Aceticon @ Aceticon @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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Avoiding the shit from enshittification isn't hardcore, it's just the normal adult thing to do.

Portraying this as a trolley problem is misleading and manipulative.

This is not a trolley problem because:

• It's not a single decision after which there is no walking back on it, rather it's a cyclical choice which happens every 4 years and a lot of what was done by the candidate elected in once cycle can be undone in the next (as the Republicans frequently demonstrate when one of theirs gets elected after a Democrat).
• It's not a single person making a decision, it's millions of people all at the same time and it's not even the average of their choices that gets executed (that would require Proportional Vote) but it's done using a weird mathematical formula, so there are tons of situations were no matter what one's choice is (or even not choosing at all) it makes no difference whatsoever.
• Voters don't actually know upfront what either choice will deliver. Politicians often promise one thing and do something else.

The closest philosophical or game theory example to an election is a cyclical "Ultimatum Game" between voters and politicians only it's in the best interest of politicians that people don't see it that way (because they would be aware that they can punishing politicians in one cycle to get them to do a different split the next one, or specifically in American politics they can Punish the DNC in one cycle for fielding a too rightwing candidate to get them to field a less rightwing candidate the next cycle) so instead their propaganda has pushed for decades this falacy that it's an "trolley problem" and it's companion: the idea that people must "chose the lesser evil".

Which generally comes with "I am more important than those forigners and hence should be treated better than them" which is just another form of "what's in it for me".

Certainly my experience from living in Brexit Britain is that the kind of people who couldn't accept criticism of Britain were also the kind who though they were superior to foreigners because of being Britons and expected to be better treated than foreigners for it, and that wasn't just in their own country but also for example when on vacations abroad.

Absolutely, it's a spectrum rather then perfectly defined groups, just like pretty much everything else about humans not just psychological but even physiological.

That said, looking at my own country, Portugal, which had people having to emigrate due to poverty during the Fascist times (which was well before the "strong" passport), then most people not really having the emigrate (80s, 90s, 00s) unless they wanted to, then people once again having to emigrate due to poverty (the youth in the last decade and some, because of low salaries and an insane realestate bubble), most of those who went to live abroad were very different in different phases and it's almost a joke around here that those who emigrated during that first phase are more rightwing than those who stayed (and you see a similar phenomenon now with Brazilian immigrants in Portugal: the immigrant vote in Portugal for the Brazilian Presidential Elections is invariably far more to the Right than the vote in Brazil).

I believe those with wunderlust always leave in more or less the same numbers, but during the hard times the number of those leaving because they have to rather than because of their desire for new experiences, is far larger and outstrips those driven by wunderlust (and, as you pointed out, when everybody is poor the ones with wunderlust both want to and need to leave).

Although from this one might expect that immigrants from poorer countries will be more rightwing in average because of the higher fraction of economic relative to wunderlust immigrants, that's not the point I'm trying to make. The point I'm trying to make is that in their host countries there are two kinds of behaviors of immigrants because there are two kinds of drives to leave one's homeland, which is as true for richer countries as for poorer countries, even if the ratio of one kind to the other kind is different because poverty makes more people leave for economic reasons.

Basically people shouldn't be assuming shit about all immigrants because of effects like the one described in this article: whilst the aggregated numbers might project a certain impression, in reality there are different kinds of immigrants with different drives to emigrate and hence different behaviors in their host country, and the wunderlust ones who are the minority in the immigration from poorer countries shouldn't be tainted by the way the other kind behaves as they've very different and behave differently.

You seem to be coming at what I wrote and the whole subject starting from a political ideology and then trying to force reality to comply with your political views.

Immigrants and refugees are a lot more than just political slogans that either American political party uses in their Theater Of Democracy to bait and enrage the local muppets, and any genuine and honest thinking about immigration must be hard-nosed and principled and certainly not in any way form or shape influenced by the hyper-simplistic portraying of immigrants, side taking and baiting-slogans from the deeply fucked up American politics.

As for your personal definition of where the border in the scale of "need" between "immigrant" and "refugee" is, it's entirely subjective and down to personal preference, hence as irrelevant and valid as your taste in food: there is really no right or wrong, but yours is no better than anybody else's.

I'll go with the legal definition, because I expect it was thought through by several people trying to find a good balance and it's widely accepted.

That said, I misused the word "Greed" since I meant it in the sense of "personal upside maximization" - just the normal general want to have more stuff that drives most people, immigrant or not - whilst the dictionary definition of Greed is "excessive want", which is not at all what I meant when I used it. So my bad on that.

I don't think Economic Immigrants are worse or better than the native population, I just think that the normal want to have more shit in somebody wanting to go live in another country isn't something that makes them deserving of special treatment whilst I do think having a level of need that qualifies one for refugee status is something that makes that person deserving of special treatment.

