Outside a train station near Tokyo, hundreds of people cheer as Sohei Kamiya, head of the surging nationalist party Sanseito, criticizes Japan’s rapidly growing foreign population.
As opponents, separated by uniformed police and bodyguards, accuse him of racism, Kamiya shouts back, saying he is only talking common sense.
Sanseito, while still a minor party, made big gains in July’s parliamentary election, and Kamiya’s “Japanese First” platform of anti-globalism, anti-immigration and anti-liberalism is gaining broader traction ahead of a ruling party vote Saturday that will choose the likely next prime minister.
I keep hearing racist nationalists say stuff like this worldwide, and not matter how hard I squint it remains a non sequitur.
I mean, “we have a population crisis” and “don’t let people come here” seem entirely contradictory unless you are… well, a supremacist.
Which they are, it’s just the leap that gets me. So obvious, so rarely called out and never addressed.
Without getting into discussion about how right or wrong they are those people are primarily worried about the identity of their country. They believe that sustaining the population growth by letting in big numbers of foreigners will destroy their culture. They prefer to suffer the consequences of population crisis than live in a country with different values and traditions. Is it supremacy? Sure it is. But it’s also logical.
Logical if you believe your race/identity are superior to others, which is an illogical starting premise and the root of why conservatives are always on the wrong side of history.
Doesn’t have to the superior, but one of personal preference. You like the current cultural values and know other cultures don’t necessarily share them and so fear a cultural shift.
In this case though I think you’re right that there’s a strong superiority aspect.
What’s illogical about it? How can you even apply logic to personal values and opinions?
Recognize that it is an opinion that some people may disagree with, not a fact that everyone has to accept, and act accordingly. In this case, that means not using the force of government to persecute people who disagree with your opinion.
You’re still talking about how they are wrong but not how they are illogical. You can still apply logic to lies. It doesn’t make them true but it also doesn’t make it illogical.
Wut?
No, I’m not. I am starting from the premise that there is an objective reality we all have to deal with and that different individuals have different subjective preferences, and everything else logically flows from there.
If you’re looking for a utilitarian reason to behave the way I am suggesting, I would say that when you start taking tangible objective actions against everyone who doesn’t agree with your particular subjective preferences you will give people with a variety of different subjective preferences something in common (i.e. that they are being oppressed by you) and that will eventually make them work together to stop you. On a long enough timeline, tyranny is always a losing strategy.
No, I’m not. I am starting from the premise that there is an objective reality we all have to deal with and that different individuals have different subjective preferences, and everything else logically flows from there.
That’s just something you made up. Logic doesn’t start from objective reality and preferences. It’s just a tool.
If A then B. If B then C. Therefore if A then C.
I don’t have to know what A, B and C are in some objective reality for this rule to be true. I can see you struggle to understand that logic is abstract and separate it from facts you want to apply it to but that’s just what logic is. You’re basically confusing logic with truth. To decide what is true you have to start with some objective reality and apply logic to it but you can apply logic to anything. You can apply it correctly to Harry Potter or to invalid facts. You will not reach truth but you’re reasoning can still be logical.
But it’s also logical.
In what world is “I rather die in squalor and let the entire country suffer than see people that look different than me on the street, eat some food I don’t recognize”, logical?
In a world where someone would prefer that. You can’t apply logic to preferences. When I got to a dentists for a filling I ask them not to give me local anesthesia because I prefer the pain to the numbness. 99% of people I know don’t agree. It doesn’t make my choice illogical, it just means I have different preferences.
that is a flawed analogy making it a strawman
the equivalent would be that, instead of the numbness, you rather die in 10 years from this very preventable death… the outrageous extreme of this decision flagship indicator of irrationality
It is only logical if you’re… well, a supremacist.
I mean, it requires a mental framework of how culture and identity work that is fundamentally supremacist.
Culture works by aggregation, it’s entirely unrelated to borders and it is in perpetual shift. This assumption requires misunderstanding culture from a very specific perspective.
So no, not logical.
Internally consistent, yes: make women into reproductive vessels and men into the defenders of a fossilized culture enforced through violence. That’s a consistent worldview.
But not a logical one if you apply it to reality. The difference matters.
It matters if we’re arguing who’s right. If you just want to understand their mental jump it doesn’t. Of course those people are ignorant, misinformed or have ulterior motives but their believes are often logical. It’s like not vaccinating your kids because you believe vaccines are more dangerous than the disease. Or course it’s wrong but if you really believe it, being anti-vax is logical. Where it stops being logical is in the MAGA movement. They want to drain the swamp by voting for a criminal and want to fight pedophiles by electing one. It’s just a cult, there’s no logic there. The far right movements in Europe/Japan are build on misinformation but still need to invent logical arguments.
Sure, but that’s taking the concept of what’s “logical” to absurd extremes. Any sort of paranoid delusion is logical if you accept all of its premises.
Is being antivax logical? Not at all. It requires amazing mental gymnastics to ignore centuries of scientific research. Things that are “logical if you believe them” is a great way to describe things that aren’t logical. Vaccines do not, in fact, by all available measures, cause more dangerous issues than the diseases they prevent. If your “logic” requires a rejection of the entire epistemological framework upon which shared scientific kknowledge is established it’s not “logic”, kind of by definition.
This is the same thing. Its internal consistency isn’t “logic”. It can be shown to not be logical. If you suspend yourself from that conversation, deny the parameters of anybody who disagrees with you and cherry pick your values to specifically support your instinctively desired conclusion, then it doesn’t matter how well you can through your train of thought, it’s still indefensible.
I think that’s why the MAGA thing stumps you a bit. Their train of thought isn’t any better or worse than this. It’s, in fact, identical. Information that supports it gets magnified, information that disrupts it is ignored. They are fun about it in that they add this cool temporal dimension, where that selection is applied regardless of how it was applied before, so they’re all for free speech when people tell them to shut up, all for limiting speech when people criticise them. But that’s not different to the fundamental contradiction of being concerned about a population crisis when you are trying to turn women into walking incubators but concerned about the massive influx of people when you’re trying to be racist.
It’s a lot of things, but it’s not logic.
Sure, but that’s taking the concept of what’s “logical” to absurd extremes.
