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Comment by Etheryte | Hacker News Reader

There's already a number of comments trying to spin this in one racially loaded way or another discrimination loaded way or such. Please stop. I'll try to explain why your take is misguided with a parable which you can no doubt poke countless holes into.

Say you've lived in one place your whole life. You have a neighbour, and they've lived their whole life there as well. One day your neighbour comes to you and asks for a hundred bucks because they've fallen on hard times. Now compare this to a stranger on the street asking you for a hundred because they say they've fallen on hard times.

People go up and above for Ukraine because they're that neighbour. Many have friends, family and/or relatives there. Many have travelled there. This is not about race, or religion, or any kind of hate. We're helping our neighbour.

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No, this looks at Europeans with Rose tinted glasses.

I think there is innate tribalism in all of us. We can all rationally fight it and we rationally know what is morally the right thing to do. But it is in our core psychology to look for similarities/differences and identify as close/distance to other people.

The Ukrainian government has also made an amazing job at galvanizing EU social media around this. The message is clear, it is us, your european brothers and sisters who are suffering right now, please help.

In many ways the Ukrainians have succeeded in an information war where the Georgians, Armenians, Sirians, Yemenis have been unfortunately less successful.

> In many ways the Ukrainians have succeeded in an information war where the Georgians, Armenians, Sirians, Yemenis have been unfortunately less successful.

Ukrainian government is killing it on the "media war" and certainly a case study for the future. It certainly helps that the President is a comedian by trade and backed by producers and screenwriters - they know exactly what people want to ear/see/read. Of course this has also a (huge) negative side but this is another story. Some stuff that makes sense in a movie, doesn't make sense on real life. Scenarios and deaths are real.

In the speeches and statements I have seen, there are a few differences. When addressing the European leaders, the Ukrainian leader speaks English without an interpreter. In addition there aren't any non-christian religious symbols in the image or speech, and when it comes to cultural symbols it is almost exclusively in terms of European union.

I have read/listen to a bit of research when it comes to diplomacy and tensions between nations, and a common theme is that its the small things that tend to have a large impact on kinship, trust and cooperation.

It seems unconditional compassion is not natural to human societies of 21st century. Not in Europe, not in North America, not in Russia, not in South-East Asia.

I guess we should appreciate any compassion that our societies are moved to. And work on expanding that.

Riffing on a biblical quote, who is my neighbour? To a medieval peasant, someone from their villate. To a 19th century citizen, people of their country (most of them). To us, apparently people from some other countries, but not all. It's progress, let's keep up the good work.

>unconditional compassion

The argument from the other side is that the compassion isn't unconditional, because if they were Syrian or whatever they wouldn't have garnered the same compassion.

> We're helping our neighbour.

Cynical view here: We're helping ourselves.

We all know how difficult is to find good devs (edited: with subpar compensation) nowadays. The same applies on different fields also. As an anecdote, Portuguese government is _actively_ asking Ukrainian refugees to come to Portugal and sending them directly to areas known for chronic worker shortage. Ukrainians, typically, are not social security abusers and as such well seen by natives here. However, Portugal is not being successful and the low wages are being appointed (by our journalists) as the main reason why. This also means that other countries are competing for them.

>We all know how difficult is to find good devs nowadays.

Difficult to find good devs willing to work for peanuts maybe. Companies with a great culture and paying top dollar/euro have no trouble getting an influx of quality people, even willing to grind through several stages of interview practices to get in.

By the same logic, I also have trouble finding quality Ferraris. Though I omit to say my budget of $5000 might be the main issue here, so I spread propaganda everywhere that good Ferraris are tough to find.

>Cynical view here: We're helping ourselves.

More like companies are helping themselves here.

I'm supporting all Ukrainian refugees, not just the devs, but it's funny to see Norwegian companies cooperate to attract foreign talent and spin this into some benevolent charity work when they're just looking after their interests, to suppress local market wages.

>By the same logic, I also have trouble finding quality Ferraris. Though I omit to say my budget of $5000 might be the main issue here, so I spread propaganda everywhere that good Ferraris are tough to find.

Can we extend this to more sympathetic/relatable goods? ie.

"By the same logic, I also have trouble finding quality GPUs. Though I omit to say my budget of $500 might be the main issue here, so I spread propaganda everywhere that good GPUs are tough to find."

"By the same logic, I also have trouble finding PS5s. Though I omit to say my budget of $500 might be the main issue here, so I spread propaganda everywhere that PS5s are tough to find."

I disagree that anything below the "top dollar" is peanuts.