Your post and the one before together neatly summarize exactly the point I was trying to make.

Personally I think there's a strong difference in mindset between people who seek personal economic benefits when immigrating from those who seek other kinds of benefits (personal freedom, education, satisfying their wunderlust) and from there come differences in their general behavior, including being more leftwing or rightwing.

The very same thing exists in the population in general when it comes to their main drive in life, but for me it's even sharper in immigrants because emigrating is in my personal experience a huge change - you're literally choosing to leave a place were people behave, expect you to behave and judge each other in familiar predictable ways to go somewhere were all that is different and it's more so if they speak a different language, so it's a proper big change in one's life well beyond just merely changing cities in your own country - so I believe that what drives somebody to do something that big is a stronger indication of who they are as a person.

Clearly you didn't really read my post: nobody actually thinking about it whilst reading it could interpret "they left their own country because they wanted to experience more than just life in their homeland" as being about refugees.

I only mentioned refugees in passing at the very beginning because I don't think of them as immigrants at all (they're not leaving their country out of choice) but some people might, and I didn't expand on those at all on my post because you can't really deduce anything about a person's mindset based on what they're forced to do, but you can based on what they chose to do, especially something a big as emigrating which I know from personal experience is a big leap to take as you're not just leaving everything you know but even the familiarity of people behaving, expecting you to behave and thinking in certain ways which is one's country - moving countries is way bigger than just moving cities because from your point of view, in another country everybody around you acts strangely and speaks a strange language.

My post is about the two main mindsets that drive people to chose to leave their country for another country: personal upside maximization (i.e. make more money, i.e. greed) or satisfaction of a psychological need for meeting different people and doing new things (i.e. wunderlust)

I don't think you can tell anything at all about a person's personal drives from them being a refugee because the big change which is moving to another country was de facto forced upon them rather than them choosing to make such a big change.

From my own experience as an immigrant, there are two kind of immigrants (well, three if you count refugees as immigrants, though those are a very special case), Economic Immigrants and Cultural/Wanderlust Immigrants.

The first are self explanatory - they move somewhere to make more money than they could make in their homeland - whilst the second are the kind of people who go live elsewhere because they want to experience different ways of living.

These have vastly different kinds of personality, with the Economic Immigrants being the kind that brings along a slice of their country with them and tends to live in neighborhoods with lots of others from the same country and even little stores and entertainment venues with products and in the style of their homeland, whilst the other ones tend to integrate more in their host country, at the very least living in mixed communities, and don't seek the venues of their homeland or even the company of their countrymen.

Unsurprisingly, Economic Immigrants are often Right-wingers - they have been driven by Greed to immigrate, remain strongly wedded to the values common in their homeland when they left (so are naturally conservatives) and don't tend to be open-minded, whilst the others are pretty much by definition open-minded (after all, they left their own country because they wanted to experience more than just life in their homeland) and hence tend to be Left-wingers.

So, yeah, there's often a willingness to "pull up the ladder now that I'm in" from Economic Immigrants, but I haven't really seen that kind of posture from the other ones (maybe there is, but they were a lot rarer than the former kind in the countries I lived in so I never really had a large sample of those).

Yeah, I think I get what you mean.

My own country, Portugal, has issues and around here there is a big tendency to look to Britain for inspiration, yet Britain in many ways is even more broken than my own country (certainly it's a far less fair society, more stratified, way more violent amongst the lower classes and more fake amongst the upper classes, plus significantly more calcified and less daring in many ways) and which wealth-wise is mainly is just using the pile (of both money and infrastructure) accumulated during their time not that long ago when it was an Empire, rather than in the present day being a more productive country,

People look up to Britain, copy what's done there under the impression that it works, and then end up with similar problems but none of the good things because the "success" of Britain isn't the product of what they do now, it's just accumulated wealth and structures from almost a century ago.

That said, I think the circus that was Brexit has taken the shine out of Britain in most of Europe, including Portugal, maybe more strongly so here because Portugal used to send a lot of emigrants over there and many came back following Brexit and the consequences of Brexit with a far worse opinion of Britain than they went there with, and they certainly shared that opinion with family and friends.

Oh, I don't at all think that Brits themselves see any of that as ghoulish.

In fact the local culture has a huge thing with a heavilly classist social hierarchy, "knowing your place" in the social hierarchy and looking up to the upper classes and seing them as more capable.

(Their Monarchy is the wealthiest and most powerful in Europe and you'll find plenty of fawning coverage of them in the local media and a vast majority of Brits love the Monarchy)

In my experience people traditionally tend to see it as the natural order of things and there really was only this period between the post-War times and maybe the 80s when amongst the working class there was this idea that the working class was as much entitled to rule things as the upper classes and a lot of that has been crushed along with Labour Unions, Industry and Mining in Britain and as most of the workers became white collar workers (who see themselves as Middle Class and look down on the Working Class even though de facto they're Working Class) rather than blue collar.

