2023: “Things change, and they don’t change back.”

History always happens (and is not bound by banal pleasantries to ask first). Sometimes we get the glimpse while we are living it, sometimes it’s only apparent to the future historian.

This is an older article, but:

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I’m not saying we all should do something yay. Doing is very hard. But at least disagree with what’s going on. This is what’s weird. Almost like people choose to support (or at least ignore) injustice so they don’t have to feel bad about it.

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I don’t know about others, but what I know about my fellow country people:

They complain when corruption makes news, but not too much. They have that undying hope that they will one day make it, and they would very much like to dip their pinkie in that sweet, sweet jar of corruption, so please don’t seal it too tight, mkay?

Of course, if you ask them, they would never do something horrible as to, I don’t know, cause a horrendous train crash to line their pockets, but a little innocent corruption never hurt anyone, right?

In general, it’s not like people don’t like corruption; they’re just pressed that they’re not part of it.

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My impression is that Dutch people generally despise corruption in our own country. It’s a crime, similar to stealing (not only in a legal sense, but also in a moral sense). This attitude may be linked to our historical Calvinism?
But we are also a trading nation and historically we hate to lose profit from being overly moralizing towards foreign trading partners.
So historically there is a sort of tension for larger international companies between keeping a good reputation at home while doing business abroad that may require some envelopes being handed under the table to keep things running smoothly, and other stuff that they would never do at home.

But Corporate Social Responsibility laws are being passed here that require progressively more diligence of those companies in their foreign activities to not get involved in any way in projects that may involve things like child labour, pollution, severe environmental damage, worker exploitation, corruption, etcetera.
As a result, our largest dredging company Boskalis said it would leave the Netherlands, because it would become too diffiicult for them to operate from the Netherlands. The government didn’t budge though and passed another such law. Boskalis then retracted their statement IIRC. Edit: I remembered incorrectly. The government did budge, blocking this latest law that was prepared by 6 parties from parliament. I read in one online newspaper assumes it’s because they do fear more large companies would follow Shell, Unilever and DSM, who left the Netherlands in recent years.

The company that I work for appears to be in agreement with this legal development. It seems to align with some overall principle to be able to “say what you do and do what you say”, publicly, with a straight face.

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Which injustice? There is so much right now, you can’t carry all of it.
Most people pick a few to oppose and ignore the rest for sanity reasons.

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…like the story of Brigitte and Emmanuel Macron. That stuff can’t be scripted and will be remembered for centuries :slight_smile: . Truth stranger than fiction yada x3

It really depends. Honestly sometimes the solution is simple, but the people are just not willing to actually implement it, for various reasons. Some good, some nasty.

Ah, complaining and disagreeing is a local special. The problem is that once you actually ask them to DO something, you might find that their words and their complains have nothing to do with their actions.

For example, if you go to any social gathering I will guarantee you that you will find a significant amount of people complaining about immigrants, demanding action from the state and accusing the immigrants of being “traitors to their own country” and not staying there to “fight” (literally in some cases or figuratively, to fight for a better life).

If you ask them however you might find that their OWN children are now working and living abroad (and skipped the army too). :rofl:

So, if you point it out to them “so, according to your logic, your children are traitors to Greece, eh?” they’ll say “nah, that was legal. How dare you?”.

The same can happen with an amazing array of things that are almost meme-worthy like:
“complains about corruption - has a company that is getting illicit contracts”
“complains about the lack of infrastructure - is actively tax-dodging”
“compains about politicians - got their children hired by calling a politician for favours”
“complains about the lack of empathy in society - never gives to charity, not even the church”

and so on … this is a very fun place to live, if you train yourself to be amused by it.

oh, most of them already do … which is why most of them are “tied up” under one banner or the other and it explains the election results …

I was walking back from basketball the other day and I said “hi” to a huuuuuge woman that was having trouble walking due to her weight.
'Who is she?" asked a friend of mine with which we occassionally train together.
“ah, we went to school together. She is hired on the 8-months in the municipality in the cleaning crews”
“How can see work there? She can barely walk!”
“I said she is hired, not that she is working. Pay attention dude.” :sweat_smile:

There have been allegations that from the 105 temporary 8-month workers only 25 actually worked and some of them were not even in this country and still got paid … of course all these people, when other more important and costly allegations appear online, are forced to “attack” the people that bring the corruption to the front and “praise” the mayor even for managing to breathe. “Look how well he breathes! oh praise be, praise be” :stuck_out_tongue:

There are levels to the corruption, but Venizelos was quite correct:

If only more people knew Greek … we could export the fun of this country and people would have been able to laugh worldwide with what takes place here.

