I think it’s fair to say that football hooliganism is not unique to any particular place, and is a specific and unique problem

Yes, over-tourism and hooligans are disjoint problems. But if it is so cheap going to a place that you can just grab your fella drunkards and go you end up mixing them both in...weird ways.

Britain is not that rich anymore (and we aren't in 2011 anymore), however, during peak crisis (when the IMF rescued Portugal and almost had to do the same with Spain) we couldn't do much besides accepting anything that was bringing money, no matter how little. For some reason, the brits got used to to go to Algarve as "their" vaction spot, so much that this predates the tourist boom, and at this point in time they just straight up bought everything. You can't say no when your country is near bankrupt.

The 2008 financial crisis was a major turning point for this massified tourism. The "lazy southern people that don't want to work" had to accept any money that tourists could bring and accept any consequences. Partly due to this, there's this culture that tourists are immune to everything. If you think that hooligans are bad in a place with functioning cops, imagine them in a place that, at most, says "please don't do that" and lets you go, every single time. Even the Germans, which generally are strict rule followers, stop having any regard for simple laws.

That very same "lazy southern people that don't want to work" stereotype also got many people considering the northern Europeans to be entitled assholes. Not individually. There's not all that much xenophobia when dealing with individuals 1:1, but when considering them as a group of people, there's a lot of resentment. Germany, the UK and France being in crisis and facing the same problems we faced is giving some sweet sensation to a lot of people.

There's also the cultural idea that "when you're not in your town, you behave", even internally. People from Oporto have the same prejudice towards Lisbon people. "They come here and act like this is their place, chanting and whatever, twats" goes Portuguese to Portuguese, no need to add foreigners for that attitude to be a thing.

There's enough context to everything to write quite a few books. Nothing in these interactions are as simple as "people are annoyed at competition in their markets so they're pointing water guns".

the local government for approving those businesses to set themselves up on that street

There was the time period I just described where the governments could not have a say towards that + tragedy of commons. Every local government wants to have "the best behaved and richest tourists" so a race to the bottom it goes. Now it is a complete mess to fix the situation, especially since the Portuguese no longer own those places.

As a local government you can't go against the majority of your people, and the majority of people in Algarve are Brits and French. They own entire regions. Years and years of this environment cause that. Even in the Lisbon region, plenty of tourists buy properties because "wow, such nice weather, everything cheap", which they end up treating as investment because why wouldn't them?

There was this particularly damning "golden visa" scheme during the IMF days where you'd get Portuguese citizenship and a myriad of rights if you invested 250k (?) in real estate. A whole lot of people started doing investment tourism due to that and they're totally capitalizing on that.

The way I see it, there are two major classes of tourist in here. The rich fellas which bought the entire property market, with the richest of them tanking our water supplies with their golf courts and lobbying against any changes. And the bingo-card tourist which sees "50€ on Ryanair, nice! Honey, let's go to Portugal, it is a place in Spain that has some pubs just like home". You have a few other classes like the guys that actually enjoy discovering cultures and whatnot, but my personal experience tells me that there aren't all that many like that even though all of them will say that they're doing just that.

Now, none of this wall of text pointed at "firing water at people" as a solution; it just pointed a good deal of the context why other solutions are near impossible. However, in a way dissimilar to Portugal, Catalonia actually is a powerhouse. They can actually just limit the amount of people going there and succeed that way. But 1) business travellers are barely distinguishable from tourists 2) Madrid is a pain.

The whole point is that this is a very hard to solve mess. Most people don't know these details; they merely know that we have a "too many tourists; go away" attitude; they could be halfway decent and just respect it, unless they have some particular interest in the country. There's a trivial way to distinguish. We actually love to see people trying to speak Portuguese; even if they utterly fail; because this is enough to distinguish them from the 99%. This is how desperate we are for people that actually value anything in Portugal but the pictures and weather.

I think common sense would suggest that spraying people with water who are minding their own business

I'm not advocating for that being ok when devoid of context. Just like pointing a megaphone at some institution devoid of context will get you detained (we don't do "US's" version of freedom here; a protest that is not properly communication beforehand is forbidden for public security reasons).

If we put up some context to it, we're talking about targeting a demographic which does plenty of also-not-ok things. Does this mean that blind mobbism is ok? Nope. However, given that there's zero enforcement on both sides, this mob attitude is in a way to balance things rather-harmlessly in this precarious sittuation.

If laws were to be thoroughly enforced, many tourists would also be in trouble (eg. for loud noise after dark) their prices would be substantially higher (as it is generally believed that there's plenty of tax evasion and illegal properties in the sector). This means that the gov could definitely be doing things better and enforcing laws better. It is partially our fault because we're used to live in a lax system (which was mostly ok until this...).

threat of acid attacks

Talking to you was literally the first time I've heard of those. For some reason I don't get, London is unsafe. I hear about knifes and all kinds of shit in there but I don't see why that's the case. In the Iberian peninsula it is quite rare for anyone to assault you that way, even in proper robberies.

