Editorial: The contrast between the frantic hunt for a missing submersible and the failure to save migrants drowning in the Mediterranean is illuminating
A massive operation is under way to find and save a stricken vessel and its passengers. As time passes, anxious families and friends wait with growing fear. The US coastguard, Canadian armed forces and commercial vessels are all hunting for the Titan submersible, which has gone missing with five aboard on a dive to the wreck of the Titanic in the north Atlantic. The UK’s Ministry of Defence is also monitoring the situation.
It is hard to think of a starker contrast with the response to a fishing boat which sank in the Mediterranean last week with an estimated 750 people, including children, packed onboard. Only about 100 survived, making this one of the deadliest disasters in the Mediterranean. Greece and the EU blame people smugglers, who overcrowd boats and abuse those aboard them. But both have profound questions to answer about their own role in such disasters. Activists say authorities were repeatedly warned of the danger this boat faced, hours before it went down, but failed to act.
Here in Australia, honestly, it’s disappointing that we’re still treating refugees as criminals and turning them back. Who cares if people visit the country. It shouldn’t be too much work to identify them
Capitalist media only cares about sexy tragedies and expensive dangers. Focusing on 500 poors gasping their last breaths far from view only serves to remind viewers of how unfair things are on a basic level - and that threatens power.
The thing is, I’ve never seen such an overwhelmingly bored response from the general public to a Sexy Tragedy like this before. The only person in my life who expressed any iota of distress over the Titan is my dear mother, but she cried when we dropped off our old TV at Goodwill, so.
People are, I think, getting a little bit harder to trick with the song-and-dance of the hyper-rich dying in outstanding ways.
“When the rich are too rich there are ways, and when the poor are too poor there are ways… This is one of the ways when the poor are too poor. When the rich are too rich there is a way, and if I am not mistaken, that way will come soon.” - Pearl S. Buck
i fail to see why one being legal and one being illegal[1] should have any bearing on the response or treating the people with basic human dignity. committing a crime also does not make one worthy of death–and especially not when that crime is one without a victim like illegal immigration.
and i don’t think the latter should be illegal (certainly not meaningfully so), to be clear. i am morally opposed to the idea of hard borders. ↩︎
I agree with you. And I do understand why, and I don’t like it:
I think it is more about the profile of the people in need.
Wasn’t there a billionaire on board of that vessel? Their family probably got some influence to force this massive operation. And we idolize these big money havers.
And what money do the immigrants have? It is an ongoing issue for the EU (as an example). It looks like the EU doesn’t even want these people. Sure, they begrudgingly accept people, when they arrive. Sure there is an effort to safe them… But if some are lost on the way. Less mouth to feed.
Once again: my pessimistic observations. Personally, I feel ashamed of this whole thing.
The Titan sub has a dude who went to space with the Amazon guy along with two members of one of Pakistan’s richest families who are heavily involved in a petrochemical company.
Does the Coast Guard do a thorough investigation of anyone that is in need of their services and establish everyone is innocent of any potential crime before rescuing people
The submarine venture may have been legal on paper but they definitely committed some crimes, at very least negligence. $250K ticket price is a giant red flag and if it’s allowed at all it should increase their liability, with the talk of the ignored concerns it sounds like an outright grift.
I’m sure that sounds great in the sixth form common room, but it’s a woefully simplistic way of looking at the real world. Nation states, borders and immigration laws have formed over the years for good reason.
Also, governments have to take their populations wants into account. How much will it help these people if the population of where they end up votes in a far right government in a few years as a response who round them all up again?
lol, for a good reason these borders will be destroyed soon. Every year brings us much closer to the mass migrations from countries too hot and too poor to live in. It’s funny people don’t realize this and they still believe in their mighty borders, so freaking privileged and supercilious.
If govts wanted to do anything good for the people, the should’ve invested humongous money in education and try to make people immune to disinformation and brainless far right movement. They haven’t done anything. Even if they tried now, it’s too late. It should be done years ago. But greedy politicians only wants money from their billionaire bribers.
Yeah, we probably will see huge migration coming, but it’s more likely to see a strengthening of the borders than their destruction. I’m honestly expecting to see barbed wire and gun emplacements on the Med to stop these boats in my lifetime. It’s depressing to be honest, but clearly the people of Europe don’t want mass migration on these levels.
