Commodore Shmidlap (Retired) comments

I hate we live in a world where this is a possibility, but since we do, I believe the SDF will conduct itself as the highly trained professional force it is. I would hope they won't be tossed into hopeless missions like the US one in Somalia back in the 1990s, but those kinds of things are our reality. They will be up to the task will called upon. I'm not sure the tasks will be worth the sacrifice, though.

How about bulldozing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and turning it into a US-Vietnam Friendship Centre?

Why? The US and Vietnam are fast becoming good friends and partners against China. It doesn't seem to have the same ultra-nationalist theme park feel this place does. False equivalency, newest summer drink to beat the heat. Always seems so witty on first blush, then leaves a sour bile taste.

So all the support he got up until now by saying he wants US allies to pay more, that we do more for them than they do for us and all the rest... What happens to that now that he's reversing course? Supporters who were all for his "go it alone" approach before are going to start toeing the mainstream US policy of engagement with allies and foreign expenditures? You can always count on this "leader" to espouse no less than three opposing viewpoints all at the same time in answer to any question when he freeforms from the mess that passes for his mind. This simply smacks of his being able to keep to an approved script for once in a speech. Is that what Trumpians want? A good little boy who plays by the GOP rules, or do they want their inspired madman who "speaks the truth?"

It probably doesn't matter. What they want is a white man in the White House. He can be a business incompetent, bullying fraud...

So long as he's a racist.

Go ask the Greeks.

"We have a big garden that we're chopping down for cattle farms, and you can get diseases just from looking at our rivers and the ocean itself just off our beaches. Let's do something with that in the opening ceremony."

If I win, then the election was fair and square. If she wins, then it was rigged. Sounds like loser talk to me. Yep. Three more months of this crybaby and then he can go back to starring in TV shows.

I'm shocked Putin couldn't scare up enough cash to buy their way out of this one.

What an unfortunate world view the above comment expresses. We should all live in the cesspool MRAers create for themselves, huh?

Yeah, whatever. It's all screen capped and preserved for the Twittet Hall of Shame, including the fake tweets these guys posted that made her think her account had been hacked.

But you know, go ahead and pretend she should have just chuckled and tweeted "Boys will be boys" when they said she was going to be a shoo-in to play Harambe in her next movie. After all, what was she thinking after all when she deliberately courted male outrage by acting in a Ghostbusters remake? Or simply being a woman of color online these days?

And other women targeted by people like these MRA bullies should just shut up and let them have their way with their death threats and posting actual addresses and then none of this would have to happen, huh? "If only you hadn't talked back I wouldn't have to beat you harder" is typical MRA logic. This is exactly my point-- everyone is supposed to shut up and fear these guys while they act with impunity and drag all discourse down to their level.

Letting bullies control the field has always been bad advice and it's terrible advice in the face of this guy's so-called culture war. He started the fight here and he lost it. She did nothing wrong and they did everything wrong and no amount of your victim-blaming will change that.

Headline: "Horrible Man Now Considered Less Horrible Than Other Horrible Men."

This is probably a good idea. I mean, have fun playing the game but don't expect the rest of the world to stop while you "catch them all." The young dudes quoted in this article seem pretty sensible about it, so I'm not that worried about what's going to happen here. Sure, we'll have a few news stories to comment on but ideally this safety message will get out there and taken to heart and most of the articles can be things like "Pokemon Go players meet their significant others while playing the game" or something upbeat.

I predict the country will be a much happier place once Obama is gone.

In large part because all the anti-Obama psychos will finally shut up.

Soon to be changed to "standard operating procedure."

That's true. This is kind of a case of "They picked on the wrong person this time" rather than a triumph against bullying. There are a number of users quite rightly tweeting, "Hey, what about all those times I screen-capped death and rape threats and photos of my apartment building and complained ever since these Gamergate guys flooded this place? None of that counted for anything?"

The Trumps are frauds, the GOP is nothing more than a organ pumping racism into the heart of white America. That Mrs. Trump plagiarized her speech is the least of anyone's worries, nothing but a distraction from just how horrible everything that party stands for truly is.

Yeah, you could just put a key at the bottom of the map and use the old one, but someone has to "make work." On the other hand, as many have pointed out, whether you're a cannibal or an onsen enthusiast, this new one will be hard to mistake.

I watched this unfold in real time. It was a horrifying spectacle. The motivation behind these MRA trolls is to frighten women, people of color and LGBTQIA people-- ironic given who started this debacle, but recognizing irony (or reality) is never a strong point for these characters--- into silence by making them afraid for their lives. Hence the threats and postings of real world addresses. Then when their abuses come to light and they find out there are consequences and limits they start crying about "free speech" and how they are the ones being silenced and "victimized." Wait a month and they'll do it again, this time with a different target and it will be exactly the same.

Plenty of stuff in Japan to love. Plenty of wonderful cultural treasures. Art, fashion, music, literature, movies. Many of my faves in those things are what drew me here. Any of that is vastly superior to what's on TV.

I loved Japanese TV when I first moved here. Sometimes when I would take a sightseeing trip and I was exhausted at the end of the day it was nice to have a shower, pull on a soft yukata and veg out to celebs watching other celebs walking around going to restaurants and chatting about the food. Or one where Kitano Takeshi presented "real" ghost videos and the other celebs reacted to them with amazement or mockery and then Takeshi would add a wry comment or two in a low-key sort of way, like the one where some hip-hop dancers are upstaged by what appears to be a severed head poking out from behind a concrete planter and he said, "That's no ghost. That's a homeless guy taking a nap back there."

