• 0 Posts
  • 39 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
cake
Cake day: June 23rd, 2024

help-circle
  • To be fair, before Trump took over the party, the Republicans were generally considered to be in a death spiral.

    The prevailing idea was that the party just didn’t have a future. Their brand was this basically an unappealing mix of boring religious people and self-professed ‘sensible’, common-sense stewards of the status quo. Looking at demographic trends at the time, they were trending towards irrelevance.

    Then Trump took over and brought back the enthusiasm. They also started to court minority votes (Hispanics, Blacks) which tend to be very socially conservative. At the same time, the democrats slipped into the ‘boring status quo protectors’ role.

    Hopefully the Dems wake up, but it might take a while.





  • Status-quo politics is dead, many major western parties just haven’t realized this yet. People want firmer political leadership that promises fundamental change and isn’t afraid of breaking things along the way.

    It’s just fucking unfortunate that (in most countries) it’s only the far right who are ahead of the curve at realizing this.

    Center to left parties need to reinvent themselves and focus less on pleasing everyone or fighting losing battles. They also need to present a much clearer vision.









  • That mentality is largely the result of overtourism though.

    Spain is a country of under 50 million people which has over 70 million foreign tourists visit every year.

    The US is 330 million people but only has 50ish million foreign tourists.

    So imagine that the US has roughly 8x as many tourists per year (to match per capita) and imagine that a huge portion of these tourists were mostly coming from much richer countries and had the mentality of ‘let’s let loose in a cheap party spot’.

    Just about everyone is in favor of some tourism, it’s just currently completely out of control in much of southern Europe. The numbers just completely dwarf just about anywhere else.


  • I’m sorry, but this is completely backwards with regards to the situation in Spain or many other poorer european countries. I’m much more familiar with the situation in Croatia, but this applies to most of southern Europe (including Spain).

    Yes, the countries take in a sizable portion of their gdp from tourism, however this is generally at the expense of the average citizen. Tourism is notoriously bad at distributing any wealth it provides, while the average person living in these places gets all of the negative side effects. Tourists are generally coming from richer countries (USA, Germany, UK etc) and able to/used to paying much higher prices. So the local economy shifts to focusing exclusively on tourists (it’s where the money is) and locals get all of the negative externalities (inflated rents, inflated prices, crowding, poorly behaved tourists) with very little benefit.

    Local and national governments focus exclusively on further investments in tourism (since it’s such an ‘important’ part of the economy!) at the expense of other investments (education, non-tourist infrastructure) which would be more beneficial to the overall population.

    Not to mention, compared to just about anywhere else in the world, the number of tourists in Europe is absolutely overwhelming compared to locals. Croatia is a country of under 4 million people, but gets over 20 million visitors a year! The average salary is somewhere around $1000 A MONTH, so it’s no surprise that so much of the country is instead focused on the needs of tourists who can easily spend $1000 a week…

    This isn’t the same situation as a tourism hotspot in the US, for instance (where I’m originally from). Yes, wages vary geographically in the US, but not nearly to the same extent. The areas often grew around tourism rather than being a normal functional city where families have been living for centuries before very recently turning into what is essentially a theme park which is largely unaccessible to natives.