Posted by wahnfrieden 2 days ago
But only when LDP is falling and becoming a minority government and so-called alt-right is rising, it's "joining the trend of declining democracy."
The likely reason for going even lower in that scale is the foundation of new parties that in some case goes as far ad calling for the restoration of the political power of the imperial family.
Not really funny IMHO.
I think lot stems from the reality that many don't see the "plenty" themselves that is spend in many cases spend on others. Or notice that somehow "plenty" comes from ever increasing debt...
>A government panel has also started work on restricting entry into Japan by foreigners
but if the people want that and vote for that maybe that's democracy in action?
This has been true for decades, and fleshed out in the 90's in Modes of Immigration Politics in Liberal Democratic States by Freeman. Basically alleging that elected officials prefer client politics (what employers and small ethnic groups, etc want) over democratic politics (what people want). It gets remarked on all the time today by newer sources too.
- The original article starts with all-caps EDITORIAL:. It's rare to see such strong labeling but personally I couldn't find any facts in the piece and suspect it's to make that clear
- The article is from Asahi, which along with Mainichi are the anti-government newspapers in Japan. Not an issue for normal news but this is an EDITORIAL (emphasis from the original article, not mine)
Quietly take away from the article what you want but please don't make any claims based on this.
https://x.com/ianmiles/status/1980957928791437360?s=46
The result will be lower GDP. But the culture will remain strictly Japanese
Japanese-ness is not some backward notion from a time that the world has advanced beyond. They take Japanese-ness extremely seriously. One ignores it to their own detriment. As that particular Miss Japan contestant found out.
And as, I suspect, many foreign residents of Japan will find out in the coming years. It's unfortunate.
But culture above everything I guess?
Eventually the population will get low enough that standards of living start improving because there's so much land and resources per person, and the Japanese birth rate will start rising again. Which won't happen if they keep importing foreigners to compete with Japanese youth for resources.
Check the EU: millions of foreigner have arrived in the past 20 years, yet EU's GDP has been growing very little during the same time
Sigh.
the ldp is pro-immigration. numbers are going up.
> A government panel has also started work on restricting entry into Japan by foreigners, a policy that could further spread xenophobia around Japan.
This was the part that really set me off. I mean, democracy is fundamentally a little xenophobic. Democracies tend to be militarily aggressive and the people on the receiving end don't get a vote. One of the best arguments for being a capitalist democracy, in my opinion, is that the only way to hold off a foreign capitalist democratic military is to deploy one yourself. Otherwise it is hot knife through butter time. They are unkind to foreigners.
> Populism that gains support through xenophobia and chest-pumping arguments is also spreading into Japan. This reflects the distortions in politics and society that fuel dissatisfaction among the public with their daily lives.
And I get that this is not a good thing, but how are they to argue that it makes a country less democratic? There seems to be some bizarre academic re-appropriation of words here where it only counts as democratic if the majority can't act, can't be persuaded of new ideas that haven't been approved by Sweden and some blessed minority is secured. All that probably would be nice, but words mean something!
It is hard to get much more democratic than populism. Mobs are very democratic organisations too, that is one of the arguments against going overboard with democracy. Too much of the stuff. It is good to have a few slow multi-year rituals to give people time to think over whether they want to do something really stupid.
See: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/defining-defending-democrac...
tl;dr:
>democracy isn’t just about having an election. It’s about having more than one election.
>Imagine a system where the winner of a fair election gets unlimited authority during his term. What forces this person to ever hold another fair election? [...]
You misunderstand the purpose of editorials such as these. It is not to communicate, but to push an agenda [1], here by putting PR pressure on the Japanese government. Words are just a tool in pursuit of that goal. So 'democracy' is used because of its positive affect in the minds of the public, and because it can be successfully misused without most people noticing - the line between "a set of policies I like" (how they are using the word) and "rule of the people" (what the word actually means) has been blurred through years of media effort for this very reason.
[1] I use the term neutrally, as in agendas can be either good or bad. E.g. fighting for the right for repair, and tobacco companies deceiving the public about the harm of their product, are both agendas.
Crime rate: Japan is better.