I’m so tired of governments bending over backwards to help billionaires while ignoring average people
I’m so tired of valuing people based on their net worth. these double standards are disappointing and honestly disgusting. I’m disgusted by our current politics and economics
undefined> I’m so tired of valuing people based on their net worth.
You mean like you just did?
In case you care, which you’ve already indicated you don’t, there are more researchers on the submarine than billionbaires.
From what I’ve read there’s one researcher on the sub, two members of one of Pakistan’s richest families, an “explorer” who rode with the Amazon guy into space, and the CEO of the company that thought their submarines were too advanced to get categorised/certified for the depths they visit.
Don’t forget that the CEO also bragged in a video that the sub only has one button, is controlled by a cheap wireless logitech controller and he bought parts of the sub from camping world.
There’s nothing wrong with COTS equipment like the Camping World light that’s been made much fun of. The controller either, at least in principle, though the idea of using this battery-powered wireless device specifically is maybe not smart. But the fact that the guy who built it is bragging about them as if he’s pulled one over on Big Bathyscaphe should have been a red flag about the quality and safety factors built into the rest of the thing.
Yeah, a COTS video game controller makes sense in context (though I’d have opted for a wired version, myself). I’m also pretty sure the US Navy also uses Xbox controllers for their periscopes photonics masts in their subs.
The difference is that the Navy uses actual Xbox controllers which are very reliable. The reviews for that logitech model are filled with connection issues, which of course makes people wonder if they were doing any validation testing on the sub at all
“actually, you’re the one valuing people on net worth for pointing out the things we’ll do to accommodate billionaires but not for migrants” is such a piss take it’s not even funny
This is a summary of the posted article (I’m a bot).
US coastguard, Canadian armed forces and commercial vessels are all hunting for the Titan submersible, which has gone missing with five aboard. The UK’s Ministry of Defence is also monitoring the situation. It is hard to think of a starker contrast with the response to a fishing boat which sank in the Mediterranean last week with an estimated 750 people, including children, packed onboard. Greece and the EU blame people smugglers, who overcrowd boats and abuse those aboard them. Both have profound questions to answer about their own role in such disasters.
Capitalist media only cares about sexy tragedies and expensive dangers. Focusing on 500 poors gasping their last breaths far from view only serves to remind viewers of how unfair things are on a basic level - and that threatens power.
The thing is, I’ve ***never ***seen such an overwhelmingly bored response from the general public to a Sexy Tragedy like this before. The only person in my life who expressed any iota of distress over the Titan is my dear mother, but she cried when we dropped off our old TV at Goodwill, so.
People are, I think, getting a little bit harder to trick with the song-and-dance of the hyper-rich dying in outstanding ways.
“When the rich are too rich there are ways, and when the poor are too poor there are ways… This is one of the ways when the poor are too poor. When the rich are too rich there is a way, and if I am not mistaken, that way will come soon.” - Pearl S. Buck
On the same vein it would be very easy to say that media, the Guardian included, almost never report on the (weekly or even daily this time of year) rescues that the Greek (and other) navy does successfully carry out. Nor, of course, are the effects of the migration wave ever discussed with appropriate nuance except a one liner under a picture of a local saying “Mr Spyros the baker said he feels for the migrants but he dislikes what’s happening to his neighborhood.”
They only find space on their front page when they can point a finger at some huge disaster with a tragic photo to illustrate and shock normal people.
Pelt me with stones if you must. I am Greek and live in Athens. The amount of people that have come here and are going around downtown and everywhere else with basically nothing to do in their lives and getting by with benefits if they’re lucky (and very often resort to crime as poor people will do anywhere) is unsustainable. If you read opinion polls there is now a very large majority of the population that think this. Even those who vote left have completely come around in the last years. So don’t be too hasty with your conclusions. This is not about lacking empathy or humanity. It’s just realizing the objective reality that has taken shape around you.
Greece has been blamed for this recent tragedy because the land borders are guarded, which presumably leads to people smugglers sending more people on ships to Italy. But what are we even supposed to do? Just let the country become an open air camp of no prospect poor people, while destroying our society in the process? How does this help anyone? Does anyone think Greece, the recently bankrupt economy, can magically provide for millions of destitute people? Or that if the EU for whatever reason decides all are welcome and thus implicitly invites literally millions, it will not result in widespread social unrest? We already see far right gaining almost everywhere. Here we had literal nazis in parliament and they are currently regrouping after being put in jail.
