Seems like the bias is on your part… Which is ironic, given the articles content….

Or do you have _evidence_?

No, I don't have any bias, it's everybody else having biases. To be sure, I just checked how many times before I was biased (it's zero times), so I can't be now.

The username kinda suggests an Eastern European (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Muromets) so I read the post as a personal opinion that the bias exists.

Not everything comes with evidence, nor is everything a court case. If you have experienced racism again and again though, you can often tell when you see it, or you can quite safely deduce it in a case or wrong treatment, even without hard proof.

Racism? I didn't know Romanians and Danes were of different races.

Well, now you've learned something.

If you happen to get a bit into the whole Nazi classification of races (don't, you almost certainly have something better to learn), you'll find that they made a distinction between Germanic "Aryan" types and Slavs.

>Conflating racial prejudice with cultural prejudice is a cheap trick.

Race is culture. There is no scientific or biological basis for the racial classifications we use. That whole framework was invented by European slave traders and imperialists to justify white supremacist ideology. At one point, Irish and Italian immigrants to the US weren't considered white. Whether Jews are white or not depends on one's opinion of them (they tend to become less white the more paranoid people become of them.) Greeks wouldn't be considered white by many people yet many white people also hold up ancient Greece as the bedrock of "white culture," which as a concept doesn't even really make sense. "Asian" defines half the human population, so broad as to be nearly useless. "Black" is a whole can of worms. None of it is scientific or objective, all of it is a social construct.

>Racism? I didn't know Romanians and Danes were of different races.

Now you do. In the ideology of racism (from the 19th century to the Nazis and beyond) not only Romanians and Danes are of different races, but also Nordic/Germanic/Anglosaxon are of different race to Italians, Bulgarians, Greeks, and so on, including of course the Irish. With a long history of those (and more) not considerd "white" in the US, and being persecuted by the KKK and others.

>Conflating racial prejudice with cultural prejudice is a cheap trick.

Yes, god forbid we condemn prejudice as racial when in fact it's just prejudice because of their "inferior" culture.

Of course, though, those two go hand-in-hand historically. For example, according to Nazi racism, Jews had a "damaging influence" on German culture, they promoted various forms of decadence and so on. And of course every modern racist would say they don't hate blacks as a race, just black culture and crime and so on.

And yet they are wrong, so clearly evidence was needed.

> If you have experienced racism again and again though, you can often tell when you see it, or you can quite safely deduce it in a case or wrong treatment, even without hard proof.

There may be some overlap between systemic racial mistreatment and child abuse - however the nuances seem to set them far apart. I believe conflating the two makes it harder to get the full measure of each.

It's not that they can't be compared. It's that they ought to be fully considered in isolation first.

Wait, are there Europeans who don't acknowledge that this bias exists? In my experience with European colleagues and those who've traveled a lot there it's so universally-acknowledged that this would surprise me.

It could be, but communication issues could also be at play, plus overeager doctors/social workers. In Romania they go at great lengths not to pull children out of family environments, in Denmark and other more developed countries it could be the opposite.

Implying ripping children out of their families willy-nilly is "more developed."

Development past a certain point is not universally a good thing.

The term is used to describe the stages a country has been through, and there’s plenty of evidence that as countries develop further, the nature of those developments may or may not be beneficial.

Brexit, online safety and other forms of “progress” come to mind.

Late stage capitalism.

Its tongue in cheek. Germany is developed, but you will get arrested if you try to homeschool your children.

It’s very important your children be taught whatever it is the government wants them to be taught! Which went very well for Germany in the 1930s…

b/c it's seen as a basic right, and issue of equality to have access to the same level of state education. The concept of "your" children is something of the problem.

It could be a problem, but usually isn’t.

The (darkly) funny thing in the case of Germany is that this lack of diversity in education has created a generation with the fertility rate of South Korea (ie dying).

In this case, the state creating a monoculture that results in the ‘destruction’ of the existing state goes to show why evolution values diversity far more than monocultures.

> this lack of diversity in [German] education

any evidence of that?

In a lot of sci-fi, the most “developed” civilisations have their children raised by robots in crèches.

I don’t think it was supposed to be aspirational.

Not ripping children from actually abusive families is more developed. There are many cases of abuses families who need to lose their children, and in some those families still have children. There are other cases where good families lose their children.

Note that I carefully did not say anything about what abuse is. Unfortunately there is no agreement and I don't want to get into that debate (it is well worth having, but it would change the direction I'm trying to go here).

There are debatable issues, and clear cut issues -- not providing basic care or medical care is quite clear cut.

Homeschooling is debatable, if the children are evaluated to be equal to their regular schooled peers, I don't think the child should be taken out of the family environment, but should be subject to further wellness checks by social workers.

