Aceticon

joined 7 months ago
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[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 3 weeks ago

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

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 35 points 3 weeks ago

First they came for immigrants ...

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 3 weeks ago

Those 17 pages worth of babies they murdered in the first 6 months of the Gaza Genocide were all Hamas!!!

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

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.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

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.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (11 children)

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).

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 weeks ago

The British Inquiry Into The Iraq War found evidence that both the US and the UK were guilty of the War Crime of Pillaging in Iraq, exactly because they forced the Iraqi Government which they themselves put in power to hire US and UK firms and to give US and UK firms oil exploration contracts.

Obviously, neither of the War Criminals (Bush and Blair) ever saw the inside of a jail cell, though I think somebody actually tried to do a citizens arrest of Tony Blair once.

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