And there are other questions on this whole issue. Look at UN statistics and see that the majority of people arriving here are not fleeing from Syria. They’re from Pakistan and Afghanistan among other places. Why is the answer to those countries’ problems to settle their populations in Greece and Europe? Why is no other place on earth willing or expected to help them? How realistic is this as a solution when the number of people who would like to move to Europe (from Asia, Middle East and Africa) is larger than the population of Europe itself? Also, is Saudi Arabia for example only able to house Cristiano Ronaldo? They have resources and are closer geographically and culturally to a lot of these people.
This is just one person’s opinion (although very common) but uncontrolled migration can yield even worse results (nightmarish in fact) in the long run than what we’re seeing right now. And what we’re seeing right now is already terrible. I wish there was a more viable solution than the people stay at home and make those places better to live in, which is just unlikely.
Everything you’ve said pretty much exactly describes the homeless situation in Seattle, in that there are so many with great needs, but only so much one city can do. Meanwhile, the people living in Seattle and paying taxes are seeing their city deteriorating around them.
Nah, I do agree it’s a much more common take than people realize. Another POV I’ve seen was on the other end of this spectrum, when Malaysia actually offered to open up their borders to refugees years ago and the refugees…refused lol. Apparently they prefer to get into South Korea instead. I’ve never seen a faster 180° change in opinions regarding refugees like that time.
The so-called “refugee problem” would not exist if countries with means would actually deal with the root causes of people fleeing countries without means. In the US it’s much the same with Mexico and other countries south of us.
Their countries are going to shit because of the accumulated circumstances of centuries of colonialist exploitation, and people there are forced to take their lives into their own hands and try to go somewhere else, because staying isn’t an option for them anymore.
Refugees are just a symptom. We need to address the illness itself, or it will never go away.
Sadly, the symptoms make for an easy political wedge issues to score cheap points, and so it remains beneficial for certain politicians to continue ignoring the illness.
Lemmy is officially not ready to take over reddit until I see people discussing the cardi b, blink 182 loving stepson angle to this story being discussed.
I just find this sort of article kind of pointless. Response to a situation in one place was drastically different than a response in a completely different place involving completely different people and agencies with their own different priorities. I don’t think it’s all that illuminating in any global way, except it shows the priorities in one of those places aren’t great. A commentary on the same agency (or even country) responding differently to rich and poor would be more meaningful, but I think the US Coast Guard was pretty proactive when Cuban refugees were crossing in makeshift rafts (a commentary on the difference between US and Greece in those much more similar situations would be interesting, but wouldn’t hit the rich/poor or anti-immigrant angle).
That’s fair as far as it goes, but there are analogous behaviors on the US side of things as well. This is just another instance in which the US government has gone to incredible lengths to rescue tourists who got in over their heads (Wendover Productions touched on this in recent video about the National Park System, if you’re interested) at the same time that Border Patrol and local vigilantes have been recorded sabotaging water caches left as life-saving measures for migrants crossing arid parts of the southern border. That’s a pretty clear indication of which sorts of lives out society thinks matter, and just as in the Mediterranean it more or less comes down to “which ones look and talk like I do?” rather than “which ones are most deserving of the limited resources available to help them?”
We are a global people. We could do more, and we actively don’t. We should all be ashamed and just because it makes you feel uncomfortable or helpless doesn’t mean you have to rationalize the shame of our species.
I don’t think it’s all that illuminating in any global way, except it shows the priorities in one of those places aren’t great.
but that unto itself is kind of important, is it not? these are social tragedies which do not need to happen–but they’re basically allowed to happen by a mixture of social apathy, lack of scrutiny, and inhuman social and political incentives. you’re demonstrating why this is illuminating, and why we should talk about it: because the alternatives you describe can happen and are happening but don’t with certain groups, or from certain countries.
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Here in Australia, honestly, it’s disappointing that we’re still treating refugees as criminals and turning them back. Who cares if people visit the country. It shouldn’t be too much work to identify them
Capitalist media only cares about sexy tragedies and expensive dangers. Focusing on 500 poors gasping their last breaths far from view only serves to remind viewers of how unfair things are on a basic level - and that threatens power.