I would consider even a fraction of what big tech pays to be fair enough. Thanks to scarcity we can ask for more.

>I would consider even a fraction of what big tech pays to be fair enough. Thanks to scarcity we can ask for more.

Maybe in the US and Berlin/London/Amsterdam that holds true where VC money is constantly raining from the sky keeping the demand higher than the labor supply, but in most of west EU, outside of big tech, the pay of most IT & dev jobs are in line with all other office work grunts.

I wouldn't consider the 50K for mid levels and 80K for seniors, a dev salary to write home about in a high CoL EU country.

Making the labor pool bigger will not improve the wages.

My point is it's not peanuts either.

I know this can sound very first world problem in the current context, but peanuts is always relative to how much things cost in your environment and how much the purchasing power of everyone else is. If every office worker earns as much as every dev then devs do earn peanuts.

Devs in the US and other regions have the unique advantage of earning far more then the median in that area, therefore not peanuts.

Like how if you're earning on 80k in SF you're basically in poverty despite being in the 5% top earners globally.

Maybe in this particular case of the job board, since SW developers have an easier time finding jobs and can in principle work in English.

But for everyone else I bet that the EU will fail to integrate them into the labour market, while still having to offer healthcare, accommodation and other kinds of support, financial or otherwise.

There is no way that this is a win for the EU, otherwise they would have done something similar years ago.

> "People go up and above for Ukraine because they're that neighbour"

Where do you draw the line on "neighbor"? Why Ukraine but not Syria?

I feel like ucranians are fellow europeans. I guess it's the same for Norweigians.

If you look for a well-defined and rational response, I don't think there's one.

Anyway, I'd like to say that people is being too cynical about this. There has been, and there are right now, many efforts in Europe for supporting and integrating non-european refugees and inmigrants.

This "oh look, they care because they're white", well, there's a lot of selection bias right there, and I don't think we should be sorry to care about people we feel it's the same to us.

There has been hundreds of thousands of non-european people inmigrating to Europe for years, but somehow we're hypocrites now.

> "I feel like ucranians are fellow europeans."

> "If you look for a well-defined and rational response, I don't think there's one."

The lack of a well-defined and rational response, beyond vague feelings, is what causes this discussion to eventually reduce down to claims of pure racism.

We're denying that there's racism and xenophobia involved, whilst simultaneously being unable to explain why we're seeing those differences.

I'm not accusing you of anything, I'm merely observing. I hope you too can see why this ambiguity is problematic.

> "There has been hundreds of thousands of non-european people inmigrating to Europe for years, but somehow we're hypocrites now."

And there are many millions more that - given the same support and openness given to the Ukrainian people now - would leave the war-torn, collapsed countries they were born in and look for refuge in better societies in Europe. But those people aren't getting the same level of support. Why do we treat those groups differently then?

>Why do we treat those groups differently then?

Because it's much easier and safer to integrate people with the same religion, ethnicity, that come form a peaceful country with a good track record in STEM[1], meaning they have a high chance they will integrate well with the locals and be productive, with a low chance of unemployment, crime and social unrest that usually comes from importing people from countries with a long history of extreme poverty, crime, civil wars, LGBT & human rights abuse, poor education and religious fanatism.

It's not racist to see that 2+2=4 and call a spade a spade.

[1] Ukraine is 15th place in the world in terms of medal count at the international math Olympiad, ahead of many richer countries like France, Italy, Sweden, Netherlands, Austria, and is home to manufacturers of planes and jet engines and other engineering marvels like the Antonov 225

There's a lot of context missing here. Russia does as well as Ukraine in STEM fields and that is because of the Soviet Union making education cheap and accessible, not anything Ukraine specifically did.

Are you sure that Ukrainians are the same ethnicity?

Are you sure that Ukrainians share the same values about religion and human rights as western europe?

>usually comes from importing people from countries with a long history of extreme poverty, crime, civil wars, LGBT & human rights abuse, poor education and religious fanatism.

You could use this exact sentence to describe many regions behind the iron curtain, Ukraine included. It's really telling how many people here are willing to bend over backwards to paint Ukraine as a progressive, "Western compatible" country all the while pretending that there is zero racism in these attitudes.

Yeah, Ukraine has the same issue every other post-Soviet country has, even the EU ones, like corruption and poverty. But after the 2014 revolution the people of Ukraine proved that they prefer western values more than being Putin's puppet state.