> There are many cases of abuses families who need to lose their children, and in some those families still have children.

A challenge is where the ripped-off children wind up, a foster home system with it's own abuse issues.

I'm not implying anything other than the fact in Romania social workers KNOW it's very, very likely the child will fare worse fate in an orphanage or foster care, EVEN in cases that would be considered abuse in the West.

Given a more developed country, I'd presume there are more people willing to adopt/do foster care for the right reasons and the social workers can regularly check upon the welfare of the child, thus there can be legitimate reasons to lower the threshold of taking a child out of a family setting vs a less developed country.

That's not at all the implication.

> in Denmark and other more developed countries it could be the opposite.

Did you mean: richer?

I mean more developed, because a country like Saudi Arabia is rich but not developed imho, and there could be countries that are develope -- i.e. they have good education, infrastructure, medical care, human rights, clean environment etc etc and not that rich.

> like Saudi Arabia is rich but not developed imho

> good education, infrastructure, medical care, human rights, clean environment

I don't know for sure (never been to Saudi Arabia), but I'm guessing they check off all the boxes except for human rights[1]. (About a clean environment--I imagine they'd be as clean as Abu Dhabi or Dubai (the UAE) which were a lot cleaner imo or on par with Western cities.

I guess this is a matter of subjective matter, but is _human rights_ a dimension a country has to have in order to be considered developed?

If human rights is indeed a dimension that needs to be satisfied, would that mean that the brutal treatment of black and brown minorities in the US by the police would make the U.S. a country that's not developed?

Also, Western European countries also have a track record that has historically surpassed world records for brutality. For example, Belgium[1] was chopping off the hands of African tribal people they had forced into labor (effectively enslaved), Germany murdered 6 million innocent Jewish people[2] and had a habit murdering people even before the Nazis in its colonies as well[3], the British were responsible for numerous famines in India as well as famine in Ireland as well as other atrocities[4], the French committed atrocities[5], so did the Netherlands and the Dutch with the East India Company[6], and Spain and Portugal (along with England and others) were highly culpable in the murder of millions of Native Americans[7].

Did these actions, at least temporarily, render these Western European countries as "not developed" countries?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_and_Namaqua_genocide

[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/worst-atroci...

[5] https://newlinesmag.com/newsletter/the-dark-legacy-of-french...

[6] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/10/dutch-colonial-history-...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_Indigenous_peoples

Sorry, I know this is an old thread, but I feel a bit like I need to share my thoughts on this matter.

> like Saudi Arabia is rich but not developed imho > good education, infrastructure, medical care, human rights, clean environment

Saudi Arabia's record on human rights is truly horrible (for example, recently they've started murdering refugees[0]), but the idea of whether a country is "developed" seems to be highly subjective, imho. I don't know for sure (never been to Saudi Arabia), but I'm guessing they check off all the boxes except for human rights[1]. (About a clean environment--I imagine they'd be as clean as Abu Dhabi or Dubai (the UAE) which were a lot cleaner imo or on par with Western cities. I guess this is a matter of subjective matter, but is human rights a dimension a country has to have in order to be considered developed? If human rights is indeed a dimension that needs to be satisfied, would that mean that the brutal treatment of black and brown minorities in the US by the police would make the U.S. a country that's not developed?

I'm asking this since Western European countries also have a track record that has historically surpassed world records for brutality. For example, Belgium[1] was chopping off the hands of African tribal people they had forced into labor (effectively enslaved), Germany murdered 6 million innocent Jewish people[2] and had a habit murdering people even before the Nazis in its colonies as well[3], the British were responsible for numerous famines in India as well as famine in Ireland as well as other atrocities[4], the French committed atrocities[5], so did the Netherlands and the Dutch with the East India Company[6], and Spain and Portugal (along with England and others) were highly culpable in the murder of millions of Native Americans[7].

Did these actions, at least temporarily, render these Western European countries as "not developed" countries?

[0][a] https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/08/21/saudi-arabia-mass-killin...

[0][b] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/26/world/middleeast/saudi-ki...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free_S...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_and_Namaqua_genocide

[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/worst-atroci...

[5] https://newlinesmag.com/newsletter/the-dark-legacy-of-french...

[6] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/10/dutch-colonial-history-...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_Indigenous_peoples

It also because north Europe has one of the most toxic social services in the world, kidnapping kids 24/7. That's basically their job.

Whatever core truth you're trying to express, wording it in this way isn't helpful.

No.

Seen complaints/protests like this in my country. Then the adult children of the lady leading these protests spoke out against her and pointed out she was just doing it to get a house and embezzling a load of GoFundMe money.

