Your idea of “racism” arose in a western historical context and simply has no application to Japan. Japan didn’t bring a bunch of people to their country by force and then enslave them and deny them political rights for hundreds of years.
Nation-states not only exist, the UN recognizes their existence as a human right in the The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The UN recognizes a right of “peoples”—groups of people bound together by culture, ancestry, language, etc.—to self determination. I was born in a country named after one ethnocultural group (Thailand) and my family is from another country named after our ethnocultural group (Bangladesh). Japan is the homeland of Japanese people, just as Thailand is the homeland of Tai people, and Bangladesh is the homeland of Bengali people.
Not sure why you keep on repeating that when nationalism is a thoroughly modern concept and not something that God handed down to us thousands of years ago. It's frankly bizarre for a Bengali born in Thailand and living (presumably, based on timezone) in North America to be so invested in defending the honor of the Japanese ethnostate on the orange hacker website.
Also, I don't know what you would call the historical (and even current) treatment of Zainichi Koreans other than "racism" (as well as the current treatment of immigrants from places like Bengladesh).
> Not sure why you keep on repeating that when nationalism is a thoroughly modern concept
The desire for cultural groups to form their own communities isn’t modern, it’s ancient. What arose in the 20th century—in the aftermath of colonialism—is the global recognition that these groups have a right to form nation-states. The recognition that right was a driving force across the world in the 20th century: Pan-Arab nationalism, Indian nationalism, Bengali nationalism, etc.
> It's frankly bizarre for a Bengali born in Thailand … to be so invested in defending the honor of the Japanese ethnostate on the orange hacker website.
Because your criticism of Japan undermines the legitimacy of the existence of countries like Bangladesh as well. My uncle didn’t get shot at by Pakistanis to establish a multicultural economic zone.
> Also, I don't know what you would call the historical (and even current) treatment of Zainichi Koreans other than "racism" (as well as the current treatment of immigrants from places like Bangladesh)
If Japan allows immigrants into the country then mistreats them, then that’s wrong. But that’s not what this article or my post is talking about.
Nuclear is too expensive in ways that are effectively fixed costs. Solar is the cheapest form of power available on the market. I agree that we should have pushed nuclear 50, 40, 30, and 20 years ago, but now you’re asking the American people to pay more because something was the right call in the 90’s.
No, it wasn’t. In 2008, I went to a lecture by a professor researching better PV cells, and it was, “here’s the benchmarks solar needs to beat to be cost competitive with nuclear, let alone oil or natural gas. As you can see, we’re nowhere close, but here’s what concepts we think can get us there.”
Meanwhile, nuclear’s appeal is that it can scale incredibly well. It’s not cost competitive with oil or gas, and certainly not with solar, but it can put out a ton of energy. With the sudden need for more and more data centers, there’s now a market for that. But solar is cheaper, safer, and is ready to go now.
That doesn’t work if a nation has strong institutions and hierarchies of command. Russia and Nazi Germany (and Iraq) were organized around a strong central leader who personally granted authority to his subordinates, but Iran’s rulers are given authority by a process. If the new supreme leader is killed, they will simply elect another one. Imagine that FDR was visiting Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked. Would the US government have collapsed? How many politicians and generals would the Japanese have had to kill before the US surrendered?
You can lose in chess if you run out of time, even if you have an overwhelming piece advantage. US leadership has made some questionable decisions that effectively turned their game (and only their game) into ultrabullet kriegspiel.
reply