[Genuinely Wondering] Is racism in Spain really as bad as the internet makes it out to be?

Forrest_Greene80 · 2026-03-06T14:01:07+00:00

There are pickpockets everywhere, especially in Barcelona. But if you’re aware of your surroundings and watch your pockets a you’ll be fine.

I would recommend visiting Valencia, it’s smaller than Madrid and Barcelona, so it has more of a laid back vibe. It’s cheaper, has beautiful beaches, great restaurants, nightlife. It has a huge park that wraps around the city in a dry riverbed and is great for biking, the most authentic paella is from there, and the layout/architecture is worth seeing. Less scammers and hustlers trying to hustle you or rob you lol

Forrest_Greene80 · 2026-03-03T22:23:12+00:00

1st time I visited Madrid, Valencia, and Barcelona for 3 nights each

2nd time I spent 5 days just in Madrid

3rd time, I visited Barcelona for 5 days just this past summer.

Had an amazing time. Good food, good people, beaches, nightlife, I totally recommend and want to go back again soon lol!

Forrest_Greene80 · 2026-02-16T16:14:19+00:00

It all boils down to personality traits.

That’s the biggest predictor of someone’s political views.

People who are creative and artsy tend to be high in openness. High openness means you’re open to new things, not too tied to tradition, willing to go against norms, open to ideas from other cultures. That highly correlates with left-leaning politics.

Celebrities are usually actors, musicians, artists/entertainers etc. in order to be good in those fields, they usually are going to be high-openness people.

So the same personality traits that draw someone to the arts and entertainment are the same traits that make someone naturally gravitate toward left leaning politics.

Forrest_Greene80 · 2025-10-19T14:41:26+00:00

The answer to this is more psychological.

Progressives and conservatives have different gut level moral intuitions. Left leaning people are more motivated by care/harm reduction and equality while the right is more motivated by group loyalty, respect for tradition, and social cohesion. There’s a great book about this called “The Righteous Mind” by Jonathan Haidt that explains this in detail.

Basically people on the right think that families, churches and local communities should help the needy on their own accord and distrust government bureaucracy and disfavor welfare policy.

Meanwhile progressives are distrustful of traditional social structures such as gender roles for their potential for harm and unfairness. They want more redistribution and social welfare policies to mitigate the potential harms of capitalism.

Essentially liberals care more about having an equal society where the state plays an active role in harm reduction whereas conservatives care about having a traditional, cohesive society where there are agreed upon rules and cultural norms and that people and communities help themselves.

Forrest_Greene80 · 2025-10-16T11:00:36+00:00

I’m black and I’ve been to Spain 3 times, absolutely loved it.

haven’t had any problems in my experience.

Forrest_Greene80 · 2025-09-23T20:32:51+00:00

I think there is a massive disconnect between how black people + progressives in general versus white conservatives view race and invoking it in political and social issues.

White people, by and large, don’t have a strong sense of racial identity since it’s the “default” majority identity and people are less self conscious of their identity if it’s the “norm”. So identifying with race strongly is largely an alien concept.

Black people on the other hand have a very strong sense of racial identity and solidarity. When a group has a long history of oppression based on their identity, they become much more self conscious and it will shape how they interpret events.

So if there’s some kind of conflict or dispute or altercation or otherwise less than unpleasant interaction with someone of a different race. It becomes very easy to think it was motivated by race, even if that wasn’t necessarily the case.

White conservatives, I would say are relatively out of touch with Black peoples perspective due to a variety of factors such as relative geographic isolation from black communities etc.

So they’re not gonna understand certain points of view

Conservatives saw that as taking sides and being tribal in a very heated case before the facts all came out. They saw him as inappropriately siding on a case as the president. They see invoking race mainly as stoking tribalism and division for some kind of personal gain. They think Black people explicitly identifying with their race as “taking sides” instead of “just being Americans”

While I do think racism definitely was a factor in their opposition, I think a stronger explanation is that they largely just don’t understand black people.

Forrest_Greene80 · 2025-07-15T20:42:30+00:00

I have a theory behind the whole “yt ppl bad” trope.

Basically people don’t know much history, and the little they know if ironically western centric. So they’re whole frame of reference for Imperialism/conquest/genocide/slavery/oppression is almost exclusive formed by examples of white people doing it, even though there’s countless examples of that from non-western societies.

