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What's the most diverse country in the world? Yeah, that's right, you guessed it.

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kswiston

Member
It's funny because it's true. No other continent is known for it's wars quite like the Europeans.

Every continent's history is full of war. Europe just had the technology to do it on a larger, flashier scale in the past 3-4 centuries. Read up on the history of the Korean Peninsula for instance. Those guys were always at war with each other or China.
 

RM8

Member
Wow, Japan. I realise this is only Tokyo, but it seems to me like we foreigners are everywhere here. I guess the diversity takes a sharp dive as soon as you step out of the city.
 

Principate

Saint Titanfall
Every continent's history is full of war. Europe just had the technology to do it on a larger, flashier scale in the past 3-4 centuries. Read up on the history of the Korean Peninsula for instance. Those guys were always at war with each other or China.
I'm fully aware of that but there's a reason why Europe ended up dragging the rest of the world into global conflicts both times. It's a pretty unique feature to it.
 

99Luffy

Banned
Pointless definition of diversity imo.
If youre white, black, asian, latin, or middle eastern. Which country would you least feel alienated in? Thats diversity.
 
He's still using a very colonialist viewpoint on skin color and the social/racial hierarchy that were created and gave a sense of unity of the same skin color towards/against somebody of a different skin color.

Racial hatred and classification is an ancient concept found all around the world. At best you could pin "scientific racism" on white people, if you must take that route.

I'm fully aware of that but there's a reason why Europe ended up dragging the rest of the world into global conflicts both times. It's a pretty unique feature to it.

War, conquest, colonialism, imperialism and genocide are historically all common human endeavors. Scale is the only difference when it comes to the European practice of these things.
 

Fuchsdh

Member
How to be a diverse country: Have some colonial power(s) draw arbitrary country borders

Yep. There's a reason that Africa dominates that list, and it's because it's filled with countries that are not heavily urbanized, and have borders that don't correspond well to any ethnic group, let alone the dozens that might be in any one.
 

Gutek

Member
Pointless definition of diversity imo.
If youre white, black, asian, latin, or middle eastern. Which country would you least feel alienated in? Thats diversity.

Middle eastern is white. Latin could be any race. The American lens sucks.
 
Yeah I didn't mean to single out Switzerland as cheating or anything, but the federalization keeps the groups clearly distinct. There are technically four ethnic groups that make up the ethnicity 'Dutch' in the Netherlands (actually there are many more in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, but I take it they mean Netherlands proper). Frisian, Lower Saxon, Lower Franconian and Middle Franconian. If the Netherlands would have formed as a federalized state according to ethnic groups (and not united provinces later coalescing into one nation state), people would likely still identify themselves Frisian, Saxon, etc, instead of Dutch. That the diversity rate here is lower than the immigration rate, furthermore means that people self identify as Dutch even when it's not technically their ethnicity.
And even then I think many people in the Netherlands still identify themselves as Limburgian, Frisian, Achterhoeker etc.. and have many distinct features in language, religion, last names and cultural customs that may be larger than between some groups that are considered of different etnicity in this research. I think the methodology doesn't present a good view of the diversity of some countries.
 
LOL Not within a White dominated society.

ok. This is the 2013 cast of Canadian Big Brother.
slice_-_meet_your_houseguests_canada_25975529.jpg

and this is the 2013 cast of the American version:

I want your honest opinion. Which cast is more racially diverse?
 
Seems a bit flawed that tribes only counts towards diversity in some countries but is completely taken out of the picture in others. If anything this highlights to me that colonial borders make it hard for people to find and accept a national identity. Or that some racialy and culturally close groups just didn't come together yet to form a national identity.

I find that interesting considering the history of my own country, Germany, which ranks pretty low on that list. For the longest time the map of central Europe looked like a clusterfuck thanks to each German tribe having it's own state. Only in 1871 Germany unified for the first time. The German language as something that people from north to south can understand only took proper shape after the protestant reformation thanks to Martin Luthers translation of the bible.
 

kswiston

Member
Wow, Japan. I realise this is only Tokyo, but it seems to me like we foreigners are everywhere here. I guess the diversity takes a sharp dive as soon as you step out of the city.

