Roadblocking is not entrapping or touching (even with a toy)

Yes, they are not. One of them leads to annoyances, the other leads to people losing their jobs or missing their connections. Everything is a matter of cost-benefit. If a major annoyance once might do country-wide changes, then that’s maybe worth doing.

I would, at best, classify this as a minor annoyance. I understand this to be a largely cultural thing. I personally don’t care much if people interact with me that way. I wouldn’t even call it a rare thing; it happens a lot outside of protests.

that of surrounding/hounding/bothering individuals, as this can intimidate them

That’s… the entire point? Those fellas want to create this idea that tourists are not welcome without actually harming them. That’s precisely the goal. If that’s the idea you got out of this then the protest just worked.

and disrespect their consent/bodily autonomy

Ehhh, big meh. There are waaaaay worse experiences in that regard in a “tourist’s life”. For example you have this “mandatory tourist thing” to do in Lisbon which is to ride the tram 28. You can hardly find an online picture of what it actually looks but it basically is equivalent to putting 15 clowns in a mini. The kind of crammed where people get troubles breathing. Barcelona has their equivalents as well.

Tourists aren’t supposed to feel their bodily autonomy harmed from this; they are supposed to feel that they’re not welcome.

normalizing this stuff makes it easier for more hatful people to get away with it in the future

Of course that hate-twats will try to capitalize on every opportunity to erode freedoms, however, in my opinion, there are quuuuuuuuuuuuite a few steps between this particular event and that scenario.

Quite some southern cities even have this without the protests. It is very common for people to attach water misters to buildings. Those spray people passing them without asking for any consent. Just so happens that they feel great during the hot days.

Barcelona DOES have a unique reputation for these anti-tourist groups.

The literal exact same thing happens in every other alike place. We have the same in Lisbon.

The pieces of information foreigners get do not necessarily match the local truths.

As an example: I do volunteering at a kind-of-food-bank. It is obviously free to do. However, if you try to look that up in the internet, every single result will lead you to the idea that you need to have a guide or whatever reason to pay in order to do volunteering in here. The English information is HIGHLY distorted to hit foreigners. It is 100% unreliable. Do not attempt to look up for things about southern European countries in English. Most things that can somehow be capitalized on are lies or deceptive.

assaulting

Keep muttering that word. Whatever.
Their Rickshaws and boats are fucking the air as well. Can I also say I’m being assaulted? I’m objectively being harmed.

Plenty of people over here are considering way less nice things that spraying water. You have some actual assault going on in places (as in, punching tourists in the face) and vandalism to drive them off, but yeah, let’s pretend that the 5ml of water are the real harm.

strangers who have done nothing

Knowingly going to a country suffering from overtourism? Going for AirBnbs instead of hotels? Blocking locals from being able to go to work because whatever route they pick looks scenic? Not bothering to learn like three words or whatever to be able to say hello or goodbye?

That’s a “I’m going to throw 500kg of glass in the general bin” kind of done nothing. They know they’re being asses to the locals. Is it legal? Yes. It is also legal not to recycle.

They’re dehumanizing us because “they paid” but 30 seconds of slight moisture is the real crime.

The 200€ of flights (which has plenty of negative externalities), 100€ for the AirBnb (which not only was someone’s eviction but also likely dodged taxes), 100€ for random food (which likely dodged taxes) and 100€ in some random tourist trap (which many times dodge taxes). Those crimes do not count because they were intermediated by someone else? The thousands who get trespassing tourists? The littered nature? No, those do not count; what really counts is the bloody water.

The bulk of the tourism money doesn’t come from the 90% of clueless asses filling the streets. Comes from the rich ones. But if the law was such that it only allowed the rich to come it would also be bad. So, like I asked you before, what’s the actual solution? Just pretending that nothing is happening?

And FYI, every single one of these countries has not-that-far-places that are more than pleased to see tourist activity. You have like ecovillages & such where you get to participate, appreciate nature and do rural tourism, all while enjoying the Mediterranean weather they came for. But no, people really must take the 1000000000th picture of the Sagrada Familia so that their travel-ego fills up. And yet you think that we should have empathy over that? Housing and jobs disappearing because random twats want to take pictures. Oh noes, the moisture. Right…

And what I asked you was what they should do instead given that Catalonia will always be a minority.

The last minority in Spain that was veeeeery unhappy started a diplomat space program. Is that the way?

I also pointed out that this pacific-ish way of manifestation (cmon, this is not hard assaulting; more like attention grabbing) has done wonders for some movements in the past. Modern Netherlands were reborn out of people roadblocking “innocent people trying to go to work or trying to enjoy their off days” with bicycle protests.

