Wednesday February 15, 2012

MASSWIPE's past comments

  • 1

    MASSWIPE

    And this man will be governor of Tokyo until at least March of 2015. Nice going, voters of Tokyo. It's unprecedented that no members of the Japanese cabinet have visited Yasukuni on August 15 in back-to-back years. People can thank the DPJ for something, namely getting a clue and defusing unneeded tensions with other nations (mainly Korea and China, but don't think that people in other places are not offended by the Yasukuni visits on 8/15). I realize that for the Japanese, there is an element of "feeling good" when thumbing their noses (or extending their middle fingers) at people (Chinese and Koreans) who supposedly hate them, but politicians should not visit a controversial place on a particular day just because it feels good to irritate somebody.

    Posted in: Ishihara calls Kan, cabinet 'not Japanese' for not visiting Yasukuni Shrine

  • 0

    MASSWIPE

    Well, Japanese voters know what to expect on August 15 if the LDP ever gets back into power. The DPJ has defused and depoliticized this stupid shrine issue in the easiest way possible--by having Cabinet members refrain from visiting the place on August 15. And they've done it without compromising Japan's sovereignty or "kowtowing" to the politicians in Beijing or giving in to the Japan-haters in Korea. The real losers in this sea change are the defenders of Japanese war criminals. Don't think for a second that "irrational Japan-haters" in China and Korea are the only people in the world who object to seeing Japanese cabinet members visit Yasukuni on August 15. Good for the DPJ to understand this in a way the LDP cannot.

    Posted in: LDP leader Tanigaki, former PM Abe among 50 politicians to visit Yasukuni Shrine

  • 1

    MASSWIPE

    Breitbart--I never wrote that "it's all Thatcher's fault" and you know it. The process of turning the UK into a bank-centered and bank-owned state was begun under her and continued under Major and "third way" fake Labour PM Blair.

    You clearly don't know much about the political economy of Britain. Compared to other large national economies like Germany, Japan, France, Canada, US, etc. agriculture and manufacturing are much less important in the UK, and as a result financial services and banking account for a much larger percentage of profits and overall GDP. That's why the 2008 economic crisis hit so very hard there. Again, all this began with Thatcher's "big bang" initiative in the 1980s to put London at the center of the rapidly globalizing financial services industry. If the government only has to worry about the bankers, it doesn't have to worry about trade unions, so Britain waved goodbye to manufacturing, save for a few Japanese car factories up north.

    And Britain's people know this. They know Downing Street puts bankers first, and will do so under Labor, Tory, or coalition governments. The riots need to be examined in that context. As for your paranoia about immigrants, you're getting your data from biased sources. Britain has been a steady but not huge recipient of overseas migrants since the 1950s, owing to its colonial history. There has been no inundation, except perhaps in the case of the recent large influx of people from Eastern Europe (people whom, I suspect, you don't think about when ranting against multiculturalism).

    Posted in: British PM promises action to restore order in strife-torn cities

  • -1

    MASSWIPE

    So it appears that Barack Obama's Republican opponent in 2012 is going to be a parochial, red state, know-nothing who says and does whatever Grover Norquist tells him/her to say and do (if you don't know Norquist, you should; he is the unelected Rasputin of the US Republican Party). That's too bad. Obama could use an election campaign against a more formidable and intelligent opponent. The last two times out he's run against somebody who was an off-the-wall blowhard (Alan Keyes, 2004 Illinois Senate campaign) and somebody who was borderline senile (McCain, 2008) and probably not even eligible to run for president because unlike Obama, McCain wasn't born in a US state and the territory he was born in (the Canal Zone) now belongs to Panama.

    One of the most intelligent one-time Republicans in America is now an independent: Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee. As a Republican Senator in 2006, Chafee did the whole world a favor by casting the deciding vote that ended the tenure of reprehensible Republican chickenhawk John Bolton as US ambassador to the UN. Too bad Chafee or other moderate New England politicians have no chance at gaining the Republican presidential nomination.

    Posted in: Bachmann wins Iowa straw poll; Perry enters GOP race

  • 1

    MASSWIPE

    "The Nanny State infantilised large swaths of the British people."

    Breitbart--Nice to see that you finally dropped Anders Breivik's preferred explanation for What Ails Everything (multiculturalism) since that had little to do with the riots in England. But now you've just moved on to another one of your preferred targets of derision (the nanny state) so you're no closer to the truth. Britain had a full-blown nanny state from the late 1940s; why weren't riots frequent in the 1950s and 1960s then?

    Because Britain today--in the aftermath of the Thatcher-led "Big Bang" of the 1980s--has one of the most distorted and unbalanced national economies in the world, very heavily dependent on financial services. Multinational bankers working in The City and living walled-off in London's toniest neighborhoods are the only people in that country who really matter to Downing Street. And they're not not even mainly British bankers; a lot of them are German, Japanese, and American. Until you can acknowledge this problem in the UK your postings can't be taken seriously.

