5 ms·

This is not the answer HN is looking for, but Iceland is safe because it's full of Icelanders. England was safe when it was full of Englishmen. Not anymore. Swe

by Muzza 13y ago

This is not the answer HN is looking for, but Iceland is safe because it's full of Icelanders. England was safe when it was full of Englishmen. Not anymore. Sweden was safe when it was full of Swedes. Not anymore. Etc.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
13b9f227ecf0 13y ago
I agree with your sentiment, but note that the white English "working" class has descended into much higher criminality and violence over the last fifty years. So there are other factors at work. In contrast this has not happened to nearly such an extent in the USA, for one example.
saraid216 13y ago
This is actually my intuition, too: most of the Scandinavian countries' successes are better attributed to racial homogeneity than to actually being institutionally sounder. I can't prove that, though; there have been discussions before about immigration similarities, but nothing that I found convincing enough to remember.
- onemorepassword 13y ago
  Seriously, I fucking hate this uninformed American crap, like Europe is some mythical white people planet? "Racial homogeneity" my ass, Scandinavia or the rest of Europa isn't living in the middle ages anymore. It's insulting and borderline racist nonsense.
  - mercurial 13y ago
    Immigration is pretty low in Scandinavia. Coming from Paris, it's quite bizarre to visit Copenhagen or Árhus and wonder what happened to the non-white people.
    - rdl 13y ago
      There are actually a lot of refugees/immigrants in the Norway/Sweden/Denmark/Netherlands from Islamic countries, now. And, those communities tend to commit a disproportionate number of crimes, although this could be for a variety of reasons -- poverty before moving, poverty after moving, culture, age, ... (Biology seems like the least likely, especially given how bloodthirsty the vikings were only 50 generations ago)
  - saraid216 13y ago
    You're welcome to show increasing percentages of non-white people in Scandinavian countries instead of spouting vitriol like an insulting and borderline racist ass.
- tinco 13y ago
  You have an irrationally racist intuition, peoples hostility to racism should be your first clue to criticising your own opinion before voicing it. Criminality has always been strongly linked to economic class differences. If you look at how immigration injects low economic class workers into medium/high class environments, it is only logical that crime numbers rise. Racial arguments stem from self-preservationary superiority feelings, and have in the past also been used against Irish and Italian immigrants.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    Yeah, I didn't fully spell out my intuition, which was based on the fact that Scandinavian countries are more democratic. This allows for a stronger welfare state, which reduces economic inequalities, thus resulting in a lower crime rate. My intuition is that the stronger democratic nature of these cultures is due to racial homogeneity, rather than magical Scandinavian white sauce. There are cases in Africa where this can be seen (notion of "it takes a village" have generally come from African communities), but I honestly don't know enough about them to verify: have they scaled to an extent where they're comparable to the ultra-democratic bloc? Have they sufficiently negated the influences of Euro-American imperialism such that we can claim their democratic impulses are original rather than imposed? The corollary to this is that most of the failures of American democracy can be traced back to the slave trade, from the Three-Fifths Compromise to the present day litany of anti-black sentiment. Irish and Italian immigrants did have problems, but they've been largely integrated into the American melting pot in the present