I propose turning that group back from a mob, into a protest, and getting in the government’s face.

Has happened, hundreds of times. Zero effect. Governments couldn’t love anything more but free money that comes independently of the well being of their citizens. Dutch disease 2.0. Plus, the Madrid government isn’t exactly known for attending Catalonia’s needs. For some reason they tried to declare independence 9999 times in these last decades.

The folks inside should instead take the issue up with whoever put the sign on the door, and work to take that down.

Well, having a reputation for being annoying towards tourists is a sign by itself. And put yourself in the shoes of those fellas. What can they realistically do if the democratic process doesn’t cut? Should they just abandon their land?

Downplay it all you want but it’s still assault

Words aren’t black and white things. The cashier not issuing a receipt is financial fraud but we’re talking about gum; they dodged 5 cents in taxes.

Especially when acid attacks are not unheard of

I personally haven’t heard of those one single time, but even if they were a thing every now and then, are we going to assume that anyone spraying a few ml of water might be throwing acid just bcuz? The point of these protests is to raise attention to the problem, not to harm tourists. If someone goes that “extra mile”, throw them behind bars, this instead of assuming that the thousand others might be trying to seriously injuring someone when they’re, very likely, doing something that goes away after 2 minutes in the local weather.

It is not a secret that a few cities across southern Europe very pissy about the treatment they’re getting. I’m not into victim blaming, but it is strange to think of these tourists as surprised when they got confronted with some sort of protests or message of disdain. In Portugal those are all over the place. From graffiti to protests. And sure, most of those do not involve any sort of physical touch with the tourists, however, if I was a tourist I’d be way madder at some of the protests I see over here than over taking a minuscule spray of water and those you wouldn’t qualify as “assault” only as “speech”.

It doesn’t justify assaulting (albeit calling 3ml of water in the Mediterranean summer an assault is a bit of a stretch), but that was not the only thing you said. You were isolating Barcelona as a special case. I simply said that it is not isolated at all, that every popular region along the entire Mediterranean coast is suffering from the same.

London’s situation is bad but 1) 6 times more population dilutes tourism way better 2) London’s tourism is “going there, taking pictures, famous Harry Potter things, giant ferry wheel, bye” instead of “I like this weather and everything is cheap; I think I’ll stay here for as long as my visa allows” 3) the richer you are the least affected you get as tourists can’t compete with you all that easily 4) London has that other phenomena, which is not quite tourism, called mass immigration, and the last time I’ve heard about citizen actions towards the problem they were following the “we no longer want to participate in anything with out neighbors” path which is IMHO a bit more extreme than just being mad en masse with a relatively harmless protest.

From a political standpoint, Madrid is an oppressive mess. Catalonia is in the podium for the most productive region and this is killing it slowly (as it did with Portugal and parts of other countries). You can’t quite say the same about London. In London you might end up living far from the city center but your economic woes do not come from the thousands of immigrants nor the tourists all around.

There are plenty of legal things that are condemnable.

Going to a place that you know upfront that is suffering like this, where you know that you’re contributing a teeny bitsy to get someone homeless, jobless and cultureless might be legal but it isn’t moral.

One might argue that most tourists do not know that. They simply look up some “top 17 best places to go in summer 2024” and off they go. They think that they are going to ride in a lovely tram through lovely streets and then some paradisiac beach when reality is smelling sweaty butts through crowds all the way.

But how to you convince dumb tourists to be smart and moral tourists when there are plenty of good places they can go to that aren’t overcrowding (even in these same countries)? I personally dunno. And since you think that individuals should not be concerned then you probably prefer some other route.

We can have quotas, but then you get gentrification. Whoever is the richest gets in and the others do not.That’s also terrible. Plus you’d get a black market with illegal renting due to market pressures.

What solution do you propose exactly?

That’s Algarve for you. It just straight away stopped having Portuguese people. The entire south coast of Portugal is now a British colony.

Except the retirees, people only go there in the summer so, by May, “business” owners need to hire like 50k persons willing to do crap jobs and by September they all get fired. Ofc that people aren’t really willing to do that so we get the added bonus of bosses going to journals to complain that “there isn’t a shortage of jobs, it is the Portuguese that do not want to work”. What a dream job, to live in a cardboard box to appease Brits looking for the cheapest nice-place.

Whatever happened there that was Portuguese is no more.

Aren’t you figuring that we’d rather not have that? That money is mostly not reaching anyone but landlords, restaurant owners and rickshaws. We get poorer with tourism money.