No, it’s just what logic is. Anti-vaxer doesn’t have to know the science. Not knowing something doesn’t mean my reasoning lacks logic. I can invent some facts and then apply logic to them. Logic doesn’t have to operate on true statements. “All unicorns are pink and all pink animals eat clouds hence all unicorns eat clouds”.
That’s… not how that works when you make statements about the world. Your unicorn example is all well and good in a universe where there are only hypothetical animals, but you’re eliding big chunks of that chain. “Unicorns are pink” is a valid statement in the abstract, but if you’re arguing about animals in the real world that’s not where the chain starts. The chain goes: unicorns exist, unicorns are pink, all pink animals eat clouds.
And of course in this situation you need to evaluate each statement. Unicorns exist is going to be a big fat FALSE, which means you can’t claim all unicorns eat clouds and argue it’s a logical statement. It’s a meaningless statement by itself because it depends on a false assumption.
Which is my exact point. You are claiming the argument is logical because you’re assuming the only requirement is that it is internally consistent when all their premises are accepted. But the premises are false, so it’s not. I appreciate that you’re getting stuck when the chain of statements they cherry pick changes over time (see the free speech example), but they’re not meaningfully different. If you let them cherry pick the clauses they need to verify and ignore everything else they can make a consistent argument in the moment about anything, including vaccines and flat planets and jewish space lasers.
I mean, no they can’t because they suck at this. But still, they can make something close enough to one that if they speak fast and loudly enough on the Internet they can get more morons to follow their channels than to block them, so… here we are, I suppose.
“I want to protect my children and I believe that vaccine are MORE dangerous then disease so I don’t vaccinate my kids” - that’s a logical statement.
“I want lower value and I believe A < B so I choose A”. That’s logical.
In this case, to change the outcome you need to attack the facts. You have to prove that vaccines are in fact LESS dangerous and then, using the same logic, the person will conclude that he should vaccinate his kids.
“I want to protect my children and I believe that vaccine are LESS dangerous then disease so I don’t vaccinate my kids” - that’s illogical statement.
“I want lower value and I believe A < B so I choose B”. That’s illogical.
In this case you’re not going to argue the facts. The person already thinks that vaccines are LESS dangerous but his logic is wrong. You have to fix theirs logic and they will arrive a the correct conclusion.
The original case of anti-foreigner sentiment is the first case. The logic is valid, the facts are wrong. For some reason you’re not getting the difference.
Logic doesn’t have to operate on true statements.
Logic is based on facts, ie: if you jump into a pool > you will get wet.
Believing that logic is not factually-based is absolutely off-base.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic
Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the study of deductively valid inferences or logical truths. It examines how conclusions follow from premises based on the structure of arguments alone, independent of their topic and content.
Looks at pile of dead cultures in textbook… No, that’s not logical. That’s Jingoist dumbassery.
Like, if you start with the premise that they are right and you are wrong I guess it would be illogical to disagree with them, but that’s just a completely meaningless argument that doesn’t tell us anything too interesting about abstract reasoning nor does it have any substantive connection to factual reality that I can see
Many cultures adapt for the better / become more humanist with open migration. Think of it as enhancing your identity (which is likely just mid at best in its current form if we’re being real)
I think you missed the part where I’m not saying immigration is bad. I’m just explaining how people who oppose immigration think.
Sorry but in the case of Japan, it’s definitely not logical. At best, they have an argument against over-tourism. But the Sanseito party acts like foreigners moving to Japan are creating a spike in crime. They literally have young women weeping through a megaphone on the street, crying that foreigners are rapists. But that’s simply not backed up by statistics. Crime per capita has not increased, and the demographic committing the most serious crimes in Japan is predominantly native Japanese.
So they are lying but their argument is “foreigners cause crime which is worse than demographic issues so we don’t want foreigners” which is logical. Logic != truth.
Pff OK if that’s the argument you want to go with, I don’t think we need to continue.
Yes, I also think that my factual statement accurately pointing out how your reasoning is flawed and how I’m right is a good way to end this discussion.
If your culture can’t stand up to outside influence was it really that great? Also, the door to the world has been opened. There’s no closing that one it’s been open. So they’d rather crash into civil unrest because ignorant people have a hard on for the old days?
So they’d rather crash into civil unrest because ignorant people have a hard on for the old days?
Yes, exactly. That’s a perfect summary.
Japanese people are being fed the same kind of propaganda as UK citizens and Americans. People say ridiculous things like “What if the number of foreigners increases to 20% of the total population? Then women will be sexually assaulted.” Instead of immigrant gangs taking over apartment buildings and eating the pets it’s foreigners buying up all the land to build compounds for foreigners to live in and pooping in the streets.
But there is also a feedback loop where nationalists in Japan make the news, and it’s repeated by right wing foreigners who don’t know Japan but admired their idealized, racially pure Japan where everyone is polite and orderly and this would never happen, and then that gets repeated to Japanese people as if it were large numbers of foreigners warning them not to let immigration ruin Japan as it has ruined those other countries. Most of the Japanese people in this loop don’t understand English, and the right wing foreigners don’t understand Japanese. The reality isn’t always faithfully translated in either direction, and the language barrier makes it harder for people to realize the discrepancy.
I’d like to clarify that I had never hardly ever pooped on a street.
Is there nowhere in the world now that fascist racists are not on the rise?
It feels like we are barreling towards another world war.
I wonder if economics has anything to do with this trend worldwide. When people have to worry about their next meal every day they tend to get frustrated and finding something or someone to blame, rightly or wrongly,is a way to vent that frustration.
With more and more wealth concentrating at the top 1% it stands to reason that the population that feels frustrated is increasing quickly.
it’s a direct result of global economies. When things are bad financially the scapegoats are ALWAYS immigrants and the poor. always. every single time. “Things are tough for you? well it’s that group over there…it’s their fault!” and collectively our society in their infinite wisdom consistently fall for it hook, line, and sinker.
However unlike other countries Japan isn’t pumping out kids regardless of the scape goats. So compared to other places this rhetoric coming from them is extremely idiotic. And if a Japanese person believes this is the way forward then I hold them in lower regard than your average MAGA cultist. I didn’t think you could have a population more stupid than MAGA but Japan, good job, you proved me wrong.