day. Chinese people, such as myself, have had more trouble but have nonetheless integrated better than blacks did, possibly because our enslavement didn't have the same level of cultural momentum, possibly because of an imperialistic cultural history of our own; it's unclear to me. The failures, thus, come from these struggles. These are struggles that, as far as I am aware, did not happen in Scandinavian history. They have humorous nationalistic jibes between each other, but they did not have the kind of wildly divisive events that led up to the Mason-Dixon line and the Reconstruction, which reinforced these divisions to the detriment of democratic institutions. In other words, it's not actually that Scandinavians are better people. They're not more democratic because they're less racist. They're more democratic because there were no significant populations of brown people to oppress during their formative periods. Denmark is an interesting edge case, in that they participated in the Colonial Age, but nevertheless built strong democratic structures and were then enveloped in the firestorm over depictions of Mohammed. Or maybe that supports my intuition. Who can tell. But that's how it is in political science; half of them seem ready to watch democracy deflate like a rubber ducky in the Hong Kong harbor. Anyways, this was all off-topic, but I thought it was unfair to let an ad hominem stand.
fishtoaster 13y ago
I would imagine the homogeneity in most forms (race, creed, income status, class, political views, etc) reduce conflict and crime. Such homogeneity is not always a good thing though; in the US, at least, we ostensibly follow the "melting pot" philosophy.
- onemorepassword 13y ago
  Yes, and Europe is full of white people only dancing around hand in hand in love and peace. US melting pot my ass. My black European father married my white European mother when the US still had segregation.
onemorepassword 13y ago
Sweden, England and most Western countries have only become safer over time. This is just racist bullshit.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Oh? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Sweden http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Sweden
- mynameishere 13y ago
  http://www.mdch.state.mi.us/pha/osr/deaths/Homicdx.asp http://www.mdch.state.mi.us/pha/osr/deaths/Homicdx.asp Top chart is just Michigan. Go to the bottom to get the latest numbers. White homicide rate: 3.4, black: 18.2. Youth numbers: http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/youthviolence/stats_at-a_glance/hr_trends_race.html http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/youthviolence/stats_at... It is bullshit though, I'll give you that.
  - tinco 13y ago
    You should be careful when posting such statistics. People might think you have racist sentiments, or worse they might enforce their own racist sentiments. Statistics like that should come with an explanation on how these graphs correlate very strongly with social economic status and other societal effects on lower economic class communities and that actual correlation between race and criminal behaviour is not nearly as dramatic as implied here.
tomjakubowski 13y ago
And America was safe until the British showed up.
eaurouge 13y ago
Scandinavian countries also didn't go around colonizing others, or getting involved in slave trading, or importing cheap labor when convenient, or generally meddling in other countries affairs. About England ever being peaceful, that's funny.
- gongador 13y ago
  Actually at least Sweden was involved in slave trading, out of a slave fort in Ghana called Carolusborg. I'm pretty sure there was one or a few short lived attempts at colonies as well, somewhere in the Carribean. Here's a link to a Swedish newspaper discussing Carolusborg (in Swedish). http://www.dn.se/resor/sveriges-morka-slavhistoria http://www.dn.se/resor/sveriges-morka-slavhistoria