What are western values?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17284511

You're making a lot of broad, unfounded claims. According to [1], Ukraine has a "A long path towards integration" (into the European Union):

> "Of course, it is not only Ukraine’s population but its level of economic development that makes membership so costly for the EU. Ukraine is much poorer than Bulgaria, the poorest existing EU member state. Using 2013 World Bank pre-crisis (mid-year) figures, Ukraine’s GDP per capita ($3,900) was slightly over half (53%) that of Bulgaria ($7,340). Ukraine’s GDP per capita is also just over one-tenth (11%) that of the EU average ($34,240). For the sake of comparison, the GDP per capita of Croatia, the newest EU member, is almost identical to that of Poland ($13,520) and higher than that of the largest candidate country Turkey ($10,945)."

"Ukraine’s membership prospects are also linked to significant legal and political challenges. In discussions over Ukraine’s Association Agreement, EU negotiators repeatedly expressed concern over Ukraine’s high level of corruption, and insisted upon reforms within the judicial and electoral systems, as well as the release of former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko from prison for medical treatment."

[1] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/eu-accession-and-ukrain... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union%E2%80%93Ukraine... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potential_enlargement_of_the_E...

I was talking about the Ukrainian people and you're talking about Ukraine the country. Different things.

> "I was talking about the Ukrainian people and you're talking about Ukraine the country. Different things."

I think this is where this conversation is going to have to end, because I don't think this is a reasonable, or a rational argument to make.

We've started this thread by trying to better understand why many other countries who are in a way worse situation do not get the same help offered now to Ukraine - and you're response is now basically down to "because the Ukrainian people are special and I know it".

>many other countries who are in a way worse situation do not get the same help

Then why aren't YOU helping those in worse situation from many other countries that are not Ukraine?

Help is not a random charity, countries are funded by their taxpayers so the taxpayers in a democratic country should have a saying on where their tax money should go to for help or else their leaders will be voted out come next elections, and if many EU countries are biased for whatever reason to help Ukraine or Ukrainians, then it's their choice to do so regardless of how you feel about it. Life is merciless and inherently unfair to almost everyone and whining about the fairness of it on the internet won't help anyone.

If this unfairness bothers you then vote against this or put your money where your mouth is and donate it or go to the middle east or Africa and help the poor people there.

They are not getting the same level of support? Last time I checked there was free housing, food etc and guidance for all of them, not to mention the thousands of NGOs that cover all roles.

I'm sorry but all I can see in this criticism is people who feel uneasy because we feel closer to Ucranians.

I don't feel sorry for it, honestly.

Humans are tribal in hundreds of different dimensions.

For example, If two people riding Harley motorcycles and two other people driving converted camper vans all arrive at a rest stop at the same time, it is likely that they will be friendly with each other based on the type of vehicle they arrived in.

But religion,politics,race,gender,age,nationality all can be big ones as well. Syria hits a lot of those.

Where do you draw the line on "neighbor"? Somebody who lives in your general area, or somebody from the other side of the world?

> Where do you draw the line

There is no universal logical line. It is also very patronising to try and tell a cultral group of people who they should or shouldn't consider their neighbour. This isn't to say comparisons shouldn't be drawn between the different scenarios just that doing so while proposing that the solution is racism (or similar) will lead to nothing consutructive and only bitterness and resentment at the accusations.

I call this term "minor privilege". West is affluent, and they are likely to donate if some is victim from their group. Syria is not in west, so they aren't born with that privilege and many west aren't emphatic to them due to various reasons like media coverage, leaders etc.

Syria’s not in Western, Eastern or any Europe. Might as well be Papua New Guinea, there’s zero connection there.

The horror stories like “Syrian refugee kills pregnant woman with machete” or “10 men gang rape woman outside nightclub” (8/10 being Syrian refugees) certainly aren’t helping either.

Being on the same continent is a very basic minimum requirement which Syria doesn’t pass.

> "Being on the same continent is a very basic minimum requirement which Syria doesn’t pass."

Why is being on the same continent a "very basic minimum requirement"?

Because neighbor in this context literally means next to or very near another country. Open any map and you’ll se that Syria’s neighbors are Iraq and Turkey, not Sweden and Germany.

The EU doesn’t owe any support to Syria, critics should be thankful that the EU is doing so much given the cost in social harmony and a rise in extreme right-wing sentiments.

> "Because neighbor in this context literally means next to or very near another country. Open any map and you’ll se that Syria’s neighbors are Iraq and Turkey, not Sweden and Germany."

Sweden and Germany aren't next to, or "very near" to, Ukraine. Next to Ukraine are Russia, Belarus, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Poland and Turkey.

