Yeah definitely my fault that the mushroom croquettes come with surprise bacon on top or that a starter I had no idea I would be getting had tuna in it /s
Not my country so I am mostly laughing about it, but if I’d be Spanish and vegetarian I’d start riots lol
Replace France with Germany and you have a list of places where I consider the food terrible as well :D
My main issue is just that it’s greasy food with barely any spices & very potato heavy, I just don’t like Spanish food and I don’t understand why some people are loving it so much. I’m not judging, it’s just not what I like. Apart from that as I said, Spain is together with Greece my favorite countries in the world.
Idk with food it’s like, everyone has their own opinion, some people say pizza sucks and I’ll never understand that, but here we are.
Just out of curiosity: what do you imagine to be more “upfront” than saying "I am vegetarian“? Why would this be a secret or something that would devalue my opinion? I know how meat tastes and I like a good steak or fried/bbq chicken, I just decided not to eat that anymore.
Yes! North and south, east and west, love Spain. But seriously, even if you order something veggie like croquettes they’ll just put bacon on top of that lol. Or like you have dinner and they just casually bring you a tapa that has tuna in it without even asking if you’re eating fish. Like, the concept of not eating certain stuff seems alien to many places there.
I have no idea what people cook at home but your typical Spanish restaurant e.g. in Madrid or the south is tortilla de patatas, patatas bravas, croquettes (ideally with ham), lots of ham in general, some other potato stuff. Some seafood. I’m vegetarian and I just suffer there :D
Great! Maybe Spanish food will stop being all potatoes and pork finally.
Nothing but love for Spain, together with Greece my favorite country in the world, but Spanish food sucks lol. I know very subjective and all, but I just don’t get how you can be surrounded by France and Morocco and then still not use any spices and stuff :D
I think your view is a bit optimistic - centers in North Africa won’t fix the systemic issues with our border policies. Frontex absolutely does send people back to places where they face torture and sexual violence. They’ve been repeatedly documented performing illegal pushbacks in the Mediterranean and the Aegean.
They’re actively pushing people back to Libya where EU-funded detention centers are effectively torture camps. And Frontex continues illegal pushbacks regularly despite court rulings against them.
There’s extensive evidence of this: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/03/libya-migrants-tripoli-refugees-detention-camps
I understand wanting to believe we’re better than this, but the facts don’t support it. The “we’re decent people making mistakes” narrative is comforting but doesn’t hold up when you look at the policies we collectively support through our governments.
About the “high value migrants” thing - that’s exactly my point about how our immigration system works. We welcome people based on economic utility, not humanitarian need. We’ll roll out the red carpet for an American engineer but let Syrian doctors drown.
And this economic utility approach is still fragile - when the economy turns, even the “high value” migrants become scapegoats. Just look at how Brexit campaigns targeted Polish doctors and Eastern European professionals despite their contributions.
Your argument is a perfect example of how we sanitize our migration policies with euphemisms. “Border control” sounds neutral and reasonable, but what we’re really talking about is active policies that regularly result in preventable deaths.
Frontex doesn’t just “control borders” - they push migrants back to Libya where they face documented torture and sexual violence. They don’t accidentally fail to rescue people - they actively avoid responding to distress calls. These aren’t unintended consequences; they’re the designed outcome of policies meant to create a “deterrent effect.”
Whether it’s technically “racism” by your narrow definition is beside the point. The reality is we apply completely different standards to different groups of migrants. When Ukrainians needed refuge, we quickly created special protection status. When Syrian doctors needed refuge, we let their families drown in the Mediterranean. The difference isn’t “HOW they come” - it’s who they are and where they’re from.
Your claim that “we don’t care about the color of their skin” is contradicted by statements from European politicians who explicitly advocated for Ukrainian refugees because they were “European” with “blue eyes and blonde hair” (as multiple news anchors and politicians stated in 2022).
And yes, a “few politicians” absolutely represent broader European attitudes when they’re leading political parties and setting policy. Friedrich Merz isn’t some random person - he’s likely to be Germany’s next Chancellor. When these politicians face no meaningful backlash for their statements, it reveals societal acceptance.
