• VICE Documentary on the Roma (Gypsy) with a Pro-Roma Stance
    145 replies, posted
[QUOTE=Cone;45517702]what do you mean when you say normal people?[/QUOTE] He's obviously just referring to people who are outside of the Romani community, but just chose a poor word for it. Don't try to imply he's saying something he's not.
[QUOTE=Cone;45517702]what do you mean when you say normal people?[/QUOTE] People who aren't from a minority/ethnicity. Not normal as in "other people who aren't normal are abnormal". Don't turn it around at a pathetic attempt to call someone racist.
i'm not implying anything i'm just wondering what exactly people think causes romani people like the way they claim they do
[QUOTE=Gwoodman;45517809]Not those dirty gypsies, that's for sure, haha :rolleyes: The cherrypicking is strong.[/QUOTE] They see me talkin'... They hatin'... Readin', tryin' to catch me talkin' racisty...
[QUOTE=Rocâ„¢;45517371] Bullshit. Pure bullshit. You know why? Because most of the people you catch doing that, at the end of the day, get picked up by people in cars that rival the Average Joe. Hell, I've lost count to how many have gold teeth. [/QUOTE] Of course people will be exploited, but the police in Sweden have stated that it isn't a big problem. The fact that a few are being exploited shouldn't lead to people being afraid to give them money. I'm not generalizing when I say they need to beg at all. I've visited a charity organization and heard the stories of how fucked the poor people are in eastern Europe, not to mention the general prejudice towards beggars. On top of that, as I said, nobody would voluntarily beg for an entire day in 35 degrees celsius [QUOTE=Rocâ„¢;45517371] Oh, and by the way... I'm pointing out their messed up culture, not their race. You guys are the ones who keep assimilating everything to race, just so you can play the "you're racist" card.[/QUOTE] Again, racism extends to ethnicity. Cultural racism is quite the thing these days. I'm not calling you out on anything. Just saying. (i dont want to derail, thread isn't about Sweden, if you want to talk about that we should do it via PM.) [QUOTE=ionuttzu;45522905]They don't get shit from begging here because Romanians don't like gypsies so they don't give any money when they see one begging.[/QUOTE] This seems to be the case, sadly. Beggars over here aren't exclusively gypsies, but extremely poor people. Many Swedish people assume that they're lying, thieving and organized etc.
I feel ashamed to be European when I read some of these posts. And I live in a city that has a lot of the same percieved problems with Roma people and begging. You don't fucking choose to to live a life on the street begging for spare change. Begging for money is a humiliating effort that is done out of desperation. You can't just lump a large group of people and judge them collectively, whether you claim it's a culture or a race. This video pretty much proves that there are Roma people out there willing to earn an honest living.
[QUOTE=VikCreamCake;45517420]It's hard to beg in a country where people are barely able to provide for themselves. In Romania one in five people live in poverty, and I met a Moldavan girl whose father worked three jobs. He earned the equivalent of €500, and €300 of that went to paying the rent. She would be considered middle class. The people who come to beg are literally at the bottom of society. I can totally see their desperation.[/QUOTE] They don't get shit from begging here because Romanians don't like gypsies so they don't give any money when they see one begging.
[QUOTE=UnknownDude;45522498]I feel ashamed to be European when I read some of these posts. And I live in a city that has a lot of the same percieved problems with Roma people and begging. You don't fucking choose to to live a life on the street begging for spare change. Begging for money is a humiliating effort that is done out of desperation. You can't just lump a large group of people and judge them collectively, whether you claim it's a culture or a race. This video pretty much proves that there are Roma people out there willing to earn an honest living.[/QUOTE] You do realise that there are many parts in the world where begging is one of the main sources of income, and often causes the families to earn more money than they would in other employment? There are honest Roma who earn a living, but depending on which country you're in that amount will change greatly. I agree however that in Eastern Europe the Roma have a harder time than the ones in countries such as Sweden or the United Kingdom, where social support and welfare are more easily available.
Calling thievery part of their 'culture' is going a bit far. It's a result of poverty. They're forced to live as scavengers because that's the only thing they can do to survive if society doesn't throw them a bone. Nobody is willingly living as a thief if he can get a honest and stable job, no matter how shitty it is.
