In winter, I'm a Buddhist,
And in summer, I'm a nudist.
- Joe Gould
"My Religion"
In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.
- Oscar Wilde, aware in 1889 that popular conceptions about the country and its people are mostly fiction.
Not even 10% of what Japanese people are thinking is communicated overseas.
- Watanabe Tsuneo of CSIS
All foreign correspondents, whenever they desert statistics for judgments of opinion...become models of self-deception. They may call themselves, with proper gravity, ‘reporters’. But...they are nothing but quack psychiatrists who do not even know that this is the field they practise.
- Alistair Cooke
Where all news comes at second-hand, where all the testimony is uncertain, men cease to respond to truths, and respond simply to opinions. The environment in which they act is not the realities themselves, but the pseudo-environment of reports, rumors, and guesses.
- Walter Lippmann
We want...a revolution - a turning of the wheel, so that the state becomes once again the servant of the people, and not the other way around. We are the progressives now, comrades, (and) you the reactionaries.
- Daniel Hannan
If the textbook says, "It is well known that...", you can be sure that is a very good place to begin a research inquiry.
- Isaiah Bowman, geographer and former president of Johns Hopkins University
The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.
- Cicero (55 BC)
We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press. It is not we who silence the press. It is the press that silences us. It is not a case of the Commonwealth settling how much the editors shall say; it is a case of the editors settling how much the Commonwealth shall know. If we attack the press, we shall be rebelling, not repressing.
- G.K. Chesterton
You can see a lot by looking.
- Yogi Berra
All text copyright 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 by William Sakovich
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fllib19554 said
odjebi, thx
21st Century Schizoid Man said
A Choson Ilbo is too easy on conclusion. There are tons of Japanese who openly criticisize and call for abolition of the Emperor system. I, for the one, would vote for abolition depending on the situation/condition of Japan at the time, if we have a mean to calmly put an end to it. That decision is on Japanese. Same as in U.K.
BTW, did they really use the term “Emperor”? Isn’t it customary for Koreans to call it Japanese King (日王)?
21st Century Schizoid Man said
But Choson Ilbo is also very keen about mentalities of Japanese. It is rare to see criticism and calling for abolition on TV. We call the mood “air” (空気) nowadays in the context of criticizing those who cannot feel the mood of any particular situation in interacting with others – 空気読めない奴 for instance (person who cannot feel the mood). General perception of the Emperor in Japan is relevant to this self-censorship. Some may feel irritated for this, while I am ok with it.
21st Century Schizoid Man said
The feeling I have for the former Emperor is complexed and not straight forward. Sometimes I condemn the former Emperor tried to dispense with responsibility of the war, but many Japanese deny it. One thing for sure is that I do not want – and I do not believe generation younger than I want – go back to the old constitution where the Emperor has the supreme rights to govern the country (albeit with many conditions attached). In my opinion, the Emperor must be the spiritual center expressing cultural value of our country. If we do not need it in tangible form, then that would be the time to abolish (probably in the form of resignation and blank position “voluntarily” uttered by the Emperor itself, supported by the Diet). I think several Japanese involved in creating the current constitution (and so-called forced by GHQ) shared the idea of the spritual center (probably with lots of dissatisfaction, and if so, to that extent they are different from me), because if not, they could not accept the GHQ draft.
antinipa9529999 said
21st Century Schizoid Man, go die idiot
antinipa9529999 said
21st Century Schizoid Man, you’re a twat