It’s not relevant to my point, which is that it’s not the fault of someone who goes to another country as a tourist.

As a tourist you are the one doing the decisions. The "let's pick this 50€ Ryanair over that 300€ whatever to a place that's not massified" was a decision.

I would equally criticise assaulting end consumers as a form of climate protest. Would you not?

I advocate for lesser evils. In climate matters I think that forcing costumers to pay for externalities would do the trick. Albeit, plenty of people would argue that to be worse than getting sprayed with water. Suddenly that 50€ flight becomes a 2500€ flight and then local tourism becomes much more enticing.

What’s YOUR suggestion?

If you put a flat tax, you harm business.
If you put a quota to it, you'd have the business of pretending that travelers are business people instead of tourists.
If you limit hosting to hotels, you'd get a tremendous market pressure for housing to go down to raise hotels (which is better than "local housing" for tourists as it is more efficient and doesn't fuck up with neighbors).
If you limit the amount of properties that can do so, you guarantee that no local is ever able to go anywhere else in their own country without a friend lending a sofa.
If you simply spam enough properties such that everyone fits, whenever the economy goes bad (/Covid) the country goes snap bankrupt.

As you can probably imagine, living in a country that suffers from this, I've heard plenty of debate. There's no perfect solution and the solutions that seem to be the closest to good are basically gentrification.

Showing tourists that they're not welcome is probably one of the actions that causes the lesser amount of harm (both to locals, businesses and tourists) as basically most other measures ensure that the best thing most people would be able to afford would be a few towns away from home.

I assume your personal carbon footprint is 0 in that case.

It is negative. I was living a very modest job and fired myself to voluntarily work for the transportation sector (eg. find ways to make public transit more enticing). The things I started doing were good so I eventually got paid for them. The last time I touched a plane was in 2014, I don't eat meat and I very rarely buy clothes. For some reason, society has this weird idea that following your conscience means living miserably.

"Oh, but then how will I visit Mars 3 times a year?" You do not. Traveling for leisure is not a god given right. I bet that most people have fairly nice towns not that far from home, and if they do not, why not vote locally to create nice towns locally? Architecture was a concept that was murdered in the 60's but we can redo things with time.

The farthest I've went was literally Barcelona and my vacations start with the question "where can I get to by train in less than a day?". No government is forcing me not to be an asshole, I can behave without hard rules. This way, If I ever need to go to... say... to Norway, for some researchers conference or whatever, I can take a plane, knowing that it pollutes a lot, yet without an heavy conscience because it is a one off, not the semestral dose of planes and poverty incentives.

And you can say "man, that's just your opinion", but the fact was that before massification people saw consideration for others as something important. They had different ideas of what was wrong or right, yet except for the odd asshat, people had the "I'm not going to overfish this lake because other people might also want to fish" attitude. That opinion that "not being considerate is not wrong" is just silly to my ears and is precisely what is fucking up the planet.

I did that because I enjoy Spanish culture

And yet that's generally not the case. If I had to place a bet, a lot of people that come to Portugal don't even know that it is not Spain. My parents work in the mail service and you have plenty of mail addressed like "Lisbon, Spain". They couldn't give less of a fuck about the place, simply figured that it was cheap and checked travel bingo card on it.

Are there considerate tourists that actually do care for the place and want to be behaved? Plenty. But the ratios are completely fucked. If you talk to people that work in the tourism sector they will point out that they are very VERY tired of dealing with the asses. What's their percentage? I have zero clue and this is not something measurable, but I personally had plenty of encounters that didn't quite go the way society should go.

Last year the pope came here and with him a lot of followers. The fuckers had free transportation passes and yet had to break transportation barriers and block off locals because they were all too busy chanting.

That was at the time of my last vacation. I got myself in a train to Spain to miss that and the majority of people I do know did equivalent trips. That's how saturated the environment is. Every time a big wave comes (pope, sport's event, Taylor Swift), we simply move away because the city is otherwise going to become unlivable.

Good thing I mentioned Taylor Swift because that's a prime demo of tourism being an asshole factory. She came here a few months ago. She was mass attended by Americans. People figured tickets in Portugal to be cheaper than wherever they live so they just flew here. Fuck the environment or the Portuguese being able to attend anything where they live without having to pay a 300% premium, right?

That is a xenophobic attack. And you are currently advocating for it.

I advocate for whatever the utilitarian solution is and I do understand the concept of people having feelings when a loved one becomes homeless.

If sending a few hundred tourists to space makes live muuuuch more bearable for millions, then do it.
If having hundreds of locals annoyed makes the lives of millions of tourists great and that leaves the coffers full such that the locals can be compensated, then great.

