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> I think I > prefer the cruder analysis of someone like Camus to Beaudrillard; > Camus doesn't give the impression that people are just abstractions > and that all that needs to be changed is the structural paradigms of > language. I never particularly got that from Baudrillard either. From one angle - and I know this is painfully irrelevant to what we were just talking about, a fastidious non sequitur - it's hard to imagine a less structuralist, less linguisticist writer. Writing is always struggling to catch up, or getting carried away with itself, in Baudrillard. The more common objection is that it doesn't stick around in one place long enough to register any kind of truth. I never took part in a single political Action (with a capital 'A') of any kind while I was a student, and the only one I regret not taking was the one I should have taken outside the Campsfield detention centre, where refugees where imprisoned pending processing. But that was a moral issue, and remains one. Here in Leicester there are many refugees and migrants of dubious legal/national status, and their vulnerability, like that of the homeless, is terrifying - such that many people don't want to go near it, never knowing what might be asked of them. That's what I mean about seduction: the fear is that some person will be able to indebt you to them, that you are already indebted to them, that you will be asked to realize an impossible obligation. Why are certain people, in Australia and elsewhere. so terrified of refugees, so inclined to regard everything they do as a threatening gesture, an attack, an attempted "manipulation"? I am afraid that the desperate gesture exacerbates this fear, although I am not sure that the moderate, restrained gesture will do much to alleviate it as the fear comes out of an obscure deep well of its own and is afraid, in the last analysis, of everything. There's also the fact that being kind costs money, and costing money is about the worst thing you can possibly do in a rich country. Dominic