Quote:
Originally Posted by jalfrezi
How does this work in real life (assuming you have one, which is debatable from your daily word count here)?
If you meet someone new, what criteria do you use to determine their ethnicity before engaging them in debate?
I don't need ethnicity (in my sense) to debate, but using your definition, keep in mind i am in Italy. We have 8% foreign born in Italy and they are mostly poor. The normal conversation when meeting someone new is actually which neighborhood of my city they grew up in.
Ie upper middle class italians don't meet non italians on a daily basis to chat about stuff, they are just not in their circle of acquaintances that can become friends. They don't work with them as peers, they don't send kids in the same schools, they don't eat in the same restaurants and so on. So those encounters are infinitely more rare than say in London or Paris, even in Milan or Bologna. Just an example approx 100% of italian physicians are italians. almost 100% of professionals (accountants, financial advisors, lawyers, notaries and so on) are italian.
Only if you work in hospitality you meet immigrants regularly (say you sell wine to restaurants) as peers.
There are non-italians in my circle but they are mostly well integrated east-europeans, so we just don't debate ukraine, moldova, russia with them , not the same we would debate among us. They have a right to care about those topics infinitely more than us (some of them have actual family members on one side of the conflict, some on the other one) so we defer to that and that's it.
Also keep in mind italian isn't like english. It's almost impossible to speak it well enough to cover your country of origin (if foreign born and moved after 8-10y old), and almost every country has a different italian accent. When it's not countries it's well defined area (hard to be sure after 2 min if someone is from Morocco or Tunisia, but it's very very very very easy to tell they are northern africans for example, just by listening). It's actually very easy to know where they are from inside italy as well (but i think this is true in the UK as well), even decades after they moved.
So you basically pick up culture/country of origin within 1-2 minutes and you simply avoid debating stuff that is "hot" in that country unless they start talking about it first, and when they do you stay far less aggressive (italians do tend to debate very aggressively even in chitchat situations) than you would among italians because they have a right to care about it much more than we do.
I don't discuss french colonialism with northern africans, ukraine war with moldovans and so on (unless they start etc).