JAPAN NEWS AND DISCUSSION
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- English Instructor (Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe)
- Berlitz Japan, Inc. (ベルリッツ・ジャパン株式会社), Kansai
- Salary: ¥125,000 ~ ¥250,000 / Month
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- FT English Teachers for Kids - Osaka
- Kohgakusha Co., Ltd. （株式会社興学社）, Osaka
- Salary: ¥255,000 ~ ¥275,000 / Month Travel Expenses, Encouragement of Japanese learning*
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- Translator
- ZAIHON, Inc. (日本財務翻訳株式会社), Tokyo
- Salary: ¥6.0M / Year Negotiable
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Yuki_51
I don't see anything faulty about suggesting that behavior that, over incredibly long spans of time, exhibits itself in a pretty much constant percentage of the population is by definition normal. It is not normal for all people, but it is indeed normal, it appears, to have a percentage of homosexuals in the human population. So it seems absolutely normal for a certain percentage of human beings to be homosexual.
Posted in: Are you in favor of same-sex marriages?
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Yuki_51
And by "normal", I mean that there is a rather constant percentage of the population, since time immemorial, that tends to prefer same-sex relations. I would say that makes it pretty normal, yes. It's a minority, but its consistency, in spite of really draconian attempts to extinguish it, would suggest that it is indeed normal for a given percentage of human beings.
Posted in: Are you in favor of same-sex marriages?
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Yuki_51
To the people who say homosexuality is not "normal" human behavior:
Then why has it persisted since the beginning of time, in approximately the same percentage of the population, from culture to culture, race to race, rich to poor. What always has been, and never goes away, seems pretty "normal" to me.
Posted in: Are you in favor of same-sex marriages?
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Yuki_51
LostinNagoya ...
How can you say its teaching is superb. There is no excuse for killing someone because they no longer believe something that they used to believe. No excuse. None. Zero.
This is not projection, and it is not any minor point. It is a glaring deficiency of any religion that would claim, as Islam does, to be universal. You can't just pretend it isn't true. The simple fact is that if any person in almost any Muslim majority country would attempt to publicly leave the faith, that person would have to fear for his or her life. Until Muslims condemn this barbaric tradition, the Muslim religion has no future.
Posted in: Can Islam and the Western world coexist peacefully?
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Yuki_51
Muchakucha is correct.
And any religion that thinks it is okay to kill apostates is a religion that is terribly insecure about its validity. If you possess ultimate truth, you don't have to kill anyone for deciding otherwise. This is THE NUMBER ONE most illustrative point about Islam. It is insecure, and even though it says "submit to Allah", it wants to take matters into human hands. So in fact, Islam is not a religion that submits. Islam believes that God needs help. Some submission.
Posted in: Can Islam and the Western world coexist peacefully?
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Yuki_51
Often, a disaster has to come in order to discredit hysterical religious fervor that assumes political power. Look at Japan's embrace of state Shinto. (Actually mostly an imposed embrace from the top down, but nonetheless a situation where a fundamentalist supernatural belief system attained political power.) Ultimately, that resulted in the utter devastation of the country. Shinto still exists of course, but only a very few of us are interested in it having any political power ever again.
Posted in: Can Islam and the Western world coexist peacefully?
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Yuki_51
"say they want to live" should have been "say they want to leave".
Sorry.
Posted in: Can Islam and the Western world coexist peacefully?
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Yuki_51
They can coexist peacefully, and probably will, eventually. But we should expect it to take centuries. After all, it took centuries for Christianity to calm down and become largely secular, a process that isn't even yet completely finished. And the Christians had to go through their own internecine wars, which were almost unspeakably violent. I expect nothing less will occur between competing Muslim strains.
Capital punishment for apostasy, however, to mention one big thing, is an affront to human dignity. Islam needs to revisit planet Earth in this area. The name of the religion is supposed to mean "submission". When you kill people who say that want to live, you are not allowing for "submission", you are committing oppression.
Posted in: Can Islam and the Western world coexist peacefully?
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Yuki_51
I think it's not a fear of open minds, but a fear of change. Ignorantly and fearfully, authorities feel that Japanese culture will somehow change in some major and negative way if a significant number of people start smoking pot. I believe this is highly unlikely. I actually don't think that pot is psycho-active enough to radically change behavior at all. Therefore, I tend to ridicule the claims of adherents about pot's beneficial attributes (for example, that it produces enlightened thinking) as much as I ridicule the claims of Japanese authorities that pot is some incredibly dangerous substance.
Posted in: Japan going to pot: Celebrity busts and student smokers have authorities in a tizz
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Yuki_51
Japanese authorities are making exactly the same mistakes American authorities made, and the results will undoubtedly be the same.
For starters, they grossly, horribly, overstate the problem. They make claims about usage that are simply rubbish. Inevitably, a small group of experimenters will come to understand the scope of official ignorance and disinformation, they will spread that understanding to others, and respect for authority will begin to rot.
The problem then becomes serious, because since authority has chosen to take an unwise stand, and to support that stand using unwise techniques, respect for authority begins to crumble in many directions, not simply about pot. Eventually, authority has little clout left -- even in areas where it doesn't take absurd positions based on ignorance and fear, and doesn't attempt to spread disinformation.
When authority presumes to tell individuals how to run their own lives, authority had better pick and choose its fights wisely, and it had better conduct such fights, once picked, wisely. Otherwise, authority will discover that it no longer carries much authority.