The problem isn’t that we want functioning migration systems. It’s that we’ve created a two-tier system where people from certain regions are forced into deadly routes and then blamed for taking them, while we pretend this isn’t connected to who they are.
No argument here, I think humans are being racist/xenophobic in general. The best example imo is the hatred against Syrian refugees in Libanon and Jordan, where people even speak the same language, have the same food and culture, and mostly have the same religion.
I guess I would just wish that we would actually live those “Western values” we keep talking about. And I definitely wish the best for all those wanting to flee from Trump, I would consider that too if I’d be in the US.
Our “capacity to help” is inconsistent and conditional. Yes, there was initial support for Ukrainian refugees, but as I mentioned in another post politicians like Friedrich Merz (likely next German Chancellor) soon accused them of “social welfare tourism.” Same happened e.g. in Poland. The welcome narrative quickly gave way to scapegoating.
This pattern happens repeatedly. We initially welcome groups based on perceived usefulness or cultural similarity, then turn on them when convenient. Polish workers in the UK went from being praised as hardworking to being blamed for “stealing jobs” and straining services.
You’re assuming Americans would be “more easily accepted” because they’re “wealthy and educated,” but this ignores how xenophobia operates. Brexit campaigners didn’t distinguish between Polish doctors and laborers - they lumped all migrants together.
Even well-off migrants become targets during economic downturns. Look at how Romanian doctors and nurses in the UK were treated during Brexit despite filling critical NHS shortages. Or how German refugees after WWII faced hostility from other Germans.
Our immigration policies aren’t based on humanitarian concerns but on economic utility and cultural anxieties. When politicians need scapegoats, they’ll target any migrant group regardless of their contributions.
The Americans who’d face the most persecution under Trump are often the same ones who’d face discrimination here - LGBTQ+ people, religious minorities, and people of color. The idea that we’d somehow treat them better than other migrants ignores Europe’s deep-seated xenophobia.
With Ukrainians, we initially saw a wave of genuine support that I was happy about. But within months, politicians started using them as scapegoats. Friedrich Merz, likely the next German Chancellor, accused Ukrainians of “social welfare tourism” - as if they were fleeing bombs for German benefits. Similar rhetoric emerged in Poland and Hungary, where the initial “these are Europeans like us” sentiment gave way to the same xenophobic patterns.
The point is - even that initial acceptance runs out eventually. No matter who you are, we will eventually turn against you given enough time. Americans coming now might be welcomed as “expats” with valuable skills, but as soon as there’s another economic downturn or political shift, they’ll be “immigrants taking our jobs” or “ruining our housing market.”
You’re cherry-picking examples and artificially narrowing this to “Black Americans vs. African migrants” when my original point was about Europe’s broader treatment of migrants and refugees from many backgrounds.
Why are we suddenly only discussing Black people? My original comments covered migrants from various regions, including Middle Eastern refugees, Ukrainians, and Southern Europeans. This selective focus is a distraction from the systemic issues I highlighted.
Even if we accept your unsupported claim about differential treatment (which needs actual evidence), it doesn’t disprove discrimination - it just shows how xenophobia intersects with class, perceived cultural compatibility, and legal status.
The documented policy failures at Europe’s borders affect migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, various African nations, and elsewhere. Focusing on how “Black Americans face no issues” (which is itself questionable) ignores the thousands who drown in the Mediterranean or face abuse in detention centers.
Let’s return to the actual evidence: Europe has policies that result in documented human rights abuses at borders. We criminalize rescue operations. We fund dictatorships to stop migrants before they reach us. We’ve created a system where people die rather than receive help.
These aren’t opinions - they’re documented facts. Whether you call it racism, xenophobia or “migration management,” we’ve normalized treating certain groups of human beings as disposable.
I would say your entire argument is based on an approach where you create a definition of racism that’s extremely narrow and then claim it doesn’t exist in Europe because it doesn’t meet your specific criteria.