The thing is, I’ve never seen such an overwhelmingly bored response from the general public to a Sexy Tragedy like this before. The only person in my life who expressed any iota of distress over the Titan is my dear mother, but she cried when we dropped off our old TV at Goodwill, so.
People are, I think, getting a little bit harder to trick with the song-and-dance of the hyper-rich dying in outstanding ways.
“When the rich are too rich there are ways, and when the poor are too poor there are ways… This is one of the ways when the poor are too poor. When the rich are too rich there is a way, and if I am not mistaken, that way will come soon.” - Pearl S. Buck
One’s legal and one’s illegal?
So you should just be left to die if you get shot while committing a crime?
i fail to see why one being legal and one being illegal[1] should have any bearing on the response or treating the people with basic human dignity. committing a crime also does not make one worthy of death–and especially not when that crime is one without a victim like illegal immigration.
and i don’t think the latter should be illegal (certainly not meaningfully so), to be clear. i am morally opposed to the idea of hard borders. ↩︎
I agree with you. And I do understand why, and I don’t like it:
I think it is more about the profile of the people in need.
Wasn’t there a billionaire on board of that vessel? Their family probably got some influence to force this massive operation. And we idolize these big money havers.
And what money do the immigrants have? It is an ongoing issue for the EU (as an example). It looks like the EU doesn’t even want these people. Sure, they begrudgingly accept people, when they arrive. Sure there is an effort to safe them… But if some are lost on the way. Less mouth to feed.
Once again: my pessimistic observations. Personally, I feel ashamed of this whole thing.
The Titan sub has a dude who went to space with the Amazon guy along with two members of one of Pakistan’s richest families who are heavily involved in a petrochemical company.
Fucking agree so hard.
I think you mean one is full of rich people the other not.
What law did the migrants break?
Does the Coast Guard do a thorough investigation of anyone that is in need of their services and establish everyone is innocent of any potential crime before rescuing people
People aren’t illegal.
How can a human be illegal? And which law governs the Titanic sub’s operation?
It’s not illegal to seek asylum.
Is it really a crime to be human based on geo location and net worth? To me it doesn’t make any sense.
The submarine venture may have been legal on paper but they definitely committed some crimes, at very least negligence. $250K ticket price is a giant red flag and if it’s allowed at all it should increase their liability, with the talk of the ignored concerns it sounds like an outright grift.
The Earth belongs to every being. No one is illegal anywhere here.
Beau (of the fifth column) has a cool shirt that says something like “Beyond these borders do not lie a lesser people.”
I’m sure that sounds great in the sixth form common room, but it’s a woefully simplistic way of looking at the real world. Nation states, borders and immigration laws have formed over the years for good reason.
Also, governments have to take their populations wants into account. How much will it help these people if the population of where they end up votes in a far right government in a few years as a response who round them all up again?
lol, for a good reason these borders will be destroyed soon. Every year brings us much closer to the mass migrations from countries too hot and too poor to live in. It’s funny people don’t realize this and they still believe in their mighty borders, so freaking privileged and supercilious.
If govts wanted to do anything good for the people, the should’ve invested humongous money in education and try to make people immune to disinformation and brainless far right movement. They haven’t done anything. Even if they tried now, it’s too late. It should be done years ago. But greedy politicians only wants money from their billionaire bribers.
Yeah, we probably will see huge migration coming, but it’s more likely to see a strengthening of the borders than their destruction. I’m honestly expecting to see barbed wire and gun emplacements on the Med to stop these boats in my lifetime. It’s depressing to be honest, but clearly the people of Europe don’t want mass migration on these levels.
Regardless people deserve to be rescued if possible.
I’m so tired of governments bending over backwards to help billionaires while ignoring average people
I’m so tired of valuing people based on their net worth. these double standards are disappointing and honestly disgusting. I’m disgusted by our current politics and economics
undefined> I’m so tired of valuing people based on their net worth.
You mean like you just did?
In case you care, which you’ve already indicated you don’t, there are more researchers on the submarine than billionbaires.
From what I’ve read there’s one researcher on the sub, two members of one of Pakistan’s richest families, an “explorer” who rode with the Amazon guy into space, and the CEO of the company that thought their submarines were too advanced to get categorised/certified for the depths they visit.