    Posted in: British PM promises action to restore order in strife-torn cities

  • 3

    MASSWIPE

    Sosuke Takaoka is an idiot who just shot himself in the foot. He's an actor in Japan. Doesn't he realize that a disproportionately high percentage of people working in Japan's entertainment industry are ethnic Koreans who have adopted Japanese names? This is an open secret, analogous to how Jews in Hollywood used to Anglicize their names. No wonder Takaoka's agency dropped him.

    Posted in: Anti-Korean Wave in Japan turns political

  • 3

    MASSWIPE

    Breitbart, why pin all of the UK's problems on multiculturalism alone? Any good reason for that? You don't think deregulation, the "big bang" in financial services, and turning Britain into a country where the only people who apparently matter are multinational investment bankers in The City have had bad effects on the society there? Why are you so one-sided in your arguments?

    Posted in: British PM promises action to restore order in strife-torn cities

  • 0

    MASSWIPE

    S&P has zero credibility regarding anything. Alas, it seems everybody will ignore that.

    "the problem is we haven't spent enough borrowed money yet, another trillion or two and everything will be ok"

    This pretty much summed up the Bush administration's attitude towards war. Probably 40% of all the money used by the US to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush years was borrowed from foreigners. How come the right-wing deficit hawks weren't complaining then?

    "Something Obama and like-minded collectivists should look into."

    I'll never understand how right-wing Americans who take such a dim view of collectivist thinking end up living for decades in Japan, of all places.

    Posted in: U.S. credit rating cut for first time ever

  • 0

    MASSWIPE

    "The a-bombings didn't seem to prevent the Soviet Union from marching down and taking what had been promised to them or even more."

    Seiharinokaze--There's really not much point in responding to your typically convoluted comments, but I choose not to take seriously anybody who seems to think that history would have unfolded in the exact same way without the occurrence of a significant event, such as the atomic bombings on August 6 and 9. If you wish to believe that, on cue, Japan would have surrendered on August 15, signed the terms of surrender aboard the USS Missouri on September 2, and emerged from the war a unitary, intact country (unlike Korea) even without the atomic bombings, fine. That's a counterfactual argument that can never be proven or disproven.

    Posted in: Do you consider the A-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be war crimes?

  • 2

    MASSWIPE

    This isn't a very helpful question to ask. The moral absolutists can declare it was a war crime, so there, the US shouldn't have done it. But, accepting that it was a war crime (I'd say it was), the really interesting question (even more so than "Did the US have to commit a war crime to end the war quickly?") is this: Did the US have to commit a war crime to preempt a Soviet occupation of northern Japan? Facts on the ground had forced the US to accept the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe a few months earlier. Did the US have to prevent such "facts on the ground" from being established in northern Japan by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Without the bombings, would the Japanese have surrendered as quickly as they did to stop the march of Soviet armed forces into Hokkaido? The people who are convinced that the bombings had nothing to do with Japan's decision to surrender probably think yes, but I'm not so sure. Be thankful that Sapporo wasn't renamed New Stalingrad, and be thankful that Hokkaido didn't turn into an extension of the Gulag Archipelago.

    Posted in: Do you consider the A-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be war crimes?

  • 0

    MASSWIPE

    Korea agrees Japan's request to settle the dispute via ICJ instead of spending countless hours and money all over the world shouting "Dokdo is ours!!!"??

    Because, Nigelboy, Korea has no interest in acceding to any request from Japan regarding this matter, sovereign states are in no way subordinate to the ICJ, and the one country (the USA) that could potentially coerce Korea into accepting Japan's request won't do so for fear of offending a key ally in Asia. So your oft-repeated third choice doesn't exist, and possession is nine-tenths of the law. But I'm sure the "magnificent obsession" of the bureaucrats at the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs regarding Dokdo/Takeshima will continue indefinitely. Stubborn bunch they are indeed.

    Posted in: 3 Japanese lawmakers give up and return home from Seoul

  • 0

    MASSWIPE

    Nothing will change under the current circumstances. I can think of only two scenarios in which Japan could get back control of the rocks: 1) South Korea suffers an economic crisis so calamitous that it is forced to sell Dokdo to Japan, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, because Koreans would demand no less, and even so the Korean politicians arranging the deal would probably be assassinated. 2) The US withdraws all armed forces from the region, giving rise to an unstable multipolar environment that allows Japanese rightists to indulge in their wildest dreams, including renunciation of Article 9, development of a nuclear arsenal, and seizure of territories that they felt were wrongfully occupied by South Korea and the USSR after WWII.

    Basically nobody outside of Japan and Korea knows or cares about this territorial dispute. The US won't definitively take sides in a dispute between 2 of its key allies. Japan's efforts at portraying these uninhabited rocks as some sort of "occupied territory" akin to Gaza or East Timor are ridiculous.

    Posted in: 3 Japanese lawmakers give up and return home from Seoul

  • 0

    MASSWIPE

    "I have lived here for decades and pretty much always felt accepted"

    BreitbartVictorious--You seem pretty obsessed with American politics (as your name indicates) for somebody who's lived in Japan for decades. Care to explain why? If the US seems like a foreign land to you, why worry so much about what's going on there?