It doesn't always need to go against tourists. The problem with tourists is that the current balance is not utilitarian at all. Millions are being left without a country they call home in the name of some other millions being able to prop up their vacation ego. This is a big consequence in exchange for a small reward.

And I’m finding it a bit perplexing that you are simultaneously advocating for that while also talking about making decisions based on conscience.

As I stated, I'm an utilitarian. I advocate for whatever maximizes the global happiness, sustainability et all. Someone getting a miserable life requires a lot of people getting very very happy to balance.

A good part of my interference to "water attacks" is because I don't see myself getting any more fired up over them than I would over people chanting "go away". The water part, for me, a someone without any PTSD, it like "ehh, ok". Might not be for other people, but that was not the way I guessed it. I did not imagine a world with acid attacks nor did imagine getting someone's ass to my face in public transit to be any less "assault" than being sprayed with droplets of water. I reckon that is is simply my perception.

Random tweet I just came across: https://x.com/Scaife51/status/1811403266531471842?t=4fdIaowFfaHmYv77no51LQ

That's this place: https://www.reddit.com/r/portugal/comments/1e1c4ky/why_albufeira_is_a_british_colony/

Can you realistically believe that one can live in there without being anti-tourist? That's NOT a one off. That's a very common occurrence in the south coast (both Portugal and Spain). It is not a major city or anything like that. Every city down there is currently like that.

I’m not muttering it. It’s literally assault.

The point I pointed is that the law draws a hard line but reality has no such hard lines. Some ok things fall beyond the line. Some not ok things fall outside. Some common sense helps with that but even that's cultural.

As for "literally assault"; I can read Spanish but heavy legalese is not something I want to bother with reading. I'm simply assuming that it is not all that different from whatever the law is in here, across the border. You don't have conventional "assault" in Portuguese law, you have "offenses to the physical integrity", which can be "simple", "aggravated" or "by negligence". The first two assume intent to physically harm; the last one assumed that you had no intent but were terribly negligent and that led to someone being hurt. (Thats Artigo 143.º if you're into Deepl-checking that)

So, I don't even think that spraying people in water would constitute "assault". Maybe "harassment", you do have that in legalese; however I do believe that harassment needs to be targeted (like to a very finite group of people, not to hundreds of people).

Then you have "disturbances to the public peace", but if that was to be enforced it would affect tourists waaaay more than protestors. This kind of law is generally not enforced in order to just let the tourists be drunk in the middle of the road however they want without facing consequences over it.

So, to begin with, I don't think that anyone here is committing a crime. Your notion of what is a crime is totally up to your society; my society can have a totally different notion.

As a "fun fact", we recently got pseudo-nazis doing public speeches over "claiming back Portugal" and telling everyone that looked tourist to fuck off. That was not only legal but protected and anyone that attempted to mess with these events would be the one committing a crime.

None of those consequences you listed are any individual tourist’s fault.

That kind of logic implies that nobody is responsible for pollution or lack of recycling but governments. You are obviously responsible for your actions. There might be some government shaping them but ideally your conscience would suffice.

For some things you need help from some entity because it is just too hard (like not rewarding companies that put lead in food; silly example but you get it) but simple things like "save water", "recycle", "be nice to whoever is nice to you", "let people exit transit before you go in" are pretty much left for consciousness.

You can decide your next vacation location based on consciousness or you can do so based on ego. "Oh man, Barcelona is cheap and looks sexy in my travel curriculum" is a condemnable attitude.

If the government has failed to regulate these things that’s on them.

Like I already asked you plenty of times; how do you regulate that without plenty of side effects?
Travel tax? You'd be harming businesses as well.

Forbid local housing from being used? Already a limitation in place; but too late; not the licenses have already been issued. (PS: These are the license counts for inner Lisbon (emerald is regular housing used for tourists and blue is proper tourism estate): https://poligrafo.sapo.pt/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/4bcf1c68-a837-45ed-9f83-15c4ed12e549.png)

Have some mandatory prioritization of locals over foreigners? That would be xenophobic.

Dress it up however you want, you are advocating for indiscriminate xenophobic assault and harassment.

I've lived in both Portugal and Barcelona (for one month but it was a thing), in both cases before the tourism boom. The people in both places were everything but xenophobic; they both used to be very welcoming. The thing is not xenophobia as the attitude would be the exact same if the problem was to arise from the same country (if the numbers were enough).

You can't simply become homeless and jobless while staying welcoming; esp when, not all but plenty of, tourists treat us as inferior. They consider us to have less rights than they do because "they paid". That's a real rhetoric you get to experience.

