• How Do We Face Loss With Dignity? - ezra kline show (podcast) nytimes link

    initially, this started out as a really interesting discussion about Mohsin Hamid’s book and the themes therein. then it kind of forked off in a really interesting direction.

    But what I think is very stark is that it cannot be that the moral right is simply to say that people mustn’t move, they are criminal if they move, they should be criminalized if they move, because in a world where there will be, I think, enormous flows of people, due to climate change and environmental disruption, but also wars and other things, if we say to people that they just can’t move, we’re, in a sense, handing out death sentences to millions and millions of our fellow human beings. If you can’t leave a country where there’s a war underway and where people of your particular group are being killed, or if you can’t leave a country where there is enormous starvation and crops have failed, we are basically deciding that these people now need to die.

    And for me, that decision should be revealed in its correct moral complexion, which is to say it isn’t the person who wishes to move who is the criminal here. If somebody is drowning and we can help them and we don’t, it’s not the person who drowns that is the criminal here.

  • I Was A Stranger and You Welcomed Me - revisionist history (podcast)

    this smashed up against the previous discussion with an interesting riff on the contrast between the canadian approach to refugee resettlement and the american approach. there’s a little bit of well placed moralizing that should hit home.