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from the explain-the-sound-of-one-hand dept.
With no families or visitors to speak of, many older tenants spent weeks or months cocooned in their small apartments, offering little hint of their existence to the world outside their doors. And each year, some of them died without anyone knowing, only to be discovered after their neighbors caught the smell.
The first time it happened, or at least the first time it drew national attention, the corpse of a 69-year-old man living near Mrs. Ito had been lying on the floor for three years, without anyone noticing his absence. His monthly rent and utilities had been withdrawn automatically from his bank account. Finally, after his savings were depleted in 2000, the authorities came to the apartment and found his skeleton near the kitchen, its flesh picked clean by maggots and beetles, just a few feet away from his next-door neighbors.
The huge government apartment complex where Mrs. Ito has lived for nearly 60 years — one of the biggest in Japan, a monument to the nation's postwar baby boom and aspirations for a modern, American way of life — suddenly became known for something else entirely: the "lonely deaths" of the world's most rapidly aging society.
To many residents in Mrs. Ito's complex, the deaths were the natural and frightening conclusion of Japan's journey since the 1960s. A single-minded focus on economic growth, followed by painful economic stagnation over the past generation, had frayed families and communities, leaving them trapped in a demographic crucible of increasing age and declining births. The extreme isolation of elderly Japanese is so common that an entire industry has emerged around it, specializing in cleaning out apartments where decomposing remains are found.
Compounding matters, Japan has a declining birthrate and bans immigration.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday December 04 2017, @12:56PM (3 children)
I thought you already had gone because I haven't seen your posts in a long time. It's too bad because I've always enjoyed your input.
A healthy discourse requires many perspectives. Retreating to an echo chamber might feel like the safest thing to do, but it weakens your mental immune system. Your ability to think critically grows slack. For that reason I'd encourage everyone to remain and speak up. We all make each other stronger.
I find reflexive xenophobia or any reflexive political talking points dull, too, but they're so tedious and repetitious that you can tune it out like traffic noise from the nearby expressway. For me the best antidote is to refuse to let interlocutors get away with shallow dittohead expressions. Probe and challenge. With very few exceptions most of the people on SN who post that nonsense can do better, but default to laziness if everyone else lets them get away with it.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Tuesday December 05 2017, @07:12AM (2 children)
Damnit I hate it when someone says something nice to me on the Internet. Unfortunately it's overbalanced by at least two very literal "don't let the door hit you" responses.
Unfortunately it's this place that feels like it's becoming the echo chamber. There's not really anywhere I'd be retreating to. I just don't have the energy to keep watching what are essentially verbatim Nazi ideological arguments, just with "Jews" replaced by "Muslims" or merely "immigrants", get constantly modded Insightful and stay that way. That didn't used to happen. The solution to the future is not to demonize a third or half of humanity.
Some of us have the ability to do that, and some of us aren't built to live in the big city. I'm always surprised anyone would even give a crap about me being here when I have a history of commenting probably less than once a week on average. I respect your ability to keep at it. Don't let me stop you.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by SunTzuWarmaster on Tuesday December 05 2017, @02:47PM
The number of places to have a non-echoChamber, open discussion on the Internet is vanishing.
That said, many of the posters here seem to think that their US/EU opinions on the world of Asia/Russia are relevant. Anti-immigration policies ("Japan has no policy on immigration" - Japanese PM) in Japan usually refer to *Westerners* and *Chinese*. They don't have an influx of Muslim immigrants because 1) they are an island and can more-or-less protect their borders, 2) they are relatively distant from the Muslim world, 3) their (illegal) immigrants are from Asiatic descent, and 4) the Japanese people are openly hostile to the gaijin. I've been there. There was an *actual* protest on my Western organization during my visit.
That said, there aren't many options. In the old days, children were an asset rather than a liability. They worked the farm. They worked the store. They cared for you in your old age. They contributed meaningfully to the household. People had many of them.
In modern times, they are a liability. They need to be fed. They need more-or-less continuous care until age 18. They need education. They generally give nothing back; it is generally assumed that parents should have saved for retirement. It should come as no surprise that people have less of them. The 2nd-3rd world still have lots of kids, as they are assets. As nations develop, children turn from assets to liabilities by 1000 small changes (retirement savings replacing family care, children being unwelcome in the workforce and going to daycare, child labor laws forbidding 12-year-old workers). Similarly, an educated, rather than strong/industrious, population becomes the backbone of the economy. On the whole, "less people that work nicer jobs and producing more economic value" is probably a good thing.
