When I read the headline, I sided with the mother. But a five-year old having to cross four roads in total to and from (with vehicles going up 25 mph legally, and who knows how fast illegally) is a bit much.
Some groups of people have absolutely endless amounts of grievances. They have made the grievances their entire personality. They will never be sufficiently satisfied with whatever concessions you make to them
this is a racist dogwhistle. _Homogeneous_ is code for racial or ethnic purity.
the things i read on hn...
Do you believe it's possible to have cultural homogeneity without having racial homogeneity?
Btw I think you're wrong: people can be extremely xenophobic with the folks from the next village over who are their cousins thrice removed. It's nothing to do with race or culture, just who's in the in-group and who's in the out-group, and what those are depends on a myriad of factors that "race" and "culture" are only convenient, but inaccurate, proxies for.
Another example: Greek football fans from Athens will literally murder their counterparts from Thessaloniki, and they're all just as Greek as each other [1]. You just have to draw a line in the sand and people on either side of it will start throwing stones at each other.
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[1] Culturally of course. We're not a "race". Tiny little rant but with Nolan's Odyssey, there were the usual complains about Helen being played by a black woman etc. and people all over the internet were having fights about what real Greeks look like. Oh they have fair hair and light skin. No they have dark hair and olive skin. And so on. The truth is that most Greek families are like mine: one parent is fair-haired and light skinned (my dad: blond hair, green eyes, goes red in the sun; his mom: blond hair, blue eyes, skin like yogurt) and the other is dark-haired and dark skinned (my mom: brown hair, brown eyes, goes brown in the sun; her mom: black hair, black eyes, never sat in the sun). But stereotypes persist so me and one of my friends were asked how come we're both fair-haired with light-coloured eyes when true Greeks are brown and at the same time a friend recommended to me a concealer that was three tones darker than my actual colour even though I was standing right there in front of her eyes with my pasty-white skin. Race is not what it's made out to be. End rant.
Because Japan is the quintessential homogeneous westernish society that most are familiar with. UK and US are not homogeneous by any means. I could have said Poland or Estonia but that doesn't evoke an image of harmony like Japan does due to unfamiliarity (even though they too are largely harmonious).
> why is it that racial differences are also cultural differences?
Probably because race is equivalent to heritage which usually follows a cultural lineage unless one of the generations makes a big effort to assimilate to some other culture. Culture is inherited, and races are inherited. If a baby was born a completely random race unrelated to the parents, then this property wouldn't hold, but the way things are, race ~= culture.
> Like, don't all Americans, black and white, love their guns for example? Or love baseball?
No? Isn't it self evident that Americans don't all share a culture? Aside from the first generation immigrants that are obviously their own culture e.g. Chinatown, Black Americans have an entirely separate culture from White Americans, which have a different culture from Asian Americans. The only way this could change is if all the groups completely assimilate, which is not going to happen.
Race isn't the only factor of course: if all the Japanese heritage Americans moved back to Japan, there would obviously be cultural tension there despite being the same race. But just the way history worked out, in most places and cases that could reasonably happen, racial homogeneity is approximately equal to cultural homogeneity. And when trying to achieve that, it's a lot easier to see that a person is of your race than to see that they are of your culture.
People and groups with unlimited grievances (and, unfortunately, associated revenge fantasies).
Switzerland has less of this. So you can send your 5-year old for a long walk alone, knowing that your neighbors will be looking out.
(PP: even the word "rural" is seen as a dog-whistle, e.g. by the NYTimes.)
Listen: I'm a visible minority where I'm a citizen of, myself. I'm not shilling for racial homogeneity or totalitarian philosophy at all. I'm just sharing my lived experience that when there are lots of groups with lots of grievances against each other, there's less ambient, latent trust.
Regardless, there are local laws against this.
Yeah, but maybe the laws are stupid and should be changed?