You also likely notice foreigners because they stick out. Also, tourists.

It looks like there were about 16k American foreign nationals living in Tokyo proper in 2012, out of a population of 13 million. Even if you combine foreign nationals from China, South Korea, and the Philippines (so not just non-east asians), the number is less than 500k out of 13M. Not very diverse. And as you say, diversity takes a dive as soon as you leave the city.
 

patapuf

Member
Who's saying that? There's been wars between people of the same skin colour all over the world. People are always going to dislike people who are different from them, but it seems like race can make this a much larger issue, especially with integration. I'd love to be proven wrong and that anyone of any race can actually move to any of the top 20 countries on this list and not have any issues/be accepted as one of their own. It would be really neat to see a place like that.

Speaking for switzerland, if you are slavic for example , you can have a very hard time integrating yourself based on appearance and name alone (though it's getting better). Just because the skin colour is the same doesn't mean there are not plenty of other visual tells. Europeans will and are still able categorize from which part and ethnicity of europe you come from based on how you look.

That leads to exactly the same issues with prejudices, systemic rascism ect. as when people have different skin colour.

This is true in other parts of the world too.
 

Principate

Saint Titanfall
Pointless definition of diversity imo.
If youre white, black, asian, latin, or middle eastern. Which country would you least feel alienated in? Thats diversity.
That's an extremely simplistic and naive definition of diversity. Even among black people within of all sorts of African countries you may still feel more alientated in that sane countru than you would in some western countries.
 
ok. This is the 2013 cast of Canadian Big Brother.


and this is the 2013 cast of the American version:


I want your honest opinion. Which cast is more racially diverse?

Are you really going to use an anecdotal example? LOL

For the sake of argument, let's say your right, I think the biggest problem is nobody watches Canadian shows so people's perception of Canada is skewed towards pasty whiteness.
 

Fritz

Member
I think there are two reasons for that:

The first is that communicating over the Internet is not the same as meeting a person in real life, and our brains have evolved to respond much more to the latter. In this sense I believe that connecting the world virtually is only the first step towards connecting it completely.

The second reason is something Historians like to talk about: social and cultural change has always been driven by recombination of different factions leading both to unification of separate groups as well as emergence of new subgroups within those groups. It's basically one everlasting mixer.
In this sense it's possible to imagine a future where humanity is divided not along cultural or ethnic lines, but along ideological or intellectual lines, with each group being highly genetically diverse within itself.

My bet is on education/affluence.

There is already a global community of young liberal high profiles that probably feels more connected to someone of the same group from abroad than to some people of their own community.
 
He's still using a very colonist viewpoint on skin color and the social/racial hierarchy that were created and gave a sense of unity of the same skin color towards/against somebody of a different skin color.

I'm not sure that it's that people with the same skin colour are necessarily ethnically similar, it's that two people who hail from the same geographic location and are therefore likley to have the same skin colour are likely to be more ethnically similar than two other people who come from different sides of the plant and whose skin colour (may) reflect(s) that geographic distance.

Having the same skin colour as someone else is a poor indicator of genetic similarity but having different skin colour from someone is a good indicator of genetic difference.
 

Principate

Saint Titanfall
Because the world cares enough about European politics to intervene?
Or more accurately Europe has affected so much of the world through colonialism that shit that occurs there tends to spread.
Racial hatred and classification is an ancient concept found all around the world. At best you could pin "scientific racism" on white people, if you must take that route.



War, conquest, colonialism, imperialism and genocide are historically all common human endeavors. Scale is the only difference when it comes to the European practice of these things.
Exactly scale is the entire point and I'm not only talking technologically. The influence of those wars don't simply effect Europe like most Country/contental wars they spread much further
 

99Luffy

Banned
You just named 3 at the very beginning of your list?
And the others? People identify with race, culture, language, and yes. Skin color.
If I go to an employer who touts diversity and I get there to find 12 different versions of "third generation" british thats gonna leave me pretty annoyed.
 
