Australia has turned Nauru into a living hell for would-be immigrants

Well, sure, racism may be fundamentally about in-group preferences, but this psychological mechanism can manifest itself in qualitatively different ways depending on how the in-group is defined. I would argue that someone who grew up attending public schools in Toronto will have a very different idea of what their group is (or could be) than someone who grew up in a small and homogenous town in Quebec, let alone somewhere like Russia or Japan.

The ruling class writes the laws, but no ruling class has any right to send anyone - refugees, conscript soldiers, even volunteers - to their deaths.

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That was pretty dense on my part to not think of the media element - especially considering Murdoch’s stranglehold there.

It appears Australians are faced with the similar issue we struggle with here in the USA – A corporate media that manufactures consent via mass misinformation and half-truths sprinkled with tasty bits of rampant fearmongering.

Sadly, it can make even the smartest people turn rancid with hatred and fear based upon ignorance.

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Yeah, it was an incredibly white-dominated video for a video that also claimed it was representing a multicultural country. For a bit there, I thought it was going to be a parody because it was… so… white. I guess they thought they covered all their bases with this small (about 1.5 second) clip of two people of color who also might be gay here:

But, yeah, most of the rest of the POC looked like they were performing for tourists.

I guess that video might unwittingly represent the denial many Aussies are living in? Sorry, Aussies, but this Nauru thing has got me feeling kinda pessimistic about you guys. Just like we need to do in the USA, you need to reform your country obviously.

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I watched the whole thing. It was a struggle to make it through the opening bit about all the minerals making the country rich, but I hung in there. By the end, my eyes and ears were bleeding. The whole “Straya” thing reeks of the infantile “Aussie Aussie Aussie Oi Oi Oi” chant, an overtly aggressive cultural expression that excludes anyone who doesn’t want to wrap a flag around themselves on Australia Day or get pissed at the cricket. There’s enough in that clip to write a PhD thesis.

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Just going to leave this here. It’s in Melbourne, Australia and shows either an incredible grasp of or blindness to irony.

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I don’t know if it is effective or not(and how its effectiveness would compare to a policy of equally strict border control; but less ghastly storage sites); but it seems pretty reasonable to expect that would-be migrants occupy a continuum of urgency, from people who wouldn’t even consider a trip somewhere they couldn’t get a visa for ahead of time, to people who see getting to point b as a literal matter of life and death.

A policy could be ‘effective’ in that it discourages members of the less urgent tiers while still leaving the more motivated ones to occupy the detention center. I’m not sure if that is, in fact, how they stack up; but in principle it’s a perfectly plausible outcome.

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Man, it’s such a piece of shit. What drivel!

That bit about our bloody rock shitting on Paris is so bad, it makes me really hope it’s parody.

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Well - that or renovations. But yes, very appropriate picture for this political moment.

I did a bit of digging. The creator says it’s a parody and a remix. According to this article, it’s been viewed 3 million times on FB and YT. The problem with parodies that don’t look like parodies is that they attract some weird support. It’s like an anti-racist parody of Hanson drawing in racist support. It’s a fine line if you don’t make your position clear.

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The bigger problem is that he doesn’t say what he thinks “parody” means, or what he is parodizing.

From a copyright perspective, the only way he can argue this isn’t copyright infringement is by arguing it is a parody in the legal sense of the word, which means not that he is making fun of patriotism or Australia, but that he is somehow making fun of the original song “Hey Ya!”

By simply calling it a parody and a remix, he seems to be describing the song in a pretty technical way, without saying what the song is intended to mean.

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Phew…

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Murdoch needs to fucking die. Soon. I don’t care how.

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I expect he has a secret goa’uld sarcophagus or a machine that will keep him alive for hundreds of years.

Yes, I’m feeling pessemistic today. Not even the news that Nasty Nigel might not win his seat is making me feel better.

Yes, you’re right. We do need reform. But that’s almost impossible under this current, evil, completely fucked up federal government. Supporters of which would say the problems began long ago, under the opposition party, blah blah blah. Which to a certain, simplistic, extent is true, but things have got so much worse since the current evil bastards were elected (not by my vote). We desperately need reform on issues such as treatment of our Indigenous population, their life expectancy, racism towards multi cultural populations, and especially our treatment of asylum seekers, potential refugees and the whole ‘turn back the boats’ bullshit and flow-on effects for countries which take on Australia’s ‘illegals’.

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Agree. But the problem is his regime and the views expressed by that regime are bound to continue without him. I used to work for uncle rupie a long time ago and that experience taught me that the company views come very much from the top down and with the kids most likely to take over from him, his death will in no way result in a ‘clean sweep’, change in company culture or anything similar.

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Are you saying the Jews tried to enter Poland illegally and were detained
in the Warsaw ghetto by the Nazi INS? Pretty revisionist of you…​

Are you saying that the detainment of Jews in ghettos was illegal under German law? That sounds pretty revisionist of you.

Legality does not equal morality or what is right, and I think this would be the principal objection in both cases.

Allah who?

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​That legality does not equate with morality does not make the situation
described in this posting the equivalent of Buchenwald or the Warsaw
Ghetto. According this way of thinking, all behavior which is legal, but
immoral, would be identical. That is absurd. And no, I have no idea about
whether the imposition of conditions which amounted to the Warsaw ghetto
were legal or illegal under German law.

There were Jewish ghettos in many countries over there, even before the rise of Nazism, because they were considered to be foreigners and not citizens in those countries.

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