I was refering to a diet full of delicious red meat, bacon and carbohydrates. The diet is popular in many countries and I love it too.
But it is a simple fact that such a diet is impossible in Japan. The price of meat, especially red meat is extremely high.
PS: I agree with you that a carbon restricted diet has obvious healt benefits. My point was that following an unhealthy red meat diet in Japan is impossible due to price.
> In many countries it's not considered shameful to live with your parents while you're single.
I can completely understand that you want to live with your parents when you are studing (or a young working adult). But 28years+ is becoming a bit ridiculous. Maybe it is because a lot of people are not getting married anymore. But the point is that many people (and some of my friends) can not afford a really expensive apartment. Tokyo is expensive to live in.
Anyways, the point I wanted to make is the Article's comment about the clothes young people wear - it is quite deceptive to use such a metric.
> * "Japanese health care is a joke" compared to what? Look at life expectancy numbers, doctors per capita, etc.
Life expectancy is higher in Japan partly because of diet (there are not that many overweight people - that is almost the norm in USA and Aus. Even trying to get overweight with the FAtkins diet followed in USA and Australia would be prohibitively expensive in Japan).
The USA's life expectancy is also lower due yo violent crime, excessive deaths due yo traffic accidents, AIDS and other lfestyle diseases).
Yet life expectancy is not the only measure of health care. There are other factors such as quality of life. The simple fact is that dental care in Japan is far behind the west (and I am not talking about the poorest of the poor without proper dental care, but fairly rich upperclass people).
> ATMs are open 24/7 in convenience stores.
That is true, I grant you that. 7-11 ATMs are open, but you will not find your banks ATM open after 19h00 (e.g. JP postbank).
PS: The goal of my post is not for Japan bashing but trying to give an unromanticized balanced view. There are many things wrong with the Japan, just as there are many things wrong with the west.
It is easy and popular for westerners to romantacize Japan - but it has serious and structural problems. When analyzed on its own (instead of comparing it to the USA) it becomes readily apparent.
I will just say a few observations which show that the picture the article paints is not quite accurate.
Firstly, yes there are many people with fancy clothes. What the author does not say is that a lot of those people live with their parents - and their whole income is expendible. I don't know if this phenomeneon started after the bubble economy, but it is quite shocking.
Then there is the fancy cars - what is the percentage of car ownership?
About employment - finding permanent employment for young people has become almost impossible. Many young people now have short term contracts or do so called "arebeito" (extremely short term work with hourly wage). This is clearly not optimal and is a new in this generation.
Japanese health care is a joke. They spent a lot on the last years of life (everywhere you look is AED machines), but nothing on the quality of life. Japanese dental care is below third world country! The majority of people do not get orthodontal treatment even when clearly necessary. Take a look next time you walk around.
Another example of the quality of health care - I've spoken to two dermatologists (from national health care in Japan) and they don't even know about ruaccutane (isotretonion). This surely is a basic treatment that in some cases are necessary?
Japanese banking is pathetic. It seems they do everything by hand - which is nice but inefficient. With my non-japanese banking I get internet banking for free and ATMs are open 24/7. Good luck getting that in Japan.
> That is most certainly not current US immigration policy, which explicitly provides priority for family connections.
That is true. But the person who broughthif family over, how did he get here? Because he is skilled and already at the top of his field! So, a skilled person bringing over his family or an American whi brings over his foreign wife is already at the top of society.
I myself looked at immigration (chiefly yo USA, Ireland and Britain) - almost impossible for me to do if I didn't have an advanced degree.
> [citation needed]
You are willing to believe an unfounded assertian of the nlog post, yet evidence of countries with more liberal policies you ignore?
I stated the example of South Africa with an open border. In many Nordic countries with a liberal immigration policy, crime by immigrants is much higher (finland, sweden, etc...).
> i have no guilt about being white...
Yet the premise of article is that the world is divided into rich white people and poor black/asian people and the reason for that is "International Apartheid".
So according o the article, if a person supports rational immigration policies, he is a racist who supports global apartheid.
Perhaps you did not comphrehend the article or you feel the same - hence no need for white guilt since you support open borders.
> if you are going to argue...
I am not arguing that Apartheid was a fair system (it was not). Yet the world is a lot more nuanced than good/bad black/white.