[QUOTE=Clavus;45522912]Calling thievery part of their 'culture' is going a bit far. It's a result of poverty. They're forced to live as scavengers because that's the only thing they can do to survive if society doesn't throw them a bone. [B]Nobody is willingly living as a thief if he can get a honest and stable job[/B], no matter how shitty it is.[/QUOTE] Seriously? Some of the best money is in thievery. That's why so many people turn to it in the first place. If you get an honest and stable job you have to pay taxes and have a permanent address. Say somebody earns £22k a year through a legitimate job. They immediately get taxed 25%, meaning they are left with £16.k. Then they have to pay rent and council tax, this can range from £500-£A lot of fucking money. Say they pay £600, which is relatively low if they have a family, that leaves them with £7200 a year for other expenses. A thief who lives as a nomad would then only have to break in to a school and steal 8 iMacs in order to earn the same living that somebody with a job and permanent housing would. I'm not saying all Roma are thieves, but to victimise the ones that are and claim that their lifestyles aren't profitable is absolute horseshit. [editline]28th July 2014[/editline] There's a difference between stealing bread to stop yourself from starving, and stealing scrap metal and high-ticket items.
[QUOTE=Clavus;45522912]Calling thievery part of their 'culture' is going a bit far. It's a result of poverty. They're forced to live as scavengers because that's the only thing they can do to survive if society doesn't throw them a bone. Nobody is willingly living as a thief if he can get a honest and stable job, no matter how shitty it is.[/QUOTE] True, it is not 'part' of their culture. However, the morals of paneuropean culture and society are, for a big part, grounded in Christian morality, and as such, there is a great sense of guilt and shame attached to thievery and all similar criminal acts. This cultural grounding of conscience, however, is not present in Roma society, so long as you, say, steal from someone who is not Roma. This is of course further strenghtened by the greater society's ostracization of Roma. I remember reading an article about this back in some sociology class or something. In European society, we are traditionally taught to feel shame when we commit an immoral act, but in Roma society this is different, you could say more simplistic- shame is simply upon those who get caught. The Roma are not simply an innocent group who have been ostracized for centuries by an evil majority, but an ethnicity caught in an endless negative feedback loop between them and the society that surrounds their own, caused by fundamental differences in culture and general philosophy on what is acceptable behavior and what isn't. Those countries where the Roma can continue their nomadic lifestyle have much less social friction because they can exist outside the majority physically as well as socially, but in Eastern Europe where their traditional lifestyle has been destroyed and they were moved to ghettoes in the communist era, the differences between them and the majority cause much greater friction.
[QUOTE=VikCreamCake;45521025]Again, racism extends to ethnicity. Cultural racism is quite the thing these days. I'm not calling you out on anything. Just saying. (i dont want to derail, thread isn't about Sweden, if you want to talk about that we should do it via PM.)[/QUOTE] Cultural racism? What the hell? Thats just enabling them in their criminalized culture just because they are from another ethnicity and have a different culture, which, as we all know, doesn't fits with modern cultures at all. Its not like we're batting an eye at someone praying to whoever in the middle of the street or anything of the sort, we're bothered (to put it lightly) by people who have actual disruptive behavior towards the environment and to others. [editline]28th July 2014[/editline] [QUOTE=UnknownDude;45522498]I feel ashamed to be European when I read some of these posts. And I live in a city that has a lot of the same percieved problems with Roma people and begging. You don't fucking choose to to live a life on the street begging for spare change. Begging for money is a humiliating effort that is done out of desperation. You can't just lump a large group of people and judge them collectively, whether you claim it's a culture or a race. This video pretty much proves that there are Roma people out there willing to earn an honest living.[/QUOTE] Fun part is, when the filming is over, it actually might be extremely different from what you just saw. The part about begging isn't all in black and white. Just because you see people begging, doesn't means they might really need it. [editline]28th July 2014[/editline] [QUOTE=Clavus;45522912]Calling thievery part of their 'culture' is going a bit far. It's a result of poverty. They're forced to live as scavengers because that's the only thing they can do to survive if society doesn't throw them a bone. Nobody is willingly living as a thief if he can get a honest and stable job, no matter how shitty it is.[/QUOTE] Forgetting the fact that society actually does helps them, and they just end up fucking it up. Hence why the bad image.