Posted in: Japan going to pot: Celebrity busts and student smokers have authorities in a tizz
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Yuki_51
What government needs to do is something a bit radical, but not so radical when you get right down to it. At a point where any business, be it a bank, an automaker, or any other enterprise, gets so large that its failure poses a systemic risk to the entire economy, government should then impose some level of control on how that business is operated in an attempt to diminish or eliminate that risk.
The problems of such an approach are serious of course. For starters, one needs to determine how to evaluate the point at which enterprise size becomes problematic in the event of bad corporate decision-making. It's no easy call. And whether government can coerce a business into behavior that ultimately saves it is another open question.
But such a paradigm might inhibit needless mergers and acquisitions. Perhaps there is a size limit beyond which we might want to consider whether we even allow mergers. Perhaps we should let them go unchecked, but regulate more if . Ultimately, I could see the choice being theirs: Get as large as you want, but at some point you are going to have to surrender some of your autonomy if you continue to get even larger, or stay below the size level that ultimately poses systemic risk should your decisions come back to haunt you.
Posted in: Should the U.S. government bail out American automakers?
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Yuki_51
I'm bored by stubborn ignorance posing as something else. There is nothing I can write, nor nothing I can reference, that is going to change your closed mind. You believe a giant hoax was pulled on millions of intelligence folks because that is exactly what you want to believe. No one is going to change it, including me.
Sayounara from this ridiculous thread.
Posted in: Which conspiracy theory would you most like to find out the truth about?
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Yuki_51
I'm not into doing homework for other people, sorry. It's out there; it's mountainous; it's incontrovertible. Spend some time on it.
Posted in: Which conspiracy theory would you most like to find out the truth about?
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Yuki_51
As for the steel building collapses ...
It's all quite well documented. Architects now understand exactly what temperatures were reached, and the precise dynamics of the falls. There is absolutely nothing mysterious or unknown about it, nothing that would suggest anything other than exactly what appeared to have happened, and what indeed did happen. Only those who want to believe something else persist in their folly. And they do so in spite of vast evidence that absolutely buries their pet point of attack (the steel melting in this case) under a mountain of logic and fact.
For your information, I'm a licensed commercial pilot, and I suspect you wouldn't know Jet A-1 (it's a fuel) from Jet B. I also wonder if you can visual 5,000 gallons of fuel in one location -- I mean the size of it. Now take that by almost a factor of FIVE (nearly 25,000 gallons), and light a match to it.
Odd that the steel melted? Sheesh. Go get a degree in some physical science, please.
Posted in: Which conspiracy theory would you most like to find out the truth about?
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Yuki_51
and that they're alive and well! http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1559151.stm
C'mon. The date of that article is Sunday, 23 September, 2001. Of course there was still confusion at that early time. The only confusion that remains consists of confused minds and those who want to be confused, or who want to try to confuse others.
Posted in: Which conspiracy theory would you most like to find out the truth about?
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Yuki_51
Indeed, grafton. Twelve men landed on the moon, two each in six separate flights. The number of people involved in the project probably runs not merely into the thousands, but the tens of thousands. It is probably the most remarkable engineering achievement in human history. So daunting a task is it that no one since has even attempted it. Someday of course, providing we don't decide to knock our civilization back into the dark ages, somebody will do it again. The math has all been done, the engineering rather old hat; it's just going to take a ton of disposable money and a lot of will. And when the next visitors get there, if they look in the right places, they will find footprints. Those footprints are going to be there for a long, long time.
Posted in: Which conspiracy theory would you most like to find out the truth about?
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Yuki_51
And as for the guys with the boxcutters, sabiwabi, you overlook the dozens of telephone calls from people on the planes describing exactly that -- guys with boxcutters using violence to take over the planes. What, they weren't Arabs? What planet do you live on? We have video of these guys. We know their names, the villages where they were born, and how they paid for their one-way tickets. There is simply no doubt about what happened that day in the minds of sane people.
It's amazing to me that, by and large, people who buy into one of these conspiracy theories invariably buy into most of them, if not all of them.
It seems to be a group of people who are simply rebelling against all authority. I don't know if it's because they feel powerless in this world, and their "they are all lying to us" attitude makes them feel somehow empowered, or exactly what the underlying pathology is. But assuming people are not just writing garbage for the fun of it, assuming that they actually believe what they write, it's truly scary.
Posted in: Which conspiracy theory would you most like to find out the truth about?
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Yuki_51
@Brunobear: Would it matter if someone could produce a number like, say, 5,261,347?
You realize of course that pretty much the entire continent of Europe (particularly central and eastern Europe) was a wasteland by May of '45, right? Public records were, in so many countries, simply incinerated by bombing and general warfare, as the Germans stormed through on their way east, only to have the Russians storm through in the opposite direction later.
The German government, to my knowledge, has never tried to come up with a number, and they probably couldn't if they wanted to. But they make no qualms about what happened, particularly the general scale of it.
Do you think it was inflated by several hundred percent? As usual, there are professorships, Nobel Prizes, fame and monetary rewards for anyone who can prove a great conspiracy. So far, no one seems to have been able to do it. Can you imagine that competent people haven't tried?
Posted in: Which conspiracy theory would you most like to find out the truth about?
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Yuki_51
@mistersmarmy: Can you spell ad hominem? I didn't think so.
Posted in: Which conspiracy theory would you most like to find out the truth about?
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Yuki_51
I guess this "survey" is an attempt by JT to find out the general IQ level of its English language readership. Let's see if it nudges the century mark.
Posted in: Which conspiracy theory would you most like to find out the truth about?