The Modern Immigrant

and what people mean when they say “You’re one of the good ones”

So, just to lay out some camps and borders here, I’m an ethnic Romanian currently living in Romania, though I’ve lived abroad in the West for a sizeable chunk of my life. Europeans reading this should understand exactly what I mean by that but, specifically for my American audience: I’m a white guy, though I don’t 100% count as white on this continent. Think 1980s Italians; we’re cool and we’re coming up in the world, but we’re still pre-9/11 Italians, so everyone thinks we’re all in organised crime and that we don’t speak English good.

Don’t bother trying to put me in a camp and, just so you know, I wasn’t born in a camp and no one in my family ever died in one (OG bigots will get both of those references).

It goes without saying that the zeitgeist pendulum has swung and we’re now in a post-woke era, which should have been a perfect time for everyone who spent the last 10 years complaining about free speech, cancel culture and everything else that went down, to actually start saying what they weren’t being allowed to say when shit was going down!

However, unfortunately, most public discourse seems to be dominated by a mix of “owning the libs”, chuds celebrating their victory in the Culture Wars, schizo ramblings, actual hate speech, and just general nonsense.

Which is pretty fucking disappointing…

I thought the whole reason why we fought the Culture Wars was because brainwashed morons weren’t allowing us to have genuine conversations about what was wrong in the world and how to fix it. I notice a startling absence of exactly that now, in the ashes of our victory…

Kinda reminds me about the Trojan War: it was officially about getting Helen back, but it was actually all just the unfettered bloodlust of a few megalomaniacs posing as concerned citizens…

But, I do not believe that our victory should go to waste and, until the pendulum swings once again, I think it’s important we do everything we can to actually take advantage of free speech, until the “enemy” returns and snatches it away from us once again.

I think we should explain, as white people, to our brothers and sisters of colour, what we meant when we were out-and-about, tiptoeing about immigration all those years. (I used the past tense because, like I said, the pendulum has swung really far to the right these days…)

It’s not black and brown people’s fault for not knowing what I’m about to say. It’s our collective fault for not being able to create an environment in which we could’ve communicated this earlier.

So, without further ado…

*Drum roll*

All white people, by this point, have noticed that there are two categories of “black and brown” people currently living in historically “white” nations.

The good, the bad and the… (I’ll throw jabs at ethnic groups later in this essay. For now, let’s try and be serious…)

So, which are the “good ones” and which ones are the “bad ones”? (a question as old as prejudice itself).

And now, here’s what’s truly mind-blowing!

Here’s the thing (and I’m not trying to be mysterious here): Everyone, regardless of their ethnicity, knows exactly which one is which!

You, the reader, regardless of your background, know on some level, exactly which one is which!

So, why read this essay? What’s the benefit, other than to hype up your inner racist or, potentially flare up some inner self-loathing?

Well, because I have a theory as to why the number and the intensity of the “bad ones” has reached levels that many in the population find troubling!

We need to establish some basic truths first!

Truth #1: In the year 2026, with the exception of a few heavy lunatics, most people have figured out that the colour of one’s skin has very little direct impact on the quality of one’s character.

This is a concept that was very hard to get across 2-3 years ago, because it basically posits that “racism”, in the classical sense, does not exist as an ideology in the 21^st century in the world, which is nothing short of heresy to some people…

Truth #2: Racial profiling and colourism exist for a reason, and that reason is “correlation”.

Most white people are suspicious of people from the “Global South”, not because they are from the “Global South” but because they have noticed a higher incidence of problematic behaviours amongst people from the Global South. If you’re a superficial moron though, you might actually end up bringing up biology to explain that which is clearly the result of historical context.

Truth #3: Black and brown people have noticed the exact God-damned thing as white people, just that there’s been too much noise recently, and that has prevented us from having a rational conversation on the topic!

This last one is the truth from which we’ll start building, because it is, by far, the one truth most people will be most comfortable with.

What we mean to say here is best visualised by thinking about the Cubans (and other Hispanics) who support the US’s anti-immigration policy (which many of them do). Those people aren’t “race traitors” hypocrites, or idiots. They’re making a distinction between their immigration journey and that of the more recent arrivals!

Think about it like this:

Travelling to a Western country to work used to be a fucking expensive investment!

