₦airaland Forum

The estimate seems far-fetched.

Portugal protests: Revolt of the Generations

March 12, 2011

Portuguese society took to the streets in eleven cities on Saturday afternoon. Hundreds of thousands of people of all ages and political leanings came together to send a clear message to Portugal's political class to start implementing policies which create a future for the country's youth. How many all over Europe are feeling the same frustration?

300,000 people (at least) filled Lisbon's central Avenida da Liberdade (Freedom Avenue) shouting slogans such as "Thieves out!", "Portugal! Portugal! Portugal!", "With a precarious situation, no freedom!", "Sócrates resign!" In Oporto, the Praça da Batalha was packed full, a situation repeated up and down the country.

The main characteristic of today's demonstration was that it was organised for the country's youth by the country's youth, a great deal of work having been done by voluntary civil society organizations using social networks; another feature was that those who took part were not only young people - there were demonstrators from all walks of life, all generations and all political persuasions, from the far left to the far right. They came together to tell the Government of José Sócrates: Enough!

Yet it is not only the present Portuguese government (Socialist, in name only) which is at stake - it is all the governments since the Portuguese Revolution of 1974, which have failed utterly and totally to create a model which caters for the interests of Portuguese society.


Successive governments from the same three parties (PSD - Social Democrats; CDS-PP, Christian Democrats/Conservatives; PS - Socialist Party, currently an insult to the word Socialism) have since 1974 - for nearly four decades, wholly failed the people who elected them. One of the slogans chanted today was "President, dissolve Parliament!" Yet the strange thing in Portugal is that the people carry on electing the same Parties, maybe following the premise that if you drop water on a stone, eventually it will drill a hole.

While it is said that every people has the Government it deserves, the Portuguese people are right. The education system does its job, and very well - Portuguese students compare extremely favourably with their peers in the Erasmus Programme and the Portuguese education system has been ranked among the best in Europe. This is clear to see for those who work in Portuguese Universities.

What the Governments of these political parties have done is to destroy Portuguese industry, destroy Portuguese agriculture, destroy Portuguese fisheries and what have they created in return?

A situation in which most retired persons receive miserable pensions after a working life, a situation in which supermarket prices are equal to or higher than many richer countries, a situation in which it is practically impossible for a young person to buy a house, unless s/he has substantial savings (and how?), a situation in which a whole generation has been thrown into a collective garbage dump of professional hopelessness: the Generation of 1,000 Euros in Europe; the Generation of 500 Euros in Portugal, for the few who manage to get a job - normally in a call center.

The precarious situation in which the Portuguese youth finds itself - studying hard for years to what end? - and then in many cases working not as a full-time, fully-integrated employee but either part-time or working as a temporary or external worker, means people are unable to formulate plans for buying a car, getting credit for a house and starting a family. They are unable to start a life.

The alternative is to go abroad. Therefore it is no surprise that the anger felt by Portugal's generation of tomorrow exploded in demonstration - an orderly one - against politicians whose collective ineptitude and absurdity was summed up by the ridiculous speech from the Portuguese President Silva, who favours a liberal approach to the economy (an approach which was totally and wholly defeated in the recent economic and financial crisis) and who mentioned the importance of the family as the pillar of tomorrow's society (how? if his PSD Party has played an equal part in the failure to create a future - and his personal responsibility in the abysmal management of European Funds after Portugal's adhesion must not be forgotten - he was Prime Minister for a decade just after Portugal joined the European Community).

For the few that do manage to land a job (these days mainly those with contacts), they will find a working environment where they are supposed to work 35 to 40 hours a week like the rest of the Europeans but in fact are expected to work far longer, well outside the timetable stipulated when they signed their contract. Let us see (verbatim) how the interview works,

This happened during the past week in an office in Lisbon. A young mother went for a job interview, which started as follows: "Ah, you've got kids, eh? Well then, you don't want to work here, we start at eight and finish at the earliest at nine p.m., usually far longer, Saturdays, Sundays, nights, ".

How many interviews start like that, with the expression "this is a work post, not a job"? And that, for 500 Euros, a lifetime of sacrifice, an abominable standard of living fraught with dramas and difficulties, successive governments asking for more sacrifices and falling further and further behind the rest of Europe, low salaries and high prices and then a miserable retirement pension?