@yebellz

fooled millions on Twitter

That is a low bar to pass though.
Who knows, maybe AI will become the reason for people to finally PAUSE and think “is this real? Should I cross-reference this?” so “all hail the mighty AI”

What is unique about them? Could you please elaborate? :slight_smile:

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Ha! This reminds me of February 2020. Italy was ablaze with covid. And French media were all saying “Covid is an exotic disease that will never reach France”.

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Ah yes. I remember there was some headline news about potentially the first covid case being reported very close to our South-East border around that time.

Some seemed to think that our borders would somehow stall the spreading of the virus into our country.
That might work with borders like these

but not with borders like these

But cArNaVaL!! So everybody gathered to party hard for 4 days straight, right before the first lockdown (ofcourse with full hospitals in the carnaval epicenter).

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To be fair, most of us didn’t realize what was going on. I was there with a group of young players
https://eygc2020.hgos.hr/
and lockdown started three days after we came back.

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After the media sensationalised and fear mongered swine flu and bird flu which were both non-events, it’s not surprising that nobody was overly concerned when the spicy cold first broke out.

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I expect half the public reaction to the next one to be “we are not doing this”.

The other half will say “you are endangering everyone”.

Oh, wait…

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Not a non-event if you know someone who was killed by it, as I do in the case of the swine flu.

Sadly, as @Kaworu_Nagisa points out, our government has no credibility left for a large number of people.

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I find it quite concerning that you’re downplaying pretty serious outbreaks of viruses not endemic in humans as “non-events” right after we’ve seen what a pandemic actually does. Neither of those were, or are (bird-flu is a serious issue under wildlife at the moment, and can easily be transferred to humans, as has been shown in history) non-events or “safe”.

Firstly, one doesn’t know beforehand how deadly a new virus is, this wasn’t even clear a couple of months into the covid pandemic.

Secondly, “fear mongering” may well have resulted in people taking adequate precautions to stop an early outbreak from becoming endemic. Cause and effect are blurred in your statement

Thirdly, although these two examples didn’t become contagious enough to make it to the level of a global pandemic (yet), viruses mutate and thus that could’ve happened at any moment, the chance being directly proportional to the number of people being infected.

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That’s the next step of problem-solving. Personally I see more often over here that people don’t even see that anything needs to be done. And with enough people not seeing that anything needs to be done, how can anything be achieved.

You can see it in that blogger videos who shows how people live in places. From time to time he asks people on the streets of some craphole what they think about it. And people often answer that everything’s good, no complaints here, it’s worse in Detroit and so on. Partly it’s just a polite way to say “bugger off” but only partly.

I found this one video interesting. A Japanese perspective on change (or more like Western perspective on Japanese perspective on change). Even though the video isn’t exactly about that.


I went on a long walk today. Outside is damn depressing.

I walked pass new apartment complex. It’s these big 9-11 floor buildings. They’re like 200 meters long. And compared to their size they look very close together. And all the roads around them are filled with parked cars, even spilling out on the main road a little. No wonder with those giant buildings and the complex being far away from anything. And since it’s spring everything outside the roads is just dirt with puddles so it looks like a peninsula in a sea of dirt. The main point is that it looks weird. I think because of disproportionality. The ground is flat there with no high trees, and compared to that these big buildings. And since everything else looks vast they look even more bunched up, and cars filling everything adds to cramped feeling. I went to the builder’s website, and it looks better there. But in reality it undoubtedly weird. Supposedly there will be a whole cool complex there, with schools, kindergartens, big park and so on. But sometimes in the future, first - build and sell apartments, as usual.

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That is, unfortunately, typical now over there (soon to become “mundane” with how often it happens :confused: ) but some days I wonder, as a former teacher, what is the deal with all those school shootings (especially like in this case, 15 years after graduation from it)

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Honestly, I don’t know what else can be said about this.

We’ve covered every human reaction possible at this point.

Eh, we have our own problems:
https://www.keeptalkinggreece.com/2023/03/27/ose-chief-traffic-manager-dies-traffic-accident

Especially that last paragraph makes me want to go to twitter and check what people are saying about it, but I am trying to resist the temptation :sweat_smile:

Well, maybe they got the Noor Special :woman_shrugging:t2:.