Yeah the consistent and ever growing wealth gap as corporations continue to grow more profitable and people have more trouble affording food and housing is at the core of a lot of it. People are angry, but the corporations/1% are spending billions on social media, lobbying, funding certain political campaigns etc to convince people that their anger should be directed towards others around them. It’s the fault of foreigners, immigrants, minorities, women, LGBTQ, the young, the old, etc etc.
And on the other side of that, Russia has been working to stir up division in a ton of nations since the 90s and has gotten much better at it with social media, so these two groups have homogenized.
Then on the third level, the super rich billionaires like musk and Thiel want dark enlightenment, which is the collapse of society so they can create neofuedalism and run their own techno-slavery-kingdoms, so they want it just as bad.
LGBTQ, trans
What’s that “T” for again?
Ah yeah, sorry, wrote that rant while on the verge of falling asleep, thanks for the heads up
Train enthusiasts?
like how WW2 followed ten years of great depressioning
Of course: the more people feel the system isn’t working for them, the more they’re willing to vote for nontraditional candidates who promise to burn it down. More often than not, those candidates are right-wing demagogues.
Inequality breeds resentment, it’s hardwired in our brains. And resentful people are easily led to blame minorities, something hateful and/or power hungry can use for political gains. The ones causing the inequality are more than happy to help this process asking as it usually keeps them from being blamed.
And as in the current political and economic system the inequality globally can only increase, blame and hate is what you get.
Its so depressing, swap just a few nouns around and it reads exactly like an article about the UK
Mariana trench.
Come on up to Canada, amigo.
Just don’t acknowledge Alberta and it’s all good
You mean USA-light?
That’s because our elected leaders are barreling us towards a war. It’s good for the economy…
The global collapsing of communism was always inevitable.
There has always been 1 of 2 choices countries would make when it finally arrived.
-
Abandon the system of capital and embrace socialism
-
Quintuple down on all the worst aspects of capitalism by fully embracing fascism and dooming your society to total collapse
-
Is there nowhere in the world now that fascist racists are not on the rise?
Yes. This is a Western capitalism thing; Chinese politics has only recently discovered rightwing nationalism and there are plenty of non-Western thriving democracies in, say, South America.
This has to be one of the most absurd claims I’ve seen in a while. You go on to contradict yourself in your second sentence. And still get it wrong. China didn’t just discover bigotry. They’ve been dealing with it since before the founding of the United States or capitalism for that matter.
South America full of thriving democracies? Are we talking about the authoritarian one Trump is paying to torture innocent undocumented. Or is it the fascist one Trump is talking about sending 20 billion to bail out their flailing populist leadership. Or is it the one that got lucky and woke up enough last minute to unseat their burgeoning fascist and take him to trial? But still chock full of the descendants of nazi german expats. Or was it all the tiny ones around them. That have to deal with all of them and the narco cartels. Regularly having elected leaders slaughtered. Hell even Mexico is struggling with that. And I’d say their leadership is far better that what we have here.
It’s got nothing to do with the west or capitalism. Though the West and capitalism has done very little to actually help the situation. Tribalism and xenophobic bigotry are basic human nature unfortunately.
China didn’t just discover bigotry. They’ve been dealing with it since before the founding of the United States or capitalism for that matter.
Good thing I didn’t say “bigotry,” then, I said “rightwing nationalism.” Also I think it was clear I was referring to the modern PRC, not past Chinese polities. It’s no coincidence that the Uighur genocide, an aggressive posture towards Taiwan and budding pro-natalism all came within the same general time period. China will eventually have to deal with fascism, but they’re not barreling towards it like Western capitalist countries are because their history under capitalism is shorter and fascism hasn’t had time to metastasize yet.
South America full of thriving democracies?
Again literally not what I said. I said there are plenty of thriving democracies in the world, and gave an example of one place where they exist. The existence of non-democratic countries in South America doesn’t contradict this statement.
Or is it the one that got lucky and woke up enough last minute to unseat their burgeoning fascist and take him to trial?
Yes, that one.
But still chock full of the descendants of nazi german expats.
That has nothing to do with what we’re talking about. Like, at all. What’s even your point here?
That have to deal with all of them and the narco cartels.
Fun fact: Homicide rates across South and Central America has been decreasing hard this last decade. Sure the cartels are a massive problem, but they’re a massive problem that’s getting better
It’s got nothing to do with the west or capitalism.
Authoritarianism has nothing to do with the West or capitalism, but fascism specifically is a phenomenon that requires established capitalism.
The fact that you didn’t use the term does not change the fact that it’s what you’re describing.Even if you choose to call it something, it isn’t.
We are not here to play Calvin Ball with you. It’s also quite obvious that people are getting irritated by your kayfabe.
Even if you choose to call it something, it isn’t.
It literally is. Nationalism is a relatively new idea, emerging during the late 18th century. The concept of a French nation or a Chinese nation is a very recent thing, and either way I was very clearly talking about the modern PRC not the fucking Qing dynasty.
… and just like the USA, it’s all populism, rage baiting and ZERO actual solutions
As it turns out, we are all human and are all vulnerable to the same psychological manipulations. No country is immune without active resistance.
yes but the more ignorant a population is, the easier the target
It’s very easy to judge from the outside looking in. Every country has a version of MAGA. But there are probably people around the world who also sees the entire USA as MAGA, in the same way this post sees Japan as dominated by racists.
I was comparing the racist japanese candidate with the trump clown show
Yes, that’s how these things manifest. I don’t disagree. When I said “this post”, I didn’t mean yours, but the post in general, with all the replies. Some are saying the Japanese hate children, or they wouldn’t go there anymore because of the anti-foreigner stance, or that everyone is overworked.
It’s social media, if you get a half assed knee jerk reaction you got lucky… there are no intelligent discussions going on here
Japanese people are extremely racist. They genuinely put republicans to shame.
The open secret of most Asian societies!
I’ve known several people who are half Japanese and whose grandmothers would never forgive them for that fact. They’d love all the cousins and shit on them. It’s really sad.
Japan’s population crisis is caused by its young people being too overworked and overcharged to want to have children. Their population by age is becoming very top-heavy which means that the young are paying a lot to keep the old alive.
