Russell: Fortunately no-one here has said anything like that. What has been claimed is that the practice of deliberate ignorance of government inhumanity is a commonality.

OK....

From the conversations I have had, people are well aware that the refugees are treated fairly harshly (though much less harshly than in many other countries), and they mostly approve of this harsh treatment as a disincentive. (A similar misconception arises around the massive invasions of civil liberties that governments are committing. I assumed that most people were unaware of this and would be outraged if they knew. But when I spoke to people, they knew about it and heartily approved! Damn!).

Perhaps you could also clarify the approving comments about Malcolm Fraser's immigration policy. One interpretation is that we should allow wholesale immigration by people who fought on our side as we lost colonial wars (a common interpretation of Fraser's actions at the time). But I suspect that is not what you meant. He certainly did not support unlimited immigration, although business oriented parties generally support higher immigration as a way to keep wages down and to reduce the power of organized labour. In any case the Australian boat person issue pales beside a far greater humanitarian disaster for which we share responsibility. Every year tens of millions of people die from hunger and treatable illnesses, yet we pretty well stand idly by. This is Nazi holocaust every few months. Now. How will you plead in the Nairobi human rights trials of 2030? You knew. And you did, what?

...

Tim:But when I see these statements without any actual concrete policy proposal, and without acknowledging the consequences of such a policy, one might begin to suspect that what we are seeing is not much more than moral posturing.

Russell: But you want direct immoral action instead.

No. I respect the fact that libertarians are honest about their intentions. They say what they want to do, and acknowledge the consequences. Put as simply as I can, this does not mean I agree with their policies. My ow view is that this is a difficult problem for which there is no simple, appealing solution. I don't think that the main problem is simply that Australians are ignorant racists. Given that there are ~40,000,000 refugees around the world, and at least several hundred million people who would like to move to Australia to live a better life, it is not feasible to take everyone who wants to come here. My proposal would be to increase the refugee quota as high as the voters will accept, at the expense of most other components of immigration. This should allow us to roughly quadruple our refugee intake. At the same time we need to strongly discourage people from setting out on the perilous boat trip to Australia, because any feasible Australian intake will still leave vast numbers who also want to come here. I don't have a good answer for how to do this in a nice way. The Greens ridiculed the notion that nicer treatment of boat people would result in an increase in the numbers. They were totally wrong about this as shown by Labor's experience. If we have policies which say "everyone who shows up in a boat can stay", then a lot of people are going to show up in boats, and many others will die on the journey. Is that humane?

...

Tim: Further, if you make such comparisons without proposing an alternative policy, and showing what its realistic implications would be, you also lack credibility. What is the alternate policy? Russell: That's what they always say when advocating a policy that's indefensible.

To my mind if people are not prepared to articulate what their actual proposal is, and to show they have thought about the consequences, they should not expect other people to respect their position.. If you are not prepared to articulate an alternate policy, and show you have thought about (or don't care about) the consequences, then it is just posturing. Saying that a policy should be "humane" does not tell us what you are proposing. Is it humane to encourage people to risk their lives in boats? Is it humane to change our society in a way that means we cannot look after old people and the unemployed (likely if huge numbers of refugees come here)? Is it humane to implement policies that will greatly increase unemployment and reduce wages for people living here now? You need to be more specific. If you said <I support the idea that anyone who arrives in Australia can get permanent residency, and you had some analysis that said, say 20,000,000 (applications for the US green card lottery run at around 14,000,000 each year) people would arrive on an annual basis and yes our infrastructure and government services would be overwhelmed, unemployment would rise to 25%, wages would halve, there would be a housing crisis, etc>. And if you said that you accept that as a price for the betterment of humanity, at least we have something to discuss. I suspect that very few Australians would be prepared to make such sacrifices for other people. If they did, they would already be donating 60-80% of their income to the poor. -- It long puzzled me why people would take positions that involve a) Not actually articulating a policy b) Not investigating the consequences of the things they seem to be proposing c) Using emotive, judgmental language towards those who have a different view. Perhaps it has something to do with status displays and displays of group affiliation. But it is frustrating when people refuse to say what they want and refuse to consider the implications of their ideas. Generally I find that if people are actually interested in solving a problem they will have a view as to what policies they are proposing. They will have thought through the consequences. And they will be open to other ideas about these matters.

On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 6:06 PM, Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> wrote:

On Mon, 16 Dec 2013 12:32:10 Tim Josling wrote:

...

In any case the Australian boat person issue pales beside a far greater humanitarian disaster...

Such hypocrisy. You complain about a supposed Godwin violation when people make legitimate analogies and then come up with this bogus claim.