Who's saying that? There's been wars between people of the same skin colour all over the world. People are always going to dislike people who are different from them, but it seems like race can make this a much larger issue, especially with integration. I'd love to be proven wrong and that anyone of any race can actually move to any of the top 20 countries on this list and not have any issues/be accepted as one of their own. It would be really neat to see a place like that.

Speaking from a German perspective: There was a big immigration wave of Iranian intellectuals who left Iran after the revolution. They have the highest rate(IIRC) of university degrees per capita. There is no anti-Iranian sentiment in the German populace at all. I think it's more of a class/education issue than an ethnic one.

edit: Beaten by Fritz of all people
 

efyu_lemonardo

May I have a cookie?
Are you really going to use an anecdotal example? LOL

For the sake of argument, let's say your right, I think the biggest problem is nobody watches Canadian shows so people's perception of Canada is skewed towards pasty whiteness.

I think there's a bigger reason to discount Canada: its tiny population compared to the US. Diversity may be the topic of this thread but on a practical matter I think most of us can agree that achieving it on a large scale is much more difficult than on a small one.
 
I'm not sure that it's that people with the same skin colour are necessarily ethnically similar, it's that two people who hail from the same geographic location and are therefore likley to have the same skin colour are likely to be more ethnically similar than two other people who come from different sides of the plant and whose skin colour (may) reflect(s) that geographic distance.

Having the same skin colour as someone else is a poor indicator of genetic similarity but having different skin colour from someone is a good indicator of genetic difference.

No but my point is skin color grouping and hatred exacerbated during colonialism, imperialism, and the Atlantic slave trade. Ethnic hatred was more prevalent because as you said they hail from the same geographic location and tend to be your neighbors despite being the same skin color.

I think there's a bigger reason to discount Canada: its tiny population compared to the US. Diversity may be the topic of this thread but on a practical matter I think most of us can agree that achieving it on a large scale is much more difficult than on a small one.

No doubt, I was just explaining why people think of Canada as less diverse than America and why that perception still persists.
 
Seeing Japan as the third least diverse country in the world reinforces how I kinda shrug off people trying to taking their games to task for not being super diverse when probably the vast majority of people in that country have never seen someone not Japanese except on TV.
I mean, Disney made a successful kids movie about the Polynesian people without a single white character.

How is that a valid excuse?
 

PillarEN

Member
Wow, Japan. I realise this is only Tokyo, but it seems to me like we foreigners are everywhere here. I guess the diversity takes a sharp dive as soon as you step out of the city.

It's the same story in the Czech Republic but not on such a wild level. Outside of Prague it's very homogenous with a very small amount of ex-Vietnamese and a little Roma. My grandma probably hasn't seen a black person since she last visited our family in the States and she lives in a 100 thousand populated city. Country side? It's pure white except for extreme exceptions. Japan with 98.5% of the population being Japanese? It's a whole nother level regardless of tourism. That tourism means jack in terms of being more understanding of the outside world. And not in a negative or positive sense. Just a number game. Especially outside the major cities.
 
I think it's a valid point. From history it seems easier for people to get along if they have the same skin colour. The brits might dislike eastern European people, but imagine if they had a different skin colour?

Nobody in Sweden is going to complain about all the Finnish people immigrating to their country.

Not today but as far as I know in 50s and 60s when huge amount of finns emigrated to Sweden they were treated as second class citizens and there were actual programs trying to turn them more ''swedish'' (not allowing speak finnish in schools etc).
 
No but my point is skin color grouping and hatred exacerbated during colonialism, imperialism, and the Atlantic slave trade. Ethnic hatred was more prevalent because as you said they hail from the same geographic location and tend to be your neighbors despite being the same skin color.

All these have been things for thousands of years. The only thing Europeans did different was possess the technology to perform them on a global scale.
 

Morrigan Stark

Arrogant Smirk
Wow, Japan. I realise this is only Tokyo, but it seems to me like we foreigners are everywhere here. I guess the diversity takes a sharp dive as soon as you step out of the city.
Must be Tokyo. Even in a large city like Osaka, I saw very very few foreigners.
 
Wow, Japan. I realise this is only Tokyo, but it seems to me like we foreigners are everywhere here. I guess the diversity takes a sharp dive as soon as you step out of the city.