Don’t forget that the CEO also bragged in a video that the sub only has one button, is controlled by a cheap wireless logitech controller and he bought parts of the sub from camping world.
There’s nothing wrong with COTS equipment like the Camping World light that’s been made much fun of. The controller either, at least in principle, though the idea of using this battery-powered wireless device specifically is maybe not smart. But the fact that the guy who built it is bragging about them as if he’s pulled one over on Big Bathyscaphe should have been a red flag about the quality and safety factors built into the rest of the thing.
Yeah, a COTS video game controller makes sense in context (though I’d have opted for a wired version, myself). I’m also pretty sure the US Navy also uses Xbox controllers for their
periscopesphotonics masts in their subs.https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/18/17136808/us-navy-uss-colorado-xbox-controller
The difference is that the Navy uses actual Xbox controllers which are very reliable. The reviews for that logitech model are filled with connection issues, which of course makes people wonder if they were doing any validation testing on the sub at all
Also the xbox controller is not controlling a critical system. I presume if the submarine loses it’s photonic mast it is not dead in the water.
You should look more into the story and into the occupancy before you start taking random moral stances cause you want to be rich one day.
“actually, you’re the one valuing people on net worth for pointing out the things we’ll do to accommodate billionaires but not for migrants” is such a piss take it’s not even funny
Well, on the bright side, if there is a successful rescue the rescuees can afford to pay the bill. And they should be held to it.
Genuinely surprised by some of the comments here. This is worth discussing and I’m glad the writer of this article drew attention to it.
It looks like its all over now that the coast guard have announced finding a debri field on the ocean floor
Typical garbage take by the Guardian. It used to be a good paper.
And not news. This is an opinion piece/diatribe.
… Newspapers have always had opinion pieces in them?
It’s marked as an editorial. What do you think an editorial is?
Billionaires lives matter more, obviously /s
Today, you could drown an entire cruiseship of Romani and most of Europe would cheer.
This is a summary of the posted article (I’m a bot).
How do I work?
Good bot
I see the reddit bots have started migrating
Report ‘em and carry on.
yeah we banned this one
Thank you!
Capitalist media only cares about sexy tragedies and expensive dangers. Focusing on 500 poors gasping their last breaths far from view only serves to remind viewers of how unfair things are on a basic level - and that threatens power.
The thing is, I’ve ***never ***seen such an overwhelmingly bored response from the general public to a Sexy Tragedy like this before. The only person in my life who expressed any iota of distress over the Titan is my dear mother, but she cried when we dropped off our old TV at Goodwill, so.
People are, I think, getting a little bit harder to trick with the song-and-dance of the hyper-rich dying in outstanding ways.
“When the rich are too rich there are ways, and when the poor are too poor there are ways… This is one of the ways when the poor are too poor. When the rich are too rich there is a way, and if I am not mistaken, that way will come soon.” - Pearl S. Buck
On the same vein it would be very easy to say that media, the Guardian included, almost never report on the (weekly or even daily this time of year) rescues that the Greek (and other) navy does successfully carry out. Nor, of course, are the effects of the migration wave ever discussed with appropriate nuance except a one liner under a picture of a local saying “Mr Spyros the baker said he feels for the migrants but he dislikes what’s happening to his neighborhood.”
They only find space on their front page when they can point a finger at some huge disaster with a tragic photo to illustrate and shock normal people.
Pelt me with stones if you must. I am Greek and live in Athens. The amount of people that have come here and are going around downtown and everywhere else with basically nothing to do in their lives and getting by with benefits if they’re lucky (and very often resort to crime as poor people will do anywhere) is unsustainable. If you read opinion polls there is now a very large majority of the population that think this. Even those who vote left have completely come around in the last years. So don’t be too hasty with your conclusions. This is not about lacking empathy or humanity. It’s just realizing the objective reality that has taken shape around you.
Greece has been blamed for this recent tragedy because the land borders are guarded, which presumably leads to people smugglers sending more people on ships to Italy. But what are we even supposed to do? Just let the country become an open air camp of no prospect poor people, while destroying our society in the process? How does this help anyone? Does anyone think Greece, the recently bankrupt economy, can magically provide for millions of destitute people? Or that if the EU for whatever reason decides all are welcome and thus implicitly invites literally millions, it will not result in widespread social unrest? We already see far right gaining almost everywhere. Here we had literal nazis in parliament and they are currently regrouping after being put in jail.