The solution to this (apart from don’t get into such a situation) is to import young workers to even out your population spread and to raise wages in line with the cost of living and raising a family.
They appear to be shouting “Damn foreigners! Coming over here and making all our elderly live longer than we can economically support them! Overworking our breeding generation so they don’t want kids! Curse those foreigners!”
(overworks and robs an entire generation to death)
“Why would foreigners do this?”
Also I’m almost getting tired of posting this brilliant illustration but sheesh, if the jingoistic authoritarian entitlement clan isn’t using the same playbook every. Time.
It really is the best illustration of exactly what’s happening.
I’m not sure I like this comic because it suggests:
- The immigrant worker is absent a cookie not the other way around
- That the working class is dimwitted and easily hoodwinked into racism
I think both assumptions are actually copes by a middle class who, afraid to look at its own complicity in neoliberalism, find’s easier to condemn the common people as racist and intellectually deficient.
In actuality I think the working class is intuitively aware that their disfranchisement is directly connected to policies like immigration. Along with the opening up of global markets which had a disruptive affect on wages the policy of open immigration has kept wages low and fractured communities and a common sense of culture.
- The immigrant worker is absent a cookie not the other way around
Statistically and visibly just how it is. Those dudes work two jobs that are both really bad to live in a shithole, because they have no choice.
- That the working class is dimwitted and easily hoodwinked into racism
'Member WWII, or WWI, or the various imperial wars before that? I 'member. The prejudices are intuitive alright.
I think not acknowledging that both are true and happen over and over again is a cope. The subset of middle class people who realise what’s going on are that way, because they’re basically working class people, but for whatever reason are privileged enough to spend time actually learning and understanding.
I’m not sure I like this comic because it suggests:
The immigrant worker is absent a cookie not the other way around That the working class is dimwitted and easily hoodwinked into racismSo you dislike it because it’s real and accurate? I don’t understand, it could not be more accurate and straight forward for a comic
I think the cookie represents entitlements or government services granted to citizens.
The wealthy person has oodles of subsidies and tax breaks, but is trying to scare the working person by talking about the immigrant seeking equality.
That is literally the messaging from corporate media sources. The comic doesn’t really get into whether the working person believes it or not, to me it’s more about the messaging used by the wealthy.
I don’t actually think global markets or immigration are inherently bad things. It’s vastly superior to nationalism and rigid borders. The problems are entirely caused capital and the exploitation of workers, hence the plate overflowing with cookies. The wealthy are the problem, not immigrants.
The cookie could just be stuff in general. Rich people have lots for no reason, workers have a little or none depending on whether their ancestors were from a lucky region.
I think the cookie represents entitlements or government services granted to citizens.
No, the cookie is just employment (money for work)
Then why does the rich bald guy have so many? He doesn’t do shit.
Funny math. Here’s a pretty nice explainer.
TBF it’s not a universally agreed on theory, but it’s plausible and can produce the exact real distribution of wealth with minimal changes.
nepo baby
Boomers of the world consumed all resources and pulled up all ladders behind them. American Boomers are especially oblivious to their roles in creating the current world, and seemingly oblivious to concepts like basic empathy. Their entire worldview is a function of how they can best benefit. “Generation Me,” was the perfect tag.
Got mine, fuck you
Japan’s population crisis is caused by its young people being too overworked and overcharged to want to have children
While this may be a contributing factor, there is obviously more to it. Japanese workers actually work less than the OECD average hours per year. Take a look at a handful of countries such as: Mexico, South Korea, United States, Finland, Germany, and Japan (generally representative of their respective regions and income levels)
Then compare those country’s hours worked to their fertility rate
Mexico works the most hours of any of those countries by far, only behind Colombia in terms of hours worked, yet has the highest fertility rate of any countries I listed
South Korea works a lot of hours, second highest of those countries, just above the US. They have by far the lowest birth rate. A bit over half that of Italy and Japan, the 2nd and 3rd lowest birthrate countries, yet both Italy and Japan work far less hours than South Korea
Germany and Finland, famed for their quality of life and lower working hours, both have relatively low fertility rates. Far less than the US and Mexico, countries with far more hours worked, and far fewer legal protections to workers - especially pregnant women
In short, when comparing different countries, I don’t see a substantial correlation between hours worked and fertility rate
Its basically the exact same issue happening everywhere in the western world, Japan is just a few steps further a long.
Basically, a shrinking population is good for the people, because there’s fewer people among which to divide the resources that the land can provide, so on average that should mean more resources for people, in other words a lower cost of living (since cost of living depends on resource availability). And it also means that there’s less supply of human labor on the labor market, and by the rule of Supply and demand that means that the prices for human labor (wages) are gonna go up, i.e. people are gonna get paid better for what they do.
That intuitively makes sense, because if your country has 10 million people instead of 100 million, then your CEOs and companies are better gonna treat your workers better or they’re gonna strike, and since there’s fewer other people to replace those workers, their strike would have greater impact and therefore more power.
on top of that, you can’t just assume that there will be a high demand of human labor in the future. You have to assume that automation is going to reduce jobs, so if you don’t also reduce the number of workers, you’re gonna face an unemployment crisis, and that can be very bad for the workers.
More humans = more demand for labor, because there are more needs.
And humans are a resource too, a very important one nowadays. And more humans = more specialization.
deleted by creator
Japan will be the test case for declining populations. They will be the first to show us the consequences and the right and wrong ways to deal with the issue.
Short of Malthusian disasters, I don’t think any sort of economy in human history has had to deal with this.
The nazi party is funded by Russia btw and there’s so much propaganda in Japan rn its insane. One major piece still making news is that foreign tourists dont pay their hospital bills and losing “Japan so much money”. The amount of unpaid bills was 400k usd that year and foreign tourists revenue was 58 BILLION usd. That’s 0.00069% loss of total revenue.
This constant propaganda around the world is so depressing and not because its there but because truth is right next to it and nobody’s looking.
funded by Russia btw
This constant propaganda around the world is so depressing and not because its there but because truth is right next to it and nobody’s looking.