The jobs that pay us more than 860€ (the minimum salary) disappear with mass tourism because 1) land values get too expensive 2) a lot of highly qualified people just emigrated away after being unable to pay rent.

People who attended STEM fields know that the way to get proper jobs is to leave the country, which is bloody unfair because we used to have them. Instead of 3k/mo white-collar jobs we get 860€/mo whipping simulators dealing with entitled tourists.

Ofc that not every job disappeared but since the economy is highly uncompetitive with it’s tourism focus, you get the worst possible scenario for everything else.

Plenty of movements went on due to public pressure through protests. iIRC the Dutch pro-livable cities movement started that way, with protests against cars, half a century ago.

Also, you’re giving to tourists a right while stripping it from ourselves. You forget that in a crowd you’re going to have some that are going to break into private property, halt streets and do all kinds of dumb shit in the name of an Instagram picture.

Touristing and handling garbage can be seen the same way. You can think a bit about what bin to use and that takes some extra effort or you can just throw everything in the general because it is easier.

You’re touristing in another countries for like 1 week a year. That means that the ratio of time you’re touristing to the time you’re not is like 53:1, assuming that everyone does the same (which is def not the case). So, a perfectly balanced town in this hypothetical reality has 1 person touristing for each 53 not doing it. In some parts of these cities the opposite happens. It is so massive that you get many times more tourists than locals and that is enough to get everything malfunctioning.

Barcelona just had to remove bus lines from Google Maps to let locals have a chance to ride them. How is this fair? And this is the authorities doing something as you just advocated for. They got called out for that as xenophobic and whatnot. So, tell me, if I live in a place with a nice environment, how to I go to work? And how do I keep a house and a job given the rent increases sponsored by the millions that want to prop up their Instagram? If we can’t forbid them from coming, what exactly should we do that is not going to be called xenophobic? Tax it to reduce their numbers? That’s also condemned by plenty as gentrification. What is the good solution exactly?

Most “beautiful” bits people visit are at least a century old, plenty of them like 5+ centuries old. I don’t think that people back then were considering tourists.

I’m either case, weather and natural features play a big role for southern Europe. We didn’t decide to have these.

Also, IIRC, we also didn’t ask half of Europe to unbuild itself in this last century. WW2, cities for cars and fucking up nature were not decisions we had a say on.

It is silly AF to have a German/Brit/French/American/Chinese fuck their country up trough some industrialization and pro-productivity-but-anti-quality-of-life policies, get rich doing it and then proceed to go to a country that has opted to stay out if it to enjoy what they could have at home but decided not to.

When did locals consent to have their city taken over?

When the purchasing power disparity is too big, you create this imbalance where you can’t just refuse them while at the same time you know that long term it fucks everything up badly.

Businesses will accept them given that they can now charge triple rate for everything. Politicians get extra tax revenue and benefit from bits of corruption here and there. Meanwhile the commoner has to figure another place to live.

The entire south of Portugal (so, not all that far from Barcelona) is now devoid of locals. If you go there in the winter you get to see almost-empty-towns that used to be major cities. Everyone moved to Lisbon. And now that Lisbon also happens to have grown to be an hot spot as well? You guessed it, people mass moving as well, this time for another countries.

A few years back, our PM literally told us to emigrate; that’s how bad things got in here.

As for political parties that “want” to “solve this”, it is basically a single party show; the far right.

Then you’re not paying attention. Plenty of such protests-with-thousands in a few major places that were overwhelmed. Barcelona, Maiorca, Lisbon, Algarve, probably most of Greece, Italy, Southern France, etc…

It is not false that the government has blame, however, there’s plenty of preverse incentive in here. Land prices skyrocketed and a lot of very well positioned individuals got very well in life.

At the end of the day, being a decent human being doesn’t require laws. If you know you’re competing with locals whose rents already are higher than their salaries, with their businesses that now can’t support rents any longer and generally browsing fake-local-crap (and I assure you that most mass tourism is), then you’re just making yourself unwelcome.

Even the “tourists are injecting money in the local economy” argument is in a good part bullshit. Ofc that some of it loops to everyone else, but the gains are generally very poorly distributed and many times negative as that money destroys homes and jobs.

If you go to some parts of Lisbon, you’re not going to be able to hear one single word of Portuguese. Just yday I heard about a guy complaining that tourists attempted to forbid him from going into a waterfall near his home because… It ruins their photos and they waited in line to have them while the guy just “skipped the queue”. Mass-tourists can’t just figure that it is a country where people live and not a theme park, the “we paid to come here, we have rights” argument is heard plenty of times.

