Hacker News Reader

Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

> how much of Tokyo and Japan being "safe" is because it's largely racially homogenous, politically/socially conservative, and anti-immigration compared to other first world countries.

Citation very much needed.

For instance Russia is socially and politically conservative, mostly "racially" (everyone is "white" because according to you that matters) homogeneous, anti-immigration (outside of limited amounts of labourers from the former Soviet republics), yet... it's not safe nor clean nor developed. Same can be applied to a host of different countries across the world.

View on HN

This feels like an attempt to cash in on modern western antipathy to Russia to win an argument. I would not call Russia especially homogenous, especially dangerous or especially poor. It has modest crime that is relatively low for its income level (which is globally around the low-middle end of the spectrum). Crime in Russia is higher than China, but lower than Mexico (two countries with similar GDP/capita). Russia is also pretty diverse and it has a long history of being a diverse multi-ethnic empire. Commentators in during the Napoleonic Wars even mentioned how the diversity of the Russian empire was a point of national pride. A huge variety of peoples live within the borders of Russia: Kalmyks, Cossacks, Tartars, Russians, Jews, Baltic/Volga Germans, Belorussians, Ukrainians, Finns/Karelians, Moldovans, Georgians, Chechens, Turkmen, Armenians... The fact that the leadership of the Soviet Union passed from a Jew (Lenin) to a Georgian (Stalin) to a Ukrainian (Kruschev) to a Russified Ukrainian from Siberia (Brezhnev) would suggest that the country has a very different attitude toward ethnicity than who it is construed in the context of America.

Hmm, I looked at the list of the world's most dangerous cities, and even scrolling all the way down did not reveal a single Russian city (its mainly South and Middle America, South Africa and the USA). Can you give a citation for your claim?

Just because Russian cities aren't among the most dangerous in official records doesn't make them in any way safe. If nothing else, the complete lack of rule of law, with arbitrary detentions, should be enough of an indicator of an unsafe place.

Now you’re moving the goal posts. There’s plenty of places that lack political freedom but are very safe in terms of day to day life. E.g. China or Singapore.

Well it's a facet of day to day safety - if the police can detain you and torture you to death because they don't like your T-shirt's opinion, that country isn't safe on the expression side. Safety isn't only from random robbers and murderers, but also the state.

99.999% of people will never be in this situation and they don't care. Ask people if they want Singapore's safety and they will take it.

Most people just want to be safe from robbers and murderers. Trying to conflate political safety with physical safety is just wordplay.

That needs citation, too.

30% of Russia isn't white.

Their skin is various variations of white. A Tajik or a Chechen are still white-ish coloured (which is why differentiating by skin colour is one of the stupidest ways to differentiate people)

By white people mean European (which is broadly a mix of Near Eastern Farmers and Western Steppe Herders)

How much of white Russia died in Ukraine in last 18 months comparing to non-white?

What is the point of this question?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com