I had a kid 2 years ago and that's the only excuse I have for somehow having not heard of this news (or it simply slipped through my sleep deprived memory). Wow. I thought for a second this was about the Inejiro Asanuma assassination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Inejir%C5%8D_... but... wow. Homemade gun? I guess someone sufficiently motivated will figure out a way to kill someone at range even with strict gun controls...
Shinzo Abe's Assassination
171–180 of 211 posts
Re: Shinzo Abe's Assassination
#172Meta comment on cultural awareness: "Japan wants you to say its leader’s name correctly: Abe Shinzo [1]" Why authors are still messing this up almost 5 years later is bewildering [1] https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/21/asia/japan-name-abe-shinzo-in...
One of the most annoying things about speaking the dominant world language (obviously it is also great in many respects) is that there is some pressure to change your language rather than just adjusting the sounds and spelling to the pre-existing phonetics. Erdogan is pronounced closer to erdoyan and Türkiye insisting on the umlaut. Nguyen and Pho rather than wynn and pha. Gyro instead of hyro. Blonde vs blond (WHY w…
It's less about being the dominant language and more about sharing the same writing system (the Latin alphabet) with most of the world. So, however a Vietnamese name is written, since it's already in Latin characters, the characters are imported verbatim (well, usually diacritics don't survive, but what can you do).
The opposite extreme would be cases like Korean, with its own writing system not used anywhere else. Therefore, once an American name is written in Korean letters, there's no ambiguity in how to read it. So Los Angeles is 로스앤젤레스 ro-seu-aen-jel-le-seu, and everyone who can read Korean knows exactly how to read it.
Except... how do you determine which spelling to use? The sound systems are so different that there are usually no clearly correct matches. Also, how do you really know how these names originally sounds? Should Nevada be read with a long "a" or short "a" in the middle? You see a name Charles in an article, is he an Englishman or Frenchman (with different ch sounds)? Should we consider Einstein a German physicist, or an American one?
Two book publishers make two different choices, and you end up with the same people's name written in two different ways.
So, basically, there's no easy solution. You either pay the cost when you're reading (as in English) or when you're doing the transliteration (as in Korean).
Re: Shinzo Abe's Assassination
#173I went to a conference in Nara last year and at one of the receptions I told a Japanese attendee that I was sorry to hear about the assassination. I joked that my name is pronounced Abe like Abe Lincoln, not like Shinzo Abe. He kind of shrugged and said it would be kind of like if it had happened to Trump in the US, in that there were a lot of of people that didn't like him. The article makes it seem like people disc…
The cult connections weren't widely known by the public prior. His assassin opened up a giant can of worms with the Reunification Church still discussed on the nightly news to this day. Last I heard the government is getting ready to ban them like they did Aum Shinrikyo. The whole thing has tarnished Abe's legacy, that and his expensive state funeral which pissed off a good chunk of the public.
I feel like the public in Japan can get upset about the weirdest things though.
Everyone loses their minds over the princess leaving the imperial family getting a 1M departure gift, and a funeral for the single most significant PM of our time that cost ten million dollars.
Meanwhile, everything has gotten 10% more expensive over the past year or so, which is actually worth getting upset about, compared to the 0.01 yen that the Abe funeral cost each Japanese citizen.
Re: Shinzo Abe's Assassination
#174I went to a conference in Nara last year and at one of the receptions I told a Japanese attendee that I was sorry to hear about the assassination. I joked that my name is pronounced Abe like Abe Lincoln, not like Shinzo Abe. He kind of shrugged and said it would be kind of like if it had happened to Trump in the US, in that there were a lot of of people that didn't like him. The article makes it seem like people disc…
> He kind of shrugged and said it would be kind of like if it had happened to Trump in the US, in that there were a lot of of people that didn't like him.
Not really--Abe's approval ratings were well above water almost his entire tenure, and his approval was often over 50%. Trump's approval rating never hit 50% and his net approval was underwater almost his entire presidency.
It would be more like Reagan. A large minority of people really hated Regan. But he was relatively popular overall.
Re: Shinzo Abe's Assassination
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
"These people (the Trump voters) are sick and tired of being lied to by fake politicians and they just want to burn the whole system down -- Trump is their fire bomb." -- Michael Moore, prior to the 2016 election.