The Holocaust was not about disasters, disease, famine, etc (which all happened during WW2). It was about deliberate mass-murder.

The original Nazi bomb complaint was about people who knew, or knew and pretended not to know, that a bad thing was happening in Germany, and who did nothing. That is a sin of *inaction*. Later this was unconvincingly 'clarified' by claiming that the Nazi reference was only incidental. Above I added to the reasons why this is a bad comparison. Not only was it over the top, but it ignores other far more serious sins of omission. I am not newly raising a Nazi comparison, just pointing out again how bad was the original comparison. No hypocrisy here, sorry. A distinction was claimed about sins of omission versus deliberate acts. Moral philosophers generally regard such distinctions with scepticism. Kant's Categorical Imperative ("Act only according to that maxim<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxim_(philosophy)> whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.") makes no distinction between acts and omissions. Thus he gives as an example of immorality "failing to cultivate one's talents". And again in respect of the Germans, few of them took part in the atrocities in an active way. Hitler was not elected (with a minority vote) on an explicit platform of doing what he did. In fact the Nazis went to considerable lengths to keep their intentions secret. In the absence of a clearly articulated and worked out alternate policy, and given that arguably the current refugee policy is humane (by discouraging people from risking their lives) you would be hard pressed to argue that the average Australian is actively guilty of immoral acts in respect of refugee policy. The state of the third world and the attendant hunger and disease are also in part the result of active acts by western powers. So I don't see any pertinent distinction here. The complaint of hypocrisy also fails on another level. Again we see the core issue being avoided, in a fog of distraction and overblown moralizing. The issue was the expression of a high degree of moral fervour against Australia's current refugee policy, and at the same time a curious reluctance to articulate an alternate policy and to describe the consequences of that alternate policy. Surely, I asked, if you really want a better policy you should tell people about it. The vague hand waving statements that our policy should be more "humane" fall far short of what is needed. Even when I suggested a possible change to policy there was no interest at all. Not what you would expect for such a morally critical issue. I conclude that the displays of moral fervour do not ring true. As mentioned before, people perform bogus moral pontifications for all sorts of well-known reasons. * As status displays (eg I am a superior being to the ignorant rednecks who want to bring back the death penalty), * As displays of group affiliation (eg Look at all those horrible ALP people being charged with corruption. Isn't it terrible! [Said by one Liberal party member to another.]), * As diversions (eg I am just outraged about X, so please think about that rather than Y), * To incite hatred against various people (eg the "threat narrative" concept from Typhon Blue, often used eg against various unfavoured minorities eg the 'threat' to virtuous white women from negro rapists in earlier times), * To make an expression of a fashionable opinion seem more important and significant than it otherwise would (eg the various ebbs and flows of opinion as to the marriages we approve of and don't approve of eg we currently regard the marriage of 15 year old women - which was once common - as immoral, while not allowing gay marriage is also currently seen as immoral by most people). Perhaps the explanation is one of these, or something else. In any case my attempts to draw these people out about their alternative proposals have ended in failure.

Hi All, Sorry if something like the following has already been said on this list. (I'm getting too many emails, and have too many non-IT processes queued up in my "wetware".) Yes, every human deserves the right to refuge from tyranny, oppression, and danger. No, not every human deserves to choose any country they want to live in. Certainly there is a grey area, between being a refugee and an illegal immigrant. And I've heard that 90+% of boat people end up qualifying as bona fide refugees. But logic dictates that a person who has traversed 5, 10, or 20 different countries and (when they arrive in Australia) suddenly declares "NOW I want to apply for asylum" does NOT have sanctuary as their PRIMARY motivation. (Hint: We have the second highest standard of living in the world -- see Inequality Adjusted Human Development Index.) If Australia has already accepted more refugees than (most) other countries (based on our respective ecological and financial capacities): Then it is ethically and logically correct to say "No, you can not settle here, but we will help you go somewhere else safe". Australia is not a magic pudding. Carl Bayswater

Lev Lafayette <lev@levlafayette.com> wrote:

The UN Refugee Convention states that a person must seek asylum in the first safe country that they reach. By definition, countries which are not signatories are considered not safe, as they grant absolutely no legal protections to refugees.

Here is what the signatory map looks like:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Refugeeconvention.PNG

As you can see there's a gaping hole between the Middle-East, the Indian subcontinent, SE Asia, to Australia.

This is why it has been suggested that a rational policy would be, first, to accept refugees as they arrive and process their claims, and, secondly, to encourage more countries which are currently not parties to the Convention to join. Many of those countries, as I understand it, already have refugee populations who then have to move on in order to seek asylum in states that recognize their rights.