Frontex literally pushes people back at sea where they drown, sends people to places where they’re tortured and raped, and we collectively allow this to happen. That’s institutionalized racism whether you like it or not.
Your claim that “if white people came by sea they’d face the same fate” is a hypothetical that can’t be verified - it’s a classic counterfactual fallacy. The reality is that we don’t see masses of white people drowning in the Mediterranean while the EU turns a blind eye.
You’re also trying to define racism only as “racial laws” which is an incredibly narrow definition that no sociologist would accept. Structural racism manifests in policies, practices, and institutions - it doesn’t require explicit “whites only” signs to exist.
Regarding Ukrainian refugees versus other refugee groups: initially there was indeed more acceptance based on perceived cultural similarity and yes, race. But as I already mentioned, even Ukrainian refugees are now being scapegoated by politicians in Poland, Hungary and other countries. The pattern is clear - initial acceptance followed by growing hostility.
The European Parliament groupings you mention are irrelevant to my argument. I was clearly talking about national politics where far-right parties have either gained power or significant influence in Hungary, Italy, Austria, Sweden, Netherlands, France and Germany among others.
Your attempt to frame this as “open borders extremism” versus “moderate border control” is a classic false dichotomy. There’s a massive difference between reasonable border management and letting people drown at sea, which is what Frontex does.
I stand by what I said - Europe has deeply ingrained xenophobia, and Americans coming here will discover that too once the novelty wears off. They’ll be blamed for housing problems, job market issues, and changing the culture - just like every other immigrant group before them.
Is the Wikipedia article on logical fallacies a bucket list for you?
If everything I’m saying is so obviously wrong it should be super easy to make a sound argument against mine instead of just trying to derail the discussion.
Yeah totally agree. The problem is there was no more outrage because we normalized hating refugees and migrants so much that there wasn’t even a debate or anything anymore, everyone was just rolling with it.
I honestly made an argument using facts to back it up ,and your reaction so far has been whataboutism and deflection. I’m also not sure how exactly you would argue against this when most European countries have right wing (extremist) governments right now and do I really have to explain that a core feature of right wingers is to hate immigrants?
Other places bad isn’t really an excuse for us to suck as well
Look at what happened to Ukrainians, I think our capacity to hate other human beings is endless unfortunately.
I feel like we have absolutely zero vision for the future. Like, there’s trade wars, actual wars going on. Russia and Israel are committing genocide and are ignoring the ICC. Most of the EU is cool with that, either because they support Israel or worse they support Israel & Russia both. So we basically abandoned international law and with that humanity itself, and for what? Short term political gains.
Instead of capitalizing on the influx of skilled & motivated people from all over the world we chose to give in to hate and violence a long time ago. With the help of frontex we let the most miserable drown in the Mediterranean Sea, die somewhere in the Sahara or get raped and enslaved somewhere in a Tunisian prison, an Italian farm, or the Belarus border just to mention a few examples. We abandoned humanity there as well and again for what?
Having humanity and good living conditions could have been a vision in this cruel world, but we aren’t good enough to live it. We failed.
On top of that, my country‘s infrastructure is falling apart, people can’t afford housing anymore, healthcare gets more expensive and worse at the same time, and we’re basically a tech colony with all the American and Chinese tech dominating our lives. These countries also don’t give a fuck about humanity, but they produce innovation. What kind of innovation are we producing? We have Spotify, great.
I see now vision either about what our values are (there are no credible ones), nor about what our business model during this new industrial revolution should be. It’s so fucking frustrating to watch.
What’s there to watch? They’re a Nazi quasi dictatorship and you can watch in real time how the political elites there radicalize more and more. Will we express our concerns when they lock up LGBTQ+ people? Will we strongly condemn when they’re being put in concentration camps because Orban realized you can get away with anything nowadays?
We’re way past the time where we should just watch, idk what to do exactly honestly but a first step could be to freeze all assets and block their vetoing rights. I don’t want to seem them leave the EU because of all the exile and anti-Orban Hungarians who’d be punished similarly to what happened with brexit though.