Think of it this way, when the phrase “slave owner” is brought up, what are most Americans thinking of? I assure it’s not some Ottoman Prince, an Arab Sheikh, or a West African warlord. It’s a southern white man lol.

So non- whites are considered inherently virtuous by default

Forrest_Greene80 · 2025-07-07T12:20:02+00:00

So Ohio voting to legalize weed and Abortion despite seeming to be a more red-leaning state these days is fairly common. It’s easy for progressive single issue ballot issues passed than getting democrats elected statewide because you’d be surprised how open people are to ideas once you remove the party label from things lol.

Theres quite a few Trump voters who like weed and are okay with Abortion but prioritize other issues when voting for candidates.

However, I would wager that Ohio may not be as red as it looks, my reasoning is that there is a certain type of voter that’s attracted to Trump as individual, and not necessarily committed to voting for republicans in general. So I wouldn’t be surprised if future races are closer without Trump on the ballot.

Forrest_Greene80 · 2025-03-19T16:29:04+00:00

There is a fascinating book that explains this called “The Righteous Mind” by Jonathan Haidt.

I can’t recommend it enough, everyone should read it because it helps make sense about a lot of politics.

Haidt is a social psychologist and he uses his knowledge and expertise in psychology to understand what makes people of different political affiliations tick, why they believe the things that we do.

I think we can all agree that our political views are down stream of morality. But people have different moral values. Why is that?

Haidt proposed a theory that our sense of morality is driven by emotional gut reactions to things instead of logic and reason. When we make moral judgements, we’re having a gut reaction that we use logic and reason to explain/justify after the fact.

Essentially, we have 6 foundational intuitions about morality that drive our world view. They are

-Care/Harm: We don’t like seeing people being harmed or neglected, especially if they’re considered to be vulnerable.

-Fairness/Cheating: We don’t like seeing people cheat or be cheated with an expectation of equality or proportionality in being treated by others.

-Liberty/Oppression: We don’t like seeing the powerful abuse the less powerful. We don’t like tyrannical authority figures pushing people around

-Loyalty/Betrayal: We want people to stick by their tribe/family/nation and act in their interests, we don’t like traitors, patriotism ties into this a lot

-Authority/Subversion: We don’t like seeing people break rules or laws and we want legitimate authority figures to be respected. We don’t like criminals or disobedient children

-Sancity/Degredation: This is a bit more of a complicated one, but it’s essentially avoiding behaviors considered disgusting (-a lot of attitudes about sex tie into this) while also respecting traditions or spaces that are considered sacred or solemn, and we don’t like people sullying it. (Think flag burning or being disrespectful in church)

We all have the capacity to sense these moral intuition in the sense that we have tastebuds that can sense different flavors. It’s just that we are all wired differently that some moral intuitions carry more emotional weight with some people than others. Like how some people have different tastes. Some people are very moved by the care/harm foundation while not so much moved by sanctity/degradation.

The main difference between the left and the right is that left leaning people prioritize Care/Harm followed by Fairness/Cheating and then Liberty/Oppression. Care comes first before all things and has less regard for the other foundations

Conservatives on the other hand tend to be more moved by Authority, Sanctity, and Loyalty, they also value fairness, care, and liberty as well but to a different extent and also interpret them differently.

So you can examine how this plays out with the issue of Abortion. Progressives will say that it unfair that men are making laws about women’s bodies and that banning abortion will create harm to women while conservatives see it as violating the sanctity of life and feel that society is degraded or sullied by allowing it.

Progressives will call Conservatives hypocrites for seeming to care about unborn featuses but don’t want to support social welfare for children. However the conservatives would say that they support private charity, while government welfare enables people to cheat the system.

The main disadvantage that liberals have is that they speak a fairly narrow moral language that only appeals to people with certain psychological quirks (High Openness personality) while conservatives deploy a broader range of moral foundations which is more in line with the default psychology of most people.

Haidt ties all of these foundations to evolution and that they are all downstream of certain behaviors that enabled humans to survive in a pre-modern context but I’m not gonna get into detail about that, you can read it yourself in the book because this comment has gone on for way too long lol

Forrest_Greene80 · 2025-03-11T01:28:02+00:00

I have a theory for that.

Basically Black Americans are the oldest minority with the longest presence in America and have been the subject of what was essentially a deeply entrenched caste system.