Over the years, though, I've come to find most of it unbearable. There are the leering jiji being "hilarious" while doing things traditionally associated with young girls here like painting their nails and doing purikura. Haha, except for the sexist overtones. The leering jiji creepily interacting with AKB members, that genderless-kei kid on every single show sqealing YADA when jiji mock him, the time the hilarity involved locking effeminate gay men and transgender women in a shed and then telling them they were going to be exploded with TNT to see if they would drop their "act" and respond in a masculine way as the timer ran out on them (NONE DID, in case you're curious) and the one the other day where they showed an overweight guy with health troubles and every fact in his case was responded to with a resoundingly loud "EHHHHH?!" from the talent on stage and the audience. Then the profusion of Sanma and Sanma-related shows, the exact same music cues used in every single show, the constant use of the "rule of 3s" when something ostensibly hilarious happens and it's repeated exactly three times for three times the fun. And about eighty million hours of programing a day involving people walking around dull places and going to dull restaurants and having dull conversations while exclaming, "Oishi!" and "Umai!" at every dish they're served.

On the other hand, there are some fun shows. Maruko-chan and Sazae-san soothe, Itte Q is genuinely funny, Seiji's search for Japanese people living in remote areas fascinates, I always enjoy the journeys of the Yous on Why Did You Come to Japan?

I value having more free time to do other things (like write this dumb comment) now that I don't watch nearly as much TV or that when it is on (Mrs. Shmidlap), I can ignore it in favor of reading. I don't understand why it would even be necessary to learn to like Japanese TV. It really is mostly garbage.

We actually have people on this site okaying the idea of identification armbands. People often freak out when you make those Nazi comparisons, but this isn't exactly a comparison. It's just straight up old school Nazism. Congratulations, racism and paranoia have converted American citizens into the exact spitting image of all those guys in the old newsreels. They loved their armbands, too.

And a loyalty test for Muslims? "Hello, are you loyal to the US?' "Of course!" "Are you planning to blow anything up?" "Oh, of course not." I loved the novel Catch-22 when it was satire. Now it's practically a daily account of Colonel Trumpcart's rise to power. Captain Black and his "loyalty oath" campaign. I have zero love for anyone who would spill blood for ISIS or whoever it is we're fighting, but that doesn't mean I like any of you guys, either. Didn't take much to strip away the thin veneer of American idealism to reveal the ugly core of hate and cowardice within. Terrorists are despicable and so are Trump supporters. Unrecognizable as Americans. I don't know what you are but you're certainly no countrypeople of mine. Go make your own nation somewhere and parade around with your armbands and gun-love far away from a land where people actually died within memory of many still living to put down the exact same things you guys are espousing here on JT.

The exact same things.

I like the reasoning that because she's a woman who's appeared in media and has done photoshoots to support TV shows and movies she's acted in she must be trading on her looks. Also that her appearance is the sole reason she was in any of those shows and movies in the first place, and therefore she deserves every photo where she's pulling a face or caught halfway in a blink to be printed specifically to make her look foolish. Anything to rip on a woman with visibility, huh, fellas?

"South China Sea," or, as the rest of us call it, the entire Pacific Ocean and parts of the moon.

People always go to the Tom Clancy scenarios when they should look to Occam. It wasn't "staged" by anyone but some very jumpy and incompetent military officers. They overplayed their hand. It's happened before plenty of times. That it will inadvertently give Erdogan the very pretext he needs to clamp down on secularism and move towards a more Islamist Turkey is simply his good luck and the rest of the world's bad luck. Not everything has to be plans within plans, and frankly, I don't think Erdogan is capable of pulling of that kind of Hollywood show. He's more like a mallet than an X-Acto blade. And now he's going to hammer Turkey and keep those ISIS people supplied with all the money they need to hang on for a while longer as the US once again muddles and stumbles around without a whit of common sense. What a mess.

I think of all those dudes from North American and Europe showing up at Narita to be on "Why Did You Come to Japan?" and attend that one ninja school that makes money propagating something that's largely a myth or exaggeration. Must be pretty good cash in it, though.

The coup has already failed at accomplishing anything beyond giving Erdogan the pretext for a crackdown. No more trying to fudge with the constitution. Here comes the martial law and the openly pro-Islamist moves. Jokers jumping way too early just created their own self-fulfilling prophecy/worst case scenario. Smooth move, coup clowns.

Be a good idea for all the MRAs and "they're ruining my childhood" dudes to move there and live Ghostbusters-free and with limited Internet access.

They don't want to scare off foreign investment as they incrementally slip through the language they really want into a constitution-- one party rule and removal of human rights.

All out in the open-- the plans of dirty old men who despise women and universal human rights and want things run solely to their own benefit in the guise of "traditional values." A nation heading into straight-up theocratic dictatorship. I mourn for Japan's future.

The smiling face of soft dictatorship by the same ol'/same ol'. Great-great-grandons of feudal rulers and grandsons of militaristic overlords carrying on the family business. Just updated titles. An illusion of change for a few years, and then when eyes are elsewhere, the sudden reemergence of reality.

That's good. She can spearhead that effort and then when it passes and Abe gets the Japan he wants, she can serve tea to his grandkids for the rest of her life as his maid.