22912

99% is an admitted exaggeration. But portraying Scandavania as a very homogenized region isn’t much of an exaggeration. According to Wiki the diversity of Sweden has almost entirely due to the Syrian refugees from 2015. I understand there is already some friction between Arab and native-born Swedes. I’d like to fast forward and see how Swedish democracy is working in 25 years, when the gratitude for being allowed in by the Arabs, and the empathy of the Swedes to the immigrants are both long gone, and 2nd generation Syrian-Swedes start protesting.

I suspect that meeting the diverse demands of hundreds of different cultures is going to be harder than you all imagined, as the Turks and Germans have discovered.

22913

A little late, but better late than never I suppose. This is a committee recommendation being forwarded on to Parliament, and it only passed 14-11, so this isn’t a done deal yet.

22914

Frankly, if I was Ukraine, I’d be tempted to let the Russian spearheads penetrate deeply and then cut them off, very similar to the beginning of the campaign, except now I think Ukraine has the ability to destroy the spearheads. All we have seen the Russians do in the last 9 months are plodding artillery based offensives. I’ve seen nothing leading me to believe that they are capable of mobile operations. They do have more infantry (which they lacked at the beginning of the war) but poorly trained convicts and conscripts aren’t going to be able to do this effectively.

22915

Can you point to some actual racial demographics on this? I tried to find some, and it was…oddly difficult to find.

What I was finding was that “minorities” in those countries exist, but then among those minorities, basically all of them were… Other white folks.

I found this, for instance

Sweden has a population of about 10.1 million people. Approximately 80% of this population is made up of ethnic Sweden with no immigrant background. About 20 percent have at least one parent that is an immigrant or has some non-Swedish ancestry. Here is a breakdown of all people resident in Sweden who were born in another country:

Finland 163,867

Iraq 127,860

Poland 75,323

Former Yugoslavia 69,269

Iran 65,649

Bosnia and Herzegovina 56,595

Germany 48,731

Turkey 45,085

Denmark 44,209

Somalia 43,966

The vast majority of people on this list can be classified as white. The major exception is Somalia. The overall percentage of the Swedish population that is black is less than 1%, although it should be noted that a well-known Swedish politician, Nyamko Sabuni, is black. There are negligible numbers of people from other racial groups, including East Asia, South Asia, Native American, and Pacific Islander.

So, you’ve got 80% of their country which is actually ethnically swedish… But of the other 20%, virtually all of them are also white people.

Again, I would be interested in finding more demographic data, but it was not immediately found when I searched. I think maybe it’s hard to find because if the uniformity in their racial demographics.

That’s not at all the point.

It’s not their fault racial prejudice exists… They are targets of it, and a lot of the failures of democracy that were cited were mentions of injustice, a lot of which is based on that racial prejudice.

Places like Sweden don’t have as much racial prejudice and the injustice that stems from it, because there aren’t many people of any race other than white.

And, again, you actually can look at some of those countries mentioned, and see that they actually DO treat their small number of minorities very poorly. France has basically made Muslims from Africa into a permanent underclass.

Maybe democracy in France works great… If you are a white Catholic.

22916

Can we take the creepy race demographics digression to another thread? I’m rather uncomfortable with how much “whiteness” became a topic so suddenly and completely un-necessarily.

22917

Off topic, sure, but creepy?

22918

Holy fuck, that took a turn. Nice bit of victim blaming there, @DaveLong and @Timex !

22919

Just to be fair to Dave & Timex, they’re blaming it on the expression of racism, not on the victims of it.

22920

Agreed. I’ve been around here long enough to know that how it comes out is probably not what was intended, but yeah - creepy is a good description.

Last post on this topic, just to answer your qst, @Timex All the Scandinavian countries have statistics institutes with public data for any number of things (DST in Denmark, SSB in Norway, forget what the Swedish one is called). IIRC, all but the Swedes carry explicit demographical numbers (the Swedes deliberately do not, in order to combat racism), though as with all statistics, one needs to look into the definitions (apples and oranges).

22921

Conscripts, true, but if the Russians have achieved one thing for the past months, it is probably to improve the quality of the men they’ll be sending into battle. Although they tossed thousands into the meatgrinder to stem the Ukrainian offensive, I’ve read respectable military analysts who estimate Russia has been holding back 100-150K mobilized conscripts who have been spending the past 4 months training in preparation for the spring offensives. So the quality of the troops being sent into such an attack are going to be quite a bit higher than what we’ve seen since the beginning of the war.