Forget “legality”, just think about the costs! Think about how much it cost someone from Sub-Saharan Africa to travel to Europe in the 1960s, 1970s and even 1980s. Air travel was expensive back then and the whole reason why most people wanted to leave their native countries was because they weren’t making enough money to survive, let alone afford airplane tickets.

If you left for another country, that meant you weren’t going to be able to support your family directly anymore, since you would be physically separated from them. Sure, you could send money back, but you had to be sure that, even without the money, they would survive.

Once you arrived in the West, you needed to find a place to stay, which usually cost money. Sure, it was way cheaper than today, but remember, you’re coming from somewhere in the “living under a dollar a day” part of the world.

White people were also a lot more… “rough” back in those days and you had to put some extra effort into dealing with them. You had to speak the local language. You needed some skills and some level of education (i.e., basic literacy, calculus, preferably more). You usually needed a contact already in the destination country just to find a job, or even just to pick you up from the airport.

You also had to be hardworking, because God knows, “them white people were mean” and they were going to work you to the bone!

You also needed some understanding of Western culture, or at least the ability to adapt quickly.

The list goes on and it all points to one glaring fact:

Forty years ago, the people immigrating to the West were leaving countries in which they were at least “middle-class”.

Sure, the “middle-class” of 1970s Korea or Zaire was way poorer than that of the US or France, as well as much smaller, but it was still a middle-class and I don’t want to understate what it means to be middle-class, particularly on a global scale.

Think about the immigration journey referenced above and what you actually had to do to successfully arrive and gain consistent employment in the West back then.

You needed to be educated, open-minded, adventurous, intelligent, hardworking, pioneering, outgoing, open-minded, resourceful, courageous… just to arrive in the country itself and get a job! Then you had to work for years dealing with some level of oppression and opposition and you had to be fucking resilient and you had to be good at your job!

All those things you had to be, had to be the product of what can only be described as a “middle-class upbringing”!

In other words, most people travelling to the West to work as mechanics, cleaners, servicepeople, as well as engineers, doctors and office workers, were the product of either a “privileged” upbringing, Western values or they were just fucking brilliant to begin with.

Those people either (a) would have succeeded in their home countries anyway (though not on the levels they could achieve in the West), (b) couldn’t have succeeded in their home countries due to factors outside of their control or (c) they were just “built” for the West and could only succeed in the West.

Then something changed and something else did not change.

What changed was the “Rise of the Developing World”.

Let’s share our journeys! I’ll go first!

I live in Romania, a country in Eastern Europe and, at this point in time, most Europeans would be tempted to agree that the standard of living of Romania, Poland, Slovenia, Albania, Czechia, Serbia, Croatia, the Baltics, Slovakia, Macedonia, Bulgaria and, yes, even Bosnia, has exceeded the standard of living of Western Europe.

France and Britain are a fucking hellscape. Germany is slowly tumbling down a similar path. Scandinavia is populated almost entirely by Scandinavians. Spain is still ok and so is Portugal. Italy is, allegedly, a country with a functioning government. Switzerland, Austria and most of the Benelux don’t count, since those are essentially gated communities masquerading as countries (except Belgium which is approaching Congo levels of failed statehood, ironically).

The “East” is were it’s at!

Sure, there’s a war and all that but, hey, what would Eastern Europe be without a bit of drama and controversy?

Turkey (I refuse to call it “Türkiye”, and they should be thankful I don’t refer to “Istanbul” as “Constantinople”) is more “European” than most of Western Europe at this point.

The Middle East is basically like a game of Minesweeper. You can either land on oil, in which case you end up with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE, Kuwait or Oman… or you can land on actual mines if you’re in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya or Palestine. (And most people who have been to the latter countries can confirm that, even in those places, there are pockets of peace and prosperity on par with “the West”.)

I’m not even bringing up Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, because those aren’t “gimmick” countries. I.e., they’re not just getting wealthy because they have dead dinosaurs underneath their feet, but they’re actually building diversified and robust economies.

Iran and Israel might be… special, but if you do a deep dive, you’ll realize that the standard of living in both countries is actually comparable.

I don’t think I have to go through this exercise with the whole planet. You get the idea. A lot of places that used to be poor, are now pretty fucking well-off, or at least they’re doing well.

