[Soulflytribe]

So you mean it's kind of not apartheid at all, then?

You must be a very literal person....

It's much more ethical to identify the drivers which lead to under-representation, such as poverty, and focus on that.

What is worrying is that we don't know where this madness will end. They want to apply this same rule for public and private jobs, and even to allow or not political candidacies.
If things keep going this way, in a few years people will have to sit on the front or back of the buses according to their race.


This is a very dangerous experiment that can't possibly come out well.

[Social_Critic]

I agree. I guess it's going to be an experiment, and it's likely to backfire.

You know, in the past I wrote about companies' inability to hire and train locals to get things done. They never think ahead, so they ship in foreigners to do the work. And this applies to all companies. The Chinese in particular are awful. They even ship te guy who's going to clean windows if you let them. This eventually pissses the government off. Except for countries like say Venezuela, where they got a long range plan to make private enterprise go broke and smash independent unions. Venezuela lets the Chinese in by the bushel.

So the madness continues. The problems do exist, but the proposed cures are probably just as bad if not worse.

[Rio]

I'm thinking now, when you give these kind of rights, in the future they will not want to lose it. And since the goverment give the rights to them, they will vote in to the president still rulling just because that :/

[Social_Critic]

Of course, rio, you hit the nail in the head. A+ comment. When special interests get a law passed in their favor, they fight like crazy to hang on to whatever privilege they got. The general population doesn't see the harm it causes, or there aren't enough to worry about that particular subject.

I was ne'er taught this, I just see it happen over and over in every country I live and/or work in. This is why you do need to worry...you may see a special privilege given to you today, in 2 years it goes to another group...by the time you know nobody pays taxes, everybody gets subsidies, and there are 34 holidays a year. You should check out the mess Peron started in -Argentina which is now being capped as the grandest edifice of blunders by our dear Cristina Fernandez de K.

[Smertios]

The problem isn't trying to correct a historical social injustice. The problem is that they are doing it wrong. Quotas don't help. In many cases, they only make things worse. Especially racial quotas in Brazil. We are talking about the land of miscegenation, after all.

It's like we all forgot about Alan and Alex Teixeira da Cunha. Identical twins, who applied to the University of Brasília in the exact same year. They went through the racial examination process, that was required, because of the quotas system. One was considered white, the other was considered black (and yes, black, not pardo):


Of course, that was in 2007. There are bad examples even now. Last year, my university (UFMG) reserved 12.5% of the available positions for public school and black students. The candidates that benefitted from these quotas would run only against each other. If they didn't pass for those 12.5%, they'd run against everyone else. The result was amazing. The students that were running in the quota system had, on average, a better score than the ones in free competition (i.e. not benefitted by quotas). So it was as if there were no quotas in place at all.

To add to the above example, there are dozens of studies around showing that students that enter universities via the quota system do not do worse than other students. Grades are extremely similar. So all this issue is quite pointless. It's not helping with anything. It's not making any difference.

What Rio said a few posts above this one is pretty much the truth:

No, here black and white study on the same place.

There hasn't been a racial divide in Brazil in a long time. The Chico & Roberta (yes, I haven't forgotten the lambada fever) stereotype of blacks, whites and pardos all dancing and having fun together is actually pretty accurate:
[youtube]efvsSS6_ZYw[/youtube]

It's the same in schools, universities etc. The real issue is not race. It has never been race. The real issue is social class. Richer Brazilians have a strong prejudice against the poor. Whether they are black or white is almost always immaterial.

How much's that on Brazil? 'Cause plenty working class families in Spain gotta survive with 1400-1600 EUR a month, and I'm pretty sure the costs of living are higher in Spain than on Brazil.

And they look decidedly middle-class.

1500 USD is equal to about 3060 BRL. Most institutes here consider that 1200 BRL is the minimum a four-member family needs to live without going through difficulties (mostly with food and transportation). So, I doubt that family can be considered poor, but they certainly can't live very comfortably with that much money only.

The social class model used by Brazilian institutes is a bit different from the ones used in the US. We usually classify people into 6 social classes, from A to F, A being the richest class and F, the poorest. Who is part of which class varies from system to system. Many even omit the F class. The system used by the IBGE (official census institute in the country) is this:

• Class A: Monthly wage above 12440 BRL
• Class B: Monthly wage between 6220 and 12440 BRL
• Class C: Monthly wage between 2488 and 6220 BRL
• Class D: Monthly wage between 1244 and 2488 BRL
• Class E: Monthly wage up to 1244 BRL

That would put such family in Class C, which is usually understood to be the traditional middle class. But yeah, stuff here is usually more expensive. Especially with so many taxes. So being in Class C isn't exactly a good thing.