It's the same story in the Czech Republic but not on such a wild level. Outside of Prague it's very homogenous with a very small amount of ex-Vietnamese and a little Roma. My grandma probably hasn't seen a black person since she last visited our family in the States and she lives in a 100 thousand populated city. Country side? It's pure white except for extreme exceptions. Japan with 98.5% of the population being Japanese? It's a whole nother level regardless of tourism. That tourism means jack in terms of being more understanding of the outside world. And not in a negative or positive sense. Just a number game. Especially outside the major cities.

Honestly that's in line with the typical model of migrant distribution across a country, particularly in the modern era. Migrants tend to cluster around cities and other areas of relatively high development for reasons of economic opportunity, ease of transition (as in, if there's existing communities of transition), and access to resources. In nations where such migration is at least somewhat extensive - like the UK - this can filter out into less urban areas, but will still see difficulty penetrating the truly rural.

All these have been things for thousands of years. The only thing Europeans did different was possess the technology to perform them on a global scale.

That's why he said exacerbated. As in, enhanced. Made worse.

On the point of the slave trade, what Europeans promoted is what is particularly known as 'chattel slavery', which is slavery en masse and that treats the slave as little more than an object. Chattel slavery was not previously unheard of but it wasn't the big form of slavery either, and moreover, slavery had become quite contentious back in many of the European countries that would go on to actually promote the atlantic slave trade. The dehumanisation that was part of that was necessary to overcome the dissonance of the fact that slavery was technically not legal in say, England itself at the time (read on Somerset vs. Stewart), and shifted the way that race was seen to influence a person's very nature.
 

kswiston

Member
I think there's a bigger reason to discount Canada: its tiny population compared to the US. Diversity may be the topic of this thread but on a practical matter I think most of us can agree that achieving it on a large scale is much more difficult than on a small one.

I'm not really sure what you are trying to say, or why population matters much beyond a certain point. There are like 7-8 countries in the world which don't have "small" populations compared to the United States. Are those the only ones that count?
 

efyu_lemonardo

May I have a cookie?
My bet is on education/affluence.

There is already a global community of young liberal high profiles that probably feels more connected to someone of the same group from abroad than to some people of their own community.

Speaking from a German perspective: There was a big immigration wave of Iranian intellectuals who left Iran after the revolution. They have the highest rate(IIRC) of university degrees per capita. There is no anti-Iranian sentiment in the German populace at all. I think it's more of a class/education issue than an ethnic one.

edit: Beaten by Fritz of all people

This is exactly the kind of intellectual divide I was talking about. Sooner or later (and at the current rate I'm betting on sooner) there will be a large fracture along those lines.
Edit: and I'm hoping that when this fracture manifests itself it will go along with a unification along the orthogonal lines of ethnicity and race.
 

Z3K

Member
UAE is only no.33? It feels much more diverse than that, I've met people from all corners of the globe here.
 
No but my point is skin color grouping and hatred exacerbated during colonialism, imperialism, and the Atlantic slave trade. Ethnic hatred was more prevalent because as you said they hail from the same geographic location and tend to be your neighbors despite being the same skin color.

I can get on board with that. Of course, ethnicity in African society as a concept was fundamentally altered by the colonial experience. What was once a fluid, complex system of relationships based on geographic, social, familial and trading contacts (and probably some other factors I've forgotten) was reduced to simply Tribe One and Tribe Two by the Europeans. Partly from ignorance but mostly as a device by which to control the population. Tribe One gets put in charge but if Tribe One fucks with London, then Tribe Two gets the job AKA divide and rule. This still has an impact today.

I suppose what I'm saying is that, with just a little digging, there are so many side issues and semantic and subjective judgements around ethnicity, that any attempt to count separate ethnicities and rank countries based on that count is going to need to be a lot more in depth and considered than the approach taken here, which is a fag packet job when you break it down. And to be fair, it is not claiming to be scholarly work.
 

EGM1966

Member
Technology will be key in this. Imagine a world where you can cheaply travel between any two points on the globe in an hour - such a revolution would do more to break down cultural (and ethnic) barriers than a hundred peace treaties or trade agreements.

