{"id":41975,"date":"2018-02-14T01:00:53","date_gmt":"2018-02-14T06:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=41975"},"modified":"2018-01-25T08:55:10","modified_gmt":"2018-01-25T13:55:10","slug":"qotd-portuguese-quality-of-life-or-is-portugal-a-shithole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/02\/14\/qotd-portuguese-quality-of-life-or-is-portugal-a-shithole\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Portuguese quality of life … or “Is Portugal a shithole?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

You see, you can judge a country\u2019s status as an \u2026 ah\u2026 excrement sinkhole by figuring out \u201cMigration out or in?\u201d<\/p>\n

In Portugal this picture is complicated. They are suffering \u201cbrain drain\u201d as their youngest, brightest and most educated decamp for Germany, England, or even Brazil (where the picture is also complicated) but at the same time they receive immigrants from Africa, Brazil, South America, China and, weirdly, Russia (I\u2019ve never figured out if these are descendants from people who took their crappy cars when the wall came down, and drove until they hit the ocean (or drove\/walked till they hit the ocean) or whether they\u2019re a fresh migration. I know the first existed, but I haven\u2019t sussed out the other particulars.)<\/p>\n

So, Portugal is not a shithole. What it is is a country so tied down by regulations, rules, and the ever present weight of tradition (Portugal, like many Baltic countries produces way more history than it can consume locally) that it works at cross purposes to itself.<\/p>\n

Looking at what Portuguese (at least some) can do abroad, in terms of insane amounts of work and sometimes success, one assumes that if Portugal could eschew its perennial fascination with socialism, it would \u2026 well\u2026 I don\u2019t know, but it would be scary for good or ill.<\/p>\n

I mean for a country tied up with socialism (first national, then international) for the best part of a century, it\u2019s not doing badly at all. Look at it this way: it hasn\u2019t gone Venezuela. And the gentleman in the back who just said that\u2019s because they can\u2019t do anything efficiently, not even socialism, is just being mean. Yes, the Portuguese have been locked in a tragic fight throughout history with their traditional enemies, the Portuguese, but that\u2019s no reason to look down on them.<\/p>\n

Sarah Hoyt, “On Shaking The Dust From One’s Sandals”, According to Hoyt<\/em><\/a>, 2018-01-17.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You see, you can judge a country\u2019s status as an \u2026 ah\u2026 excrement sinkhole by figuring out \u201cMigration out or in?\u201d In Portugal this picture is complicated. They are suffering \u201cbrain drain\u201d as their youngest, brightest and most educated decamp for Germany, England, or even Brazil (where the picture is also complicated) but at the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,7,41],"tags":[262,554,557,661],"class_list":["post-41975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-history","category-quotations","tag-culture","tag-immigration","tag-portugal","tag-regulation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-aV1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41975"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41975\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41976,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41975\/revisions\/41976"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}