Gay chemist on drugs blows himself up. That's what the newspapers would write.

I have read you could read a newspaper on pluto via sunlight.

Just some context. The full story below:

http://www.billoreilly.com/b/Enabling-Evil/-886315675367237274.html

I don't really feel the need to comment on Bill O'Reilly, MSNBC, etc. If you need your 'news' and opinions spoon fed to you keep tuning in.

I'll stick to reading a variety of newspapers and thinking about them.

@Lawdeedaw

There's so much factually wrong here, I don't know where to begin. Let's start with this:

"That rape and mutilation has been going on for centuries but was significant in the Second Sino-Japanese War, a distinct war in and of itself."

Japan was in a state of almost complete isolation from the rest of the world between the years of 1633 and 1853. Even after the period of isolation ended, Japan was too busy for decades industrializing to be rampaging through China, as you suggest.

Japan DID eventually get involved in Chinese politics and in fact went to war with them in the First Sino-Japanese War... in 1894. There are no reports of atrocities committed by the Japanese military during this conflict. In fact, quite the opposite, Japan would release Chinese prisoners of war once they promised not to take up arms against Japan again.

The subjugation of Taiwan (which was ceded to Japan at the end of the first Sino-Japanese War but resisted Japanese rule) is a different story. However, accounts of what exactly happened are sketchy and most of the information we have is anecdotal. What can be gleaned from these anecdotes is that the Formasians put up a fierce guerrilla resistance campaign and that the Japanese tortured and killed anyone suspected of aiding the resistance. Still, it doesn't appear to have been on the same scale as the massacres which occurred during the Rape of Nanking.

As you mentioned, some of the most awful abuses were done during the Second Sino-Japanese War between 1937 and 1945 (the Rape of nanking occurred during this war). The abuse ended Japan's defeat in WWII.

What you can see here by doing the math, is that Japan's military abuses in China lasted a grand total of 50 years--from the subjugation of Formosa (Taiwan) to the end of World War 2--not "centuries."

Next, let's talk about misrepresentation. You seem to be implying that Japanese textbooks don't say that Japan is the aggressor in WW2 (or previous conflicts). As I pointed out in my last post, that is flat-out wrong. There is ONE textbook that was approved for use that whitewashes the history but that book has been ignored an not used by the vast majority of schools in Japan.

If you want to criticize Japanese textbooks, you could criticize them on the grounds that though they mention the terrible things that Japanese forces did, they don't go into a whole lot of detail. See this article for more information.

As far as Abe goes, what exactly has he said that is so terrible? Yes, he hangs out with revisionists. Yes, he has expressed his opinion that Japan should stop apologizing for WWII and start looking to the future instead of the past. Yes, he has said that the issue of "comfort women" should be re-examined in light of claims that some of evidence of their existence was fabricated. But these are not really radical statements by any means. And many people and newspapers do strongly and openly disagree with his statements, so this idea that Japanese people don't challenge him is completely wrong as well.

Yasukuni is a total clusterfuck of a situation. It is a shrine to ALL of Japan's war dead. This includes war criminals, but it also includes regular soldiers just doing their duty. In terms of Shinto beliefs, all of their souls now reside there. Basically, if you want to pay your respects to someone who died in military service in Japan, you have to go there to "see them."

Abe is a total dumbass (and the press let him know it) for going there because he knows already how China and Korea will perceive it, but on the other hand his going there does not mean in any way that he reveres the war criminals who are interred there. I have no idea what his personal views are but publically he has stated that he and his wife go there to remind themselves about the terrible toll war had on Japan the last time Japan engaged in it.

Finally, as for the link you provided, it was to a year-old opinion piece that lacks context. Abe made that statement at a time when it was revealed that some of the evidence of the existence of comfort women in Japan had been faked. It was later decided that the apology would not be changed. In fact, The Japan Times is reporting that it is likely that Abe will mention that "comfort women" had their human rights violated by Japan in his upcoming address on the end of WWII, so the comparison of him to Ahmadinejad is a bit far-fetched.

To take a less emotional counterpoint :

a) Internal attacks like this, when considering the massive population of people (1/3rd of a billion), are extremely rare. Lightning strikes compete very well with these in terms of lethality. So what exactly do you do? Turn the country inside out (do things legislatively/executively that affect everyone) because there's a chance that 1 in 300 million people will once every year or two do something like this?

Also) Southern generals fought over secession. Today, the civil war is taught as being largely over slavery - but that's heavily revisionist, since at the time of the civil war the war's implications on slavery weren't even mentioned outside of black newspapers. White people were fighting over who gets to run the south, the south, or the much richer and better politically connected north.

To illustrate, the emancipation proclamation only freed slaves in the states participating in the cesession, not elsewhere. The remainder were freed after the civil war. Reason dictates that it was done primarily to cause disruption in the rebelling south, and not for any particular racial sympathy. (Here's a map for those interested. States marked in blue got to keep their slaves : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Emancipation_Proclamation.PNG).

In general, throughout human history, the defeated are usually historically revised to appear as bad as possible, so there are no questions about whether the right thing was done, and no sympathies linger for the defeated. So the south being turned into a ~1~dimensional~evil~enslaving~caricature~ of history is rather normal. Although, critical thinking people should probably know better than to fall for ancient propaganda.

-scheherazade

There is some skepticism from the economics writers, and more so in the Grauniad than the BBC or our local rags, but even there they're more vocal about Greece and close to silent on Britain.

I think the IMF deserves much more scrutiny from the press than it's had

Actually the whole thing reminds me of the 80s and Reaganomics, with the whole group think from the political classes and surprisingly little argument from anyone else.

