The human race. That's about it as far as I'm concerned.

@Stephanie, do you mean the human species?

Race technically refers to subspecies if I remember Phys Anthropology correctly. The last alternative 'race' for humanity was Homo Sapien Neanderthal. In fact, there is more genetic diversity amongst people of the same color as between random samples of people of different color...

The human race sounds better. In the context of alien races and the human race :-)

Also you're either continuously doing a really lame joke or you still haven't figured out my name is not Stephanie..

Do colors really exist? I always remember thinking having both indigo and violet on the rainbow was stupid. To me it was always just purple, so why break what I consider to be one color into two colors? Probably the same thing with people. The media have taken historical definitions and used it to classify people.

To be honest I do not even know what are considered to be races. Are Japanese the same race as Chinese? Or is the race just Asian and if so does that include Indians?

I do agree with the spirit of it though, it is hard to classify people based on some genetic-based grouping. But tell that to the university admissions officers that dock "Asians" points on their SATs and boost up the SAT scores of people of African descent. They believe that races exist enough to discriminate.

My feeling is that diversity does exist and it is not uniformly distributed. You do have clustering. But to look at someone and mentally pigeonhole him into a category and discriminate based on that, I think is BS. Because there are not enough pigeonholes for everyone. But police are profiling and universities are affirmative actioning... so that is just the situation we have now.

Klokskap, race is lower rank in taxonomy than subspecies. We are also a subspecies of homo sapiens, called homo sapiens sapiens or anatomically modern humans. But apart from that you are right - there are no genetic premises to "create" human races.

The thing with human races is that colour isn't the thing to look at genetically and other than that it's not obvious what makes up race. I wonder if any serious attempts have been made to split humans into different races based upon something less silly than colour, birthplace or birthplace of a small group of someone's ancestors..

I think that wouldn't really achieve anything though. Humans are typically not picked for certain properties when breeding, which I think is the 'problem' with dividing them into races.

@Stephanie, I know, but if you recall this is neither a mistake nor a joke, it's just how I'm gonna call you as a result of our Ukraine dispute.

As for stuff like affirmative actions mentioned by Marlen. While I refuse to accept the notion of races based on genetics no-one can deny that there are huge cultural and socio-economic differences between different groups, and much too often those divisions overlap with the differences in skin-colour.

Race is the byproduct of the way people instinctively identify everything in their surroundings. If you know everything or mostly everything about object A, then for all sorts of objects like A, the quickest way for you to think about and vocally convey the make-up of some object B is "B is like A except for X", where X is some easily identifiable trait, usually sensed with sight but could be something else. Where most people's brains fall into logic pitfalls at that point is the correlation = causation fallacy that leads to generalizing differences observed behaviors as directly related to the differentiating characteristic that stands out. Genetics has nothing to do with it, it's all constructs of the human mind built into societies that are able to pass on those constructs through generations.

@yassem: Just asking because people who feel the need to call someone else lame names because of some past dispute always seem to have a certain intellectual integrity.

Sadly it doesn't always seem to be inherited, so I guess it's not a good property to use for race.

@Stephanie, I love how you pretend to be on such a high horse : D
I have no idea why you think "Stephanie" is lame, do you have anything against women?
Oh, and I am indeed terribly sorry, it just occurred to me it was a thread about a unified European army, not Ukraine.

It's lame because it implies women are cowards or whatever you thought of me.

No, it is based on the generalization that women are more pacifist (and of course the result that for first couple of times I actually thought you were Stephanie).

Ooh! It's a race. It's a race! I'm winning!

Race is fundamentally not a function of genetics.

Culture is sociology, it definitely exists, and there are different cultures.

The idea of race as a biological fact has been thoroughly disproven.

So what makes up ethnicity? What is your ethnic background? What does it mean to be white/caucasian (have you ever been to the caucasus?) What does it mean to be African-American, and what does nationality have to do with ethnicity?

Should ever ethnic group have their own nation (like Israel for the Jewish?)

Does it matter if people with a different cultural background move to your country?

