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Comment by AlecSchueler | Hacker News Reader

I think people are angry when, as others have mentioned, there are more resources and international cooperation going into helping these 5 people who took a needless risk while we watch 100s dying regularly while they try to flee literal war ones in regions we've destabilised for years.

You can also see in this thread people calling them "precious lives" as though that doesn't apply to the people making the ultimate sacrifice to try and bring their families to safety.

I have nothing against people being rich but it's frankly scary to see these refugees be dehumanised, framed as economic immigrants and become victim to to increasing legislation to keep them out of safety on the basis that we can't afford them using our resources when we suddenly have resources enough to spend on extensive missions to search for people who made bad decisions for fun and risked the lives of others for nothing but profit and fame.

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All that's awful and I hope we can make it better. That said, the humans on that silly submarine have very little to do with what we are and aren't doing about refugees in the Mediterranean.

Who’s we that destabilised these countries? Cos I bet you it’s is not the countries that they are sailing to.

If you want to call them refugees then take them home. They are economic migrants where “we” live.

France, the UK, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy have each spent a couple centuries having fun destabilising the whole world for their own gain.

The US was a bit late to the game, but appears to have caught up quite well.

And while in Europe these people often first set sail for the western Balkans, it usually isn’t their destination.

You missed Portugal and Germany.

Yes, I did! Sorry about that.

I thought it wise to only mention those whose colonial history I knew about, and avoid exposing my whole point to criticism by over-extending myself.

I live were those poor people try to go, and I call them refugees. I also say we, because as a voting citizen of one of those countries that did some of said destabilazing over the years, I cannot wash myself of all responsibility.

I’m starting to think that’s the primary purpose of voting - to get people to feel complicit in actions they didn’t want by people they didn’t want in places they didn’t know existed.

That, and providing legitimacy to the existing power structures, no matter how much of a say people actually have.

And delegitimising all others forms of feedback and expression.

Than you have a clearly distorted view of democracy. And I do not feel complicit, why would I? But, as part of the Western democratic world, I cannot simply ignore everything we did all over the world in the last 20 odd years and pretend it was some outside force doing all of that. Democracy, regardless of shape in form, is exactly about giving people a voice in those affaires. Which is a good thing, IMHO.

In Switzerland it pretty much works exactly like that.

The recent boat that sank was sailing to Italy from Libya, one of its ex-colonies.

"We" would be roughly the members of NATO and its allies, former colonial powers and the countries traditionally within the sphere of Catholic influence.

Where are they sailing to that this doesn't cover? The recent example being spoken about in this thread was trying to make it to Italy, which has been involved in various conflicts in the middle east since the middle ages.

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