Yup. Diversity hinges on people actually mixing for real and travel and access are key to that.

Sadly that's why we're seeing push-back like in US and UK to an extent now. It's partly driven by a fear of real diversity and cultural change (among other factors to be sure) and it's about trying to slow it down and refocus on a notion of what a "true" citizen of those countries are.

Myself the sooner we all mix a shit ton and interbreed a shit ton the better. Remove the very foundations of "us/them" as quickly as possible.
 
It was ethnic hatred, not something rooted in a philosophy like White Supremacy.

Race in that context is just a large collection of ethnicities defined by common perceived characteristics.

White Supremacy is no more deeply rooted in philosophy than any other supremacist attitude. The scientific language they use is a mostly unique trait though.

Myself the sooner we all mix a shit ton and interbreed a shit ton the better. Remove the very foundations of "us/them" as quickly as possible.

It wouldn't matter if we were all the same race if far more divisive concepts like religion, language and cultural practice remained the same
 
Australia so low is a bit laughable when ~50% have at least one parent born overseas but english, scottish, irish, croatian, greek and italians are all white too so no real difference eh?

Yeah, this seems like nonsense.

The article claims Australia is famously anti-immigration when the opposite is much closer to the truth. Yes we are scared of a few thousand people coming via boats and lock them up in overseas gulags but we also accept near to the highest refugee intake on a per capita basis and of whole economic success over the last 25 years is based on allowing as many people in a possible as fast as possible to force growth.

AusGov said:
Australian people

Australia is one of the most ethnically diverse societies in the world today.

Almost one in four Australian residents were born outside of Australia and many more are first or second generation Australians, the children and grandchildren of recently arrived migrants and refugees.

This wide variety of backgrounds, together with the culture of Indigenous Australians who have lived on the Australian continent for more than 50,000 years, have helped create a uniquely Australian identity and spirit.

Indigenous peoples and cultures

Before the arrival of British colonisers in 1788, Australia was inhabited by the Indigenous peoples - Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, sometimes referred to as the First Australians. Aboriginal people inhabited the whole of Australia and Torres Strait Islanders lived on the islands between Australia and Papua New Guinea, in what is now called the Torres Strait.

There were over 500 different clan groups or 'nations' around the continent, many with distinctive cultures, beliefs and languages.

Today, Indigenous people make up 2.4 per cent of the total Australian population (about 460,000 out of 22 million people).
 

trixx

Member
I mean a lot of these tribes also correspond with different languages and dialects. I remember when I was younger, for the most part I only heard twi from most of my family members. One day I went to one of my aunt's house and she was speaking a language that seemed so foreign to me. The vocalizations... It was like wow, I didn't even know the human vocal chords could do such things.

Hundreds of languages and thousands of dialects within a relatively small region is pretty crazy.
 
Are you really going to use an anecdotal example? LOL

For the sake of argument, let's say your right, I think the biggest problem is nobody watches Canadian shows so people's perception of Canada is skewed towards pasty whiteness.

I'm guessing you don't live near the Canadian/US border.

You original comment about the media not depicting Canada as diverse makes sense now. As American media rarely if ever depicts Canada. When they do it's often just a scripted recreation of Canada, and not actual Canada.

If you do live close to the border you can watch both Canadian and American television channels. And you get access to both Canadian/American shows and Canadian/American commercials.

Even just watching commercials you can see Canadian TV is more diverse. Canadian banking commercials constantly use interracial couples in their advertising, and the bank adviser depicted will often be a different race as well. In the American equivalent, often everyone would be white.
 
Race in that context is just a large collection of ethnicities defined by common perceived characteristics.

White Supremacy is no more deeply rooted in philosophy than any other supremacist attitude. The scientific language they use is a mostly unique trait though.

OK, I'm not sure what you're arguing then, when everything jumped off about SKIN COLOR, due to this post I was indirectly responding too.

I think it's a valid point. From history it seems easier for people to get along if they have the same skin colour. The brits might dislike eastern European people, but imagine if they had a different skin colour?

Nobody in Sweden is going to complain about all the Finnish people immigrating to their country.
 
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