Maybe they realised how pointless it was to point out the inevitable?

It is a long time ago, and I was quite young, but I don't even remember any Cassandras at the time... certainly our local newspapers all drank the kool-aid.

https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=860&dat=19770728&id=bnFUAAAAIBAJ&sjid=f48DAAAAIBAJ&pg=4288,1371520&hl=en

This was in the local newspaper, this man died from his injuries. Actually there was a video on Videosift a few weeks ago of the removal of the immense hematoma he suffered from this cat related injury.

I think the lady makes a very good point about damage being done to sex relations, and often times it seems the internet-generation feminist is actually not interested whatsoever in equality and is more accurately described a misandrist.

Very recently in my own country we had a number of famous feminists fighting to get rid of "page 3 girls" - semi nude models in tabloid newspapers. It never happened, but even as it was happening there were page 3 models complaining because it meant they'd be out of a job they enjoyed and got paid well for. No woman OR man should feel forced to take their clothes off in public for any reason, and in fact that is the case as these people are not slaves but career models by choice. What was actually happening was a prudish approach to human sexuality had been disguised as an equality thing; and the language was always of course referring to the little girls - because if you disagree with little girls having to grow up to go topless you're a certified monster and pervert.

That kind of shit really detracts from the things that are seriously unfair such as, most obviously, the pay gap. No woman should get paid less for the same job. There's no "rape culture" that i've ever heard of if your sample size includes greater than 1000 people in the west, and terms like that detract from the argument again - if you want to talk rape culture then look to India, where there is (and needs to be more) attention on changing the attitudes of the male community towards females because of horrific acts taking place.. almost commonplace. And to India's credit there was a big campaign tied into their favourite sport, with social media involvement and obviously most men proudly wearing symbols and stuff. There are parts of that society that has issues that could do with feminism.

But this is the profession of being offended. You have to drum up publicity, it has to be viral, or you don't get paid. You don't get a column in the newspaper or the mag, you don't get enough hits on your youtube to make enough money. Not if you talk about the pay gap or the gender inequality in less "civilised?" societies.. no, you do that by talking about the tits on page 3. Or espousing something unfair and incendiary; something someone will want to argue with. Nothing that fits with common sense. These people are self publicists - they will make a spelling error on a tweet to encourage others to call them stupid, correct them, essentially RETWEET AND REPLY AND FOLLOW AND LIKE!

Whether or not Sarkeesian(?) should have commented, there is a point well made in this video. I've been on the receiving end of something disguised as feminism in the past, and all it did was make me wary of anyone under 30 that calls themselves a feminist. Before i can establish whether that means misandrist, i have to establish common ground, because i'm a feminist too. What we need is more decorum and less extremism. You can't change the world without the help of both sexes, why alienate each other?

Sorry, one more detail; the newspaper story. Ferry altered course to port (left) to try and dodge but there was a reef/rocks and she couldn't move much more---
Had to stop and assist the rather clueless sailors.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/newslocal/northern-beaches/sailboat-hits-queenscliff-ferry-as-end-of-summer-storm-lashes-harbour/story-fngr8hax-12272
44849376

Gonna have to completely disagree. The stupid argument is that victims are just useless turds that have no ability for self empowerment. Also, if we applied "the victim role" to every situation, which it most definitely should be if you favor it, we kind of seem stupid ourselves. Down here in Florida you don't cross the street just because the little man is white and says its okay. You get run the fuck over if you try that shit. No, see, stupid people drive so I teach my children to look both ways; even as adults, despite the fact that this falls in to your idea of blaming the victim. Also, I will teach them not to drink around frat parties or to do it alone. Not because I blame them if they get raped at college. Precisely the opposite. Empower them with facts.

A newspaper op did just that. Hey, they warned, be safe please. And they were blasted...so parents are blaming when they teach the same? We should teach that it's okay for people to be stupid just to spite assholes? That it is on teenage boys not to send naked pics of their girlfriends rather than saying, "Hey kid, don't send naked pics to your boyfriends..."

Please don't say any of that was apples to oranges...because it all applies. Please think rationally. Nobody is saying the victim is to blame--we are simply saying don't walk in a minefield to protest the war.

The Disney Cruise Line Blog has a short report on the rescue, http://goo.gl/rx0qJz (with quotes from and links to an article from the Mexican newspaper Milenio).

The rescue took place about 13km from the port of Cozumel, https://goo.gl/maps/7LRjH

That's a lot of people on the streets in France.

But my favorite is still the meeting of world leaders, including Turkey's Davutoglu (highest # of journalists in prison), Bahrain's Sheikh Khalid (#2 on the list of journalists in prison), Polish PM Kopacz (raided newspaper for criticising the government), etc.

When these folks are presented as staunch defenders of the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press, you know someone spiked your beer with LSD.

All these statements of solidarity with Charlie Hepdo make me wonder just how many newspapers have the balls to put their caricatures on the front page tomorrow...

"I'm so upset by the relentless state mandated murder of black Americans, that I'm actually somehow more angry and personally hurt about the implication that I may actually be complicit in perpetuating racism and racist attitudes, than the actual problem!"

Racism is institutional first and foremost. Come back to me when white people have a history as being treated as slaves, come back to me when you are considered dirty on mass just for the colour of your skin, come back to me when you struggle to find a job just about anywhere, come back to me when the picture printed of you in a newspaper is one that depicts you as a victim at fault.
Come back to me after you've sat your arse down and listened to the lived experiences of people of colour.
Then you might realise that white people don't have all the answers, and we should shut the fuck up, sit the hell down and listen.