NoneOfUrBusiness @ NoneOfUrBusiness @fedia.io

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1 yr. ago

Americans, it's happening. It's fucking happening.

Of course, all of the excess wealth was going to the 1%, so average dumb red hat wouldn't have noticed.

Maybe most of it, but certainly not all. Real wages were consistently going up under Biden, especially for the bottom 10% of earners. This isn't as apparent as it should be partially because he did fuck all to combat price gouging.

They're not saying that Japanese people are trending that way, but rather that they will inevitably go that way for the same reasons America did and Europe is. The reason it's not happening yet is because Japan simply doesn't have enough foreigners yet; the cutoff seems from Europe's track record to be around 5%. More than that and they start getting scapegoated for all sorts of problems.

As seen in this map (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Europe#/media/File:Islam_in_Europe-2010.svg), percentage of obviously foreign people (in this case Muslims) and far-right politics are strongly correlated and other than Italy all European countries with a strong far right have more than 5% Muslims.

Japan is very insular, especially around immigration policy, they don't like foreigners.

True, but also there simply aren't enough foreigners there yet for them to progress from the "damn foreigners grumble grumble" phase to the "We must deport those foreigners or they'll Westernize/Islamize our children and end the Japanese race!" phase. I mean it's gonna happen eventually, but we still have a bit of grumbling before they start calling it a crisis.

I mean even people who were screaming didn't think American democracy would start falling this quickly. I mean did you expect him to start arresting dissenters within a month and a half of his inauguration?

attending is the bare minimum i can do, but until we collectively get up enough courage for large scale civil disobedience, simple protests are a starting point to get you connected with local allies and movements.

Simple protesting are not a starting point. Using protests to agitate and sell your community on more radical action is a starting point. I'm not saying you're like that, but many people think that protesting is enough or the most they can do, or that they just need to "put pressure on their representatives" or win the midterms. Those people are, in fact, not even at the starting line. The idea of "this isn't enough, but it's a good start" is dangerous because it invites inaction with the assumption that action that is "enough" will happen eventually. It won't; you need to make it happen. Many, if not most, in this nascent resistance movement don't understand the urgency of the situation or the scale of action necessary to fix it and will have to be dragged by people like you to effective resistance.

If you're wondering why I keep saying you and not we, it's because I'm armchair strategizing/agitating from the other side of the world.

Just meeting won't stop it. Spread within your community the idea of a general strike. Given Americans' poor showing so far it will be necessary.

So you always and up with a pyramide at the top

Let's assume for a second that in society X every couple has one child at the age of 30 on average, and that child mortality doesn't exist. In that case the average couple has to care for one child and four grandparents for a total of 2.5 dependents per working adult. That's an inverse pyramid; there are more old people than young people. The older humans are the more likely they are to die, but also when they die new old people come to take their place so it cancels out. Anyway for comparison let's consider society Y where every couple has two children on average. In that case two sets of grandparents will give birth to four children who will then have four children in total, producing a cuboid and a ratio of 2 dependents per working adult. More than 2 and you get a pyramid at the bottom.

The education system rivals international peers.

Almost all true except this part. The Japanese education system is actually pretty bad compared to most Western countries.

Wow that actually makes a lot of sense.

That's kind of implied by the context.

To be fair not all companies are "black" in that sense. The salaryman isn't dead yet, but AFAIK you can have a good-ish work-life balance in Japan nowadays. It's not quite the complete revamp they need to survive the 21st century, but things are slowly getting better.

I mean yes, when did I say otherwise?

And who decides which jobs are made up?

Having kids is a lot more expensive when you're wealthy/middle class than when you're poor (most of the costs like food, education, etc directly vary with your already existent quality of life), so to poor people it's a lot easier to make the decision to have another kid. Also I don't know about India but for example in my (third world) country daycare isn't a necessity in the same way it is in the West so that's part of the equation too.

Japan could see a right wing backlash to the changing demographics at some point as we've seen in Europe.

They'd need to import a lot more before that happens (it seems 5% of the population being visibly foreign is the cutoff), but otherwise all the pieces are already in place. If America doesn't survive Trump democracy is gonna die isn't it?

It makes more sense if you just concentrate on making life more manageable, comfortable and sensible for the population you already have.

And working age people are necessary to make (and keep) life manageable, comfortable and sensible. This isn't a hypothetical; they're suffering the effects already. We'd need to lean a lot more into automation before society can function as an inverse pyramid.

And they only need to have 49 more children to get there!

The beginning was like two months ago; we're now about 40% of the way in.

Uh... Of fucking course? There's a reason the poem mentions trade unionists.