And there are other questions on this whole issue. Look at UN statistics and see that the majority of people arriving here are not fleeing from Syria. They’re from Pakistan and Afghanistan among other places. Why is the answer to those countries’ problems to settle their populations in Greece and Europe? Why is no other place on earth willing or expected to help them? How realistic is this as a solution when the number of people who would like to move to Europe (from Asia, Middle East and Africa) is larger than the population of Europe itself? Also, is Saudi Arabia for example only able to house Cristiano Ronaldo? They have resources and are closer geographically and culturally to a lot of these people.
This is just one person’s opinion (although very common) but uncontrolled migration can yield even worse results (nightmarish in fact) in the long run than what we’re seeing right now. And what we’re seeing right now is already terrible. I wish there was a more viable solution than the people stay at home and make those places better to live in, which is just unlikely.
Everything you’ve said pretty much exactly describes the homeless situation in Seattle, in that there are so many with great needs, but only so much one city can do. Meanwhile, the people living in Seattle and paying taxes are seeing their city deteriorating around them.
Nah, I do agree it’s a much more common take than people realize. Another POV I’ve seen was on the other end of this spectrum, when Malaysia actually offered to open up their borders to refugees years ago and the refugees…refused lol. Apparently they prefer to get into South Korea instead. I’ve never seen a faster 180° change in opinions regarding refugees like that time.
The so-called “refugee problem” would not exist if countries with means would actually deal with the root causes of people fleeing countries without means. In the US it’s much the same with Mexico and other countries south of us.
Their countries are going to shit because of the accumulated circumstances of centuries of colonialist exploitation, and people there are forced to take their lives into their own hands and try to go somewhere else, because staying isn’t an option for them anymore.
Refugees are just a symptom. We need to address the illness itself, or it will never go away.
Sadly, the symptoms make for an easy political wedge issues to score cheap points, and so it remains beneficial for certain politicians to continue ignoring the illness.
Our civilization doesn’t value human life. It values capital. Capitalism turns us against one another.
Lemmy is officially not ready to take over reddit until I see people discussing the cardi b, blink 182 loving stepson angle to this story being discussed.
Be the change you want to see in the world
Shame on the US coast guard for failing to help in the Mediterranean.
this is an incredibly comical misinterpretation of what the article is saying, and i’m sure you realize that.
this is an incredibly spot-on description of most banger comments on read-it sorts of sites
Absolutely.
I just find this sort of article kind of pointless. Response to a situation in one place was drastically different than a response in a completely different place involving completely different people and agencies with their own different priorities. I don’t think it’s all that illuminating in any global way, except it shows the priorities in one of those places aren’t great. A commentary on the same agency (or even country) responding differently to rich and poor would be more meaningful, but I think the US Coast Guard was pretty proactive when Cuban refugees were crossing in makeshift rafts (a commentary on the difference between US and Greece in those much more similar situations would be interesting, but wouldn’t hit the rich/poor or anti-immigrant angle).
That’s fair as far as it goes, but there are analogous behaviors on the US side of things as well. This is just another instance in which the US government has gone to incredible lengths to rescue tourists who got in over their heads (Wendover Productions touched on this in recent video about the National Park System, if you’re interested) at the same time that Border Patrol and local vigilantes have been recorded sabotaging water caches left as life-saving measures for migrants crossing arid parts of the southern border. That’s a pretty clear indication of which sorts of lives out society thinks matter, and just as in the Mediterranean it more or less comes down to “which ones look and talk like I do?” rather than “which ones are most deserving of the limited resources available to help them?”
We are a global people. We could do more, and we actively don’t. We should all be ashamed and just because it makes you feel uncomfortable or helpless doesn’t mean you have to rationalize the shame of our species.
We need to face it if we’ll ever change it.
We are not a global people, we’re citizens of various nation states. Many people are vehemently opposed to a one world government.
but that unto itself is kind of important, is it not? these are social tragedies which do not need to happen–but they’re basically allowed to happen by a mixture of social apathy, lack of scrutiny, and inhuman social and political incentives. you’re demonstrating why this is illuminating, and why we should talk about it: because the alternatives you describe can happen and are happening but don’t with certain groups, or from certain countries.