I’ve also read some speculating that the Russians are going to come into the offensive better equipped and prepared tha before. How they’ve reached that conclusion beats me, but it’s not improbable to think that the Russian army may be stockpiling equipment and amunition for whatever big push they have planned.

Of course, Ukraine is (hopefully) doing the same, and their forces will still be significantly better trained and motivated than the RA. The key decider, here, is probably going to be whether Ukraine are able to successfully guess where the blow will fall. If they do, I think they can stop the RA. If the Russians manage to surprise UA high command, though, then things might get dicey.

22922

That’s what synthetic aperture radar is for. And RC-135. There’s no way the orcs are going to pull off any significant strategic or operational surprise. The Ukrainians however…

22923

It is plausible they are better trained, after all armies do get better at fighting a war once they are in one. But, the Ukraine army is also improving, and quite possibly at faster pace.

I’m almost certain the Russian army will be more poorly equipped than they were at the beginning of the war. I find it hard to believe that Russians have held back T-80, T-90 BMP-3, Grad MLRS, and the relatively small number of equipment they’ve made in last decade. It seems far more likely that stuff has been destroyed, and they are back to fighting with early T-72, BMP-1, and artillery from the 1970s and 80s, even for the better-trained/elite forces.

I think the only way the Russian succeed, is just by having more bodies and tanks.

22924

Russia brings civilization to the wildlands by planning to build 23 prison camps on occupied territories.

22925
22926

Washington Post (gift link)

I also saw this in the WSJ

22927

Yeah, just read some political analysts about this. Such actions are some of the only non-suicidal ways of protesting in Russia. Cause, in a weird way, it’s supporting the party line - after all, those are actually Russian people who were actually killed by Ukrainians, so why wouldn’t you let people mourn them?

Meanwhile, the Belarusian part of the Internet is sad these days. Zelensky had a speech on the occasion of the 160th anniversary of Konstanty Kalinowski’s rebellion, which was a rebellion of ex-Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth lands against the Russian empire. In this speech, he called it a rebellion of Poles, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians without ever mentioning Belarus which feels very deliberate, cause the leader of the rebellion self-identified as a Belarusian. I know that a lot of nationalists claim pre-modern as their own and it’s easy to bend identities of the time, but the man literally used “I love Belarus” as a password, created the first newspaper in Belarusian, and so on.

Clearly, Belarusian rulers are currently hostile to Ukraine. But combined with the fact that Ukrainian authorities refuse any contact with the Belarusian opposition leader and acknowledge Lukashenko as the leader - not to mention rumors about them asking the EU to go easy on sanctions against Lukashenko - it feels a little lacking in integrity. Oh well.

22928

When I was in college, it was I think a psych 101 class, I said the most un-intentionally racist thing in my life, and it was similar to this. We were watching a documentary on the Norwegian prison system, and how it is focused on rehabilitation, and that they have so much less recidivism etc. The professor asked how they could achieve something so different than the US.

My response was, “They don’t have any minorities!”

Which, after it came out of my mouth, I realized without context it could be determined to be extremely racist.

What I meant to say, and what I know you are saying, is that their country does not have a historical history of oppression of minorities and a racial divide that causes institutions, like prisons, to effect minorities in a significantly different way than whites. As well as a social system that puts minorities in a much higher risk category for incarceration, due to the racist nature of our government and systems.

I mean, the sad part is, if our prison population was 99% white, politicians would probably care a lot more about the prison population.

22929

I don’t want to keep going on with the thread derail, so I restrained myself this morning.

But since it’s going on, a simple piece of advice for Americans:

Race in Europe is constructed through different fault lines than in the US. In particular visual genetics (how you look, or “whiteness”) while present is less important than nationality or language to define one’s ethnic origin and/or otherness (and in general the degree of discrimination you will face). Minorities that are visually indistinct to most of the population but still perceived as “other” are frequent.

(Which, relevant to the thread, it’s why I wince where I see Russian soldiers described as “orcs”. That’s European racism flat and square).

I don’t disagree the U.S. is more diverse, but don’t look at genetic makeup or at diversity through US lens when trying to ascertain diversity/minority status in other cultures, because it certainly doesn’t map out the same.

22930

Yeah, I hate this. It’s an age-old practice to use dehumanizing language about the enemy, but it’s a bad one just the same.

22931