As the title suggests, it’s been a while
since I’ve received spam in my comments section (for some reason, I’m not very
attractive to spammers). But then I got this one, and boy is it a doozy.
Where do I even begin. Obviously it
has nothing to do with the etymology post that it was posted to. Have I even
mentioned Portugal on the blog before? I don’t think so. In any case, yelling
that it’s a racist country is a pretty intense way to start things.
Those links are to real articles by
the way. I looked some of them up and their URLs match the ones here, which is
crazy, like there isn’t even a malware site that it redirects you to. I’m not
even sure what this spam is trying to accomplish other than slamming Portugal.
Is Portugal a racist country? I
mean, kind of. One of those articles is about Portugal’s colonial history and
how racism still permeates the culture,
but… that’s true of a lot of places in Europe, and the United States as well. I’m
not sure why they’re so intent on calling out Portugal for it.
Also, what’s with the hate towards
Luso? I actually didn’t know this, but “Luso-Portuguese” refers to Portuguese
speaking places in general. There are a ton of colleges (like a little one you
may have heard of called Harvard) that call their Portuguese study programs “Portuguese and Luso-Brazilian”.
Yeah it’s made up… everything is made
up. And the fact that they’re talking about the DNA phenotype… what is that
about? It feels more racist than the racism they’re supposedly calling out.
Finally, they spend a lot of time
talking about Portugal’s poor economy. While there is some concern about it, it’s
also actually doing better than it has in twenty years.
There are issues, but nothing like what the comment describes. Its unemployment
rate is also under 7%, a far cry from the 40% the comment claims. And the average salary being about $900
a month is accurate, but at the same time ignores that that figure is net income, after taxes, and doesn’t
take into account cost of living, which is fairly low.
Portugal: not perfect, but certainly
not the dystopia the comment is making it out to be. I went off on a bit of a
tangent about the country, but really, inaccurate information bothers me. I’ve
also never seen a spam comment not trying to sell me something or infect me
with malware. It’s a mystery wrapped in a riddle.
