillion pointlessly knocking over Iraq. 3 million millions, that's $300,000 per refugee, you could buy each family of four a nice house and hand them $1 million for what we frivolously spent on a fruitless war.

Iraq is an example of what happens when you pump a lot of resources into a complex situation through underdeveloped and inadequate channels, and an example of what happens when a strong political mandate conflicts with inadequate institutional competence. You can not, in fact, 'buy each family of four a nice house and hand them a million,' even if the political will for it is there. Let's say we have a mandate to house them at any cost: Who's going to build the houses? Certainly not private developers, what happens to them when some substantial proportion of the refugees go home? If we're going to use currently unused housing, how are we going to avoid creating ghettos? It's not like unused housing is evenly distribution over cities. On an EU-wide scale, you wouldn't even end up with an even distribution over countries. There's a reason migrations are historical empire-killers: it's just not that easy.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2015 20:39

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > The Refugee Crisis - a crisis of conscience