by Muzza 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

13b9f227ecf0 13y ago

I agree with your sentiment, but note that the white English "working" class has descended into much higher criminality and violence over the last fifty years. So there are other factors at work. In contrast this has not happened to nearly such an extent in the USA, for one example.

saraid216 13y ago

This is actually my intuition, too: most of the Scandinavian countries' successes are better attributed to racial homogeneity than to actually being institutionally sounder. I can't prove that, though; there have been discussions before about immigration similarities, but nothing that I found convincing enough to remember.

onemorepassword 13y ago
Seriously, I fucking hate this uninformed American crap, like Europe is some mythical white people planet? "Racial homogeneity" my ass, Scandinavia or the rest of Europa isn't living in the middle ages anymore. It's insulting and borderline racist nonsense.
- mercurial 13y ago
  Immigration is pretty low in Scandinavia. Coming from Paris, it's quite bizarre to visit Copenhagen or Árhus and wonder what happened to the non-white people.
  - rdl 13y ago
    There are actually a lot of refugees/immigrants in the Norway/Sweden/Denmark/Netherlands from Islamic countries, now. And, those communities tend to commit a disproportionate number of crimes, although this could be for a variety of reasons -- poverty before moving, poverty after moving, culture, age, ... (Biology seems like the least likely, especially given how bloodthirsty the vikings were only 50 generations ago)
- saraid216 13y ago
  You're welcome to show increasing percentages of non-white people in Scandinavian countries instead of spouting vitriol like an insulting and borderline racist ass.
tinco 13y ago
You have an irrationally racist intuition, peoples hostility to racism should be your first clue to criticising your own opinion before voicing it. Criminality has always been strongly linked to economic class differences. If you look at how immigration injects low economic class workers into medium/high class environments, it is only logical that crime numbers rise. Racial arguments stem from self-preservationary superiority feelings, and have in the past also been used against Irish and Italian immigrants.
- saraid216 13y ago
  Yeah, I didn't fully spell out my intuition, which was based on the fact that Scandinavian countries are more democratic. This allows for a stronger welfare state, which reduces economic inequalities, thus resulting in a lower crime rate. My intuition is that the stronger democratic nature of these cultures is due to racial homogeneity, rather than magical Scandinavian white sauce. There are cases in Africa where this can be seen (notion of "it takes a village" have generally come from African communities), but I honestly don't know enough about them to verify: have they scaled to an extent where they're comparable to the ultra-democratic bloc? Have they sufficiently negated the influences of Euro-American imperialism such that we can claim their democratic impulses are original rather than imposed? The corollary to this is that most of the failures of American democracy can be traced back to the slave trade, from the Three-Fifths Compromise to the present day litany of anti-black sentiment. Irish and Italian immigrants did have problems, but they've been largely integrated into the American melting pot in the present day. Chinese people, such as myself, have had more trouble but have nonetheless integrated better than blacks did, possibly because our enslavement didn't have the same level of cultural momentum, possibly because of an imperialistic cultural history of our own; it's unclear to me. The failures, thus, come from these struggles. These are struggles that, as far as I am aware, did not happen in Scandinavian history. They have humorous nationalistic jibes between each other, but they did not have the kind of wildly divisive events that led up to the Mason-Dixon line and the Reconstruction, which reinforced these divisions to the detriment of democratic institutions. In other words, it's not actually that Scandinavians are better people. They're not more democratic because they're less racist. They're more democratic because there were no significant populations of brown people to oppress during their formative periods. Denmark is an interesting edge case, in that they participated in the Colonial Age, but nevertheless built strong democratic structures and were then enveloped in the firestorm over depictions of Mohammed. Or maybe that supports my intuition. Who can tell. But that's how it is in political science; half of them seem ready to watch democracy deflate like a rubber ducky in the Hong Kong harbor. Anyways, this was all off-topic, but I thought it was unfair to let an ad hominem stand.

fishtoaster 13y ago

I would imagine the homogeneity in most forms (race, creed, income status, class, political views, etc) reduce conflict and crime. Such homogeneity is not always a good thing though; in the US, at least, we ostensibly follow the "melting pot" philosophy.

onemorepassword 13y ago
Yes, and Europe is full of white people only dancing around hand in hand in love and peace. US melting pot my ass. My black European father married my white European mother when the US still had segregation.

onemorepassword 13y ago

Sweden, England and most Western countries have only become safer over time. This is just racist bullshit.

sliverstorm 13y ago
Oh? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Sweden http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Sweden
mynameishere 13y ago
http://www.mdch.state.mi.us/pha/osr/deaths/Homicdx.asp http://www.mdch.state.mi.us/pha/osr/deaths/Homicdx.asp Top chart is just Michigan. Go to the bottom to get the latest numbers. White homicide rate: 3.4, black: 18.2. Youth numbers: http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/youthviolence/stats_at-a_glance/hr_trends_race.html http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/youthviolence/stats_at... It is bullshit though, I'll give you that.
- tinco 13y ago
  You should be careful when posting such statistics. People might think you have racist sentiments, or worse they might enforce their own racist sentiments. Statistics like that should come with an explanation on how these graphs correlate very strongly with social economic status and other societal effects on lower economic class communities and that actual correlation between race and criminal behaviour is not nearly as dramatic as implied here.

tomjakubowski 13y ago

And America was safe until the British showed up.

eaurouge 13y ago

Scandinavian countries also didn't go around colonizing others, or getting involved in slave trading, or importing cheap labor when convenient, or generally meddling in other countries affairs. About England ever being peaceful, that's funny.

gongador 13y ago
Actually at least Sweden was involved in slave trading, out of a slave fort in Ghana called Carolusborg. I'm pretty sure there was one or a few short lived attempts at colonies as well, somewhere in the Carribean. Here's a link to a Swedish newspaper discussing Carolusborg (in Swedish). http://www.dn.se/resor/sveriges-morka-slavhistoria http://www.dn.se/resor/sveriges-morka-slavhistoria