more of the same

World has been doing whatever it's doing for..., approximately, ...ever, give or take, or how the hell should I know?, so I hardly think that whatever carbon-based life is, or even whatever human intelligence is, is some radical departure. The main part of being anything at all is existing from one moment to the next, a remarkable struggle that looks easy because no one has ever experienced not-it; it's hypernormalized, "the air we breathe" taken to another level. Humans will tend to look at life/non-life and human/non-human distinctions under a microscope and see huge differences in kind and this is valid, but there's an equally or in some ways more valid picture -- the big picture -- in which one can see all earth-specific developments as more of the same. So when someone makes statements of the form "world wants X," it needn't be panpsychism -- the belief that the non-human world follows human processes; properly understood, it's the opposite -- the belief that human processes are world processes. 

The (Extrajudicial) Assassin

That's a good nickname for a guy who supposedly has a good jumpshot. His Republican gym buddies use the moniker grudgingly, his Democrat pals proudly. Hmmm. But let's not forget he loves the gays -- or rather realized they're not so bad after decades of soul searching and/or fundraising -- except maybe when he's murdering them in their sleep. Paragon of fucking virtue, this guy.

friendly racism is still racism and the madonna is just as othered as the whore

Excellent article on Japanese racism by Arudou Debito here. 

The term used in Japan to refer to dominant culture members is nihonjin (日本人), or Japanese person. This is a racial term. If two "white" Americans move to Japan, become fluent, and have kids, neither they nor their kids will be considered Japanese. This is not disputed. Ask any nihonjin. These "white" kids will regularly be spoken to in English, often even after demonstrating Japanese language competence. Alternatively, their language skills will be complemented with the unstated microagressive message "pretty good...for a white person." The kids of my own loins, for real, are considered "half" (I'm northern European-looking, wife is Japanese in recent lineage), in spite of being born and acculturated in Japan. 

Group habits and tendencies, such as caring about blood type, using chopsticks and commenting on how cute everything is, acquired due to unique Japanese circumstances, such as Japan's recent feudal history and rapid industrialization, its particular brand of top-down Prussian-style education, its physical environment, etc. are granted essential status, considered to be products of Japanese genes, whether or not the racial component is explicitly stated. Japanese media is filled with statements of the form "nihonjins are like X, gaijins (外人 -- foreigners, outsiders, barbarians) are like Y." Yesterday, I learned from the TV that nihonjins are fond of the chord progression "Am G F C." It goes without saying that gaijins who like that progression are not Japanese to that extent, they're simply gaijins who like something nihonjins like.    

If those of us considered gaijin call ourselves non-Japanese (NJ), as Debito has suggested as a substitute for gaijin, we're accepting the racist terminology of the dominant culture and saying "we're not genetically Japanese and we accept that this is a relevant paradigm." But let me tell you, there is no such thing as "genetically Japanese." There is no goddamn Japanese race. (See here or a somewhat simpler version here.) And as long as we use the term "nihonjin" without qualification we're accepting its racial message. You cannot separate race from nihonjin. "Non-Japanese" means "not members of the Japanese race."

The genetic differences between the wife and I amount to phenotypes and fuckall. The actual difference between us, as a "Japanese" and an "American," is that she grew up in Japan and I grew up in the U.S. Instead of dividing the long-term residents of Japan into Japanese and non-Japanese, then, I'd suggest calling them Acculturated In Japan (AIJ) and Acculturated in (wherever). (There's an argument to be made that even this concedes too much, that where and how we were acculturated is also irrelevant, since any judgments based thereon will be matters of pigeon-holing.)

Now to call myself Acculturated Outside of Japan (AOJ) makes some sense in the fake, social construct world of Japanese culture but accepts the Japanese view that there are two types of people in the world, Japanese and everyone else. On this view, I have more in common with a person acculturated in and living in Peru than with my neighbors, even though I share a wide set of daily experiences with the latter, such as going to Lawson's, eating okonomiyaki, communicating in Japanese, etc., while I share far less culturally with the former.

But I share with any Peruvian living in Japan for some time the experience of being considered an outsider in Japan. An apt label for us "gaijin" might be: "considered impure by race for having been acculturated in a place other than the Japanese archipelago, whose inhabitants, having been acculturated rather uniformly to wrongly consider themselves as belonging to a race, maintain their dominant culture status in part by way of this myth and therefore are inclined to perpetuate it until otherwise deterred." This needs an acronym. So within the false narrative the Peruvian and I are a unity, and because this is a dominant culture narrative, the unity is a reality. We really are outsiders because we are considered as such.