That much is obvious. Japan only has miniscule amount of foreigners compared to other countries but somehow managed to also have been stoken up with anti-foreign sentiment. It’s all the dark money flowing into social media algorithms brainwashing people. And the truth is that data is the new gold. Personal information is not only commodified but also weaponised. However, as you said, the truth is next to it but nobody is looking.
Here’s a bit of a rant.
Japanese people have notoriously been xenophobic, racist, or ignorant… but they also tend to be quiet and polite since the war, so they’ve really cleaned up their image.
They’ve also had their egos constantly stroked with all the TV networks showing stupid shows where all the foreigners are SO AMAZED by Japanese culture. Same with all these social media content. It’s really annoying. Being proud of your culture and heritage shouldn’t need recognition by foreigners and it certainly shouldn’t need belittling of others.
Not saying that everyone is a racist. Not by a long shot. It’s just that this kind of self-centered, xenophobic ember had been kept alive in a non-negligible number of people. And I feel like now, there is this perfect environment for which the shitty few to really have themselves heard for maximum exposure and influence. It sucks.
They are really hell bent on self destruction.
that headline brilliantly conveys the absurdity of the situation
Exactly my thought. It’s crazy.
It’s actually scary how quick they’re rising. I live in Japan, and I once heard them at a intersection nearby on a car giving a speech. I hated how they speak. They sounded like they were heavily appealing to the emotion and used a lot of sentence final particles like ne, in a tone that sounded half-aggressive and also… very conservative in a way. They were talking some shit about how Japanese people should come first and that we should “protect Japan”, as if there was some sort of foreign force trying to tear Japan down to pieces. What’s worse was that there were actually people cheering for them. I actually wanted to go downstairs to shout at them but I restrained myself from doing that. I still sort of regret not going there to shout at them.
Their society will collapse from this racism in a generation or so. No point in correcting people who can’t see the writing on the wall. As much as the current regime tries to deny it, immigrants have been the strength of the US.
That party is minority. So yeah, fuck them. But what about the rest of the people in the country? There are many well intentioned folks in Japan, some of them have some xenophobic beliefs, but that doesn’t mean they’ll all never learn.
But they haven’t learned.
They’re scared. If you believe the info out there, population collapse is imminent. Someone shouting out patriotism, rallying the people, is probably a comforting thought to them. They need someone to blame, the outsiders are easiest.
When people don’t feel they can afford the time and money to have kids, populations break and noone is addressing it. The world could probably stand to have some population regulation back down from 8bil, but this isn’t the way :(
They need someone to blame, the outsiders are easiest.
The first sign of a feeble mind.
Alas, it’s so ubiquitous :(
It’s absolutely horrifying how effective it is to stand in front of a group of people, name their fears and then suggest ill-concieved solutions to the fears. They’re so desperate for someone to come along and solve their problems that they don’t want to think critically about what is being said. Humanity as a whole is just so easy to control.
Racism and xenophobia aside, how many humans do we need? Our poor earth. A declining population is probably an ok thing. I think it’s the capitalist class ringing the alarm bell as they see their profit forecasts take a blow. How many hundreds of millions should that island hold?
I’m all for persons voluntarily opting to have fewer (or no) progeny. Certainly, that is my intent.
But, Malthus was wrong on so many levels, and regulating reproductive activity even with the best of intent is going to be abused by eugenicists for genocide.
The already posted SK vid explains how the current social systems in most countries need at least replacement birth rates. It might be possible to have a society that could survive less-than-replacement birth rates, but I don’t see how.
but I don’t see how.
Tax the F out of the rich and give it to child-bearing families. The amount is based on the rate of decline. Hand it out as a monthly stipend, and enforce checks for kids’ quality of life.
Free government-staffed daycare.
3 Months Paid Paternity/Maternity, guaranteed jobs.
Free Fertility Clinics.
It’s going to be expensive AF for a generation or two.
That’s not how to survive with less-than-replacement birth rates, that’s how to get higher-than-replacement birth rates (possibly without immigration). (I will admit that I was unclear that I meant “I don’t see how” to long-term sustain population decreases.)
But, absolutely, to get more birth, you need to have lots of support for child-raising, so that it is seen as more joyful than it is stressful. I know SK is having problems getting the political (or even democratic) will to implement those things, and even if they did all of that today AND birth rate immediately soared, they’d still have a “demographic squeeze” that their current economy can’t sustain.
I don’t think Japan is facing the demographic squeeze, yet. I don’t think you’d find much support for these “COMMUNIST” ideas among Kamiya’s followers, tho.
It’s tunable. You don’t need to exceed, you can run at 99.95 and slowly back down.
Still going to have the geriatric problem, but that seems more approachable.
It might be possible to have a society that could survive less-than-replacement birth rates, but I don’t see how.
I want to add that historically, in the US from 1680 to 1880, the population has grown by approximately 3% annually. Source
(In the table, since the growth rate given is per 10-year interval, you have to divide it by 10, roughly, to get 3% annual growth)
This suggests that it should be possible (at least in theory) that the population can shrink at the same speed, i.e. 3% annually. This would mean an average fertility rate around 0.66 children/woman. Currently, in most western nations, it’s around 1.4, while 2.1 would be “replacement levels”, i.e where the population numbers stagnate.
The reason why i think you can have a 3% annual population decline is because it’s kinda symmetric: instead of a surplus in children (which eat and consume resources but don’t contribute through their labor power), you have a surplus of old people (which, mostly, also consume resources but don’t work). So, the situation is kinda symmetric, and that’s why i suggest that it should be possible.
because it’s kinda symmetric
That’s not what I’ve been told, but I’m not an expert.
I imagine part of that is due to an interaction with economics, particularly inflation. A 3% inflation is considered healthy, but a 3% deflation is almost certainly a monetary system in a death spiral.
This vid explains the situation better than I can (it’s about South Korea but Japan is basically in the same boat)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk
From a higher abstraction vantage point, you are not wrong, but you are basically advocating for entire countries to disappear
If the entire country wants to enact policies and cultures that would lead to their disappearance then who are we to tell them otherwise?
rational people?
But you are being disingenuous here… it’s not the entirety of Japan, same as the entirety of Murica did not choose to swim in the sewer with MAGA… yet they are forced to by a loud minority and a push over majority
I think we should at least warn them; perhaps they don’t have enough information to connect that outcome to their currently preferred policies. I.e. they don’t actually “want to enact policies and cultures that would lead to their disappearance”. Preventing persons from unintentionally harming themselves seems like a good thing.