This wasn't SBS though, she just kept adopting out her kids to devote more time to her drug habits.

This is a difficult question I've been pondering between the UK/USA.

Who has more authority over their children and in which domains?

Medical providers, can they ruin kids' lives in various ways? It's easy to manipulate worried parents.

Schools, do teachers have authority over their classroom, how much? Can they override parents, for example when rescuing them from anti-LGBT?

Nobody trusts churches anymore, so that's not really a problem.

> Oh the good old, violent Easter European bias mixed into crap science.

Honest question, trying to parse your statement (and bear in mind I don't live in Europe, so I'm surely missing the obvious): do you mean that in Denmark there is a bias against Eastern Europeans, such as Romanians?

Edit: excellent, got a downvote for asking an honest question and clarifying why I wrote it. Is this an example of the fine discourse we are supposed to have here? This is an honest question, I'm neither European nor a native English speaker and I have difficulty parsing the sentence I quoted. How on earth does this warrant downvotes?

Yes, that's what GP meant.

Domestic violence is still common in Eastern Europe(i.e Romania) so go figure why there is a bias against Eastern Europeans.

Domestic violence is higher where poverty rates are higher. (I am not saying that poverty is the sole determinant, but it closely correlates). You will find pockets of higher domestic violence throughout the US. I don't think you can rationalize bias like this, people with ethnic prejudice will look for any apparent fact pattern to support their preconceived bias.

I could not say I ever experienced it, but I have school-aged relatives that moved to Germany and received all sorts of crap from their peers explicitly for being romanians. Not a race thing because they're whiter than most germans( blonde, white, blue eyes).

It’s not just in Denmark, most Europeans have a negative bias towards Romanian immigrants (mostly because they’re too ignorant to even know Romanians are not Roma).

> because they’re too ignorant to even know Romanians are not Roma

I don't think the term Roma has a bad association, because in my experience nobody but the most woke even know it. That is the PC term. People I've encountered just use gypsy or their local equivalent.

For your edit: 'honest questions' (which are in fact anything but: the person asking has no interest in the answer, and the question itself is often leading) are a common disruptive tactic used by people (normally pushing extreme right-wing ideologies) to derail a conversation.

I'm sure that you're not doing that here, but unfortunately people with genuinely honest questions have become collateral damage caused by disingenuous actors, especially among people with itchy downvote-trigger-fingers.

Yeah, I figured, which is why my original question clarified I'm not from Europe (so no vested interest) and that I might be genuinely missing the obvious answer. Which is why I was surprised by the drive-by downvote.

Thankfully people have responded and now I both understand the sentence and they why!

this "are a common tactic" gets a bit old, good way to gatekeep certain topics.

If the same "tactic" is used, why not come up with a good counter? A point stands whether it's being asked disingenuously or not.

Yes. Romanians probably get the worst of it from the association with Roma in general who are generally discriminated against, but there is generally a base level of anti eastern-european discrimination among western Europe (and especially the UK). Not that all or most western Europeans do this, but it's a significant enough minority that does that it's unavoidable.

There is a skin condition called Mongolian (Blue) Spot (wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_spot ) that doctors can mistake for an infant being beaten or otherwise abused. It has led to a lot of cases of false accusations and children being forcibly removed from their parents who were then charged with child abuse.

According to Wikipedia, as to the distribution of this condition,

> The birthmark is prevalent among East, South, Southeast, North and Central Asian peoples, Indigenous Oceanians (chiefly Micronesians and Polynesians), certain populations in Africa, Amerindians, non-European Latin Americans and Caribbeans of mixed-race descent.

So you can see how, in a Western European nation, even if no-one is being biased in the sense of "hating foreigners", the false accusations would cluster in "non-indigenous" populations, for want of a better word (I originally had "immigrants" then realised that isn't the correct split I'm looking for.). Personally I believe there is no defense for doctors, courts and social workers not knowing about this and checking for it before making any accusations.

This doesn't seem to apply to Romanians / Eastern Europeans specifically, unless they have partly Asian ancestry, but it does show that there are conditions that can be mistaken for abuse that appear in some cultures more than others.

Damn that hits home. I’ve got a blue spot birthmark that was seen at elementary school which then led to child services showing up at home. This happened in the US and everyone involved was “non Indigenous.”

Sorry to hear that happened to you - and I realise that "indigenous" in the U.S. means the opposite to some of Europe, sorry!

I'm guessing if some kind of Commanche social worker turned up to look at a case of blue spot, they'd go "Yeah that's a birthmark, about half our children have it, our nation even has legends about it. Have a nice day!".

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37670664.