On #r4today @bbcnickrobinson is talking about tragic drownings of migrants attempting dangerous crossings.

How long will it take before politicians and journalists realise that we must approach migration as a systemic, global problem, and not one to be addressed story by story? The international community must address the causes of migration.

Nobody leaves their family, community & native land on a whim. They leave because they are driven to leave by war, or by oppressive, authoritarian governments, of by poverty, or, increasingly, by climate change

What shall we do about mental health services?

First, look at prevalence of mental health problems.
They increase with increasing inequality in society:

equalitytrust.org.uk/mental-health #r4today Germany, Spain and Italy may be doing something right, because their incidence of mental health problems is lower than the trend. We should take a closer look at mental health in those countries

@BBCr4today asks “How can we have a grown up conversation about migration?”

You do this by putting the subject its context.

Migration is a worldwide phenomenon.
UK is in the middle range of comparable countries.
Then you look at the causes of migration #r4today .@BBCr4today The four causes of migration are clear:
1 War
2 Oppressive authoritarian governments
3 Relative poverty
4 Increasingly, climate change.

It’s absurd to imagine that UK can stop migration without addressing these global problems. They can be addressed, in many ways

The #climatescam is a highly successful disinformation campaign that benefitted the fossil fuel industry and delayed the introduction of the sustainable economy by approximately four decades, between the 1980s until the early 2020s. A scam is a confidence trick inflicted on naive people by tricksters.

There is an absolute division between the majority who accept the physics describing what is happening to our planet, and a small but utterly convinced minority who believe that there is a conspiracy…

Putin’s patsy, Johnson, our PM, has given up following the science on Covid, and decided instead to follow the libertarian Covid deniers.

He has removed all restrictions. We are back to normal. No masks, no distancing, and if you have a virus you are expected to go to work
1/ We have learned nothing.
150,000 UK citizens have died a choking death, many well before their time.
Our death rates are higher than Europe and the EU
Our case numbers are world beating.
Yet we have learned nothing
2/

If we want to avoid lockdown in the Autumn, we should all be taking the best precautionary measures against transmission.

Instead, we are behaving as if the pandemic is over.

The pandemic is not over.

We may be getting bored with Covid, but SARS-Cov2 doesn’t do bored.
1/ At present, the “libertarians” are running the show.

Cases, hospitalisations, ICU patients and deaths are all going up, but the “libertarians” say, “Fine. Let it Rip. Take it on the Chin”.

Is this OK?

We need to have a discussion
2/

One of the things that are holding us back from change is the very widespread, very understandable belief that it is useless writing to your MP.

Thing is, is enough of us write asking for the same thing, they must take notice. We just have to be of one mind
1/ One thing that pretty much unites us all is that we value the NHS.
So we could all write to ask our MP (and all PPCs* too) that they will work to oppose and reverse the privatisation of the NHS.

Most MPs will respond with declarations of love towards the NHS, followed by guff
2/

The riots on Capitol Hill in January 2021 will occupy social psychologists for decades.

Here is my preliminary formulation as a psychiatrist:

1. There exists a widespread delusion that a political elite exists whose aim is to remove people’s rights and freedoms

1/ 2. In this delusion the elite operate by creating elaborate myths about general threats to well-being such as man-made climate change and Covid-19

3/ These myths are propagated using the scientific community (!) who are drawn into a quasi-religious system of false thinking
2/

One of the most important and common tricks used by deniers of Covid and man-made climate change is to pick up on a single error made by their opponents and magnify it into a total, all-encompassing "proof" that the deniers are right.
1/ This is called the Fallacy of Composition, when it is falsely reasoned that what is true of the parts of a whole must be true of the whole. nizkor.com/features/falla…

2/

#r4today give Sir Rocco Forte a platform to complain about the impact of efforts to curb C19 transmission on his business.

He is not challenged to say what he actually wants, so we have to assume that it is the Let It Rip idea.

So let us explore Forte's plan 1/ The Let it Rip group lost the argument in Cabinet back in February 2020, but did not give up. In fact their policies may have been influencing the implementation of Johnson's C19 response, which would explain his many failures, notably of Test n Trace greenerblog.blogspot.com/2020/06/list-o…
2/

Humanity is bound together and empowered to collaborate by means of shared belief in a succession of gods.

At present the god is Money, who rules through the Invisible Hand of the Market, and who requires infinite expansion into a finite space.

This is an impossibility
1/ As well as demanding an impossibility, the prevailing religion of Money is causing mass extinctions, and destroying the energy balance of our Earth.

This is the modern equivalent of human sacrifice.

2/