It is no wonder the Portuguese took to the streets. However, you can bet that in the next election, they will once again vote for a government led by the PSD or PS. Talk about obtuse,


Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey

Director and Chief Editor

Jakumo:
The Igbo name for that species translates to mean " the shame snake ", in that it hides its head when it curls up into that defensive ball shape, seemingly in shame.  Domesticated ball pythons which die of natural causes or by accident are given befitting traditional burials by the villagers in whose homes the reptiles lived and served.

Very interesting!

I would have never thought of using snakes as an anti-rodent enforcer. I'm glad to hear about Africans utilizing their environment in ingenious ways like this.

^^^^

Hey, Steve Irwin,

What type of snake is this supposed to be:  https://www.nairaland.com/nigeria/topic-582176.192.html#msg7956179

A python, or an adder?

Interesting information. He is in Tripoli though, so he's biased.

[quote author=ekt_bear link=topic=629055.msg7967184#msg7967184 date=1300854739]^-- I dunno why you bothered responding to the dude. He has an agenda, and will push it regardless 

Interesting comments, PhysicsMHD.

However, I'm hesitant to accept that explanation fully. . . we Westerns have a habit of romanticizing Eastern cultures.

I'm wondering a bit if this is the media only putting out stories that fit in with certain pre-conceived notions.

With that said, I wouldn't be surprised if Japanese are intrinsically less inclined to loot. Just I've not seen evidence of this yet. . .[/quote]I think he was genuinely expressing his belief rather than promoting an agenda. I just think it has no basis. Saying that separate, homogeneous states where the leadership is more accountable to their people than to a political cabal at the center would possibly result in less political corruption is one thing. Asserting that the average man on the street would suddenly be less likely to loot his own neighborhood/city/area after a disaster if his group were in their own culturally homogeneous state is something else entirely.

You are right about the romanticizing trend, but in the case of Japan, I think that perception of them is somewhat legitimate.

See here for example:

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/05/26/asia.suicide/

It mostly focuses on South Korea, but the parallels are there.


Also see:  http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2009/03/19/lah.japan.suicide.forest.cnn?iref=videosearch

A "suicide forest." Very interesting. Very different from Western behavior. Note that the first guy (Taro) was not just driven by debt and unemployment, but also admitted shame as a reason for his earlier suicide attempt.

No surprises there.

Wow.


Election time's gonna be pretty dangerous. RIP in advance for some of those in Nigeria during elections.

Putin's comment to this guy was hilarious. After that comment I finally got why the Russians love Putin so much.

tocdee:
Zelda- The Ocarina of Time on Nes 64 wins it for me. BLEW the world away and is still regarded by many as the greatest game of all time!!

Forgot about that one. A true classic.

Jakumo:
That is an African Rock python, of the type domesticated by villagers in Cutonou, Nigeria's immediate westerly neighbor.

Being non-venomous, all pythons kill by first biting the prey and then suffocating it by coiling around the victim twice or more times, whereupon the coils tighten incrementally with each exhalation of the prey, causing death within a couple of minutes.  The second, more time consuming stage of the process involves the snake carefully re-arranging the now-dead prey item in order to swallow it head first.  Disengaging its lower jaw, the serpent can swallow prey items of much wider girth than its head.  The swallowing is performed by "walking" its needle like teeth down the prey item from the crown of the head, to the tail or hind feet, with the snake SLOWLY pulling its elastic body over to enclose that of the prone prey victim, which then gradually recedes out of view and down the reptile's digestive tract.  

With a prey item that is disproportionately larger than the snake's head, which is the case in the above pictures, the process of completely swallowing the prey item can take up to 30 minutes.  It is thus highly unlikely that an infant left unattended for "two minutes"  could have been COMPLETELY swallowed as shown in this picture.  A far more probable scenario is that the bulge in that serpent's belly is actually an animal rather than a person, OR, that a child was in fact left alone for AT LEAST 30 minutes, and NOT a few moments as claimed by the lost child's mother.

