I oppose fascism.

That does not magically infuse into my brain mysterious connections to groups of people, nor instantaneous knowledge and mastery of tactics from nazi groups...

That would be actually kind of cool, but no, sorry to disappoint you.

You are probably thinking about the Communist factions among the Republican forces opposed to Franco.

ALL of the Republican factions were opposed to Franco and to fascism, not only the Communists.

And, besides, nobody was calling themselves "antifa" at that time, because that was damn obvious that if you were in the Resistance, you were opposed to that despicable tyrant. But they were absolutely anti fascists, all of them and not only the Communists.

And seeing slop where there is not, you are being rude to me without purpose.

Not everybody is born in an English-speaking country.

I laid down the ideas logically, maybe that is what sounded foreign to you.

By the way you are the person writing nonsensical stuff such as "Antifa is a terrorist organization", while everybody is repeating tirelessly that it is just an adjective meaning to be opposed to fascism:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49483072

If somebody says something nice and does nothing, that's good.

If at the same time somebody does something bad, that's bad.

That does not remove the evaluation (nice or bad) of the speech alone.

Saying "I am against this thing that is objectively despicable" is GOOD.

So, saying to be anti fascist is good.

Saying to be anti fascist and doing fascist things is bad.

I don't know how much more obvious things I am supposed to explain...

I guess there is no limit to it.

Anti fascist => anti dictatorship.

Anti fascist means that you don't like fascism and that you are not going to let it happen passively.

(Tired of explaining the obvious. But I guess that somebody has to.)

A dictatorship mechanically leads to a situation where the governing group is working for their own wealth, thus in this case the "group" is the governing class. The extent and definition of that class is voluntarily limited so that wealth and power converges to them.

Now you see it? Yes that is a fascism, meaning that:

dictatorship => fascism

And the reverse stems from the "groupism" (i.e. tribalism) of fascism, which entails that you need exclude large portions of the population from the political system.

As this "group" definition becomes narrower and narrower (in order to make more wealth converge to the alleged "true humans" of its center), it becomes a harsher and harsher dictatorship, and finally a strongman regime.

fascism => dictatorship

This is NOT a competition nor a championship about which dictatorship can inflict the most pain and destruction to the world.

Nobody is rooting for such a "winner".

Criticize all the despicable actions of such stinky regimes, regardless of if they are in Putin's Russia, in Trump's US, or wherever else.

We are NOT in a race to the bottom.

We shall never forget our values, as Humans and as Earth-dwellers.

Having to explain why fascism is to be fought against...

Ugh, what a world. Not even science-fiction writers dared to write such a nonsensical reality.

And of course fighting against the idiotic far-right propaganda, largely responsible for the climate inaction.

Which by the way in the US has recently passed the stage of "inaction" to enter the realm of actively destroying the planet.

This is where "people watching Fox News" are guilty here, they got the wrong information and thus are really not able to decide to "eat less meat" or "avoid ICE vehicles".

So Fox News is a real culprit. But let's not forget that many different news channels exist, with an infinitely better coverage of AGW.

So I actually think it is perfectly OK to blame people for watching Fox News.

Or you mean "big corpos"? Why does the size matter?

Or do you mean that those are unethical corporations?

So let's focus on preventing them from doing unethical things them.

In any case, we are living in society, so it is better to cooperate, and to no add but multiply our competences in order to create the future's solutions.

Living "by ourselves", all 8 billions of us, is the recipe for flash-burning through all of the planet's resources.

All of us just using wood for energy is just stupid and short-lived. Our "ancestors" lived on a much different planet and were much less many.

But let's not fall into the trap of hoping that violence can rescue us. That's the opposite of a solution. All the most devoid of ideas and of creativity, the most bloodthirsty, will win, and those are the least capable of well managing the planet in the future. (We are looking for how to prevent corporations to do unethical things, so we cannot at the same time call for guillotines.)

If it is rephrased, you cannot just put quotation marks.

But you still have to indicate the source of the rephrasing (especially when it is lightly rephrased) e.g. by a footnote.

It can be as unobtrusive as putting a simple footnote after each of those paraphrased blocks of text, thus only appearing as tiny numbers in the text.

If Klein had just done that, he would have escaped this kind of accusation, while not changing a single character of his books as they are currently written -- except for the tiny footnote numbers. The footnotes contents can also be gathered at the end of the book, and this is completely normal.

And there is nothing wrong with a text full of footnotes. That's really the standard, actually, in books targeting advanced readers, such as students.

The Ainu/mainland distinction is a feature arrived much later than the mixing I am referring to.

My point is that Japan ethnicity is the product of a mixing just as the one occurring nowadays in France, Britain or Norway, between several very different people.

So that, if such mixing produces great results (do we agree that modern day Japan is that?), why not welcome today's mixings for the sake of the great nations of the future?

But I don't think we'll reach a common understanding on this topic, so we can just agree to disagree.

And have a good one.

The right term is gaikokujin, but if we speak in English there is no reason to not just say "foreigner".

"gaijin" has the vibes of "outsider", and is never used in public speech other than by xenophobic speakers.

In private or familiar conversations it is commonly used, yes.

Why do I think that the archaeologic/anthropologic perspective is a great point on this issue?

It's because it's precisely one of the talking points of Japanese anti-immigration or xenophobic politicians or writers to emphasize those points. They always say that Japan is different in that of America or of European countries. However archaeology taught us that this is not true.

Just as European countries have always been connected and mixed together, Japan also has undergone population mixes. Just on a larger time scale. That's for the "ethnical homegeinity".

So that is a great way to explain why this particular argument of "Japanese exceptionalism" doesn't hold.

Now for the "political" homogeinity: this one is a pure illusion. In current Japan, even if very-long-term political circumstances have taught people to stay discreet about political disagreement (quite similar to, say, in Russian mindset of avoiding talking politics), there are a lot of different mindsets, and many subcultures.

Even the cultural "homogeinity" is quite recent (Meiji era), and a product of violence. There were 4 casts etc, and the samurais cast tried (and succeeded) to become the "only legitimate one".

Now what about the world in, say, one century, when all the cultures will have time to mix together and stabilize the result all over the world? It will not be unlike the "homogeinity" that you see in today's Japan.

This is precisely what Japan's ancient history can teach us, and I think it's a great way to disarm the far-right and xenophobic rhetorics that is unrelentingly ruining our ears and brains nowadays.

(PS: Please refrain from using "gaijin" which is widely regarded as a xenophobic slur.)

Quite distinct groups of humans mixed in ancient Japan, as different and distant at that time as the groups that are mixed in modern times in Peru or India.

Some groups were related to Autronesians, others to Yakuts, yet other groups to Hans, etc.

If I remember correctly, at least three distinct groups are proven to have cohabited and arrived at different times.

Mixing of cultures always lead to adding up their different solutions to all kinds of problems, improving the fitness of the result among other groups of humans.

It's gathering all the positive ideas or traditions of several groups, and the less useful or negative aspects tend to just fade naturally.

And its "homogeneous identity" is mostly a construction, dating back from the Meiji era.

And Heian period Japan had a completely different set of values, not less nor more valid than Meiji era Japan, just different.

So the identity of a nation is not something eternal nor absolute.

Heck, there is even proof Japan has been a mosaic of at least three sets of human populations in prehistoric times, arrived at different times on the land.

So here you are: yes Japan was, long time ago, a land of immigration.

- UK would rejoin EU,

- and then, later on, Reform would reach power and undermine EU just like Orban did.

So maybe it would be better to refuse UK its reentry into EU...