Preventing persons from harming others (unintentionally or not) seems like a moral imperative. And, I think there are probably SK citizens that don’t consent to the current policies that will be harmed.
But, at the end of the day, I don’t have any action items. I see it mostly as a cautionary tale to drive my own policy preferences.
Welcome to the era of Misinformation
Why do you think we are here? getting people to vote against their own benefit is how we get Billionaires and eventually devolve into fascism before we step into another WW
Yeah, the hostile information environment is … tough. But, until we figure out how to navigate it, we won’t have a truly global society, and I’m not sure that separate, non-hostile communities/associations/syndicates are a stable configuration.
Critical thinking skills are part of that, but exercising them as a defense in that environment is not something you can sustain indefinitely. Everyone needs time to rest and everyone is going to make mistakes.
but you are basically advocating for entire countries to disappear
In biology, a species is considered threatened if there’s fewer than 200 individuals of that species around.
Here’s your short reminder that south korea has 52 million people, so even if people almost stop having children for a generation or two and the population stabilizes at 5 million people, which is 1/10 of what it currently is, it’s still very far away from extinction.
ugh… watch the video and then come back once you ditch the pedantry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk
if a country of 52 is reduced to 5, they would literally roll back to per-industrial living
It’s a delicate feedback loop. Statisticians say that once you reach a certain decline rate, you end up exponentially shrinking and lose most of your middle-aged population in a couple of decades. The lower ages continue to decimate, and the geriatrics end up living in poverty.
Especially in Japan where the reproductive numbers are already barely sustaining.
Taxes have to skyrocket to keep things running, the economy and real estate go fallow. It’s a particularly nasty downward spiral they paint. Supposedly, even if you try to recover, people won’t be able to afford to have kids and they’d need to be having a LOT of kids each. Could be some horrible forced breeding shit if a few generations just to keep us from dropping to unsustainable levels.
Ideally, you evenly distribute the young, working people that are available on Earth. Japan has too few, Africa has gobs. (Although I don’t even know if the trickle of foreigners they’re taking in are from high-birth places)
Unfortunately, whatever the local majority group is is against whatever group isn’t, and that’s how you get history, and history happening again.
I’m not sure how many people Earth will hold in the future, but we can look at historical data. Source
We know that worldwide human population was around 300 million for most of the medieval age (500 AD to 1500 AD). That was sustainable, i.e. people lived like that for a thousand years without incurring some ecological catastrophe. I’m not sure whether it’s needed to return to these numbers, but it’s certainly possible.
Is it possible there wasn’t much census data between 500 AD and 1500 AD in the regions we’re seeing a big explosion of people?
There’s indeed not much data for the medieval age, at least not in Europe, but we know data from the roman empire and the modern age, and we can interpolate what happened in the thousand years between.
Well it’s also the pension system that will become hard to financially sustain. Generally you want the population to at least kind of replace itself to avoid economic upheaval.
While true, that’s an inherently unsustainable model. Pensions need to be self-sustaining, rather than relying on the next generation to pay for them. It’s ridiculous that one generation basically got a free generation and now every generation afterwards is paying the previous generation’s retirement
There’s the quantatitve thing of currency, but also simply the reality that people actually have to work to provide the things the retired people need. In this case the money issue is modeling a more intrinsic issue. With fewer young workers the retirement age has to go up to maintain a viable ratio of non-workers to workers. Yes technology and such can also help things for the better, but roughly that’s the state of things.
There’s the quantatitve thing of currency, but also simply the reality that people actually have to work to provide the things the retired people need. In this case the money issue is modeling a more intrinsic issue.
It’s good that people consider the reality behind the fiction that money is. Money is literally paper, it’s made-up literature. Reality, however, is real.
Yes, as people are disabled through aging, they eventually stop “producing” more than is necessary to sustain them. People with excess “production” have to transfer it to them. This can take various forms, but both a “self-sustaining pension” and a U.S. style “social security fund” use money as this method of transfer; the former is a bit more abstracted since interest / market gains (rather than direct contribution) are used, but it’s still the same flow. Making disabled care a cultural norm is even more direct, but also has a lot of coordination problems, and the people with excess production are often geographically (and socially) separated from the people with production deficits.
Of course, the ideal is not just about discontinuing labor participation due to disability, but because we actually want some time insofar as we can afford it.
A mark of, ideally, a bit of ‘overproduction’ is that we can work fewer hours and/or fewer years. If our ambitions and capabilities allow us to work 32 hour workweeks for a decade and then nope on out on retirement in our 30s for the rest of our lives, that would be a pretty good economic state to be in. A fantasy in practical terms, but a concept to keep in mind as a hypothetical if we ever do manage amazing ‘productivity’ without enough ‘ambition’ to consume it all.
I think that if that ever comes, it will be because “retirement” is/becomes a time when you still have excess production but you aren’t maximizing production, or that instead of 32hr/wk for 10 years, we do 8hr/wk for 40 years, with 3-5 years in there for pivot+retrain or relax+restore+refocus.
I doubt I’ll live to see it, tho.
Another fair point, that we could be targeting a more distributed “retirement” instead of taking it all at the end. How we model it so that we are comfortable with the concept wild be interesting… when and if we ever get there
you’re wrongly assuming that pensions have to be paid by labor taxes. there is no natural law of the universe that forces that. introduce taxes on the rich and pensions will be easily paid for.
I think you may be underestimating how much pensions cost on a yearly basis. In the Netherlands it totals over 50 billion euros each year, half of which is paid through labor taxes. I’m not sure we could easily squeeze that amount out of the 1% every year 🤔
They are having a population crisis … an aging boomer generation that just won’t die and their many children who will add to the aging population while the generations after these groups had fewer children. The population is now full of old people with very few young Japanese to take care of them.
It won’t matter how nationalist they want to be … they’re stuck with the problem of having a huge aging population and far too few young people.
Whether they like it or not, if they want to maintain the country’s current level of development, they’re going to need young people from somewhere else to fill the gaps.
