Comment by tpoacher
5 days ago
Is it bait? I'm pretty sure it's a reasonably factual, albeit general claim. Asking chatGPT for country-specific examples for instance gives this:
> Yes—some countries have (at various times, and in some cases still today) adopted policies aimed at making the population more “homogeneous,” through segregation, assimilation pressure, or exclusion/deportation. Concrete examples:
- South Africa (apartheid era, 1948–1990s): An official system of racial classification and enforced separation (“separate development”).
- Germany (Nazi period, 1933–1945): State ideology enforced a racial hierarchy and pursued forced removal and mass murder of those deemed “undesirable.”
- Israel (state policies affecting Palestinian citizens and occupied territory, especially since 1967): Includes laws and administrative practices that many observers describe as producing or enforcing unequal status by group; key issues include citizenship status differences and restrictions tied to national/ethnic identity.
- Myanmar (Rohingya): Policies and law enforcement that stripped/blocked citizenship for Rohingya and enabled persecution, culminating in mass violence and displacement.
- Canada (Indigenous assimilation policy, especially 19th–20th century into 1996): Forced assimilation via residential schools and bans on language/cultural practices; many have characterized this as cultural genocide.
- United States (Jim Crow + earlier immigration/citizenship rules; and internment): Historical legal regimes created segregation and restricted citizenship/naturalization based on race/national origin (e.g., earlier Asian-exclusion immigration restrictions).
You may disagree with some examples on this list, but I'm sure even you would consider that the first two are clear examples of diversity-fearing 'cultures' rather than 'bait'. And this is even before considering the wider definition of the word 'culture', which can be even more exclusionary.
I would edit the US item to remove “historical” given the current efforts to reinstate everything in parentheses and add new ones.
Fair point. I did not write my response from a historical viewpoint. I was writing from a current persepective. To give credit to their reply, many of their example are correct. With the exception of some very backwards dictatorships, at this point, pretty much most countries value some diversity. Plus, after 2010, all people under 30 have watched thousands of hours of YouTube, so they know the world is big, cool, and very diverse.
Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I clearly didn't "post generated text" masquerading as human insight in the manner cautioned in that context.
I, the human, demonstrated that even an LLM, which in this context can be viewed as an impartial source, could easily find legit examples.
I could of course have simply stated that this is the case without pasting the LLM text, but in that case I'm fairly sure OP could have simply replied "Nah-uh".