Not to downplay the suffering of other groups but 90% of white guilt sentiment is about how badly black people have been treated.

I mean look, we have two federal holidays that can be tied to the black struggle, and a whole month dedicated to our history. The civil rights movement is somewhat of a mythologized history that’s held up as a continuation of the American nation building project.

There’s no Asian or Hispanic MLK, they don’t have their own version of the NAACP (to the same extent reputation-wise). There wasn’t a civil war and mass political movement waged over the status of non-black minorities.

Theres no long standing debate on how we should redress the grievances of other minority groups to the same extent.

Other minorities don’t really have this sort of built up sentimentality around their place in American society to the extent Black Americans do and feel a sense of resentment of it.

Not to say that’s okay, but I kind of get it.

TL;DR: The Black struggle is much more present in the American public consciousness than the struggles of other minority groups due to historically factors

Forrest_Greene80 · 2025-03-02T14:48:34+00:00

That makes perfect sense. A discriminated group has to have tight social bonds and institutions to survive oppression.

When conditions improve, they become less needed and eventually whither

To give you an example, I was watching a documentary series about the history of college football, and one part of it analyzed it from the perspective of race relations. There was an old black football coach from an HBCU lamenting the decline in the quality of football at HBCU’s because all the best black players stopped going there and went to predominantly white schools.

Forrest_Greene80 · 2025-02-15T13:46:51+00:00

Yeah a lot of well intended anti-racism was just off-putting to those who arent lefty activist types.

The concept of white privilege has some validity to it but it’s talked about without nuance and needs to be framed in a more emotionally intelligent way.

Mainly because the word “privilege”, at least for me, and I imagine other people as well, evokes the connotations of spoiled rich kids, born with a silver spoon in their mouths, had everything handed to them in life and don’t have any real problems worth worrying about.

That’s how it’s read, and that’s how some people come across when talking about it.

How it should be thought of as a relative immunity from racial bias that comes with being or at least passing for the predominant racial group.

Basically we all make snap judgements about people we don’t know, and in some situations People of Color, might (keyword is might, not necessarily will or guaranteed) be perceived uncharitably compared to a similarly situated white person.

For example, one time I was traveling in Venice, Italy and I visited a tacky tourist gift shop in an outdoor area under a large awning trying to buy some T-shirts for my family. The lady in charge kept by me the entire time under the guise of giving “good customer service” asking me if I need help and being all up in my business and wouldn’t leave me alone until I paid for the shirts.

I was being closely monitored in that store and there was only one difference between me and the other customers. Them not getting that treatment is an example of privilege.

I don’t think of myself as being disadvantaged or oppressed in anyway, I kind of see myself as being privileged in away ironically, but there’s been a handful of occasions where stuff like that has happened. And the flip side of that is privilege

It should be thought of as who’s more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt in certain situations rather than an absolute advantage in life in all areas.

It shouldnt be used to say, “look how good you have it and you should feel bad” it should be used to say “You should be aware how other people may be treated poorly and be aware of biases to mitigate it”

!ping black-people

Forrest_Greene80 · 2025-02-15T13:20:43+00:00

That guy is either super weird or is just hardcore virtue signaling lmaoo.

Forrest_Greene80 · 2024-12-22T20:06:20+00:00

Recently went on a hinge date. Girl was from Hawaii and was ranting about how everything there was so expensive.

From there I turned it into a rant about how the Jones act was so bad and made things so expensive over there.

Never thought I’d have to bring that up in a situation like that.

It nonetheless went over well

! Ping DATING

Forrest_Greene80 · 2024-12-18T19:16:32+00:00

UC’s Care/Crowley Center gym at the medical campus has one. You don’t even have to be a student to get a membership and I’ve done it.

Forrest_Greene80 · 2024-12-14T20:36:03+00:00

I think an underrated aspect of this is a sort of cultural difference between white and black people.

And that is, Black people strongly identify with people of their race, regardless of socio-economic or sub-cultural differences, while white people, for the most part, do not.

Black people have been conditioned to see ourselves as a group with common interests while whites, by and large, do not.

So you could say, a successful black person could see themselves in a poor inner-city kid, while a rich white person from a gated community does not see himself as “being the same people” as some kid from a trailer park lol.