Should we have special rights to our property because of where we were born? Should nationality give us special protections under the law?

Orathic - appart from "have you ever been to the Caucasus?" you make some very good questions. The aspect of ethnicity is one of the most complex problems modern societies have to deal with, IMO - especially in Europe where open borders and huge immigration created just one huge mix of cultures.

And no, I don't think every ethnicity should have its own country. In fact, had I lived earlier I would definitely be against creation of the Jewish state (but maybe it's inherited - my uncle was an anti-zionist activist), the same way I'd oppose creation of a special state for the Romani. We have to learn how to leave among different ethnicities rather than create further divisions.

As for the "special rights" because "I was born here" - I think it's nuts. It's the same logic (also annoying as fuck): I'm stuck in traffic on a highway. Next to me is an entrance and a guy is trying to merge, and I wouldn't let him in. Why? Because my origin was a little bit back, and I am a privileged member of the highway? In my opinion he has the exactly same right to be on the highway as I do, the same way an immigrant has the same right to live and work in my country as I do (what I cannot accept though is coming to a country with the sole purpose of exploiting it's welfare system or beg on the streets, if former was a sport Polish people would win the world cup, while the Romani took the latter to a whole new level making a huge organisations with really nice profit out of it).

(Aside: the question about the Caucasus is interesting only in terms of the history of the word, does one know where the term comes from or why white people are called Caucasian - to highlight the arbitrary nature of this issue)

I really like your highway analogy.

Internal migration in the EU is one thing, and i acknowledge there are some issues - though Poles claiming welfare is an issue which will get progressively less problematic as Poland gets richers (a lot of the Polish i knew in Ireland were working and sending money home, or planning to setup businesses at home with their savings) And the hope of free movement of people, goods, and capital is that wealth will spread more evenly throughout the region (with jobs moving to countries with lower employment costs)

So while I acknowledge there is an issue, I don't think we need to do anything huge to solve it.

The other side of migration is external - the number of migrants coming to italy across the med. The numbers dying in the voyage and what is done with them when they get here.

Aside from anything else, i saw a grea TED talk suggesting the creation of charter cities. The EU / member nations could easily create a city in northern africa. Guarentee it's security. Attract investment from multi-national companies. And see migrants flock to the opportunity of working there instead of crossing the sea...
(And the only reason i suggest doing it in Northern Africa is popular opinion and the cost of land) I'll link the talk if you want...

Yeaaaaaaah, I would really like to see that because it seems to be a wild fantasy the sort of Atlantropa.
First of all - I would love to see a political will in Europe to guarantee absolute safety of even a single city in Libya, let alone a city founded by Europeans (which would immediately make it no. 1 target for all islamists)
Secondly, water, man. Libya has about 5-10 years of life left. After that it's just gonna die out of thirst.

And external immigration is a problem because of two aspects - because it is often associated with immigration from even more different cultures than internal migration. The differences between Poles and ethnic Germans are nothing compared to differences between ethnic Germans and the Vietnamese. And of course it is easier to blend in for someone, who already was raised in similar culture (for example Poland is quite lucky, because the vast majority of immigrants are Slavic - especially Ukrainians and Belorussians so immigration poses almost no problem at all). But secondly, and this is another topic altogether, what poses a huge problem is the sheer amount of immigrants who try to cross the Med. Thousands and thousands of people try to get there each week and Italy just doesn't have the resources to provide sufficient help for all of them. One could even say it's Italy's fault the situation is reaching the state of humanitarian disaster, as Mare Nostrum might be actually encouraging very dangerous behaviour (e.g. ships abandoned by captains - or to be more precise the Libyan equivalent of coyotaje - in the middle of the sea because they now Italians will try to pick up the passengers)

www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer?language=en

I guess Libyans need to sort out their own security. Even if i think some support should be on offer, it should come at the request of those cities, not directed from afar...

As for water... I don't know, maybe they can burn some oil in order to de-salinate the med.

This? http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer?language=en

ninja'd

You are posting too frequently, please slow down.