Divorce rate: Japan is better.
Suicide rate: Japan is better.
GINI score: Japan is better.
Life expectancy: Japan is better.
Obesity rate: Japan is best in the world.
I could go on and on and on. If democracy isn't working out in Japan, that tells me democracy sucks, not Japan.
https://www.athome.co.jp/kodate/6979902125/
Life is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE better in Japan than the US. It isn't even close.
Tell me how that's worse than me waiting three hours in line in the Phoenix sun to vote, only to be given a provisional ballot because I'm the wrong demographic. And I know my ballot is going to be thrown in the trash and not counted.
You have never been to Japan. Visit. It will blow your mind.
edit: lol, "You're posting too fast" an hour later. Okay @dang, you win. I'll just take the "ur stoopid" comment like a champ. What kind of fucking Nazi won't even let you speak?
Japan: 17.4
USA: 15.6
Japan has more suicides
https://www.reddit.com/r/UnpopularFacts/comments/1ke0fhb/as_...
Japan does many things well; I love the efficient and clean public transportation, the excellent customer service, the lack of price gouging at hotels and airports, and the general kindness of the people. I love the social harmony here. I also used to work for a Japanese company before switching careers to academia, and in many ways I seem to fit in better with corporate Japan than modern corporate America.
However, not everything in Japan is better than the United States. I stayed in Japan for nearly two months last summer and I found myself craving a nice deli sandwich when I returned to America. Deli sandwiches aren’t really a thing in Japan other than Subway.
For more serious matters, I know many Japanese people who moved to Silicon Valley because there were more opportunities there compared to Japan. I know a few Japanese women who felt stifled in Japan due to gender expectations and ended up thriving in America in careers such as art and biotechnology. While Japanese K-12 schools are better on average than their American counterparts, American higher education is still the best in the world, though it’s very expensive. While I had great experiences at the Japanese company I worked for (both in Japan and the US), not all companies in Japan are good. The work culture here can involve very long hours. Additionally, salaries in tech are much lower than in America, and the yen has been weak since 2022.
Additionally, the United States is a multicultural nation. While it still has a long way to go when it comes to rooting out racism and xenophobia, and while things are challenging with the current political situation, there’s still the idea that anyone can become an American no matter their birthplace. In contrast, Japan is a Japanese nation. I could naturalize, but I’ll never be treated as truly Japanese, and if I have children, even if they are half-Japanese, they would not be treated as truly Japanese.
I love Japan; I want to continue traveling here twice per year and I can see myself spending a sabbatical year here one day. However, Japan is not paradise, and while things in the United States are rather tumultuous now, there are still aspects of American life that are nicer than in Japan, and not just cheese and deli sandwiches.
Please continue to control immigration strictly, and do not let the rest of the world dictate policy in Japan.
Sounds like they nailed the problem.
Too bad there’s no push to solve this as a global community. That’s really the only way out, globalization isn’t going away, externalities and climate change are on a one way path. So assuming you can go back to a time before globalization is fantasy.
Instead, people are retreating to their tribes and the only option now is prepping for tribe-tribe battle.
It’s a shame that it’s been the failure of multiple generations to provide, not only the leadership, but the citizens who could accept and promote the right people into the leadership, for the good of all people
Alas, humanity does not have the capacity to do that.
Bummer man
Ones that strike me include:
- Most crucially, democracy relies on an educated electorate, but access to really excellent education is minimal globally. This exposes democracies to disinformation and populism
- Democracies are not great at long-term investment and planning, due to the rapid election cycle and politicians needing to manage polls in ~real time
- We long relied on media as gatekeepers and curators of sound political analysis and facts, but a revenue race to the bottom means media now chase ragebait and owner politics instead
- The uncomfortable truth is that a lot of successes of Western Democracies happened when they weren't all that democratic. Anything prior to 20th century was really plutocratic at best, then there was a slow expansion of the vote, but even then, there simply weren't that many terrible options to vote for. Even an uneducated electorate can make a good choice when all you can do is choose between two decent options
- Not entirely related, but I think shift from values-based societies to consumption/hedonistic societies broke the unwritten contract of democratic systems, where you vote not for your immediate benefit, but for some kind of societal one.