(Though I supposed some of it was transformed into support for the most extremist far right movements there of the present day, since they get a lot of support from retired working class people who feel themselves rich because the house they own is now worth a lot of money due to the massive house price bubble over there - in a way it's funny that the most Fascist people of all are actually Working Class pensioners)

Most don't really recognize that stuff as unusual or strange because that's all that they've known, same as for everybody everywhere all over the World - mostly it's only people who have actually lived and worked abroad and hence seen things done differently, who can spot the quirks and negative aspects of society they grew up in.

Couldn't agree more!

As far as I know, in the countries were Portugal set colonies up, mixed race kids were just Portuguese on account of having a Portuguese parent.

When the Revolution in Portugal happened in 1974, Fascism was brought down and most of the "colonized" countries became free (Brasil had been independent for over a century by then, so it was only nations in Africa) and any Portuguese national who wanted it was repatriated, quite independently of skin color, and many were mixed race hence why I think a large proportion of the mixed race offspring just got Portuguese nationality on account of having a Portuguese parent and was in a normal Portuguese family.

That said, I vaguelly remember that during the Fascist Dictatorship the authorities didn't want mixed race people in Portugal, but after the Revolution nobody really cared.

I guess that during Fascism the Portuguese authorities were fine with people having mixed race kids as long as the whole thing happened in the "colonies" and stayed there.

Certainly the stories I've heard from that time don't really include in the "colonies" the level of segregation I've heard about with for example the English in places like India, though in the "Homeland" it was different.

Not to say Portugal was or is some kind of Racism-free paradise. It's probably culturally just a bit less elitist and relaxed about "enforcing rules" on people than many other European nations who had their own "colonization" projects.

And then of course there is the example of Brasil were there are all skin tones possible, so clearly for many generations a large percentage of people haven't really cared about keeping races segregated since originally there were only white Portuguese, black African slaves and the natives, with the latter actually being the smaller fraction of the population. I see it as an indication that the dominant original culture (the Portuguese one of the XVI and XVII century), didn't care much about stopping people from having sex across races.

If they pay an indulgence, even the rich will get into Heaven.

(So there must be a massive divine operation passing camels through the eyes of needles)

Look into any situation where there is a massive disparity of power between some people and other people and that's were you will find the most abuses and I totally agree it's for the reasons you said of there being far less risk for the abusers due to their "status" and that such places actually attract the worst people in society so it's a bit of self-fullfilling prophecy that putting too much power and not enough transparency and accountability in a position will invariably end up with it being abused, even if you start with the purest of people and the purest of intentions.

This is also probably why there was (and only time will tell if that's still or not the case) so much child sexual abuse in the Catholic church: adult in high standing in the community and implicitly trusted by all vs child (generally from a poor background).

Thinking about this over the years (mainly for Politics, but it applies to other areas) has led me to conclude that the "good" exercise of power is impossible to get from a static situation (i.e. the idealistic idea that "give power to honest people" solves it) and instead it has to be setup as a dynamic mechanism with frequent rotation of people and multiple unrelated (ideally, competing) people watching over each other other (which is probably where the ide behind the Three Pillars Of Democracy) and whose power balances.

I'm Portuguese and I get the impression that the way the Portuguese were different from most European colonialist powers is that the Portuguese would fuck (in a literal sense) just about anybody, which is a huge contrast with for example the English that tended to not mix with the natives.

Brasil, the only place outside Africa which was a Portuguese "colony", is a wonderful example of racial mixing (though it has its issues).

Not saying that Portuguese colonialism was good (it was not even close to positive), just that it serms to have had this unusual higher tendency for people to mix across races, not because it was done with good intentions but it just happened to there being something in Portuguese culture (damned if I know what) that led to that.

Patriotism: "What can I to for my country?"

Nationalism: "What can my country do for me?"

In my experience living in a couple of countries in Europe, generally the bigger the country the more the nationalism (though Germany is maybe exceptional on this) - small countries have very little tendency for people and business to display the flag and have flag-themed products and objects whilst larger countries have more of that.

That said, the far-right everywhere are flag-shaggers and during periods with large international sports events (for example, the World Cup) many normal people will display a national flag, though even then it's more so I large countries than small ones plus in some countries other flags are used (for example, in Britain they use the flags of the nations rather than the UK flag and in The Netherlands they use the "Oranje" flag rather than the Dutch flag).

I think the only country in Europe with nationalism close to America is the UK and I don't believe it's anywhere the same level (for example, they have nothing like the Pledge Of Alliegance).