That said, you cannot ignore the costs of these changes, and the Japanese/US systems highlight the difficulties in transition. In anti-immigrant Japan, this looks like "old people dying alone" when adults didn't have children or the few children they did have don't take an active role in elder care (because they moved off to the city to pursue grueling work schedules?). In more-or-less pro-immigrant America (whatever the modern climate tells you, the USA is ~11-12% LEGAL immigrants by population), this means that our elder care is mostly provided by foreign caregivers (https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolynrosenblatt/2017/03/07/aging-parents-immigrants-and-the-caregiving-cliff), and that our economy is more-or-less growing, while the GDP per capita of Japan is falling fairly rapidly (4% last year!) while the population retires/dies. Individually, Japanese citizens are better off. As a nation, Japan's relevance is fading.
At the end of the day, it is hard to say what policy is "right", but both of these nations made their decisions independently. Part of the new world of freedom was supposed to be a "live and let live" policy - Japan *chose* to be anti-immigration early on, and, as a byproduct, does not have a domestic workforce for elder care. Both Japan and America will both suffer the consequences of their decisions.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday December 05 2017, @03:19PM
Some don't handle rejection well.
Ideological confreres do mod each other up; it's the way of the world. It has happened since the days of the BBS'es, and will always happen. It's a secondary or tertiary effect of the massive PR campaign run by the Powers that Be to divide and conquer us. When we let that chase us from the public discourse, they win.
I agree demonizing others is not the solution to the future. I mean that more broadly than you perhaps mean it at this moment. Let us not demonize those who espouse the fear of the Other, either. We might not understand them, and we will never "beat" them. But we can engage with them, state our beliefs clearly and unabashedly, and perhaps find something positive from the interaction. I had a great many bones to pick with Obama, but the speech he gave on racism in America, the "god and guns" speech, did a great job shedding light on something that is nearly universally a black-box for progressives.
As for your energy flagging as you watch verbatim Nazi arguments, I'd argue it's much better to find the energy, now, to counter them than to have to literally fight them later because we ceded the discursive field. If you study up on the twilight of the Weimar Republic, that's how the actual Nazis came to power then--key people ceded the discursive field to them and let them get their hands on the real levers of power. The issue we know, but it was far from a sure thing the National Socialists would triumph because they were a minority party; there is no physical reason they would have triumphed, if others had not ceded the discursive field.
Now, SoylentNews is far from the make or break of this republic, but the principle is the same. All of us everywhere must hone our critical thinking and rhetorical skills lest it all must come to blows.
There's quantity, and quality. I always appreciated your thoughts (clearly, since I know your handle and am engaging with you here). In fact, I have hoped to see you post more, because level-headed progressives are a rare thing now. Most progressives have surrendered to full-blown hysteria and despair. Somebody with your poise and self-possession, who can cut the crap on both sides with a choice phrase, can bring so much to the conversation at a critical time.
For me, voices like yours are a guard rail. I'm not hysterical or desperate because I voted for Trump. I didn't vote for him because I hate immigrants or want a wall built between us and Mexico or because I approve of the Know-Nothing vein he's tapped into, but because I wanted to throw a molotov cocktail at the Establishment. I did want, as Michael Moore put it, "flip the bird at the Establishment." I did want the next President to cancel the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which is the most heinous trade agreement I've ever witnessed in my lifetime (and that lifetime includes NAFTA, so that's saying something); I knew that Hillary would never cancel it no matter what she said, and thought that Trump might. He did, and that right there has still been worth the price of entry for me.
He has also been a disruptor in the way I have hoped he would be. I would most like to see him disrupt Wall Street and the power-elites connected to them, and will judge him a failure if he does not. But he has disrupted entire other quadrants of American life that have needed shaking up for a very long time. In one year he has knocked the mass media on its ass, which we progressives have been angry with since they helped sell the invasion of Iraq. In one year he has knocked Hollywood on its ass, which has been sexually abusing men and women for decades with impunity. In one year he has created conditions that have exposed the corrupt inner workings of the Democratic National Committee, which we progressives knew in our bones was compromised, but for which we lacked the proof that Donna Brazile, former chairman of the DNC, has now provided us.
I don't think Trump planned any of that, but his mere presence in the Whitehouse, as the creature he is, has created the conditions where all that can happen. I hope it keeps happening, in fact. If anything, I'm impatient for it to sweep everything out in DC and Wall Street, too. And from what I read among Trump's true supporters, they are holding him accountable for that, too. If DC and Wall Street resist, if Trump fails, then everything will become much more interesting and disrupted than many people now feel about Trump's Whitehouse.
Anyway, I hope you reassess your value in the discourse. I'd like to see you remain. If not, be well and keep the flame alive wherever you go.
Washington DC delenda est.