As Churchill supposedly quipped, democracy still seems like the least bad option, but that shouldn't mean we don't discuss improvements. I don't really know where we go from here - pumping lots of money into education would possibly do it eventually - but awareness is a good first step to fixing.
Not so sure about that. Some of today’s autocratic leaders are incredibly smart and educated people and still took the wrong turn. If education doesn’t work for these leaders why should it work for the electorate?
Hence, I’m leaning more towards your last point that it’s maybe more about values and morals? A common understanding of what is „good?“ You can certainly sharpen these through education but there seems to be more at play. Our world also seems to have moved beyond some of the simplistic moral frameworks of the past… Maybe the current times of turbulence are the precursor to the development of new moral frameworks?
This assumes every person has the same goals. The reality is that the privileged (autocrats at the extreme end of the spectrum) have completely different incentives and objectives. E.g. a person who gets most of their income through salaried work benefits from completely different (often opposite policies) than a person who gets most of their income from renting real property or from taking a cut from the profit of companies he "owns".
> Maybe the current times of turbulence are the precursor to the development of new moral frameworks?
Hopefully.
I for one would like to see a consistent (without contradictions) moral system not based on "authority" (religion or state).
Rather, the electorate is not equipped to tell the good ones from the bad ones. And I don't even mean, they aren't voting the way I'd like. Trump is doing everything he said he'll do, and his popularity is so low. Why? We see this over and over again.
Otherwise, I cannot reconcile how people are genuinely voting for terrible politicians and falling for blatant populism and propaganda.
1. More people have access to a university education today than in previous generations. Granted, not everybody goes to college, and I’m concerned about the relatively low standards of today’s high schools outside of highly-ranked ones that serve as feeders to elite universities.
2. I wholeheartedly agree. Moreover, I feel modern American culture as a whole, and not just politics, is very short-term driven compared to previous generations, though this is a perception and I have no data to back this up. I feel so many businesses, for example, are hyper-focused on achieving the next quarter’s targets. To put it in computer science terms, sometimes a greedy approach isn’t optimal.
3. I sympathize, but this is not the first time America has dealt with a reckless media landscape. I remember reading in high school about “yellow journalism” and its role in instigating the Spanish-American War.
4. I wonder if modern presidential primary elections helped contribute to polarization as opposed to the old, pre-George McGovern methods of choosing presidential nominees? The Democratic and Republican parties used to be less uniform ideologically, and party bosses often picked compromise candidates to try to appeal to different factions of each party. The pre-Civil Rights Democratic Party was an alliance of Northern pro-union, moderate-to-liberal politicians and Southern conservatives. The Republican Party had Northeastern moderates (like Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.) and conservatives from other parts of the country (like Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater). On one hand primaries are arguably more democratic, but on the other hand they’ve fueled polarization.
5. I’ll have to think about this some more.
1) Even locally in countries where education is decent, democracy seems to be weakening, with authoritarianism rising.
2) People talk about education is a general thing but really, a lot of the stuff is biology, chemistry, memorizing book and author names in literature without deeper understanding, etc. What we're missing is education focused on logic and reasoning, both formal and the so called critical thinking - the ability to detect biases, manipulative ("rhetorical") techniques, lying etc. There's focus on "presentation skills" but nothing about "anti-presnetation skills" - detecting nicely packaged bullshit and detecting poorly presented good ideas. And what's completely missing is basic psychology and psychopathology (many politicians have blatant NPD or ASPD, yet people still vote for them).
3) There's no requirement for voting except age. Maybe voters should have to answer a few questions about math and formal logic and their vote weighted by how much they get right. Or simple questions about the party they're voting for.
I mean, either these voters are right and are seeing something I don't. Or they aren't smart enough to vote. I'm not trying to be elitist but the world does feel a bit like a bus where the people are increasingly voting to go down the cliff, just to shake things up a bit.
> Maybe voters should have to answer a few questions
I think about it from time to time. I guess the concern would be that the flat earthers & co will be more motivated and organised, grit their teeth, pass the tests (since political pressure will stop them from being too hard) and educated people will be less keen. I can totally imagine this in my native Poland, where the populist right is actually polling consistently around only 35% but is very organised and has the highest turnouts.