Have these two recent reddit posts (deepl them) as a first hand experience that's not even trying to be xenophobic but cannot not be: Guy from Azores: https://www.reddit.com/r/portugal/comments/1dy6t3f/odeio_turistas/

Foreigner that was shocked at the fact that we look like a British colony: https://www.reddit.com/r/portugal/comments/1e1c4ky/why_albufeira_is_a_british_colony/

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...

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.

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.

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.

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).

You can't encrypt anything without a key. This is the key. If it wasn't in plaintext then it would be encrypted. Then you'd need a key for that. Where do you put it?

Phone OSs have mechanisms to solve this. Desktop ones do not.

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.

When the likely outcome is death, most people don't want to fight. If people were just allowed to flee to some other country, not only the bully country gets a free and repeatable pass but the neighbouring countries get some immigration crisis which lead to not-so-fun rhetorics.

The Finns were some of the most vigorous defenders in history, but if they just had the option of moving en mass to Sweden, consequence-free, they probably would. If that was to be the case every decade or so, today's Russia would be bigger than the USSR ever was and without any republic whatsoever, only Russians given that everyone else fled. They have quite the history of chomping territory; that's how they got this big to start with.

You probably understand that this wouldn't fly. That the other countries wouldn't allow it to happen anyway. But at the end of the day, you need boots on the ground to do anything about it.

Everyone considers stealing wrong. Everyone condemns big fat pigs robbing millions from the financial system wrong. If I had to place a bet, most people would of they had the chance. The fact people are hypocritical doesn't mean it is not condemnable. DiCaprio is a piece of shit in a lot of people's mind, just not in the judicial system.

No shit that a lot of middle-aged or maybe elderly man would enjoy 16 year old teasing them. Not so much for woman but if I had to bet it would happen as well. Our sex drive plays a lot here. Back in the we're animals in nature thingy, putting dicks into young women was almost always a "good thing"; propagating genes and stuff. Just so happens that we're trying not to behave like wild beasts anymore.

The brain would ideally be fully matured before one is to take life-long decisions, however 25 years is an awful lot of time. My armchair sociologist says that people would not tolerate that for the same reason people do not tolerate expecting for their kids to be 25 before allowing them to cross the road by themselves. Maturity is not a linear thing. At the age of 5 you'll try to kill yourself every now and then. At the age of 10 you barely do that. 18 is an arbitrary line, yes, because it is believed that most people at that age are able to figure life long decisions well-enough. People still get some sparks of development after 18, but it is nowhere compared to the 5-10 or the 10-15.

You state that age differences at the time were far more common. Well, at the time most marriages were arranged and considered plenty of things above the wellbeing of the brides.

In any case, we're working around my key argument. We're all silly animals, but god and it's prophets are supposed to be perfect. You can point a finger at them for that. Yes, fuck Francis. That guy is a piece of shit as well and points fairly well at the bullshit that Christianity is. This is not a anti-muslim rant; it is a "can we condemn condemnable people that were supposed to know what they were doing as they were 'perfect'?"

That's not the case in my western country but sure, hit that scarecrow. I personally know underage people dating 25-ish people.

What is frowned upon is people in completely different levels of maturity creating a tremendous imbalance, and usually abuse. DiCaprio dating teens is not a "we stand on an equal footing and love each other" kind of thing, is a "I'm famous and will use this fact to mess with teenagers".

An elderly hardly has a healthy relationship with a teenager, and this is particularly true for arranged marriages.

This western civilization thing of your already had that in the past. We stopped doing that rather recently as we figured it creates more trouble than not. Let's not pretend that "western" is some sort of axiom that just appeared and not the product of the evolution of some society. Just like eastern societies have such evolutions in some aspects. For example some eastern civilisations figured that clean spaces are better and so they try real hard to try to keep them that way. Of course you're free to argue that this cleanliness is not needed so it is a purely subjective thing of these societies and not necessarily better, but sociologists night disagree.

As for "ok if the victim preforms the deed", that's irrelevant. The same criteria applies. Promoting healthier relationships promotes a healthier society. If some 14/yo teenager is obsessed with dating way older men for whatever reason, chances are people are going to judge it, legal or not, no matter the society.

I didn't even specify any religion. I just said that god, any god, by definition, can't evolve.

This ain't Hercules adventures where gods are just sky humans with perks. Mainstream gods (&co) are all perfect in their "mysterious ways".

As such, if a prophet was into pedophilia, then either pedophilia is right (which I personally find odd... but them I'm merely human...) or that prophet wasn't exactly the most exemplary lad.

Whatever the case, people's lives are worth of dignity, be it Palestinians, Israelis, South Africans or Santa. That's not what I was arguing against at all. We can defend people while, at the same time, pointing the finger out at some bullshit they do.

The west is also full of bullshit. So what? We can also point the finger at that. Be my guest. I never said that we were perfect.