Burmese pythons do, on rare occasion, stalk, strike and swallow adult human beings, and in Nigeria, rumours have abounded for decades about African Rock Pythons big enough to kill and eat a man. Outside of protected areas like Yankari Game Reserve, however, the pressures of hunting and trapping greatly reduce the chances of any snake living long enough to attain the sort of extreme bulk needed to subdue and eat adult humans.

Good analysis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR5ZB_X_9oI

@ Onlytruth, what are you talking about? Cultural homogeneity has nothing to do with looting or not looting. I don't understand how anyone can think ethnic or cultural homogeneity prevents criminals from committing crime against those exactly like themselves. There's no evidence for it.

Looting has more to do with the number of poor people or the existence of an underclass within a society, in my opinion.

I was talking about the actual culture of the Japanese. Apart from the fact that there aren't really enough poor people there for there to be any looting, that's a culture where words like "honor" and "disgrace" still have real meaning. Just look at the suicides by corrupt, compromised, or disgraced businessmen in that country.That's what my response meant. The culture they have produced gives them a different outlook on honor and shame from some other societies. If people in Japan would rather commit suicide than endure living with their shame or disgrace, and this is not considered out of the ordinary, how will this same group of people ever deign to scavenge other people's property for personal gain, knowing the shame and disgrace they could bring upon themselves and their relatives by doing so?


As for the rest of your post, I don't know how you reached the conclusion that armed robbery came out of the civil war or that people are operating according to the "culture" of Hausa (you mean Fulani?) politicians.

Farrakhan should stick to fiddlin'.

He could really have a career there and do something with his life.

@ Ron Oneal,

In all honesty, you shouldn't be looking to Africans for a fair assessment of AAs. As I said before, the vast majority of Africans and, from my experience, even  the majority of African immigrants or their kids don't know about AA achievers in various fields (writing, art, music, science, politics, history, etc.) except for the few most popular ones, so most haven't taken the time to really learn all about the group that they're reaching so many conclusions about. My view is different from most but it's not blind praise for AAs (though they definitely deserve praise for how far they've come) or believing only what I would like to believe.

As for the backward views, ethnic prejudice and sectarianism is rife in certain parts of Africa - with Nigeria being one of the greatest hot spots - so trash talking about other groups is almost a culture there.

lol @ dayokanu keeping her in check.

Trust me, Africans that are merely talking bad about African Americans are not the ones making African Americans look lost/backwards. Trash talking and rumor mongering isn't making people act the way they're choosing to act - whether it's Nigerians, AAs, or any other group. If the whole group's image suffers because of the actions of some or a few, that's one thing. But if a country-wide trend is quite significant and quite real among a large segment of the entire population of a group, that's something that can't be brushed away with assertions about "exaggeration."

Ron Oneal:
Yeah more of the same redundant bullshit about young African Americans being no good, blah, blah, the same poo was said about my parents in the 60s and 70s and those people have grown up to be outstanding citizens. I have a young son myself who likes rap music and yet he isn't the stereotype of what some of the Africans think about young African Americans, plus I myself of the hiphop age. The truth of matter is that all kids of all colors are rebellious as teens in some way shape or form, yet the notion that most AA kids is lost is false, the majority do the right thing, but funny how Africans here think they're the moral authorities. As an AA myself I know the real story and I'm no mere outsider observing it.

1. You seem to be under the impression that people responding in this thread are not in America and not around Black Americans. Paris10 and pleep are possibly not, but every other person in this thread is (except for ababda, who I'm pretty sure is in Sudan).
2. Bullshit? I'm speaking from experience. How on earth are you an authority on "everything going on in Africa" that you mentioned in your earlier post when you've never even been there, but people who've lived and live in America are mere outsiders that can't know "the real story"? I can't count the number of AA stereotypes I've seen fulfilled in real life. It's just too many at this point.
3. Did I say anything about rap music? Check my signature. It's been that song for a few weeks now, and before that it was another rap song. This isn't about rap.
4. It's simply not true that all kids are rebellious as teens and definitely not true that all kids are rebellious in the same way. Please go to Chinese, Japanese or Indian households and find out for yourself what the difference is between the way their children/teenagers/young adults almost always act and the way certain other groups' kids act.
5. If you must know, there are many people with bad/horror stories about Nigerians (and some of them post these stories on this forum) and many people with bad stories about African Americans, so this isn't about me trying to hoist Nigerians up as "superior" or as "moral authorities." It's about correcting this erroneous notion that Africans, being of the same race, will just automatically praise AAs or ignore reality.