Or they could fix their sex problem
That is a solution … but you have to wait about 50 - 70 years to see the result
More people need to raise hell about this group because they also have members who deny the Nanking Massacre.
So do Japanese history school books, they call it the Nanjing incident and divide the numbers of murdered by 10-ish
Japan is also led by a right wing government, just not as anti-immigration as these guys
I can’t say for sure regarding the textbooks because my kids aren’t old enough to have learned about it, and I grew up in Canada.
And yes, you’re definitely right about the government as well. At least they care about how they look to the world. Sanseito, on the other hand, don’t give a shit.
At any point they can start giving people a UBI and they will have the option to quit their jobs and raise a family.
The old ways of systemic slavery will not work as human societies progress, especially in our post scarcity world.
Scarcity is coming back, buckle up
there is a difference between natural scarcity and artificial scarcity.
Natural scarcity is one that is simply there for natural circumstances. Such as, your population grows, and now suddenly you have 7 kids to feed, so you have to work harder to farm enough food. That’s natural scarcity and everybody understands that you have to work to live through it. Another example would be natural disasters, or maybe if you develop a new technology and now you want to build a factory to produce a new type of product. You have to invest a lot of hard work to build that new factory, and everybody understands that. People are generally fine with that, and pull through with it.
Artificial scarcity is one that is purely man-made, for no underlying natural reason. Examples are when the rich siphon all the wealth away from society and people don’t have enough resources to live anymore. We live in a time with enormous productive capabilities, but those don’t reach the people because somebody mindlessly steals them. People are told to work 60+ hours/week, and that’s not because of some natural circumstances but because rent is made so expensive by nonsensical policies and greedy landlords that your wage doesn’t pay for it anymore. That’s artificial scarcity and people are not ok with it; in fact it makes them very angry.
That is why you have to distinguish between natural scarcity and artificial scarcity. People are largely ok with natural scarcity but NOT with artificial scarcity; and in fact artificial scarcity should be held small at all times; i believe.
As the population ages out of the work force, and fewer replacements are coming in, where’s your tax base to support UBI? And if you say tax the rich, they won’t be rich long with no workers to leech off of.
If the disparity in wealth is reduced thanks to UBI and taxing the rich, then they can pivot towards taxing workers who will now have more money to pay said taxes.
It literally does not make sense to avoid taxing the wealthiest citizens when the disparity in wealth is as bad as it is. Unless you’re an idiot.
I would personally consider it very shaky ground to found a family on if my ability to support them came in the form of a government stipend I have no direct control over.
Can’t we instead restore the economy to functionality rather than slapping a big “UBI” patch on the big crack in the dam?
Restoring earning power to the middle class such that a single income can support a household will give families the stability they need to start families with out handing over all the mechanisms of the economy to a single, potentially untrustworthy entity the way UBI does.
A UBI is a necessity for societies going forward.
Basically, wealth inequality is so bad now that our economies and societies no longer serve the majority of people’s needs.
So wealth redistribution is required to fix the problem, the question after realizing that is how to go about it.
We can do a one time redistribution of wealth, but without fundamentally changing the system with regulations, incomes will inevitably become imbalanced again. This is what we did after the Great Depression with the jobs program that was the national parks and highway/railroad projects.
IMO it’s better to just stop treating money like it’s harmless to allow excess accumulation. It would be better if all wealth were perpetually redistribed via a UBI, this would permanently maintain wealth equality. This is similar to what we did after the Great Depression in regards to corporate tax rates and setting a maximum profit.
I think absolute ceilings and floors on income and wealth will be needed. The wealthy are basically black holes that destroys everything within reach, if given time. Preventing such singularities of excess will have to be through a system designed to give everyone UBI, while making jobs rewarding but with a fixed scope of wealth accumulation.
IMO, a system of classifying entire job classes, and giving them a fixed income rank, would make it harder for wage theft, hoarding, and corruption to happen. By making it so that everyone of a job class has a clear income regardless of location or hours, it will be easier to track who is unnaturally wealthy, thus their hoard can be more easily confiscated before it can do harm to society.
Also, through having fixed incomes, it might prevent inflation. Sellers will have to price according to income brackets, otherwise their goods cannot sell easily to a demographic. In the rankings that I proposed, a basic worker has $30k, while the highest earners get $60k after taxation. This essentially means that CEOs and other high-end careers are only double the value of a waiter’s income. Goods will have to be priced accordingly, making it harder for inflation to take place.
I personally don’t think it’s healthy for a society to force a caste system like that. And I’m not really sure there’s truth to the “if everyone gets paid the same then nobody will want to be a Dr” argument. People would still probably pursue more difficult work even without a profit incentive.
People absolutely pursue difficult work without the extra pay. Cuba has always had plenty of doctors .
It isn’t a caste thing. Typically, castes are all about locking people into a social strata forever. What I proposed includes education paying people for learning, which allows the students to be fully educated for the higher ranks of jobs, if they so choose. Also, people who work earn retirement pay at a 1:1 ratio of days worked - eventually, people get to quit working outright if they want, regardless of rank, simply because two or three decades of work is also fully paid retirement. People who quit working the high end jobs, coincidentally leave those jobs to other people.
In any case, there isn’t a huge gulf of incomes in the proposed system. The real-world elite of our time has over a 1,000x the income of an entry wage worker. Merely double the income for the hardest professions doesn’t even register in comparison. More importantly, the increased money for a high position is to reward the effort, risk, and knowledge needed to hold that position.
Over the next two centuries, I expect automation to make work into a leisure activity, rather than a necessity. Until utopia is obtained, however, we should try to reasonably reward people to work the more difficult jobs, simply out of pragmatic utility and humanity for society as a whole. By ensuring the pool of experts is large, we can spread thin the amount of hours each individual has to work, preventing burnout and allowing them all to live fulfilling lives.
It is a caste thing.
What happens when the majority decide they want more pay, pursue education, and oversaturate the good paying jobs?
Those are the conditions that led to STEM being completely oversaturated.
This beleif that a garbage man is somehow less important to society than doctors, is just capitalist propaganda…
ERK: Effort, Risk, Knowledge. We can have a body of researchers study each occupation, and assign it a rank according to what is required for the task. Provided the standards are objective - the amount of hours, the physical conditions a worker has to undergo, how much education is required to do a good job, and so forth are fairly consistent, we can fairly designate the rank of a job.
