Illyas comments

This reads as parody. No, a place being name after its climate is not a bad thing. No, the Greeks referring to a people in Africa as 'sun-burnt' isn't a bad thing either, unless you associate literally any mention of a dark skin tone as being negative. And I have to say, the author's prose reminds me of how high schoolers or college freshman write. The entire piece is just embarrassing to read.

Maybe retitle her nickname as "The Mother of Nuclear Physics."

Complete nonsense and outright revisionism, all because she was a woman.

I miss Abe...

And here I thought Japan wanted to solve its population problem... Guess I was wrong

Even if you put aside race/integration/identity/etc, I don't think importing gay men is a solution to the population problem long-term for obvious reasons.

Nature contains things that, for some people, look 'unnatural,' and that is natural.

What about being dismayed and put off by this stuff at a gut level? Do you accept that as natural too?

This is just an arbitrary ranking using subjective criteria by an advocacy organization. I despise how news organizations will report on these stories like they're some objective, factual comparison and not just an attempt to dress up advocacy under some pseudo-scientific veneer.

GDP isn't everything. I think having a high-trust society is worth some amount of economic trade-off, at least.

The plan comes in response to the 198 bear attacks on humans across 19 prefectures in the previous fiscal year, which ended in March. The incidents resulted in 219 casualties including six deaths

These numbers for a single year sound astonishing to me - in comparison, across all of North America there's under 1 death per year due to bears.

@Samit Basu

We have one though (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_Center) which makes the headline "Astronomers discover largest black hole in Milky Way" false.

Headline: "Astronomers discover largest black hole in Milky Way"

Article: "Astronomers identified the largest stellar black hole yet discovered in the Milky Way"

This is a good example of how headlines can not only mislead, but actually outright misinform people. I still don't understand why publishers don't make efforts to improve them despite all the issues that keep popping up with them over the years.

The article failing to even mention immigration as a factor speaks volumes.

Should've just massively incentivized abortion instead like American tech companies, then you'd have people here praising them as progressive.

Just last week, he said that should he win the election, he would be a “dictator” for day one of his presidency (but not after that).

It's funny how whenever Trump refers to something that has been discussed for decades (executives orders and the 'imperial presidency' concept), suddenly Democratic partisans go apocalyptic. No, Trump acting like Bush, Obama, and now Biden and using the executive branch to enact policy doesn't make him a dictator. We literally just had 4 years of Trump, and he never once acted like a dictator. Stop acting like this already.

@Cards fan

Why?

How about because the country has zero social cohesion and is rapidly degrading into the dysfunction typical of Brazil? Because low-skill immigration suppresses wages, and this fact is well-documented no matter how much double think and cognitive dissonance liberals have over it?

Strange how the 'weather != climate' point is no longer considered relevant when those arguments are made to blame climate change for weather events.

You realise the rest of the world does have a choice, and they mostly choose metric?

You don't. Go try to sell something in American customary units - you're government will use its monopoly on violence to stop you. Always makes me laugh when Europeans are ignorant of how unfree their societies actually are.

Imagine whining about another countries laws while ignoring the hundreds of thousands of OD deaths in your own. Asia in general but especially Singapore are proof that being tough on drug crime actually does work if you're serious about it.

They've been predicting global warming for decades; certainly they were expecting more forest fires. Why haven't they invested more resources on preparing for this?

Because that would be an actually pragmatic response to climate change. There's far more money to be gained in financial instruments like carbon credits than there are in levies, fire-fighting brigades, etc.

new advisory body, called the Indigenous "Voice to Parliament"

Isn't their 'voice in parliament' supposed to be taken care of by their duly elected representatives? The US has a few of these but they're for overseas territories that don't vote in federal elections. Having something like this on top of normal representation seems ill-conceived.

Shoplifting condoms in national headlines..

Another proof that Japan is one of the safest countries of the world!!!..

The employee detaining a shoplifter stood out to me more. Every retailer in the US explicitly discourages employees from confronting thieves. In fact you're liable to get fired for it, apparently.

promote equality and eliminate discrimination

Which in the real world translates into men with autogynephilia being allowed into women's restrooms. Nobody needs your Western perversion masquerading as civil liberties.

Cultural imperialism to go along with the good old regular imperialism (occupation of Okinawa). Gotta love neoliberalism.

I'd rather be replaced by an AI than an immigrant. At least the former, if repeated at large enough scale, will lead to a political movement that forces universal basic income. Oh and you know, maintain the high trust society that is reliant on having a relatively homogeneous society.

Masks trap heat, necessitating more AC usage. Therefore advocating mask usage during the hot summer months is in effect advocating for more global warming.

Where is the innovation and the new industries?

Who cares, the epicenter of new tech and innovation in the West is also synonymous with homelessness, drug addiction, and unaffordable cost of living (San Francisco).

The swing to a knowledge based economy?

No need, AI is going to make 50% of it redundant in the next decade alone.

The END to the endless red tape and the threatening conditions on importers?

Why should the Japanese worker be forced to compete with foreign workers that get paid $2/hour and have no labor or environmental regulations?

Hopefully Japan don't import the gender dysphoria portion of the movement.

woke

I didn't notice any race-swapped characters or references to contemporary American politics so if anything it's right-wing by virtue of liberals claiming anything non-political to be 'problematic'.

Musk success with Space X like Tesla is due to the United States government in particular the US taxpayers. His businesses rely heavily on US subsidiaries. Compare that to how his competitors are funding their businesses, and you will understand Musk's snake oil.

Tesla's competitors include other US auto manufacturer's that got bailed out by the government (e.g. GM), which in fact were the ones that lobbied for EV subsidies in the first place. And SpaceX's major competitor is the United Launch Alliance (Lockheed + Boeing) which is notorious for cost overruns and delays to the point where their latest rocket costs over 1 billion dollars per launch, all of which is put on the government's tab.

Russia wants higher oil prices to increase its revenues because of the war and the sanctions

Russia would want higher oil prices regardless of whether it was at war or not, as would all these other OPEC members whose financial fortunes are tied to the price of oil. It's less that they're siding with Russia and more that they're not blindly doing what the US wants even at the expense of their own self-interest and the self-interest of their people.

This is an embarrassingly bad article. It's full of stream of conscious nonsense, and the author just goes through a laundry list of gripes from nationalism to gay marriage that he doesn't even attempt to tie convincingly to food security.