[QUOTE=Noss;45517806]Btw the people who are saying that disliking romani culture is racist are wrong, Roma is an ethnicity, not a race. It's also a bit hard to be xenophonic towards the Roma as they're not in a single country, they're spread across the whole world. This means that people living in different countries have a different experience of the culture, as the culture varies country to country. The Americans who are coming in here shouting 'racism' have not experienced the effect that the nomadic [U]culture[/U] has had on countries such as the UK. I don't think anybody here is saying that they hate the Roma people, but instead the culture that a significant proportion adhere to. So, instead of insulting each other, throwing around the term 'racism', how about you people actually take the time to read what people are saying.[/QUOTE] The US has more than 10 times the Roma population that the UK does, and when viewed as a percentage of total population it's still more than double (and for Gwoodman's sake I'll add that they're slightly more common here than in Portugal), so yes people in the US have experienced the effects of them, the difference is that the US hasn't augmented those effects with institutionalized racism. And it's also not hard to be xenophobic towards them since xenophobia basically just means fear of things perceived as strange or foreign, not necessarily any specific nationality.
Fine, calls us racists or whatever, anything you want, it won't change that it would be just simple to change my opinion to this if they stopped committing crimes and wasting money on expensive glamours that serve them no purpose but linger their suffering that they put themselves in and bring the race card anytime a non-gypsie questions their methods. They don't cause me harm, I'm okay with them, they want to live this way, I'm OK with it, just don't put the causation of your problems on us and call it discrimination.
It's funny IMO how it's always the americans in these kind of threads that keep going racists! racists!
[QUOTE=Rocâ„¢;45524557] Cultural racism? What the hell? Thats just enabling them in their criminalized culture just because they are from another ethnicity and have a different culture, which, as we all know, doesn't fits with modern cultures at all. [/QUOTE] Well, it depends. Believe it or not, I've met decent romani people who were travelling across Europe. We played video games and shit and it was great. They were really charming people. In my opinion, it's racism to judge the group as a whole. Then again, my experience with romani people has been nothing but positive. That's my perspective. The people I met fit in pretty well with modern society, I'm baffled as to why the situation is the way it is, and I really don't want to buy into the entire "this entire group of people is composed entirely of bad people"-thing. I do recognize the problems in many places Europe and I'll admit I have no real solution to it, but I bet that the general public giving them shit isn't motivating them to integrate.
The problem with the Roma has nothing to do with ethnicity, it has to do with their culture. They want to live "outside" our society while still taking full advantage of all the positive stuff that comes from living "inside" our society. The stealing part however, I feel is being exaggerated. I don't know anything about what it's like in other countries but in Sweden, far from everyone of them are thieves.
[QUOTE=asteroidrules;45525302]The US has more than 10 times the Roma population that the UK does, and when viewed as a percentage of total population it's still more than double (and for Gwoodman's sake I'll add that they're slightly more common here than in Portugal), so yes people in the US have experienced the effects of them, the difference is that the US hasn't augmented those effects with institutionalized racism. And it's also not hard to be xenophobic towards them since xenophobia basically just means fear of things perceived as strange or foreign, not necessarily any specific nationality.[/QUOTE] Except the US is shitloads bigger than Portugal, as said about Spain. What xenophobia lol, its like you don't read the parts where we talk about how bad some places get because of their activity and just read "oh a roma passed the other day by me, said hi and I almost died of a heart attack! the damn non-white person talking to me!..." [editline]28th July 2014[/editline] [QUOTE=Gwoodman;45525368]Fine, calls us racists or whatever, anything you want, it won't change that it would be just simple to change my opinion to this if they stopped committing crimes and wasting money on expensive glamours that serve them no purpose but linger their suffering that they put themselves in and bring the race card anytime a non-gypsie questions their methods. They don't cause me harm, I'm okay with them, they want to live this way, I'm OK with it, just don't put the causation of your problems on us and call it discrimination.[/QUOTE] Nevermind the fact that some roma themselves actually get out of that kind of life because of how shitty it always is. But who cares, we are obviously racist for not hugging the poor minority!..