Nope. At least in Lisbon (which is probably just the same as Barcelona) the vast majority of them go straight at the tourist traps. They barely get any contact with the culture beyond having some foreigner guide pretend he knows about the city point at things while driving their rickshaw in the most annoying possible way. At the end of the day they end up eating whatever sounds foreign while listening to foreign music. This is an actual common complaint people have in Lisbon, that it is not Lisbon, it has been pretending it is Disneyland for the last 10-15 years.

There are places where people do that kind of tourism you’re describing. Barcelona, Lisbon and a few more popular places, for the vast majority of tourists, is not.

As for the “support” argument, they mostly support low-wage low-qualification boss-owns-50-other-places businesses while, collaterally, raising the expenses of every other business, prompting those to just close the doors and move elsewhere. If you are qualified in basically anything, the job market in Lisbon is a mess. Plenty of people do lie about their qualifications to state them as lower than they are, just in order to get these crap jobs. The purchasing power fell, locals are actually much poorer since the mass tourism wave that started when the world rebound from 2008. The median salary in Lisbon is like 1000€ while a rent for a cube starts at like 800-1200€.

As for the “yell at the government”, I don’t know about the situation in Barcelona, but in Portugal, the far-right just received 20% of the votes because they are the only ones addressing those problems (in a very “close the doors” kind of way). Some municipalities straight up started not giving a damn at as they cash in more from the tourists than from the local’s taxes. Oeiras and Cascais, two kind of famous tourist destinations next to Lisbon straight up are renaming official stuff to English in order to appease their real clients (eg. Not the people who live there).

It very much is plausible. Source: I live in a country that has been considered the “safest country on the world” a few times (that’s Portugal if you’re curious).

You can get into fist fights in the night zones et all and police officers are not going to care about it. Unless someone is caught in the act, nobody is going to do much as long as nothing is anywhere near lethal.

But the moment anyone has a knife, that’s going to be a trip with the officers and ends up on record. Being caught with a gun without a very good excuse is the end of the line. High chance you get to serve time over it, just for having a gun. Or anything else really.

Knuckles? Pepper spray? Stun gun? You’re likely to serve time over that. Very least, community service.

And it… Just… Works? Every time anyone annoying comes by asking for anything you can just carry on, completely ignoring the person. What exactly can they do?

A good part of those annoying fellas do so because of tourists. They know that if they sound threatening to tourists, some of them will think that they’re being robbed. They’re not. Just carry on with your life that you’re fairly guaranteed that there no such thing as a weapon anywhere close.

I’m not so sure that standard human nature is that prevalent in some countries, independently of guns.

In Switzerland everyone has guns and weirdos are not much of a thing. People aren’t even carrying them. It would be a weirdo has gun Vs you have no gun. However, given that it is publicly known that any misuse of the said guns is gravely punished (and that they treat properly people with mental health issues) that’s not a common thing.

You say you prefer relatively less armed weirdos. However prefer the solution where both of you can have lethal weapons and have to provide no justification whatsoever to carry them.

You: “Mr. officer, That hat guy, he tried to assault me, he has a gun”.
Off: “Did you?”.
Guy: “Nope”.
Off: “Do you have any proof or witnesses?”.
You: “Nope”.
Off: “Both free to go”

In a no-guns country it goes like You: “Mr. officer, That hat guy, he tried to assault me, he has a knife”.
Off: [checks for knife] “Come with me”

And how come the crazies exist nonetheless and do all that kind of stuff somewhat independently of other people being armed?

Also, these same crazies, in other countries, tend to be unarmed (besides kitchen weapons). Would you prefer to defend against one with a gun or one with a knife?

If someone in those countries is caught in shady circumstances carrying any sort of substantial blade, that person is in trouble. If someone in a “freedom country” is caught carrying a gun under the same shady circumstances, that person walks free as that’s not illegal by itself.

So, if you want to have any sense of a service respecting you, it should be hosted on a server you can control?

No difference at all between the server of the world’s biggest advertiser and a server by a company that opens itself for audits and is in a country whole laws require no bullshit? Are you sure those two are the same? All or nothing?

These last year’s of fighting were not exclusively done by volunteers and patriots at all.

Source: Gave a place to stay to a men (28yo) dodging the draft, weeks after the war started. He told me that his friends were either hiding in some grandpa house, pretending that they never knew about any draft invite, or straight up ran to some other country (some of them bribing border guards in the process).

These situations happened in 2022, not now. You can probably imagine that this is far from “with volunteers”. A lot of these were caught (or didn’t hide in the first place) and were sent to some army outpost.