This means that a lot of people currently live in countries in which the middle class is growing. Sure, the paces are different and you can still be born in a shanty town in Uttar Pradesh, but, in most places, if you’re born in at least the lower-middle class and you want to do something with your life… you can do it in your own country now!

That’s what has changed.

Now, let’s address what hasn’t changed.

The West still needs bodies.

… Actually, let me scratch that! Because, actually, this has changed too…

The West needs more bodies and its desperate to get them.

Much better…

The reasons why the West needs more bodies are many and stupid.

I won’t really get into them since, at this point, everyone has their own explanation as to why this is happening and, oddly enough, most of them are correct! It’s kind of a weird space in economics, history, politics and sociology where there are multiple interconnected reasons for this, most of which people are aware of. Automation, too many old people, too few young people, too much entitlement, bad immigration policy, social decay, etc… pick your explanation and let’s move on…

How do these two elements come together?

The people that have come into the West in the last twenty to thirty years are predominantly from the lower-classes of their home societies.

Now, here’s where the conversation really gets uncomfortable, so clutch your pearls and hold on to your crotch, because we’re about to tread into some murky waters!

It used to be relatively expensive and difficult to travel to the West to work. However, in recent years, Western governments have actively pursued policies that have made immigration easier, while also presiding over economies that have delivered lower standards of living over the last few decades. At the same time, the world has reached a point where people from the “global middle-class” are less willing to move to a new country, because their lives in their home countries are on the up-and-up! Why leave when life’s relatively good?

However, the “global poor” are more than willing to make a cheap gamble. Sure, they might have to pay a coyote, grease some customs official or cross a few seas on a leaky boat, but the journey, in itself, is, for lack of a better term, “easier” than it was before. Sure, the wages they are arriving to these countries for are lower, but they’re still pretty spectacularly high by their own standards.

There are less of the global poor as a percentage of the overall population… but then you remember that the fucking global population has fucking exploded! So, there are a lot of poor people out there!

I’m about to do some math right now but, first we need to have a conversation about certain realities.

You see, by this point, I think you’ve probably figured that I am not a racial bigot. Sure, I like saying wild shit and I might be the best dinner guest in polite society, by I do not believe that hatred for any ethnic group on God’s green Earth is justified. At least not rationally. You can hate another ethnic group, sure! But, realistically speaking, you have to admit that it’s for emotional reasons,.

Those emotional reasons can be very valid in their own right, such as someone from another ethnic group hurting you or someone you loved. But ultimately, it’s who you are that determines whether or not you make judgements concerning other people rationally or emotionally.

Let me tell you a story that illustrates that!

You see, I like Albanians.

Like… I actually like Albanians as a group, more than I like some other ethnic groups… like the Czechs, for example. I don’t hate the Czechs, I just have a mediocre level of sympathy for them. Prague is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but the Czechs themselves… they’re alright.

But, Albanians? Love ‘em!

Serbs too, but they’re not Albanian (a fact they’re very quick to point out, by the way!) And I like the Albanian people I’ve met. I like their culture. I like their flag. I like their goofy president. I like Dua Lipa. I like their history. I just like ‘em a lot.

Now… here’s the thing:

I got mugged by an Albanian in Rome at knifepoint when I was in university there!

But, it was a very polite mugging. The guy even let me take my SIM card out of my phone before having me hand it over.

The reason why I actually know he was an Albanian because we had a full conversation while his knife was tickling my lower ribs. (I was hoping he would be a Romanian, because then I knew I could talk my way out of it).

So, yeah, I got mugged by an Albanian once… never by a Czech though…

You’d think that’s plenty of reason to hate on his entire bloodline, but I don’t!

So, that’s how I’m like as a person! I judge you by your character, not by your ethnic background. That’s just flavour and, you know what?, I like spicy flavours.

However, I also need to point out that I am not a economic bigot.

What I mean by that is that I don’t think poor people are “worse” people than middle-class or rich people. I do believe however, that incidence of people who are “uncivilized” is higher in poor people.

At this point, I’m going to politely ask the people of colour, as well as any Asians or Eastern Europeans reading this to spare me a few moments, as I address the whites. Because I need to explain to them something that we already know…

Dear white people,

We, the rest of the world, use the term “uncivilized” to describe people too!!!

