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Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

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Re: Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

#81

Post by bell-cot »

ahf8Aithaex7Nai wrote: post #71

I am the son of a (Cuban) immigrant and a German woman. Once, the police asked me if I spoke German, probably because my hair is dark and my eyes are brown. Germany has a bias against “southerners”—the darker your skin, the worse it is. If your skin is light and your eyes are light-colored, you won’t even be perceived as an immigrant as long as you keep your mouth shut. But if you look southern or Asian, you’ll alway…

> It's gotten to the point where I've now lost faith in democracy. Things aren't getting better...

"it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time" - unknown, often attributed to Churchill

Rah-rah democracy advocates, and patriots of countries which imagine themselves democratic, often attribute all sort of mythical virtues to democracy.

But the reality is no more than "statistically less bad than the alternatives".

These days, the by-far worst problem for most supposed democracies is the excessive financialization of wealth. A century ago, the personal fortunes of most better-off people were tied to the overall fortunes of the country, the province, the city, and the neighborhood in which they lived - giving them huge incentives to care about those collective fortunes. Vs. now, the prevailing attitude seems far closer to "when this place goes to shit, I'll just pack up and leave".

Re: Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

#82

Post by dofm »

simianwords wrote: post #10
eloisius wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many races are there? How do you draw boundaries between people who exist on a spectrum of genetic variability? What race are Kazakhs?

Hard boundaries are not required for categories to exist. It is really surprising that smart educated adults don't see this. Will you suggest I'm sexist because I think male and female gender exists?

The implication of what you say — that white and black are races — is that indigenous Australians and African Americans are the same "race", because they both have black skin?

Re: Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

#83

Post by dofm »

dinkblam wrote: post #19
simianwords wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard boundaries are not required for categories to exist. It is really surprising that smart educated adults don't see this. Will you suggest I'm sexist because I think male and female gender exists?

Colors are a a continuous spectrum, yet we put them in a bunch of categories.

Organising people by the colour of their skin makes exactly as much ontological sense as organising library books by the colour of their cover.

Re: Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

#84

Post by dofm »

simianwords wrote: post #74
washadjeffmad wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Race theory was always pseudoscience to imply the generalized differences between people who looked differently were genetic and thus inherent traits. It's an extension of a much older, more insidious idea - blood purity. There are still people who would pretend to trace their own lineage back through every scholar, king, and prophet to Adam, while choosing to believe that everyone else is a mongrel line, inferior an…

Way to mix completely different things. Its like saying: Gender exists hence men are better. No one suggests this kinda thing. Race is not pseudo science. Race is real. White people are meaningfully different from Black people. Its not bad to be different. It doesn't mean one is different from the other. You can't beat racism by claiming race itself is not real!

In what ways are white people meaningfully different from black people?

Re: Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

#85

Post by soco »

thi2 wrote: post #51
lukeweston1234 wrote: post #37

As someone who moved from the U.S to Germany and has been here for ~15 months, I figured I would drop a few comments while I'm running a NixOS rebuild. Let me start with the wonderful things: Public transportation is nice, at least compared to the U.S. I like the shared sense of responsibility that Germans have with things like recycling. The directness is quite nice, in the U.S I often had to question if someone was…

Germans tend to differentiate between getting takeout (something like kebab/pizza/asia box to go or delivered home) or eating out (going to a restaurant and eating there). But I'd argue for most people getting into the car to get takeout is not very common.

Thinking about my Swiss village, the only takeout worth thinking about is the delicious kebab downhill which doesn't do delivery. Otherwise it would be all eat.ch and similar. Why should I drive when I can get it delivered for no extra cost? I guess it's just a cultural difference, not a drawback (in either direction)

Re: Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

#86

Post by happytoexplain »

dofm wrote: post #82
simianwords wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard boundaries are not required for categories to exist. It is really surprising that smart educated adults don't see this. Will you suggest I'm sexist because I think male and female gender exists?

The implication of what you say — that white and black are races — is that indigenous Australians and African Americans are the same "race", because they both have black skin?

There's no need to torture semantics. We all understand how the terms "black" and "white" are used in the English-speaking world. They are umbrella terms with varying usage depending on what superset/subset of people you are talking about in the moment. E.g. in the US, "black" usually refers to dark-skinned people of African descent (I assume you know this), but other dark-skinned people might be included depending on context. Yes, biological/genetic "race" is a many-dimensional spectrum, in which context it's fine to argue that "race" doesn't exist, but that doesn't make the colloquial words used to describe "race" meaningless. It just makes their borders fuzzy when mapped onto a biological context.

