ragebutt

Agree, and using the rice situation as leverage is shitty tbh. It’s a crisis and while Japan is a developed nation with a relatively good standard of living for the most part it’s also one with extremely stagnant wages and economic growth, fairly significant wealth inequality, etc.

many Japanese are struggling to get by more than Americans. Though it’s hard to directly compare. The average salary in Japan in far lower than in America (~30k vs ~39k) and wages for equivalent positions are much lower (like a computer programmer who gets paid $80k for an American company might get $50-60k from a Japanese company), but the cost of living is much lower in many ways, rent costs are substantially lower (even a Tokyo apartment is like $500usd/month unless you want something crazy extravagant), robust public transit network making car ownership truly optional, healthcare system that is not ideal but has much more managed costs than the us, etc

That’s probably in part why sanseitō (think japanese maga: anti immigration (in a country that barely allows it), super nationalist (in a country that’s already crazy nationalist), anti vaccination, etc) is seriously picking up steam and just picked up several seats in the upper house, going from 1 seat to 14 at the expense of the LDP and communist party who lost seats. They ran on rhetoric similar to trump, a “silent invasion” of immigrants is “taking over Japan”. It captured their youth, who are frustrated by a lack of meaningful jobs and the reality of an economy that has been stagnant for many decades at this point (arguably caused by boomer policy and refusal to break from tradition) but instead of looking inward at what could’ve been done wrong domestically they are looking for a boogeyman to easily shift blame to. Sound familiar?

The right wing shift is not limited to America unfortunately. AfD, sanseitō, national rally, Lega, Orban and bolsonaro, etc. many of these are picking up quite a bit of steam

They will probably buy our rice

Rice situation in Japan is pretty dire atm and probably will stay that way through 2026. It’s a staple crop and prices have gone up substantially due to the shortages

Are you familiar with the concept of minority stress and micro aggressions?

This goes back to the core point: maybe instead of being a society of people who are shitty to each other and need to be constantly called out we aim to be a society that is more empathic so that the callouts don’t need to occur?

There is a difference here between social boundaries of differing opinion (like oh I don’t like it when someone is a hugger so I have to define person space by “calling them out” or more appropriately said as implementing boundaries in this context) and basic decency. obama is saying that he was saying some “ignorant stuff” in 1978 as an undergrad so this was probably pretty heinous by modern standards. Who knows what that was - “isnt it weird”, “thats gay”, “whos the woman”, some biblical judgement shit, etc.

For the latter why does someone need to call you out, especially at college age? Why havent you learned basic respect for others and decorum? This is the issue. By putting minorities in the position where they must hear your ignorance and then choose to either ignore it or call it out you create stress that other classes do not have to experience (thus the talk of privilege) and eventual anticipatory anxiety (“is this person going to give me the look and treat me weird”) based on patterns of behavior from other people

That’s why obamas rhetoric is offensive. Because it puts the onus of action on the minority, not on the privileged class. The minority needs to act as a role model, the minority needs to call out behavior, the minority needs to accept integration with a populace that has historically rejected them and will continue to do so, and they need to tolerate that rejection until their nagging and call outs finally shift the behavior? seems like a bum deal to me.

Maybe for once in history the privileged class can suck it the fuck up and learn to not be assholes instead

100%

Elliott smith and bright eyes? Great music but miss me with that shit. I’m done with mopey days of dwelling in sadness and misery.

Charli xcx and jpop? Hell yeah. The world is terrible but I can at least have fun when I listen to music

ah right, the future sucks

Based on prices online this person spent anywhere from $70-350 (not including helium) for this sassy pic

How would you describe elevating someone described as “he called me out when I said ignorant stuff” if not “this man performed the emotional labor I was unwilling to do so instead of asking society to be better I am asking it to further burden people like him with the task of educating people like me”

I think what you say is better than what he said

You describe hearing people you consider friends and learning from them with empathic listening. Reading the article (though tbf I did not listen to the podcast to hear his full remarks and what is in the article is extremely limited) obama presents the idea of minority ambassadors to empathic reasoning:

“That’s one of the things that I think a lot of times boys need, is not just exposure to one guy, one dad. No matter how good the dad is, he can’t be everything.

“And then that boy may need somebody to give the boy some perspective on the dad.”

Perhaps I’m reading too much into his words but this, to me, reads as “pick up the slack for shitty dads that are letting the Internet turn out an army of andrew tate clones”

Also note that unlike you he does not refer to having “friends” but “role models”, putting people on a pedestal and inherently being part of the problem. I again think your comment is better largely because of this point; rather than elevate to a prop you consider these people your actual friends. Again, maybe this is something that obama says in the podcast, which I assume is far longer, but also maybe as a career politician he is so disconnected from reality he doesn’t know what friends are anymore haha

shit take. gay people shouldn’t have to act as a token friend to teach you not to be a shitty person. as a minority he should understand it even more. does he think all the dumb proud boys need a black friend so that black people can take on the burden of showing racist assholes they are normal human beings?

Also I know tons of gay dudes with 0 empathy barack, not every gay man is an empathic queen. Maybe you should have learned some empathy though before you droned all those people

the big turning point I remember was a combo of popups and interstitial ads

Popups we all know and hate as they still exist and are disgusting. They were obviously gross and ate up ram and stole focus and shit

But the interstitial ads were also gross. You’d click a link and then get redirected to an ad for 10 seconds and then redirected to content. Or a forum where the first reply was replaced with an ad that was formatted to look like a post

Like adblocking was a niche thing prior to the advertising industry being absolute scumbags. The original idea that allowing advertising to support free services like forums and such wasn’t horrible, put a banner ad up, maybe a referral link, etc. but that was never enough for the insidious ad industry. Like every other domain they’ve touched (television, news, nature, stores, cities, clothing, games, sports, literally everything a human being interacts with).

The hardline people that blocked banner ads way back when and loudly complained allowing advertising in any capacity on the internet would ruin everything were correct. We all groaned because no one wanted to donate to cover the hosting bills (which often turned out to be grossly inflated on larger sites by greedy site operators looking to make bank off their community) but we should have listened

Are you carrying excessive mental load or are you hypervigilant and dealing with undiagnosed anxiety? Sometimes the people around you aren’t pulling your weight, sometimes you’re holding yourself (and by extension everyone around you) to unrealistic standards