If you go up to some middle-class in Gaborone, or Gandhinagar, or Guangzhou or … Gdansk and someone walks by, unzips his pants, and takes a piss right there next to you, in broad daylight!... Most middle-class people would refer to that as “uncivilized”.

“Civilization” is not a Western invention. It’s not an alien concept or an oppressive foreign force shackling people to a system of values they cannot relate to and abhor. Most people on this planet understand the concept of “being civil” and they applaud it and they disapprove when someone isn’t “being civilized”.

Furthermore, most people (particularly well-travelled people) are aware of the fact that the degree of civilization is different from place to place.

Saying that isn’t offensive. It’s not racist. It’s not even self-loathing.

You know what? Let me go first again and take the brunt of this bullshit!

Romanians are a very civilized people! However, I have lived amongst the Dutch and the Germans and I’ve met a fair bit of Koreans and Japanese! Those motherfuckers are way more civilized than my own beloved countrymen and countrywomen!

That doesn’t mean that Romanians are inferior. It doesn’t mean that our culture and identity are inferior. It means that, due to certain historical factors, the incidence of the uncivilized is higher among us, than it is among them!

I used those examples because they’re quite universally comprehensible but, if I am being absolutely honest… I harbour a certain suspicion that Iranians, Spaniards and Filipinos are “more civilized” than Romanians, just that I haven’t gathered enough evidence to make that assessment final.

So, getting back to the topic at hand, there is some overlap between a country’s prosperity and its degree of civilization. That being said, these “variations of civilization” are most visible among the lower classes, but observation does not equal classification!

Let’s do that math I was talking about earlier:

Let’s say that 1.000.000 people immigrate to a country of 10.000.000 people, in which 100.000 first generation and second generation immigrants are already living peacefully with the natives.

Out of those 100.000 “older” immigrants, probably a very small number will be of the uncivilized or criminal inclination because, as explained earlier, most of those immigrants were always middle-class, even in their countries of origin. So, let’s say, 100 of them are “problematic”. (Studies actually show that immigrants, up until the 2000s, actually committed far less crimes than natives across most Western countries. Google it! I dare you!) So, in this original immigrant population, the “problematic rate” is 0.1%, which is, historically speaking, in the correct ballpark for most countries up until the 2000s.

However, those 1.000.000 new arrivals are different. They are from the lower classes of their home countries. They’re less literate. They’re less educated. They’re not as prepared to deal with the challenges of adapting to a new country.

And, still, a very large percentage of them are good people!

Let’s say that, instead of 0.1% them being, the percentage is now 1% (which, honestly speaking, is not the case! It’s probably higher, likely around 10%, but I want to be generous!). What that means is that 10.000 out of those 1.000.000 are “problematic.”

You might say: Oh, but that’s still a small number! That’s 10.100 people out of 1.1 million people! That’s nothing!

Well, here’s the thing!

That’s a very visible number of people!

Most of them are going to be living in cities, because that’s were the jobs are. They’ll probably be living in the same neighbourhoods and they’ll be doing visibly bad shit in concentrated doses! They’re going to be overrepresented in crime statistics and they’re going to be taking shits in public, they’re going to be groping women on the street, they’re going to be getting in fights with each other at the train station, they’re going be stealing shit from stores… You can imagine the rest!

Think of a real world example!

9.1 million people live in London in 2026.

In 2001, when the population was 7.2 million, 60% were native Britons and life was… “fine and dandy!”… (sort of)…

In 2021, the percentage of native Britons was 40%.

London’s immigrant population in 2001 was 2.9 million and in 2021 it was 5.5 million.

In 2026, that number has likely increased and London is fucking hellscape nowadays!

Sure, white British people have speedrun their way into economic and social collapse from multiple different fronts simultaneously in a manner which future historians will likely study in wide-eyed horror, but the pervasive sentiment in modern Britain today has shifted violently towards anti-immigration as a key culprit of their collapse.

No one had a problem with immigrants twenty years ago. (Except actual racists and they can go chew on my foreskin!... Now, there’s an image!)

So, what has happened in the last twenty years to cause such a shift in perception?

My argument, which I’ve been laying out before you up until this point is that the immigrants have changed!

