Morning Ed: World {2017.11.13.M}

LeeEsq says:

Wo1: A big drive in the growth of rightist populism in the developed world is peripheral regions believing that they are being abandoned and dominated at the same time from metropolitan centers. They believe that the the Center Left pays more attention to the needs of people from outside their borders than to their own suffering citizens.

Wo2: Nationalities might be imagined communities but they are very persistent imagined communities even though libertarians and liberals are growing dissatisfied with them. One reason why the nation-state persists is that its opponents have no idea on what to replace it with. The Left wants big supra-national federations like the European Union. Many even still dream of one world government. My side tends to want to de-emphasize national identity but increase the communal power of other group identities like sexual identity. The libertarian right wants to go smaller and replace nation-states with city-states and atomized individuals unconnected to any group but by voluntary choice of the individual.

Most people don’t want this though. People tend towards patriotism of some sorts and most people want to belong to a community that is bigger than their neighborhood but smaller than the entire world. For most people some sort of national, ethnic, or racial group works just fine for this. The nation-state also seems to be the political unity that people grasp.

Wo3: British royalists intent on imposing monarchy through out the world by any means necessary would name a ship HMS Terror.

Wo4: Jacobin needs a better grasp on Japanese politics and post-war history. Most Japanese aren’t entirely in favor of Article 9 but they aren’t dramatically opposed to it either. Japan is pretty naturally apolitical place. Its possibly the most apolitical country in the world. Very few people think about politics at all. Its why when you get depictions of government in Japanese media it tends not to be of the elected branch but of civil servants the JSDF, or some top secret fictional organization. The LDP have been able to dominate Japanese politics for decades because of Japan’s apolitical nature.

The Japanese also under went the least amount of de-axiszation than any other Axis power. The American Occupation gave the Japanese the first opportunity to re-write their constitution. The Japanese draft was more or less the Meiji Constitution but slightly more democratic. Americans just took over at this point. Many of the reforms the Occupation were reversed as soon as it ended.

Wo6: China’s Family Planning Policy, and its a bit more complicated than one child, was one of the biggest examples of social engineering in modern history.Report