If you're fine with people from Ukraine coming to Sweden and Germany on the basis of Ukraine's geographical proximity to those countries, I'm not sure why you'd be against people from Syria coming to Sweden and Germany.

A lot of Syrians sought asylum in Greece and Italy - they're not that far from Syria after-all?

> "The EU doesn’t owe any support to Syria"

What does the EU "owe" Ukraine? Ukraine isn't a member state either, just like Syria. Does the EU also owe Georgia or Moldova anything?

I think you need to take a break and contemplate your biases and presuppositions towards people.

Western Europe are helping Poland and Romania which are direct neighbors and do have to accept refugees.

Actually the real mystery is why the EU would take anyone at all from Syria, which is pure courtesy and zero obligation. And the answer is that the EU is a wannabe moral superpower that’s great at taking in refugees (or people claiming to be refugees) and bad at everything that comes after. It’s already over its capacity to absorb outsiders. In the end the EU heads of state act surprised that anti-foreigner sentiments and the popularity of right-wing parties are rising, rinse and repeat while the wheels haven’t fallen off yet.

The UK seem to know their limits since their new found independence and just as expected they’re getting skewered for not throwing the gates wide open.

But Syria and Ukraine are on the same continent: Eurasia.

Yep. Just like how you'd kick out poor souls from Australia and New Zealand if zombies invade those countries and they come crying for help.

This is the wrong way to look at it. If Syrian refugees had the media coverage Ukrainian ones do there'd be job boards for them and much more besides. People are reacting to the magnitude of the perceived crisis. Peoples' compassion pretty much knows no borders.

If there is any finger-pointing to be done then it's at the mainstream media not at how individuals or groups are trying to help human beings in need.

This is based on the assumption that it all has to do with media exposure.

>If Syrian refugees had the media coverage Ukrainian ones do there'd be job boards for them and much more besides

Your confidence in this statement is beyond me. We've been there, Germany 2015, Syria crisis.

There was no lack of media representation of the conflict, the victms, etc. Of course the whole "russia vs the world" thing makes the Ukraine-invasion a different ballgame, but no way in hell would you see job boards for Syrians all across Europe if only the media paid enough attention. The media sold and told the story over and over, to anyone that was willing to listen. People just aren't as open to completely foreign cultures and to Islam as they are to Eastern Europe - and frankly, I can't take a claim that diverges from this very basic groundline too serious. Talk to actual people in Europe and they will confirm what I'm saying here.

Everyone knows someone from Eastern Europe, we know their culture, they are - like the gp said - our neighbours. Syrians are not. I've met wonderful people amongst the syrian refugees, don't get me wrong. But to claim that there is no difference in sympathy whatsoever is simply ignorant to reality, and I think your audience here deserves better than that.

That's completely wrong. People's compassion at least in Europe is very localized and tribal.

The neighbor analogy summs it up perfectly. Don't dismiss it. Learn to understand it.

Not sure about Norway specifically, but job boards for non-western refugees existed before this war started:

https://www.refugeeforce.nl/apply

https://www.hackyourfuture.net/

Sorry. Media coverage would have no perceivable difference in the nature of response to Syrians vs Ukrainians. Rightly or Wrongly it is about what people are comfortable with. Europeans are more comfortable with other Europeans settling near them. Unfortunately there is a religious aspect too in this which I don't need to spell out. Some of that is a fear of what you don't know, but (again) unfortunately it is also sometimes the justified fear of more radical elements of the religion.

With Syria, they share much less commonalities in terms of culture than Ukrainians.

The contrast could not be more stark.

Ukraine has sent their women and children to safety, the men, their leaders, and even many women are staying to fight against overwhelming odds. Literally nobody ever wants a flood of young men into their country.

The Russian invasion of Crimea was already basically ignored 8 years ago. I am 100% certain that if the war had gone something closer to how Putin had hoped, if Zelenskyy has fled to the west, if the military had backed down and the people given up, the response would be similar this time as well.

Also, Ukrainian software development industry is 200k developers strong. I don't know how big is this industry in Syria, but I suspect it is not even close, unfortunately.

I think humans are fundamentally biased a little bit.

And it's probably a good idea if we collectively work towards eventually eliminating those biases.

People are addicted to drama and toxicity. Ignore them

Respectfully; this forum encourages discussion. It is not good enough to say Ukrainians are neighbours and would integrate better than refugees from other countries. At the expense of devolving into whataboutism, Eastern and Western Europe do have their genuine cultural differences. Will the western world still be as accommodating of Eastern European refugees in ten or twenty years?

Let us not speak in parables and downvote legitimate conversation.

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