[KlassWar]

I'm leaning to agree with Rei, it's not true apartheid. What Israel has is closer to apartheid.

Considering that a sizable Israeli Arab minority exists, with citizenship and political representation and civil rights, I wouldn't classify Israel as an apartheid system. Israel does oppress the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, but I'd call it expansionistic chauvinism rather than apartheid.

[Social_Critic]

Considering that a sizable Israeli Arab minority exists, with citizenship and political representation and civil rights, I wouldn't classify Israel as an apartheid system. Israel does oppress the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, but I'd call it expansionistic chauvinism rather than apartheid.

1. Chech out what a Christian has to do to marry a Jewish woman in Israel.
2. Ditto for a Muslim man to marry a Jewish woman.
3. Check to see whether Muslims can move in a building where Jews live.
4. Check what is the representation of Muslims and Christians in public life and universities.
5. Check to see what are the immigration rules for a Muslim man who is a uk citizen and is married to a Muslim Israeli citizen.
6. If the West Bank is Israeli territory, tell me why Muslims born there are not Israeli citizens.
7. If the West Bank is not Israeli territory, then tell me what's the penalty for the leader of a nation which systematically removes the native population and moves its non native population into the ethnically cleansed territory.

I have looked at the facts. You will find they are not something the Israelis and their buddies want people to know. That's because Isabel does practice apartheid. Israeli is a concept developed by people who were extremely racist, xenophobic, and arrogant. And it does practice apartheid. Some of the shit they do is inhuman.

[Soulflytribe]

What about the Jews living in the Islamic world, S_C? How are they treated?

[Social_Critic]

Soul fly, Jews living in countries where they are a tiny minority are probably isolated socially and tend to stick to themselves, they are sometimes persecuted and discriminated against - and this applies to both Jews living in Christian dominated nations as well as Muslim dominated nations. It's likely that, today, Jews living in Muslim dominated nations do suffer more than those in Christian nations, but Christians did ease off after the WW Ii genocide of millions of Jews. I got the feeling Europeans are feeling collective guilt about it.

But the systematic abuse of Palestinians is in another realm. This abuse is planned, organized, part of the basic strategy of the state of Israel. There are millions of Palestinians, many were driven from their homes using force and terror tactics. And today they are being systematically driven out of their land using a settlement policy which amounts to ethnic cleansing. Thus Israel is more than just a nation which practices apartheid, it's also a rogue nation with a criminal leadership. And a large fraction of these Israeli leaders aren't even born in Israel. There is a large influx of extremely racist Jews who came in from the ex USSR. These are people like Avigdor Lieberman, an extremist who leads a political party within the Likud/right wing coalition and who helps shape today's extremist and criminal Israeli policy.

So the question is, why do some of us, including me in the past, support Israel when it's such a gross violator of human rights? Because we were raised hearing one side of the story, and not the other.
We have been collectively brainwashed and persuaded to either participate or look the other way, or sometimes sally forth and defend Israel. In a sense, we have become like the German people and are now co-conspirators in a huge crime

And this, my friend, was explained by CIA analysts to USA presidents in the past. Why did they do it? Because deep in the bowels at Langley they know these facts, and their opinion is that the USA, if it supports Israel's criminals, will always have to face blowback from people who choose not to forget what has happened and is happening. Christians may feel comfortable allowing the Israelis to abuse Palestinian Christians, but the Muslims worldwide tend not to see it that way. They fight.

If you want to learn a bit about the truth rather than seeing things through those colored glasses you wear, read

imperial Hubris by Anonymous, a book about USA foreign policy failures. Today we know the book was written by Michael Scheuer

Michael F. Scheuer (born 1952[1]) is a former CIA intelligence officer, American blogger, historian, foreign policy critic, and political analyst. He is currently an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies and an Expert at Wikistrat.[2] In his 22-year career, he served as the Chief of the Bin Laden Issue Station (aka "Alec Station"), from 1996 to 1999, the Osama bin Laden tracking unit at the Counterterrorist Center. He then worked again as Special Advisor to the Chief of the bin Laden unit from September 2001 to November 2004.
.....
In February 2009, Scheuer was terminated from his position as a senior fellow of The Jamestown Foundation. Scheuer has written that he was fired by the organization for stating that "the current state of the U.S.-Israel relationship undermined U.S. national security."[7]

The above is from Wikipedia. This article about Scheuer is usually edited back and forth. Right now his opinion about the Israel and USA relationship is not discussed in depth.

Do read Imperial Hubris, it's an eye opener. Very few dare do what this man did, because as soon as they speak, they are systematically smeared, insulted, and persecuted by a very well organized repression machine.