    Posted in: Norway killer's manifesto praises Japan for not adopting multiculturalism

  • 0

    MASSWIPE

    "But it seems Japan is even scared of taking in other asians with similar culture. To me it seems that Japan is practicing a policy which in a Norwegian context would have been something similar to being scared of accepting swedes and danes into the country. That just seems extreme to me."

    Jernfrost--Excellent and insightful comments. Analogies across regions are always interesting, but alas they never quite work. Scandinavia is a fortunate place where differences have been resolved peacefully, for the most part. Norway was ruled peacefully for centuries by Denmark, and then ruled in a benign manner by Sweden until 1905. Same with Iceland--ruled in a benign manner by Denmark until 1918.

    Now, in Northeast Asia, you have a train wreck of history, by comparison. Korea was ruled by Japan in a manner more similar to how Finland was ruled by Russia--in a violent, coercive way that engendered extreme bitterness. Japan's colonial rule in places like Manchuria, Sakhalin Island, and Taiwan wasn't as traumatic and as bitter as what transpired in Korea, but in none of those cases did it approach Norway being benignly ruled as a part of Sweden. I think this history makes Japanese reluctant to accept more Asian migrants, out of a somewhat understandable fear that they dislike Japan and wish to do it harm. Obviously Norwegians have no such concerns about Swedes and Danes.

    Posted in: Norway killer's manifesto praises Japan for not adopting multiculturalism

  • -2

    MASSWIPE

    Despite the undoubted existence of gender discrimination in Japan, one has to give the Japanese people credit for having never accepted or absorbed the belief, widely held throughout the rest of Asia, that the birth of a baby girl is a curse on one's household. Average life expectancy at birth for females in other Asian countries is often shorter because those females tend to be neglected and mistreated in childhood. Again, good thing these attitudes never really penetrated to the core of Japanese society.

    Posted in: Japan ranks first for women's longevity

  • 1

    MASSWIPE

    Not bad writing for a teenager (Peter Dyloco is just 16-17 years old; look it up). But Japan's political problems are rooted in its system, not its leaders. The Upper House should be either abolished altogether or its powers severely limited, a la the House of Lords in Britain. This accounts for the "twisted parliaments" and endless gridlock in Japan.

    Posted in: Come back, Koizumi. Japan needs you

  • 0

    MASSWIPE

    Great achievement for Japanese football, and nice to see just 4 months after March 11. Glad to see most people did not treat this US-Japan match as a proxy for refighting World War II. That's stupid. Also, Japanese athletes are far past the point where they are underestimated, ridiculed, or looked down on by anybody, so disabuse yourselves of the notion that the American ladies were thinking this was going to be a cakewalk. No non-Western peoples on this planet are more determined to beat Westerners at their own games than the Japanese. This is well-known and understood by Westerners, not just in sports but in every other arena as well.

    Posted in: Japan beats U.S. in shootout to win Women's World Cup soccer

  • 0

    MASSWIPE

    Terrible idea. Japan is not in the midst of fighting a total war, the only situation that really calls for a grand coalition in a parliamentary system. Far better it would be to either strip the Upper House of any real legislative powers or abolish it altogether. Do that and the DPJ would actually behave the way a political party in control of more than 300 out of 480 seats in the main parliamentary body ought to behave.

    I realize the Japanese love the idea of importing foreign ideas/institutions and tweaking them a bit here and there to make them suit Japan, but it's hard to understand the point of allowing the Upper House to continue having legislative veto power over the budget and other matters. Other countries with bicameral parliamentary systems long ago realized the futility of such an arrangement and either abolished their Upper Houses or stripped them of any real powers.

    Posted in: What do you think of the idea of a grand coalition between the ruling DPJ and opposition parties?

  • 0

    MASSWIPE

    "Why is turning 30 important to Japanese girls? Did I miss something?"

    Yes, apparently, you did. So, you live in Japan and you're unaware of the fact that its society is one of the most obsessively age-conscious on the planet? The Japanese adhere very closely to the idea of a standardized life cycle. You achieve certain goals at certain years in your life. For women, being married or close to being married by age 30 is considered important. This is the way it is, for better or for worse. I'm sure you find this bizarre, incomprehensible, idiotic, whatever--but Japanese organize their lives around a standardized life cycle. Won't change unless the Japanese decide it should change.

    Posted in: Kurara Chibana looking for Mr Right

  • 0

    MASSWIPE

    "Hey, Kan just quit"

    Don't uncork that champagne bottle just yet. Whether Kan quits now or in the autumn is still up in the air. Ichiro Ozawa has deep roots in Iwate Prefecture, where thousands of people were killed less than 3 months ago in the earthquake and tsunami. I wonder how people up there feel about their native son right now. I'd say forget about Kan's incompetence; Ozawa's inexplicable, borderline sociopathic behavior is the real story here.

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