[QUOTE=asteroidrules;45525302]The US has more than 10 times the Roma population that the UK does, and when viewed as a percentage of total population it's still more than double (and for Gwoodman's sake I'll add that they're slightly more common here than in Portugal), so yes people in the US have experienced the effects of them, the difference is that the US hasn't augmented those effects with institutionalized racism. And it's also not hard to be xenophobic towards them since xenophobia basically just means fear of things perceived as strange or foreign, not necessarily any specific nationality.[/QUOTE] what is land mass and population density? all you fucking do is scream racists and xenophobes without even looking at people's arguments jesus fucking christ i'm done with you
[QUOTE=Prism;45500302]I believe that no western european has any idea what it actually is to live in a country with Roma. Here in Bulgaria we have whole gypsy-only appartment buildings who REFUSE to pay their heating, water or electricity bills so their neighbours are forced to pay them for them, because if anyone were to try and cut them off, the gypsies start protesting about discrimination. As said in the video, one of the practices gypsies have for getting a living is to pick metal. In itself thats illegal but we've gone to the point where we had a PSA on NATIONAL TV during PRIME TIME to BEG gypsies to stop stealing insulation from over-ground heating pipes, as it is not actually metal and they cannot sell it for anything. Another popular practice is to have ~15 children per family and get financial aid for htem. Why? Because they like family. Can they feed and take care of them? No. Do they know that they can't? Yeah, they do. Do they still make more babies? Yeah, they do. Even after the government offered gypsy families free access to condoms, none of them actually used them. I don't even know why. Just imagine а gypsy wagon being pulled by a horse somewhere in your average clean european capital, cruising around at a speed of 15 km/h. And then the horse starts shitting on the road. Over my 20 year lifetime I have not had a single good experience with the Roma. This includes back when I was ~6 years old and I had a Roma friend. I remember how he would go around trashcans and look for cigarette stumps, which he would then try to smoke. At the age of 6. He did not go to school because he thought it was boring. So yes, I do believe the report is bias since it portrays the Roma as the victim and the authorities as the villain, taking their homes away.[/QUOTE] Wow you just stole all my words haha , except for the part where you call them Roma . I wanted to say exactly the same thing .There was an incident some years ago(can't remember precisely when) when a lot of gypsies set camp somewhere next to a French village and in a few days they got thrown out of there by the people that lived in the area not by the authorities , when we said something against the gypsies, there you go the European Union asks why don't we integrate them , why don't the other countries get "scolded" for not doing that? it's not like they don't have more rights than us(the Romanians) already . They can get in schools with half the marks we need, they get offered jobs but they refuse because they get more money by stealing , begging or making 10 children and there you go -> begging gang + money from the state for each and they also spend a lot of money on jewelry and expensive cars . Not even 0.1% of their blood is ours , they just migrated and hundreds of ks settled here because nobody does anything to them ,they either steal from here or go in other countries ,gather strawberries for 3 months steal some stuff from there too , rape or kill and there you go "a Romanian did that just because they have a Romanian ID card" , they are just like those gangs in the American movies where they come in a group and they pick on people eventually beat them if they're bored(didn't happen personally to me but to other friends yes) . I'm not saying all of them are bad , I personally know a few that are really nice but I can't count more than the fingers I have. Oh damn didn't pay attention , this was kind of a dead post :D sry
[QUOTE=Noss;45528820] all you fucking do is scream racists and xenophobes without even looking at people's arguments jesus fucking christ i'm done with you[/QUOTE] That guy with the Sri Lankan wife who was offered a baby for 100€ sure must be racist.
[QUOTE=Rangergxi;45575739]That guy with the Sri Lankan wife who was offered a baby for 100€ sure must be racist.[/QUOTE] I don't get why his wife being from Sri Lanka means he's incapable of being racist. Racism isn't an all or nothing thing, someone can be fine with blacks and hate hispanics, someone can be fine with south-asians and hate roma.
[QUOTE=asteroidrules;45575836]Racism isn't an all or nothing thing[/QUOTE] Well of course not but it tells us that he isn't some white supremacist.
It's undeniable the roma population is the source of a consequent amount of shitheads, but it's not enough to shit over the entire community and call everyone a thieving bastard like everyone does. Even my parents who are generally pretty open about stuff tend to fucking hate them based on like that one time where they saw one beggar on the side of the street.
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