Garbage men don’t require nearly as much training as a doctor, otherwise people die. In any case, a garbage man would likely be at the $60k rank, because it is harder than being a waiter. Lots of sitting and driving, with the odd garbage handling in person if something comes up. The biggest source of danger comes from crashes. Far as education goes, not much, I expect - mostly cartography of the route, scheduling, and so forth.
An immigrant worker would probably have their job class at $80k annual payout if they picked food. There is lots of exertion, sun, inclement weather, and so forth. The work itself isn’t dangerous nor requires an education, it is simply exhausting. Provided that 4 or so hours of a six hour shift are done before a hour-long noon lunch, the danger of heat exhaustion from the sun can be mitigated, especially if workers are given hats, water, and 5 minute breaks for each hour to recuperate. Hazard pay can be in effect during significant levels of rain, and appropriate gear mandated for those conditions.
As to STEM being oversaturated, I think that is incorrect. Rather, it is because corporations are hyper-fixated on crushing blood out of a stone to maximize perceived profit. Everyone in every working profession has to work longer and are paid less, because the companies force that to be the case. By deliberately creating ghost jobs, using maladjusted interviews, coercion, and so on, companies can artificially force workers to come to the table to beg for scraps. If there was a 6-hour workday, mandated vacations, and other ethical standards that are enforced, companies would have to employ many more STEM students to fill out the daily roster.
UBI is the new hotness in terms of popular modern means talked about to undo the ever-growing wealth gap, but it is completely untested in the real world. It has challenges even on paper, including the ones I alluded to above involving being exceptionally susceptible income uncertainty and government corruption.
And you are right to point out that anything we do now to correct the wealth disparity problem is wasted if we don’t do enough to prevent another regression back to this same state again. I’m sure UBI could work under the right conditions, as well as many other solutions, but the real success or failure of the program will be measured based on how well and for how long it can resist attempts to dismantle it by bad-faith actors.
I am pretty sure there’s a lot of agreement here on the core of the issue, I just have doubts about UBI because it puts the fate of the most vulnerable citizens with the most easily-ignored political voice even more into the hands of their government, who often do them dirty.
It’s been tested dozens of times, and every time it is tested, it shows people are happier and healthier, and so is their community.
So it does work and is possible, and it would fix a ton of problems.
I mean at the scale at which it would be used. A small pilot program that has millions of eyes on it is not going to get undermined by bad actors because everyone is watching. It is good to create tests and pilot programs to try new economic and governance systems, but it is also important to remember that those are idealized lab conditions.
Also, consider the context of the discussion. Literally any system where money is put in the hands of those in poverty is going to immediately result in improved conditions for those people and increased local taxable economic activity. I could give them a UBI stipend, big tax rebates, increased wages, or even drop cash from planes. The point is that it is not necessarily the method that made the difference but the result. In this case the result is “get buying power to poor people”, and any system that achieves that is going to be an economic and social good.
I’m just not convinced UBI is the safe way to do that. Its an inescapable fact that any government is going to have internal forces trying to undermine its protections to enrich themselves, so it is wise to remember that any government systems we come up with that are not made highly resistant to capture are only going to serve their intended purpose temporarily.
In every study they also witness no significant drop in labor participation, and it always enriches the local community. People become more altruistic, less stressed and agitated, family relationships improve. It’s good in pretty much every single way with no discernible downsides. Please look into more studies.
There isn’t going to ever be a study that is universal until we implement it universally, so there’s literally no way to test it in the way critics want, this argument is just baseless propaganda.
I’m sure that’s true, but again, the positive outcomes you’re describing are the result of the poor peoples’ increased buying power and reduced economic uncertainty. I don’t believe the specifics of HOW they got those things makes very much of a difference, if any. UBI is one way of many to do that.
And you are again correct: there is no way to “dry run” new social programs fully. You can only create small “labs” to partially test them, which is way better than nothing, but still leaves great unknowns. The only truly tested social and economic structures are the ones we’ve seen really used in the real world.
The fact that all past models have eventually failed doesn’t necessarily mean they were bad, though. It means that they were inadequately protected and eventually were corrupted from within (not counting conquest, which I think is safe to say is outside the scope of this conversation).
I understand your position and i think that you say a respectable thought. I like the way you think but i think you’re still wrong. Let me explain:
The labor market is the mechanism through which wages are determined. Human labor is bought and sold on the labor market; that means there is supply and demand. Supply comes from workers who are willing to work, while demand comes from companies who seek to employ people.
Now, as is always the case on any market that is regulated by supply and demand, if there’s a higher supply, prices go down; while if there’s higher demand, prices go up. Prices in the context of the labor market are the price that is paid for an hour of human labor, i.e. the hourly wage.
Now, companies don’t have a constant demand for human labor at all. In fact, how much demand companies have for human labor depends largely on how much the company intends to grow. Imagine it like a house: Building a single house might take thousands of days of human labor (i.e. 8 employees for 120 days) for a single-family brick-built home, but maintaining that house takes significantly less labor (it was traditionally done by a single house-wife, and nowadays it’s done in the spare after-work hours). So, growth requires intense labor input, while maintenance does NOT.
The same is true for the economy. As long as the economy grows, it requires a lot of human labor input. You have to remember that the Great Fire of London happened in 1666, and that is the starting point for large, stone-built cities in the modern age (before that most houses were built out of wood). Also since roughly that time (1800) we have the industrial revolution which has created steam engines, cars, and basically every commodity that we have today. Building all of that up from scratch required a lot of human labor input, and that is why there was such a large demand for human labor. But today, we have all these commodities and companies already built up, and maintaining them requires rather little work, which is why the demand for human labor is declining. That is a natural development and not a human-chosen development. Growth comes to an end (see also the 1970s study The Limits to Growth that discusses that) because planetary boundaries are reached, and either we find new planets to settle or we won’t have growth; but without growth we will have less demand for human labor, and that means lower wages. And that’s what we’re already observing for the last 25 years: wages have continuously declined.
I don’t think that wages could go up again; unless you move to mars and start developing the planet all over again. That’s why UBI is necessary; because people still need resources to live.
