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.

  •  Pigeon   ( @Lowbird@beehaw.org ) 
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    1051 year ago

    I’m glad this article exists; this has been bothering me. Specifically, I’m bothered that, while aljazeera featured the stories about the boat of refugees as and after it was happening, I haven’t seen it crop up in U.S. news at all. One of the deadliest disasters in the Mediterranean, and… crickets.

    Then a submersible with a handful of white rich lads gets lost and it’s all over the papers and all anyone can talk about.

    To be fair, part of this is the fact that the submersible story has a lot of wild and novel details to it, plus the novel “oh god imagine being trapped in a submarine” fear factor, that make it great for getting attention and clicks, but nevertheless.

    The other part of it is that people see “poor, brown refugees drowned at sea in the Mediterranean, once again” and feel completely disconnected from that and glaze over. The refugees don’t get the same automatic “what would that feel like if it were me” empathizing, and the situation doesn’t get the same scrutiny of rescue details and chances and what exactly went wrong that resulted in hundreds and hundreds of innocent people drowning at sea.

    And they were in a BOAT. They knew where the boat was. The boat was reachable. They just let them die.

    It’s true that we’re talking about different countries and different organizations, but this is a recurring pattern. Refugees are being systematically and repeatedly allowed to drown when they are very near to people who could help them. Other people get prioritized and rescued like they’re kings.

    •  Kempeth   ( @Kempeth@feddit.de ) 
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      141 year ago

      while I certainly think the affluency of the victims is a factor it would be disingenuous to claim this is ALL it is.

      For any regular occurrence, at some point apathy sets in. Car accidents are just not interesting to report after the hundreth time. If there were a dozen lost subs near the Titanic every year, I’m sure the story would lose it’s luster too.

      There’s also the aspect that refugees are an ongoing and much more complex issue. You can’t just save one ship of refugees. There will be another one in short order. And if you do save them all the question is what do you do with them? At the very least that’ll cost you money. At worst it’ll cost you political power. Are you going to realize what these people have gone through to get them to a point where they are willingly face these risks? Realizing that maybe something should be done about that is even costlier. And depending on the political landscape in your country most will just consider this “a self solving problem” anyway.

      This is not to excuse what we’re seeing. But we can’t pretend that the stories should be covered the same. They aren’t the same. One is much easier to cover than the other.

      •  crius   ( @crius@beehaw.org ) 
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        111 year ago

        I see your point but just for the sake of discussion, try and change “refugees” with “people”.

        You should notice how all the other considerations simply are not worth the electricity used to transmit them on your screen.

        •  NuPNuA   ( @NuPNuA@lemm.ee ) 
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          51 year ago

          I mean, in an ideal world that emotive argument would work. But this isn’t an ideal world and that ignores all the additional baggage that comes with a country taking in these refugees/migrants loel housing, basic needs funding, healthcare, etc. This is on top of lots of European nations already suffering economically at the moment from the Covid fallout and the Ukraine situation. Just saying “we should save them as it’s the right thing to do” is far to simple for the world we live in.

        •  jmp242   ( @jmp242@sopuli.xyz ) 
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          11 year ago

          These people aren’t citizens of the same countries though. Their country apparently didn’t want to do anything and hoping random other countries take care of you is not a great plan. Countries have a duty to their citizens first, and nothing about the migrant situation helps Greece other than somehow convincing them not to come. The migrants are creating an emergency and expecting someone to come save them. Europe (nor the US) can’t take care of their citizens right now - look at the news. Expecting them to expend resources for random other people is a fools errand.

          And if it was just picking them up and dropping them somewhere safe like it would have been with the submarine that would be one thing, but that’s not what you’re asking is it? You want them to be taken in for the rest of their lives and likely supported while you have all the other problems expressed in this thread.

          • All of that is archaic nonsense that we could easily do better, but we waste our time and resources on a planet we are killing for no real reason other than “this is how we set things up centuries ago and people in power really find it helpful”.

            But then your morals I find absolutely disgusting.

    •  yarr   ( @yarr@lemmy.fmhy.ml ) 
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      41 year ago

      For better or for worse, news outlets care about engagement. “50th boat full of migrants lost this year” won’t get many clicks. “Billionaires in trouble under the sea” will. If you think these type of stories are under-reported, feel free to start your own blog or discussion forum.

  • 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

  • One group is full of hundred-millionaires. The other group is full of destitute people fleeing their home countries due to horrific conditions.

    Given that capitalism does put a price on people, that’s obviously the metric used to determine who to help.

  •  Picard   ( @Picard@beehaw.org ) 
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    351 year ago

    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.

    • 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.

    •  Bellatired   ( @ellabella@beehaw.org ) 
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • 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.

  • 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.

    How do I work?

  • It’s simple human psychology. We get all excited about a child that fell into a well but when it’s 10 children or 100 we just care less and less even if the group includes the one kid we started with. I guess it’s kinda sad but also not at all surprising

    •  chepox   ( @chepox@sopuli.xyz ) 
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      61 year ago

      I read somewhere that this an evolutionary trait that developed back from when we hung out in small groups. Empathy was only useful as a species when we could act upon said small group. Increase the group size and we find no additional benefit on having empathy for the unknown extended group.

      It kinda makes sense. Read on the news 300,000 dead! . Or 250,000 dead! There is no difference on the empathic response although one has 50,000 more dead people. Read 1 kid is suffering and your heart tears to pieces.

      We are a weird species for sure.

      •  NaN   ( @nan@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 
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        1 year ago

        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).

        •  Thrashy   ( @Thrashy@beehaw.org ) 
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          1 year ago

          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 our 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?”

        • 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.

        • 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.

    • 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.


      1. 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. ↩︎

      •  Scribbd   ( @Scribbd@feddit.nl ) 
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • 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

      •  NuPNuA   ( @NuPNuA@lemm.ee ) 
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        31 year ago

        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?

        •  kwj   ( @lysy@szmer.info ) 
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          31 year ago

          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.

          •  NuPNuA   ( @NuPNuA@lemm.ee ) 
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            21 year ago

            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.

            •  kwj   ( @lysy@szmer.info ) 
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              11 year ago

              Awful, shame on you. Instead of murdering people, try to help them. Organize and force politicians to make good integration programmes in your country, also to help people in their countries so that they won’t be forced to leave their homes. I can understand defetism, cause the future doesn’t look bright, but please use the fact that we, human beings, are intelligent enough to change this future at least in some extent.

          •  jmp242   ( @jmp242@sopuli.xyz ) 
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            11 year ago

            So you don’t think Ukraine should be fighting this war because they shouldn’t habe borders? You think people shouldn’t have a government that works for them because it’s not in their interest to flood their countries with migrants. I bet you feel there should be doors and you should have some say who comes in your house. That is the borders writ small.

            The other hard problem is, if we drop a million Pakistani refugees here, and we’re a democracy and we all vote that population might well vote in Islamic law. How’s that fair to the people who were just living here minding their own business? If we for whatever reason don’t let them vote, great. Now we have new apartheid.

            Just because there are a lot of people who would like to come tell me how I ought to live, people who don’t live here, just would like to move here… Why do they rank above people already living here?

    • 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.

  • That mass drownings have become so common – more than 25,000 people have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean since 2014 – is shameful in itself.

    Over 25,000 have drowned since only 2014?? Holy Christ.