Re: Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

#87

Post by dbspin »

simianwords wrote: post #72
dbspin wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physiognomic appearance does not equate with genetically discrete populations, so while we can obviously visually identify that people have broadly asian, african, european, polynesian dissent etc; this doesn't equate with other factors stereotypically associated with those 'races'. Race is a folk taxonomy. Ethnicity and genetics are complex - like most things when you make more than a cursory investigation. So while…

> Physiognomic appearance does not equate with genetically discrete populations The idea that race affects EXACTLY things that appear on the surface and nothing else is laughable. You need mountains of layers of cognitive dissonance to believe this. For example: different races are susceptible to different diseases. Instead of hitting tackling racism properly, you are putting fingers in your ears and shouting that ra…

[flagged]

Re: Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

#88

Post by dbspin »

llamajams wrote: post #32
dbspin wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physiognomic appearance does not equate with genetically discrete populations, so while we can obviously visually identify that people have broadly asian, african, european, polynesian dissent etc; this doesn't equate with other factors stereotypically associated with those 'races'. Race is a folk taxonomy. Ethnicity and genetics are complex - like most things when you make more than a cursory investigation. So while…

Aren't haplotype groups essentially "race"? Certainly there is not white/black race, but a southern costal Indian would self differentiate from a central one, you can spot the difference visually,culturally and lingustcally and there is also well understood predispositions of different groups to specific ailments (see diabetes). Not my area of expertise so might be way off

I'm no expert on haplogroups either, but cursory googling seems to indicate they are far more numerous and nuanced than the late victorian, scientific-racism derived classifications used today - i.e.: black, white, asian etc.

But we don't need to be specialists in population genetics to observe that human cultures interbreed. We can't reliably correlate visible biomarkers with genetic origin, especially in contemporary multicultural societies or any of the places where numerous land invasions over thousands of years have ensured continual group mixing. For example Indian subcontinent, Afghanistan, Mongolian steppe etc. My nephew is half 'Irish', half 'Indian'. But what does that mean exactly? His ancestry is likely to contain contributions from hundreds of subgroups and linguistic populations across South East India, as well as Ireland and the UK more broadly. Visibly he looks 'Indian', but what does that mean for a determinant of race?

These concepts were engineered in the colonial era. Only the names have changed. In college my friends and I picked up a cut price set of colonial era British encyclopedia. They had lots to say on racial groups, with detailed descriptions of the personality types, intelligence and appearance of groups like 'negroids' and 'hibernians'. Of course none of this was based on what we'd today term scientific reasoning or measurement - and yet the conclusions and stereotypes persist in our culture. Irrespective of powerful counterexamples demonstrating that culture and economics determine an enormous amount of educational and attainment potential. e.g.: Nigerian American economic success [1], the explosive boom and continual exceptional economic performance of Ireland [2], or the absurd difference in educational outcomes of countries which are ethnically homogenous but politically divided - e.g.: North and South Korea, Haiti and Dominican Republic etc.

Remember interindividual differences radically outpace intergroup differences. Which is not to suggest that highly homogenous ethnic groups (e.g.: askinazi jews, or certain West African populations) can't have significant differences in athletic ability. But such differences are on population levels much smaller than observable 'races' per say.

[1] https://medium.com/@joecarleton/why-nigerian-immigrants-are-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Tiger

Re: Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

#89

Post by dofm »

happytoexplain wrote: post #86
dofm wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implication of what you say — that white and black are races — is that indigenous Australians and African Americans are the same "race", because they both have black skin?

There's no need to torture semantics. We all understand how the terms "black" and "white" are used in the English-speaking world. They are umbrella terms with varying usage depending on what superset/subset of people you are talking about in the moment. E.g. in the US, "black" usually refers to dark-skinned people of African descent (I assume you know this), but other dark-skinned people might be included depending o…

Biological race does not, indeed, exist. Really at all. Defining it as a many-dimensional spectrum just so you can to continue to use the word "race", now that is torturing semantics.

The semantics I am referring to are the suggestion that "white" and "black" exist as races on a genetic level.

The example I am introducing is to test the understanding behind that suggestion.

Re: Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

#90

Post by dofm »

simianwords wrote: post #73
DasIch wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Race != Race. Race as a social construct exists but biologically speaking there is no such thing. In the US the term "race" always refers to the social construct. The german word "Rasse" did not undergo that same change in meaning. Even the most extreme right wing in Germany, the most openly racist people you can find would not dare to use that word in this manner in public. This is far more offensive than using the…

> Race as a social construct exists but biologically speaking there is no such thing Mountains of layers of cognitive dissonance are needed to believe this. Race is absolutely biological. To think otherwise is fooling oneself. You are doing a disservice to combating racism by negating the existence of race itself. Do you really think racism will just go away by suggesting black people and white people are exactly the…

You keep talking about white people and black people as if you think these are two separable races with internal characteristic differences.

They just aren't.

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