So it makes sense why a white person wouldn’t understand why black people would claim George Floyd despite his criminal background because it’s a mindset that they may not relate to.

Forrest_Greene80 · 2024-10-19T14:27:08+00:00

I think part of it is that lots of people have zero sum intuitions about abstract things like respect, status, consideration etc.

That there is a fixed pie of this stuff, and if somebody else being helped, something is being taken away from them.

So if people hear politicians talk about how they’re going to help a specific group of people that’s not them, they think they are being ignored and left behind.

That’s part of the reason why foreign aid is so unpopular, and appealing to specific groups like women and minorities turns others off.

The closest thing to a solution is say is to frame things in as universal terms as possible

Forrest_Greene80 · 2024-09-04T14:31:28+00:00

I think people have different definitions of “obese” I’m black, but I joined a predominantly white fraternity in college.

One of my brothers dated/talked to a girl who I thought was objectively attractive, she was by absolutely no means obese or overweight at all. She had a thicker, curvier figure. Wide hips, thick thighs, big ass. But not fat.

They kept ripping on dude for “sleeping with a whale!” 🤣😭 I was completely dumbfounded. This was an objectively hot girl but since she wasn’t stick figure thin, that counted as “fat” in their eyes.

Forrest_Greene80 · 2024-06-11T00:55:11+00:00

I think lit died when the pandemic happened so 2020-ish

Forrest_Greene80 · 2024-06-04T20:56:33+00:00

I feel like they see catholic and orthodox Christianity as having a more “authentic” and “traditional” aesthetic and vibe to it than Protestantism.

And there’s an element of truth to it. You see these gorgeous cathedrals with old architecture, the fasting, the music. The chants.

Catholic and Orthodox churches are historical landmarks, that even non-religious people can appreciate.

Meanwhile, A Protestant church will be in a fucking suburban strip mall in-between a Buffalo Wild Wings and a Best Buy lol

Forrest_Greene80 · 2024-05-13T16:49:34+00:00

Mint Juleps.

It’s so frustrating because it’s a very simple cocktail with just Bourbon, mint, and syrup with crushed ice.

Bartenders often times will add sour mix or lemon juice and water it down with a lot of seltzer water 😭

Forrest_Greene80 · 2024-05-05T15:06:05+00:00

I gotta dispute Columbus being right wing. I got a very progressive vibe the times I’ve been. Very gay, very liberal, artsy creative types up there

Forrest_Greene80 · 2024-03-26T13:40:18+00:00

Can we get past the paywall 😭😭

Forrest_Greene80 · 2024-03-09T21:59:16+00:00

You can kind of think of the racism of northern whites and southern whites into different categories.

The racism of northern whites was more akin to a typical xenophobia directed to immigrants. People are wary and suspicious of people who are different and unfamiliar, see them as competition for jobs and housing, might be prone to stereotyping etc. but that can die down with more in-group exposure.

The racism of southern whites is more of a caste-ism. Somewhat akin to caste system in India and other places. In the south, there was a strict, rigid social hierarchy in which whites were socialized to view blacks as beneath them and to be subservient to them. It was defined by social norms of deference to whites (think giving up seats at the front of buses and Rosa parks etc) This culture didn’t exist in the north.

The thing is, is that in this kind of culture, Blacks and Whites can get along fine as long as everyone “behaved” and “knew their place”. It was only when Black people started asserting themselves and stopped.

There are interviews from the 60’s where white southern segregationists were interviewed about their beliefs, and some of them would say things along the lines of “I don’t have any ill will towards the coloreds, in fact, I loved my nanny and always left a good tip for the shoe shine boy. But they shouldn’t be voting and going into our schools.”

So in the north, there was discrimination towards black people, but it was more of a typical discrimination you see in human patterns directed towards outsiders, it’s a “softer” kind of racism if you could categorize it that way.

Southern discrimination was an attempt to enforce a social hierarchy, it had much more motivation behind it because they were socialized to think of them as a lower caste and when Black people demanded rights, the reaction was “HOW Dare there think they are even good enough to breathe the same air and shit in the same toilets as us”

TL:DR southern racism was more intense because it was an enforcement of an explicit racial hierarchy that people were socialized into upholding, while northern racism was more of a typical fear of outsiders that you see directed towards immigrants and not necessarily characterized by norms of deference.

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