Isn’t Michael Moore a Democrat?
Yes. This was part of an MSNBC discussion about Clinton's problem with union and working class white voters. The panel was having a hard time understanding why union members would vote Republican.
Re: Shinzo Abe's Assassination
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Moonies have woven themselves into the American right wing for decades. Reagan said the Washington Times, which is an organ of the Unification Church, was his favorite newspaper. You can see Falun Gong attempting the same in the United States. The Epoch Times is Falun Gong's "media outlet" and it sponsors and shapes a lot of content online. It's all bankrolled by Shen Yun performances too. These rabbit holes go t…
Lately I’ve seen tons and tons of anti trans content that actually says sponsored by the Epoch Times. I’ve see it on Facebook and Xitter. I don’t get why that issue is so important to them. Maybe scaring people about trans people is just broadly working. Gotta fear monger or people might notice that most of our candidates are incompetent. Republicans are unelectable without scaring people about LGBT people and immigr…
Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falung Gong, views homosexuality as basically such a profound abnormal psychological state that it is among the worst of sins.
It is no surprise that their mouthpiece would be rabidly against acceptance of gender dysphoria as anything other than a perverse mental disorder.
Re: Shinzo Abe's Assassination
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
The First Amendment says that religion and government should remain separate. I have the right to freely observe that some religions are aggressively testing that boundary more than others. But, "intentionally misleading"? Can you please explain the ways I've mislead people? Here are some essays which go into the claims in more detail. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/stepping-into... https://www.nytime…
>> The First Amendment says that religion and government should remain separate That's not what it says. The US can't officially be Catholic. Nor can it officially be Protestant. That's what the first amendment says.
In practice, the Supreme Court has intepreted the First Amendment as implying full separation of church and state; for instance, school prayer is forbidden [0], even if it's voluntary and non-denominational.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_prayer_in_the_United_...
Re: Shinzo Abe's Assassination
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
"These people (the Trump voters) are sick and tired of being lied to by fake politicians and they just want to burn the whole system down -- Trump is their fire bomb." -- Michael Moore, prior to the 2016 election.
That's not wrong, we have an issue with politicians promising things that are impossible or at a minimum highly implausible - because the structure of our political system means they won't be thrown out on their ear for making promises they can't keep.
> we have an issue with politicians promising things that are impossible or at a minimum highly implausible
That's every democracy. The issue we have is that we're in a period where trust in elites is at rock bottom. (Both sides' elites--Mitch McConnell isn't much more popular among Trump voters than Biden.) The normal function of elites keeping the unwashed masses grounded in reality isn't working.
Re: Shinzo Abe's Assassination
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cult connections weren't widely known by the public prior. His assassin opened up a giant can of worms with the Reunification Church still discussed on the nightly news to this day. Last I heard the government is getting ready to ban them like they did Aum Shinrikyo. The whole thing has tarnished Abe's legacy, that and his expensive state funeral which pissed off a good chunk of the public.
I feel like the public in Japan can get upset about the weirdest things though. Everyone loses their minds over the princess leaving the imperial family getting a 1M departure gift, and a funeral for the single most significant PM of our time that cost ten million dollars. Meanwhile, everything has gotten 10% more expensive over the past year or so, which is actually worth getting upset about, compared to the 0.01 ye…
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=10%2C000%2C000+usd+divi...
Tangent, but I looked up the price since ¥0.01 sounded too low. It's ¥12 per person on Japan (which should be a good approximation for number of japanese citizens)
Re: Shinzo Abe's Assassination
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why doesn't your practical ethic include the general moral principle of not promoting religious nonsense? The causal chain is simple. People who believe religious nonsense can be easily made to believe any nonsense that hurts them (and have done so again and again), including mutilating their own genitals and the genitals of their children, which conflicts with and takes priority over your other moral principle. Your…
You obviously have a lot of emotional baggage here and it’s keeping you from making much sense.
I'm simply stating facts about religious mutilation as an impartial outsider who has never mutilated their own body or others'. I can understand why you might not like facts given your likely upbringing within a fact-denying community, but facts are what the rest of the world use as the grounding of a common framework for understanding.