Comment by padthai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by padthai | Hacker News Reader

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Decentralization of power is not always better. It is one of the reasons that China could improve its economy faster than India, for example. Projects like Galileo are impossible without centralization. If the EU did not exist Trump could bully his way in Europe. And so on.

> You are a prime example of this - you just asserted that most people in the UK are racist because they were concerned about the volume of immigration, although the UK is in fact the most ethnically diverse nation in Europe. [...] Polish isn't even a race, Polish people are white!

Ethnicity is much more than looking alike. Not in Europe, nor in Asia, nor in Africa, nor in America (N or S). And a good % of people with Polish ancestry can be easily recognized in UK. They are not that similar.

And by the way, UK is not the most ethnically diverse country in Europe, the EU, or Western Europe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_ranked_by_et...

That table lists Russia and the Congo as more ethnically diverse than the UK. OK, if you define ethnicity in such a way that it has no correlation with skin colour or any of the traditional aspects of racism, then sure. Maybe there are more ethnic tribes or something in the Congo than the UK.

Now go define it in the way people actually mean when they talk about racism, and see what happens.

Projects like Galileo are impossible without centralization

That's clearly nonsense. The International Space Station is not the product of a giant centralised power structure. It's the result of an international collaboration amongst governments, none of them able to control the others. And the ISS is much more complex an endeavour than Galileo.

Look, (ethnic) Russian, (ethnic) Caucasians and Tatars do not look alike. Same in Congo with the Bantu, Pygmy and Nilotic. You are not even choosing good examples for your arguments. Most ethnics conflicts in the world might not even skin colour related because they occur between neighbors. Pakistan/India, the Balkans, Azerbaijan/Armenia etc.

But hey, whatever fits your narrative.

People from the north and south of England can often be told apart by how they look and sound, and north/south bias is a thing - does that make them different "ethnicities"?

I mean, the whole idea that the UK is a massively racist country is so silly nobody has tried to defend it, have they? As defined in a normal way - people of very different skin colours and origins getting along next to each other - the UK does very well.

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