Actually, I’m not going to fisk the whole risible piece or I’d lose the will to live. Merely, I would make the observation that Fisk’s question has a simple answer.
When we mourn the passing of Prince but not 500 migrants, we have to ask: have we lost all sense of perspective?
Not only has it a simple answer, it’s been answered on many occasions before. Prince was a talented artist whose music touched millions. Consequently, those people will feel a sense of loss. The migrants (no, they are not refugees) have not touched the lives of millions with music or anything else, frankly. They are seeking a better life here. Well, that I can understand, however, free-loading off us and bringing a backward, violent, repugnant ideology with them, I am less happy about.
However, as one commenter to Fisk’s article points out, if he wants us to mourn all the dead, we will have a full-time job on our hands. The man is an idiot – not least because he is asking a question that has a ready answer; we identify with those we know and those most like us. Nothing unusual about that. And, no, we have not lost our moral compass, nor will I allow fuckwits like Fisk to guilt-trip me, for I am not guilty and will never feel guilty.
But, and here’s the thing, the idiot is bemoaning the state of journalism – and this from a man who has a knighthood in buffoonery. Some navel-gazing might be in order.
I was reduced to tears on hearing about the 500 migrants in the boat. There were two empty seats.
I think that I am correct in saying that going through a piece of writing and refuting it line by line is called Fisking after Robert Fisk. This is because he once wrote something that was such tripe from end to end that someone did just that.
Yes. He hasn’t improved.
I do not mourn the death of Prince. As far as I know I have never heard anything by him nor do I wish to. I do however regret the deaths of Victoria Wood and Ronnie Corbett because they made me laugh and for a short while improved my life. I do not mourn the loss of migrant lives as I regard them in the same way as those who say, climb mountains or race motorbikes, you gambled and lost, tough.
People dying in the Middle East and parts of Africa is background noise now. Hell, it was background noise 20-30 years ago. Quite simply, nobody who isn’t involved in the field of charity work here is ever going to care much about yet more people being killed in countries where warfare and violence have become commonplace.
We feel the single death of people we have emotional attachment to more keenly than the deaths of a hundred complete strangers. Our reactions don’t scale: 500 dead people doesn’t mean we feel 500 times worse about it. If we did, we’d never have any wars.
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We’ve been exposed to endless images of fly-blown starving kids and the like since the early 1980s. Over 30 years later, not a bloody thing has changed. If anything, it’s gotten worse, thanks in no small part to Western interference and meddling in the cretinously arrogant belief that one can impose Western-style democracies practically overnight on nations that lack even the most basic infrastructure for such systems. Like a decent education system.
Sean; you just nailed it. +100