Out of those additional 3.6 million, a fair chunk are going to be the children and grandchildren of immigrants and another sizeable chunk are going to be the middle-class immigrants which are still arriving into the city. Let’s say 50% of those new people fall into these categories. That means that 1.8 million of those new immigrants are members of the “global poor”. If 1% of those 1.8 million are problematic, that’s 20.000 “bad people”.

20.000 might not sound like a lot, compared to ten million, but that number is gigantic when you realise that 20.000 people can commit a lot of crime and they can do so visibly! Hell, by medieval standards, 20.000 is a literal army!

And this leads me to the tragic situation that emerges, one which you, the reader, have likely realised yourself:

The people who suffer are the “good ones”, the immigrants of both middle-class and lower-class that came to London, looking for a better life and willing to work hard, fair and cheap for it. They dislike what is happening to their home as much as those native to it, yet they have to deal with the fact that their native “allies” cannot (or are unwilling) to distinguish between them, “the good ones” and they, “the bad ones”

That’s the human tragedy happening here.

Because modern social discourse on the topic is, for lack of better terms, retarded and racial.

If you’re a native white and you speak up about the fact that immigrants of whatever social standing and ethnicity are causing problems, you are a racist. However, as the pot begins to boil, more and more people begin to speak up, and society responds by labelling all these people as racist. Two camps of a diode begin to form and a dilemma emerges for those immigrants who notice the very same problem:

Do they join with the white man or do they side with their fellow immigrants?

Because immigrants are also aware that this is happening. They notice how crime rates are rising, garbage is pilling up in the streets, immigrant communities are becoming more-and-more insular by choice and, most importantly, the recently arrived immigrants have begun pushing the very same ideologies that ruined their own country.

And now, here, is where I can actually give a very woke example of this:

There are a lot immigrants from Western countries arriving to my country, but also to Bali, the Gulf States, as well as the rest of Eastern Europe, and they’re bringing their ideology with them!

They’re either bringing their woke nonsense or their pro-Trump nonsense here, to my country, and they’re giving rise to extremist political trends and they’re slowly trying to turn all our countries (which are doing well) into their countries (which are not doing so well), despite the fact that they’ll all complain about how dumb ideologies ruined their countries and made them leave!

Now… doesn’t that sound fucking familiar? Didn’t I see some extremist political Islamic preachers on the street in London, last time I was there?

I cannot stress enough how I think that the issues we are observing ultimately boil down to bad discourse. Even as I write these words, I am forced to tiptoe around issues, not because I am worried that my beliefs are hateful, misinformed or otherwise wrong, but because I am fully aware of the fact that the environment of public discourse is still toxic, particularly on these issues of immigration and racism.

We find ourselves in a global atmosphere of extreme tribalism congregating around two ideologies constantly moving away from one another at an accelerating pace.

Though, I must say, I think it’s getting better. At least, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Not because the “libs” lost the Culture Wars, mind you, since the “chud” victory is only temporary. In time, just as how liberal discourse became absolutely moronic when it was in fashion, soon enough this right-wing rhetoric that has come into power will begin to wear people down.

We might end up swinging back into wokeness, but I actually think that won’t happen.

You see, the overflow of bad information and of biased information has made people thirsty for much more balanced and genuine ideas. It’s strange but, in a world with so many sources of information and so many “thought leaders”, the number of spaces where honest conversations can take place and good ideas given voice, are few in number and in very high demand.

I don’t believe that this is a Western phenomenon. I believe it is a global phenomenon. Soon enough, the left-right diode will collapse, no matter how much “intellectual” infrastructure has been set up to prop it up. It’s honestly already happening, as the two poles of the diode have begun to fracture into smaller camps of (sometimes) even more deranged thinking.

All the while it’s become evident that people are realising that the obsession with “identity” has ended up making our world a far more dysfunctional place.

Right now, we have rampant tribalism among the many echo chambers of the internet, with each little room convinced that it is the room. In reality, every room is insufficient in addressing the core needs human civilization needs to survive.

And human civilization includes Western civilization, Chinese civilization, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South-East Asia and so many more. Identity politics have convinced us that we are somehow fundamentally different. Christianity versus Islam. Rich versus Poor. White versus Black. Jew and Gentile. Left and Right. Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers. We live in a world obsessed with the sacredness of the individual, yet the individual seems to crave belonging to a civilized world.

