A Deeply Fractured World

[Fishbone Jones]

Somewhat misleading headline vs what is actually in the article.

I'm pretty sure most of us know what headlines are and how they are used. A headline needs to capture the readers attention in mere seconds, otherwise they move on to something else. If they stretch it a bit to draw that attention, that's what they do. Common practice among news vendors. None of it is open to editing it myself. If I did, the article becomes mine. If it does, it moves from information to opinion. I do not have one at this juncture. I want to wait a bit to hear the defence by Starmer and the Labour party and the opinions of the Conservatives and Reform parties before I start to draw conclusions and forming opinions.

I concede your point, but we don’t control what the media writes. After all that though, it made you read the article anyway, right?

 

[daftandbarmy]

Meanwhile, in Germany...

Leon Hill on Instagram: "🇩🇪 In Germany, there are around 17,000 Australian citizens who live in the country. But last year, they were suspected of only two crimes in total. Just two. But compare that to the 27,000 Algerians in the country, that same

5,572 likes, 144 comments - iamanticitizen on May 16, 2026: "🇩🇪 In Germany, there are around 17,000 Australian citizens who live in the country. But last year, they were suspected of only two crimes in total. Just two. But compare that to the 27,000 Algerians in the country, that same year they...

www.instagram.com

 

[Halifax Tar]

Interesting thread.

https://twitter.com/x/status/2074037550826553684

 

[Kirkhill]

The supremacy of law and the infallibility of judges.

The Atlantic is not noted as particularly right wing in its views.

When Following the Rules Leads to Disaster

A supreme-court decision helped cause the Ceuta disaster.

www.theatlantic.com

"On July 8, Spain’s supreme court issued a seemingly reasonable decision, unaware that by the end of the month, it would contribute to the deaths of at least 57 people, many by drowning. The court ruled that people who had migrated illegally could be sent back summarily only if they’d circumvented a physical barrier at the border. If no barrier exists—if they’d walked across open ground, say, or swum—then the government must go through a much more complicated process to deport them.

"And if you’re trying to swim to Europe from Africa, there may be no better destination than Ceuta, a speck of Spanish territory in North Africa, surrounded by Morocco on its western edge and the Mediterranean elsewhere. Every year, some migrants try to swim to Ceuta, especially in the summer, when the waters are relatively calm. Ceuta has a facility that can process about 500 people at a time. But Thursday, 100 times that number—an estimated 50,000 people—made an amphibious attempt to swarm Ceuta and emigrate illegally from Morocco."

 

[Brad Sallows]

The supremacy of law and the infallibility of judges.

Always best when someone else volunteers to be the horrible warning.

It should be a short leap from "countries have different standards of living" and "countries have traditionally had controlled borders" to speculating on the ways in which the latter contribute to the former.

 

[Oldgateboatdriver]

"countries have traditionally had controlled borders"

If you except the last 150 years, the real situation throughout history is that countries (for those that existed as "countries" as that is understood today) did not control their border. traveling was difficult, done with little in terms of roads, people lived and died for 99% of them within ten miles of where they were born outside of a few mass migrations (the Canadian and American Western frontier, the Irish Famine, etc.). Otherwise, the borders were mostly undefined and the people near the borders, such as they were, were fluid, with people on either side moving across them to live on one side, then the other. That's why, for instance, you have a lot of Americans of French descent living in the upper New England states (NY, Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire).

This only changed with the European 150 years war (the one that starts with the 1803 Napoleonic war and ends in 1945 with the fall of Berlin) and truly accelerated with the introduction of modern Income Taxation for WWI.