1) I think a lot of people (correctly) feel that their quality of life is not improving the way it should be according to the (so often discussed) technological progress and growing economy, yet don't have the ability to think about the system as a whole and the root causes.
I could be wrong too but the way I see it is that an increasingly large cut of wealth goes to the already massively rich.
Any kind of passive income is IMO exploitation by a different name. If you're not putting in work, then the money coming out has to come from other people's work. Finite investment should yield finite reward. Owning companies should be illegal just like it's illegal to own humans already (at least in the civilized world but it took even us a long time to get here).
> since political pressure will stop them from being too hard
Calibrating the difficulty correctly will be hard but we won't know until we try. Politics is adversarial so the way of coming up with questions probably(?) has to be as well.
I think people should be able to vote on laws directly - see my other comments. That would hopefully cut down on some populism and also incentivize not voting on stuff you don't understand.
But as long as we're stuck with political parties, we could try systems where each candidate party provides a list of questions+answers (with a maximum amount). Or where anybody can submit a question if they collect enough signatures.
It looks like it goes in cycles: after major catastrophic event subsequent generations that don't remember the catastrophe are willing to engage in another one (I think of WWI and WWII as one event). If the memory was stronger there would be more pressure to find other means of resolving issues.
Eg. as a "half boomer" European I remember well why EU was created. It looks like the reasons have been largely forgotten now.
My worry is that there is more will to just dissolve it instead of working on improving it.
The benefits of globalization did not reach all citizens, leading to a maldistribution of wealth.
Acid House music arose around the end of the Cold War.
If, for some reason, a handful of influential figures had blamed Acid House for all society's problems instead of globalization, then presumably the author would have written:
The benefits of Acid House did not reach all citizens, leading to a maldistribution of wealth.
We are not so far into the multicultural experiment (in the literal sense where distinct self contained cultural groups can exist in one nation), and it's becoming clear that it doesn't really work. You get endless cases of representatives chosen based on cultural groups, policies where one group wins at the cost of the whole, and lower trust in the system generally.
This is complicated by the messaging that multiculturalism is the same as anti-racism. This has been such a successful campaign that nationalism even being an acceptable idea is one of the major dividing points between parties.
I don't really believe that it's resolvable without some kind of major external factor.
Why should I want affordable housing for citizens, unless being part of my nation is important?
Why should I accept any plan that extends beyond my lifetime?
More fundamentally, I believe that when a groups identity is sufficiently fragmented, it's no longer ethical to apply the powers of the state. Since my (and my groups) interests are no longer sufficiently represented. There is no unifying identity, or argument that can be made that allows me to believe a compromise leads to anything good.
Religion is a sidetrack; god is dead.
You cannot remove the idea of a national identity without some way to prevent a unified group from forming in exclusion to the rest of the population, to advance their group primarily. And the word for that is nationalism.
And promotion of that shared identity is absolutely vital; it should be independent of race, but not ethnicity, since typically I understand ethnicity to include cultural identity.
It's not so much about what we do voluntarily; Its about how we construct an argument that taxation and policing is ethical.
But actual ethnicities and races will in any case emerge in any society over the centuries. And we will need another set of wars and bloodshed to relearn the lessons of ethnic/racialism being bad again.
The key part for me though is the voluntary nature. I can participate as much or as little as I like, and my motivation to participate can be entirely individualistic, and the whole thing still works (more or less).
Taxation and policing is not voluntary however; and I frequently see the proceeds going to short term initiatives, that are promoted based on how much they impact some minority group specifically.
Advancing one group in a democracy is not often even a neutral action; its entirely possible to use resources so poorly that it's harmful overall. (Both in economic terms, but also in more abstract things like public trust in policing, or tolerance of corruption)
Israel: religion/nationalism
Russia: nationalism
Yemen: nationalism/racialism
etc etc
Surely it is not anymore liberal democratic capitalist country?
It's theoretically possible that Takaichi had a plan and decided the economic pain was worth it, but generally you don't win elections by hurting economy.