"good reporting"

Like The Onion, the NYT usually jams the entire joke into the headline so you don't have to bother reading the whole thing, or if you do, you'll wish you had that time back, which is my excuse for not linking to this:

Netanyahu Says U.S. and Israeli 'Clocks' Differ on Iran's Threat

How about some quotation marks for that last word? Did they just run out? Sure, "clocks" should have quotes too, but gets them above only because Netanyahu doesn't have an actual war clock in his office. Duh. A good reason for "clocks" to get quotes is that it's a metaphor for an attack U.S. and Israeli bosses are planning. In other words, "clocks" doesn't refer to clocks but to actual plans for an aggressive war. Threats? That would be a weak way to put it.

Iran's (offensive military) "threat," on the other hand, does not exist, and therefore also needs quotes. Or "[sic]" or mockery.

How about this, instead?

Netanyahu Says 'Israel' 'Wants' to 'Crush' 'Iran' ASAP, 'U.S.' 'Dragging Feet'; 'Iran' 'Just Sitting There, Trembling'

morality play

The passive observer of human drama instinctively looks for someone to identify with. Who's the good guy in this story? To care at all about a story is to find some kind of rooting interest. 

Children grow up watching drama every day -- at home, at school, on TV, everywhere. They're passive long before they're active. They're acted upon. Someone has to fight their fights for them because they're weak. Someone has to get them food, not kill them, not let them be killed.

Children want their adults to be good, to be committed to them, to share their perceptions of things, to do what they would do in the same circumstances. They see in the adult -- their protagonist -- a more powerful version of themselves, regardless of what that person does or what their motives are. The weak do not get to decide. The adult's motives become the child's.

Morality is projected onto every meaningful event of childhood. The good guys are self, the bad guys other.

Adult spectatorship relies on this childlike capacity to project. When you are helpless to change anything, you fall into the old patterns.

I saw this sentence from someone who'd just argued that Bush was the Patriot Act guy, therefore worse than Obama:

I'm not trying to make the argument that either of the last two presidents has been great on privacy.   

Well, the idea that either of the last two presidents wanted to be "great on privacy" assumes that they think like you do, that they're your protagonist.

They are not. They are not. They are not.

Friend 1: "You're not very good at letting me eat that hamburger."
Friend 2, eating hamburger: "I don't want you to eat it. I want it."
Friend 1: "Yeah, but you're not good at letting me eat it!"
Friend 2: "Don't I have to be trying to do something to be good or not good at it?"

From a non-projected perspective, Obama has been great on privacy. He thinks you should have as little as possible, apparently, and he's doing a good job at achieving his goal.

And to the 5 year-old who thinks her parents could be doing a better job of letting her go to bed whenever she wants: they want you in bed at 9!

across this line you will not

Dear Mr. Limbaugh,

We respect your right to make a living as a professional misogynist. Afterall, you provide a service valued by certain people with a disproportionate share of the wealth, this obtained by leveraging systemic advantages against certain groups, like, for example, women.  That these moneyed people, for example, men, want to maintain a power imbalance that favors them is not only understandable, it's the American way. Freedom of speech is great, especially if you can afford it. We respect your right to produce words that push minds towards misogyny and improve the viability of the patriarchal model going forward, thus helping people with misogynist gains to use same to maintain same and so on.

But, c'mon, do not use the "s" word. We will run with it. Laugh's on you, chump!

Thanks,
The Liberals

P.S. Also, the "c" word and the "n" word and the "h" word...

deception by repetition

Compare...

99 images of a bearded demon in a nuclear facility accompanied by deceptions like "what are we going to do about the Iranian threat?" spoken in ominous tones by "respected authority figures," mixed in with a missile launch on loop...  

with...

a single appearance on MSNBC by Glenn Greenwald in which he explains that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program and is in no way a threat to the U.S.

Propaganda works because it has numbers and time. It's a Russian winter with millions of poorly armed soldiers. Or a death star that mass produces stormtroopers or something. Its arguments are weak. They are self-contradictory and absurd, at odds with observable reality. Sociopathy reinvents reality to comport with its needs. It thinks like a traumatized child whose psychological survival depends on the truth of an untrue statement (for example, "my parents don't hate me") and proceeds to find proof. Contradictions ensue.  

But 99 demons can beat the hell out of a single accurate statement. The demons have persuasive power mainly because they have numbers. An attempt to manipulate unconscious fears with Freud-derived chicanery would mostly fall flat without control of the "mass" side of mass media.