In my experience as an European who went to live there for over a decade, there are a ton of very subtle elements which we can't really spot from the outside, not knowing the details of how that country works and its culture, especially because they're culturally extremelly big on image management (which I talk about below), which extends to managing the image that the country projects abroad (both via things like the Media they produce - for example their series and movies about Britain in the Victorian era vastly beautify the reality and almost like clockwork ever couple of years out comes a "Britain won WWII" movie - and their politicians practices both internally and on the international stage of grand symbolic announcements of objectives with in practice either no concrete action ever or even actions which do the very opposite).

Britain is has long been setup to preserve the power of the old wealth and always had Fascist tendencies (for example, there are pictures of the old queen when she was young being taught by her uncle, the then King, to do a Nazi salute) and British elites always sided with Fascists and White Colonialists, such as Pinochet in Chile, the Afrikaaner Apartheid government in South Africa and the Genocidal Zionists in Israel, plus they themselves commited several Genocides in their Empire and historically even relentlessly exploited the local lower classes (with things like Indentured Servitude - which replaced Chatel Slavery but you'll only ever hear from the British that they were the first to "end" Slavery and nobody mentions Indentured Servitude - and Workhouses).

At the same time this is a country with an extreme cultural tendency to put managing appearances above all else (upside: they have the best Theatre in the World) which is worse the higher the social class one is from, so for example the children of the wealthy are taught to tell people what they want to hear and always show a positive image (not positive cheerful, but rather "flawless" and "impeccable") and are shunned and emotionally attacked by their peers if they display any kind of weakness (can't let others see that they're sad or even sick) and even attend private schools (curiously called "Public schools" over there because supposedly "anybody who can afford the [very high] fees can send their children there" though even that is de facto false for many such schools) which amongst other things teach them discourse techniques (basically how to deceive without outright lying), so most of them as adults have only one mode of relating with other human beings - an unemotional, highly managed posh façade were empathy, in both diretions, is suppressed and they were they manage what others think of them through subtle deceit that avoids direct lying.

To preserve this Power structure whilst avoiding rebelions by the masses their "Democracy" is more Theatre than a system for the masses to control how the country is run, set up from the very start to be "managed" via multiple "backdoors", such as the Monarchy having real power (the King can bring down Laws, but traditionally does not use that power directly but rather quietly threatens to use it to get concessions), the voting system is First Past The Post to guaranteed that only two parties can ever govern (hence capturing the top politicians in those parties guarantees control of government), the country has an unelected 2nd chamber of Parliament which has seats which are literally inherited and it has no written constitution so it works entirelly on Laws passed in Parliament by a simple majority (and given their FPTP votting system, a mere 30% of the vote is enought to get a simple parliamentary majority) and legal precedent as established by higher courts (and almost 100% of High Court Judges in Britain are people who attended the previously described, expensive "Public" Schools that only the children of the elites attend).

In such a system, control of whatever little Power is left in the hands of the "lower" classes is done in two ways:

• Constant, relentless but subtle Propaganda backed by direct and indirect control of the whole Press by the elites (for example, the board of the supposedly independent BBC is entirelly made up of people who attended "Public" Schools). You can see this in action in how, for example, the BBC will give over 30 times more attention to Israeli deaths than Palestinians deaths or how certain words, such as "brutish" are only ever used for Israeli deaths and various other very negative words are used hundreds of times more often for Israeli deaths than Palestinian deaths - the British Press was Manufacturing Consent long before the American Press started doing it.
• Surveillance to detect and stop any civil society movement that might become an independent Power based on the power of large numbers, together with incredibly ill-defined and of broad interpretation laws, and biased Judges (who as I pointed out, pretty much all hail from the elites as shown by them having attended exclusive expensive schools as children) that are used to, using State Violence, crack down on and stop those movements under the cover of "Justice". This is how for example Environmentalists who were planning to do a demonstration which would block the main London ring road were given 10 year prision sentences and how the leadership of the Green Party (a small party which is maybe the only left-of-center party over there) has been under surveillance since at least the 80s.

There was a period when the UK wasn't as bad in this sense following WWII, since in the post-War period millions of the "plebes" had military training and managed to claw a lot of power from the elites to the masses (creating things like the National Health Service and Social Security, and even causing a golden age of the Arts in Britain as working class children such as Michael Cain and David Bowie actually had real opportunities to go into things like Music and Theatre) but that has been progressivelly reversed since Thatcher went into power hence why nowadays elements of the Surveilance state have become so extreme that even the highly managed British Media is starting to discretly question it (though they would never, ever, ever treat it a a structural problem in how Power is approportioned in Britain and will always portray it as a single instance of mismanagement in the Police, which is mainly a middle and working class institution)

1969 Salsa classic - JIMMY SABATER, SALCHICHAS CON HUEVOS

All about giving some woman "sausage with eggs".