I’m not really concerned about it myself, I’m already well beyond the point it would be terribly relevant to me. I would very much disagree re: education levels, though. I’ve worked with plenty of people from various countries, and those with less education often cannot switch to a more widely understood way of speaking, in my experience. Partly, it comes down to limited vocabulary, resulting in them being unable to provide alternative ways of saying things that might be more widely understood, and partly down to an ignorance as to what elements of their speech aren’t widely used or understood outside of where they grew up.

I would still argue that a neutral Spanish is no more real a variant than BBC English or “General American” accents and mannerisms used by news presenters represent actual variants of English, though. It might serve as a crutch for intelligibility in cases of extremely heavy accents, but most cases where you might employ it are situations where you already wouldn’t be expected to employ much in the way of slang. In regular interactions, though, people mostly just speak to each other in their natural accent, and if somebody busts out a local term that isn’t understood, the other person asks “¿Qué quiere decir huachicolero?” gets an explanation, and the conversation moves on, same as it does in English.

At the end of the day, I think pursuing a neutral manner of speaking from the beginning is something of a fool’s errand for most language learners. Like it or not, you will wind up speaking like the native speakers you interact with most. I don’t particularly use Dominican vocabulary, but people still assume I’m from DR when I speak Spanish, because when Spanish became my primary working language for 5 years after getting out of the beginner stages, that’s who I was surrounded by at work. Absent very specific goals (I knew a guy who focused exclusively on Rioplatense Spanish, as he was moving to Argentina in a couple of years to study in Buenos Aires), I think most people would be better served focusing on the fundamentals, reading widely, consuming a wide range of media and actually speaking with people, rather than endlessly agonizing over perfecting the process before actually getting to the point they can actually use the language.

After years of regular use, I can speak it fine and modify how I speak appropriately, as the situation calls for. If it’s sufficient for the RAE folks working on the DELE and the staff at my local Instituto Cervantes to not remark on anything beyond occasionally flubbing the gender of a word, I’m not too worried about the neutrality of my Spanish.

Neutral Spanish isn’t a separate variant, so much as a separate register of the language, though. It’s really just a thing I hear native speakers say when they don’t realize that educated speakers from their country do, in fact, still have an accent, but it’s more just down to vocabulary choice, rather than some major change elsewhere. Like, an educated Dominican isn’t going to call a bus a guagua and they’ll probably enunciate more clearly than they would in casual conversation, but they’re not suddenly going to start using vosotros and distinción when they speak.

Whenever I hear a native speaker talking about Neutral Spanish, it’s invariably followed by why I should try to speak like people from their home country, and that people from elsewhere don’t really speak proper Spanish. It also tends to correlate pretty well with people telling me, “Yo hablo castellano, y por eso no puedo entender lo que dicen las personas plebes, ya que hablan español.” for a nice dose of Latin American classism.

If you learn something too region specific, usually doesn’t.

My experience has been more that learners tend to not realize that certain things they pick up aren’t universal, and/or that they’re only acceptable in certain contexts, and then unwittingly pepper their speech with words and phrases from one country that are unknown/unacceptable in another, or use very informal/vulgar language in formal settings. Like, if I curse around my wife the way I would curse around my Mexican coworkers, she’s scandalized by how vulgar the profanity is, and if I told my Mexican coworkers I had a fuinfuán in my backyard growing up, rather than a columpio, there’s nearly 100% chance they’re not going to have any idea what the hell I’m talking about.

It’s the little things like not understanding the historical context that something from the past fits in while simultaneously telling me Im wrong about the time that I lived through.

In fairness, that’s not necessarily a sign of them being young, but could be any number of things at play. I’ve had my grandmother literally tell me not to tell hew how things were during World War II, because she lived through it, when we were talking about well documented actions of major historical figures that she was confidently incorrect about. No amount of documentation about what Churchill, Stalin or Hitler did during a particular event could change her mind, because she lived through it, never mind the fact that she was like 10 at the time. /r/AskHistorians had a 20 year moratorium on discussing recent events for a reason. Then again, this is the same lady who left her church of decades, because she was sure she was better at interpreting the Bible and church doctrine than all the priests who spent years studying those topics in seminary, since she occasionally read random books of the Bible and was older than they were.

It could also just be peoples’ biases at play. A Marxist historian and a fundamentalist, conservative Christian historian will come to wildly different conclusions and interpretations of things like the significance and impact of the rise of the religious right in the US under figures like Ronald Reagan, despite looking at the very same events.

And it could always just be that people are essentially engaging in drive-by posting quite often on the internet. For all the good things it can bring us, and the sense of community that it often provides, I think that internet “communities” really just provide us with a close approximation of community, while fundamentally lacking key elements that help real communities to exist and function in the long term. Personally, I’m closer to the Democratic moderates/centrists that abound on Lemmy.world than I am to my coworkers or my parents politically, yet I find that political discussions here tend to lose all civility and sincerity much quicker than they do with my boss who is all gung-ho for MAGA in real life. Like, I actually got my boss to come around on things like taxing the rich and universal healthcare when I had a chance to explain them without the hysterical stuff Fox tosses out and with examples of how they would actually benefit him to have as a baseline during election season last year, and it was a more civil and less heated conversation than some of those I had here a few months prior about whether Harris was really a good pick when the Democrats announced her as their candidate last year.

I managed to knock myself unconscious and give myself a pretty nice concussion during a particularly heated pillow fight at a summer camp. Pretty sure that’s about as unique a feat as I’ve managed thus far.

I’ve never seen any of them cause problems; they simply ride the trains all day.

Maybe this is dependent on country or region, because I see wildly different behavior between the unhoused in NYC and Manchester, in the UK, for example. In NYC, I’ve personally seen them pull a knife on random people, masturbating in the middle of the day on the train, two blind guys panhandling try to beat each other with their canes, each accusing the other of faking it to invade the other’s territory, smoking crack in the middle of crowded cars and plenty of other problematic behavior.

When I’ve been in Manchester, they’ve always been pretty reserved, just trying to do their own thing and get through the day without doing anything to draw unwanted attention to themselves. You wouldn’t even know a lot of them are there, unless you’re out after the shops close, and then there’s suddenly a bunch of people in sleeping bags in the doorways, just trying to sleep out of the wind and rain in a spot that might be marginally warmer.

Too many people just view scientifically sound treatment as drug addicts getting stuff for free, and get pissed off that someone else gets a “benefit” that they aren’t entitled to. They completely ignore the knock on effects that drug addiction has to those around someone going through it and just focus on what they perceive as unearned rewards for bad behavior.

I kind of think that a lot of people would be in favor of the same programs if they were pitched without being centered on the person getting treated for their addiction. Like, instead of saying, “This plan represents the best method we have to get people off drugs,” some of those same people that are totally lacking in empathy would be in favor of it if it were put forward as, “This is a way to get all those druggies off the streets and trains where they bother you, and it’s actually way cheaper than putting them all in prison, so it works out that we spend less of your tax money and save you in the long term.” Which is a pretty damning indictment of those people.