Culture.

If the story's true, R.I.P.

Very dumb to leave the kid unattended outside like that.

Ron Oneal:
Name me one African leaders who hasn't been corrupt since the days your colonial masters left Africa who hasn't devoured and sold out his own people since you want to go there. Obama, as bad as he is with some things, was elected by the people, not put in place by a coup.

With regard to the part in bold, it's ironic that you're here going off about ignorance yet you're making the same blanket statements that you're condemning and criticizing others for.

The other part doesn't even make sense. A coup? In America? By a black law lecturer?

Africa has the resources and so called smarts that us AAs are supposed to lack, yet the IMF and World Bank and your former colonial masters still control you all, explain that. Us AAs came from slavery from a people in Africa that sold us to the white man and have influenced the world all over and have made it big in our own country, you Africans still beg the IMF and World bank for crumbs and flee everywhere else to make it big except your own country. Explain that.

If you really want to know: http://www.daily.pk/how-the-imf-world-bank-and-structural-adjustment-program-destroyed-africa-21602/
                                           http://www.amazon.com/Globalization-Its-Discontents-Joseph-Stiglitz/dp/0393051242   (pretty great book)

But once again, what you said doesn't really apply to all African countries (though it certainly applies to Nigeria), so you're basically doing the exact same thing you were accusing others of doing and were complaining about.  

Evidence or are you pulling random bullshit out of your ignorant backside? Crack is destroying us? Thats funny because I don't see the same thing. I guess an ignorant African associates crack with blacks and makes an ignorant assumption, when in reality crack and most other drugs are used more by whites than blacks.

http://weeseeyou.com/2010/02/13/rosa-lees-story-revisited-the-impact-of-crack-cocaine-on-all-of-us/

Yeah, it's subsided somewhat now, but maybe you were in Germany when all this was going down.  

Yeah, because of disproportionate laws that give a heavier sentence for crack cocaine over powder cocaine, not because we're constantly selling drugs more than everyone else and black neighborhoods are targeted more frequently by police, but go on and believe the bullshit that we're a people of drug dealer.

Yeah, you're right.

http://afrodaddy.com/411-articles/because-we-destroyed-ourselves-anonymous

A pretty bad situation.

there are 41 million AAs and you mean to tell me that we all ,listen to rap music? bleep outta man, lol, rap music isn't the problem and not all rap is negative any ways. The environment and where these kids like account for their behavior, neighborhoods didnt become bad because of rap music you , there were bad neighborhoods BEFORE there was hiphop. The Public Enemys, KRS-Ones, Talib Kweli, The Roots, etc, are not negative rappers, its the bullshit that mostly white record company owners are pushing that are negative. There is no correlation between hiphop music and crime among blacks. Even if it was, whats the problem with Africans? You have none of the problems that we have in our land yet you can only make it big by fleeing from your land and coming to America, France or Britain, where have AAs fled to make it big?

The part in bold doesn't exactly make sense. Why would anyone flee America (the "Land of Opportunity" to try to make it somewhere else? The claim is that some people (AAs) are already somewhere where they could/should be "making it big" yet a disproportionately high number aren't doing so. There are reasons for that of course, but at a certain point you just get disappointed and then ashamed as a fellow black person. I have no doubt many African Americans feel the same way about Africa's many failures since the 60s.

As for having "none of the problems" AAs have, you're right in that we don't have the same problems, but different African nations have their own problems. Nobody was claiming Africans were perfect.


The premise of the thread is fundamentally flawed in that, the reality on the ground, for Africans like myself in America doesn't lend itself to Africans being "proud of" Black Americans achievements because young Black Americans in real life (not just rap videos) are wrecking their peoples' image and weakening the impact of their past and present achievements. In the exact same way, the reality on the ground in Nigeria and many other African countries doesn't lend itself to Black Americans being proud of or unembarrassed by Africa. It's a lose-lose situation, but pride/admiration for the achievements of any group doesn't follow merely from being of the same race as that group.

This topic has been done to death, in my opinion. Little is likely to change in either group's perceptions. This forum (a Nigerian forum) is inherently biased ground anyway, so there's not much point to this going much further.

