bastard.logic.redux

With no possibilities to work legally and totally inadequate support to refugee families, more will make the decision to leave the neighbouring host counties and search for anchors with their dispersed family or social network. Germany and Sweden will remain the two most popular target end points in this onward forced migration. Furthermore, Russian air bombardment in Syria is now pushing  even greater numbers of middle class and professional Syrians - able to pay smugglers - out of the country and directly on to European soil in an effort to save the lives of their family members  from government barrel bombs and Russian aerial attacks.  No one knows exactly how many refugees from Syria have refused to register in the neighbouring host countries. In Lebanon, it is estimated that as much as 50% of those Syrians in the country have refused to register and access assistance for fear that their personal information might somehow find its way back to the Syrian intelligence services. Many fear being unable to return to Syria one day if the Asad government remains in power. This is especially true for Palestinian refugees from Syria who have found a temporary ‘ safe haven’ in Lebanon. These unregistered refugees are among the first to move onwards towards northern Europe when conditions locally become intolerable, that is, no longer capable of supporting family life.   Without a massive re-thinking of how aid is delivered and distributed, refugees in the region are going to look for ways to leave. The very least that they require is survival in dignity, a basic concept promoted by the United Nations Agency for Refugees (UNHCR). This encompasses basic health care and access to education for children, youth and vulnerable family members. As neither Lebanon or Jordan have signed the 1951 Refugee Convention, neither country is obliged to ‘protect’ refugees, that includes providing basic health and education services as well as not returning them to the country where they faced persecution.

In separate books, Philip Mirowski and Wendy Brown have both placed social media forms at the centre of the formation of our destabilised neoliberal identities. They see the social media profile as being based around an imperative for us to hone our competitive skills and to secure our value in the market driven mediated environments in which we live. These new Twitter metrics might allow us to extend such arguments further and to see more explicitly that these media are the archetypal resource for the self-training entrepreneurial subject. They are the tools of the entrepreneurial self. These Twitter stats give us the means to refine or hone our content, to have competitive profiles, to draw attention and to enhance our value. These types of stats are just the sort of thing you would expect to find where you have self-training participants who are keen to measure and adapt their performance. As we respond to performance metrics in our workplaces, so too we are now expected to react to performance measures in our leisure, communication and friendship networks.