Tribalism addresses that through some future fantasy or some historical paradise, but… it isn’t enough anymore, isn’t it?

The world doesn’t seem to make sense, doesn’t it? There’s too many people and too many identities and too many ideas and all the camps are all lonely and depressed, regardless of how many have pegged their tents in them, once overjoyed that they had found a place of truth.

Jordan Peterson came and went. Stephen Colbert came and went. Ben Shapiro came and went. One by one, it seems to me that everyone who ever claimed that one group knew better than the others eventually crumbled under the pressure of claiming to understand how the world works!

Take this essay. Do you notice how every time I came close to one side or another, your mind seemed to assume that you knew what my next sentence would be? Did you notice that the “freshness” of my voice changed into some partisan babble every time I used some keyword or another?

I can promise you it was difficult to walk the thin line between the two ends of the political diode and I spent most of my time cursing the fact that I must phrase things the way I must to avoid alienating those of one camp or another. I’m not scarred of the camps, I just don’t want to associate myself with any camp because I’ve seen a hundred camps go up in flames, as the embers of their ideologies were stoked into a tornado of repetitive nonsense.

And who suffers?

Seems to me that everyone.

And people don’t like to suffer, and they’ll do everything they can not to. Sure, some of those things they’ll do will be hurtful to themselves and other, but the core desire behind their actions stays the same:

They want to get away from the place they’re in because the place they’re in is horrible.

It’s confusing. It feels hopeless. Pointless. They can hear the slow advance of the universe they were meant to live slowly rustle its way past them as they struggle with only the most bland or painful experiences of a world full of noise.

One day, they’ll move. They’ll pick up those things that matter most to them and they’ll leave the echo chambers and seek out a new promised land of true progress, where they can live a life of freedom in their own minds and at peace with their own hearts. They won’t care about the cost of the journey. They’ll make it regardless.

The camps will survive, their hearths lit by the monotonous sermons of artificial intelligence and human mouthpieces but, in the end, they’ll just become a rotation of slop. A pendulum swing between a hundred faulty ideologies. Some will remain and, who knows?, maybe some of those ideologies will give them some peace.

But, in the end, this isn’t sustainable. Countries that run on faulty ideologies can survive for quite some time, but they never really reach the same levels as the ones which really try to provide a better standard of living to their people. They also lose their best people.

In this world of the 21^st century, we are all mental migrants. We are all part of the middle-class of thinking. We are all chronically aware that something is wrong and there exists out there a right way (and I am not talking about the political camp) to salvage what is left (again, not the political camp).

Physical migration has become unsustainable. That is a cold hard fact. What remains is the collage of humanity that the world has ended up building over the years. A collage of humans that, in itself, must move mentally.

And I return to the title and topic of this essay, one which I have never abandoned and never drifted away from.

We are all “modern immigrants” and we all know who the “the good ones” are. We all wish to be “the good ones” and we all wish to be surrounded by “the good ones”.

I’m a science fiction writer. I read a lot of science fiction and a lot fantasy.

I used to find it very bland and boring when I would read a novel of a setting that was… “universal”. “Planet Xylontia IV was populated by a society that wore these kinds of funny hats and had these types of noses and they all worshipped a four-head frog god that required sacrifices of fresh barley, and all their buildings looked the same and they all spoke the same language and ate the same food and blah blah blah…”

I’ve come to realise now that, yes, such worlds are viciously unrealistic. However, there is a “universal” thing that does bind a world together. A mutual experience. A shared concept of civilization. A set of emotions that reflect upon the world into a reality of bright hope and dark compromise. A reflection of the human heart onto the patchwork of society that etches out the same message in different words.

Ironically, it is the conflicted state of the world that ultimately just shows that we humans are all just the same. We want peaceful homes, yet we crave the excitement of an adventure outside. We want fair laws which do not crush us or our dreams. We want the wicked to kept at bay, by whatever means are effective, balanced and sustainable.

And we are willing to move to a place where that is achievable and to surround ourselves with new people, whilst also caring for our old family. That place can be physical, yes, but it will always be metaphorical too!

I close this essay out with a thought I’ve come to ponder.

I don’t know if any of the “bad ones” are going to read this essay. Though, I wonder, if a “bad one” would read this… would he or she disagree?