He didn't imply or suggest that I was not included in "yourself" (by which he means [b]our[/b]selves (blacks), since he couldn't have been referring only to himself given the context in which he wrote that phrase).

And how could he have excluded me? His statement was clearly about blacks/Africans in general.


Which of these Afrocentrists are actually linked to ancient Egyptians that they should consider celebrating their (ancient Egyptians) achievements as celebrating themselves?

Yeah, okay. Believe what you want.


But I'm not Egyptian in any way, shape or form, so what's this about celebrating myself?

Beaf:
I guess the reality of. . . another xx% being from the SS is beginning to sink in.

Good luck with that.  

Tinubu has no idea who this guy is. I wonder why he's so passionate about this supposed BB bias. . .

Maybe he's one of Tinubu's relatives that Tinubu's imposing on the ACN.

THEMOOR:
ROSSIKE


Hey Guy go here for Egyptian  and Watusi hair sytle. you may have seen these images.
http://www.white-history.com/earlson/rameses.htm

Although I do not agree with this guy Karl Earlson my point is to show the simularities between the Egpyt and african hair style. I personal believe Pharaoh Ramses II(left) and a modern Watusi(right) are very simular. The Watusi hairstyle can only be achieved with wooly hair. The small circles that appear on the statue would indicate the wooliness of the Pharaohs hair himself.

lol, you realize the link that you posted destroys your argument/premise, right?

Smh @ all the Afrocentrism. What's the point?

There were some black/African elements in ancient Egypt's culture, but the kind of claims in this thread and all over the web are a stretch

.

ROSSIKE:
PhysicsMHD said:

That's a ridiculous assertion!

Are you suggesting that introspective philosophy of the type that leads learned men to envision societal collapse began with the west?

Actually, that's exactly what I'm saying.


Find me anything from the Islamic Golden Age, or the Greek/Roman writings, or the Egyptian writings, or the Mesopotamian writings, or the Mesoamerican hieroglyphs, or anything in any Mali/Songhai writings, or even any such idea in African arts of Benin, Ife, Ashanti, etc., or any writing from Aksum/Abyssinia/Ethiopia, or the Chinese, or the Indians, or anything from Nubia/Kush/Makuria which shows a kind of self-awareness of the possible end of their society as they knew it.

I can only think of the Mayans and their doomsday like prophecies, but even there, it's not so clear cut that they actually believed their society would end. There are other interpretations.


If you can find a real counterexample, I'll retract my statement.

Western thinkers are even studying whether the universe might possibly end and how it might happen, not just how their society might end.

You grossly underestimate the knowledge and SOPHISTICATION of ancient civilizations, in particular, PRE-WESTERN civilizations.

There's a big difference between sophistication (social, religious, artistic, technological, etc.) and having a greater consciousness of how the world works or being able to look at your own local society from a global, historical perspective.

With the advantage of historically induced self-awareness, this Western might that you loathe so much will probably only slightly decline, rather than come crashing down to insignificance. I'm just being realistic about this.

^^^^^

Previous civilizations were not self-aware and did not dream of the possibility of their entire civilization crumbling into nothingness.

They were not aware that previous civilizations had reached their apogee and then come crashing down. However, for the civilization that emerged out of Western Europe in the 1300s/1400s out of the ashes of Greek/Roman civilization after borrowing from "Islamic" civilization, they've been aware of it from their very foundation (being aware of Hellenic/Roman civilization crumbling to pieces) and are aware of it till today. All those "end-of-civilization" movies, like Planet of the Apes, or any of the nuclear fallout or environmental disaster or communist or totalitarian victory movies depict this latent fear in the minds of the populace of a decline and regression quite clearly. Then there are books like The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, which, although I honestly haven't read  (and I'm not really interested in reading it), seem to reveal that the civilization that arose out of Western Europe in the 1400s is highly self-aware.


You're probably right though about the next several decades belonging to China. All indicators seem to be pointing in that direction.


I can see Japan eventually disregarding the West and rearming/re-militarizing itself so as to not have to helplessly kowtow to China's increased might as Japan's Western allies lose ground/power to China. I can also see another showdown between China and India, much greater than that of the 60s.