South Africa is an extremely complex country (11 national languages, four capital cities, traditional leadeship, two Europen populations, massive inequality between black and white, rich black and poor black, inequality between urban and rural, more people on welfare (13 million) than tax payers (<5 million), probably more illegal immigrants than white people, more HIV+ people than tax payers, etc...). An incredibly complex (and interesting) country that you describe in terms of a black white world view.
> However, it is a far from perfect analogue. Bryan Caplan cites evidence that immigrants to the U.S. commit crimes at a far lower rate than U.S. citizens.
So? This is expected! It shows the success of current immigration policies. The current policy is to only let the best of the best into the country (i.e. Those without criminal records and who has at least a degree in a technical field/ or doctor).
The blog post makes no argument that th crime rate of immigrants would still be lower if this barrier and selection would be removed (it would not!).
Furthemore, look at the South African example in this area - illegal immigrants (without work, etc...) turn to crime. Zimbabweans and Mozambiqucans esp. In violent crime. Many Nigerians ar involved in drug crime and other crimessuch as prostitution and human trafficing. Not pretty.
I strongly suspect that if South Africa enforced its border, Mugabe would have been overthrown.
But currently, most of the Zimbabweans that would be responsible for a coup de ta in Zimbabwe (18-40 year old males), are doing manual labour in South Africa.
Usage of the word Apartheid in your link is bogus! The word Apartheid is only used in order to evoke white guilt.
It is argued that because of Apartheid, blacks were poorer (even if blavk poverty increased significantly after '94, that is not the point.) The point is that the stereotype is that in South Africa black poverty is due to white people.
Your article implicitly makes the same claim. Here is the quote:
> Like the world, it was about 15% white, the rest African and Asian. Like the world, the whites were segregated from the non-whites by law (of course the West does have some blacks and Asians, but it segregates the vast majority of them). The whites lived in prosperity, the blacks in poverty,
So here is the question: how can whites still be (implicitly) blamed for African poverty? Most african countries have been sovereign for more than half a century. Many of them have been sovereign for as long as history (or only had short periods of colonial rule) - e.g. Swaziland, lesotho, ethopia.
The crude (and wrong) comparison ignores issues of culture, historical development patterns, traditional power stucture, etc...
To come back to my point - after '94 illegal immigration significantly increased. There are several reasons for this, e.g. The military was no longer responsible for enforcing the border (which fell to the police), liberal policies wrt immigration, Mugabe's experiments in Zimbabe, etc...
Post '94 there were two patterns of migration - skilled people left the country (e.g. to Usa, Canada, aus and new zealand), and unskilled people immigrated to South africa (mostly from other African countries). The size of the illegal immigrant population is difficult to estimate, but probably 10% of the population.
What was the result of this 'free' immigration?
Higher unemployment for the poorest of South Africans, increase in crime (with a large part of crime done by unemployed illegal immigrants) and then of course the fairly recent xenophobic killings(which saw a return of the brutal necklacing killings). I think it would be justified to say that illegal immigration is the biggest threat to stability in SA today.
TL;DR: South Africa should be used as an example of why immigration control is absolutely necessary. illegal immigration threatens the poorest of the poor (those struggling to find employment), leads to higher crime and threatens societal stability.
That is a really bad comparison. I suspect that you misused the word Apartheid because of its emotional connetation (which circumvents any rational reasoning that a non-emotional argument might entail).
Apartheid was concerned with the area people lived in the same country (in this area it might be seen as unjust - since people had citizenship to the country. Then again, SA is a country that should not have existed in the first place - the only ties that bind South Africans together is that they were all subject to British colonialism and their mutual dislike for each other).
In any case, the Apartheid regime tried (very successfully) to prevent illegal immigration from neigbouring countries (since for some strange reason South Africa was the only industrialized country). This was done with fairly great success. The motivation for this was twofold: to prevent insurgents from infiltrating the country and protect the jobs of black people (the white minority government was fearful of black unemployment - for this reason unemployment of black people were far less than 10% then and regularly 30-50% after '94).
> You should learn something: that variance within groups is far larger than variance in the averages of groups; and thus race and culture are poor signals for use in judgement. To protect against this bias, we do hold to equality across racial and cultural lines; to do otherwise, is to be racist and simply morally wrong.
I don't want to take sides in this debate, but I often see your above post appearing on debates about this issue.
Can you explain what your first three sentences even mean? It is basically vague, ambigiuous and devoid of any meaning (while sounding academic - perfect for online debates).
That spiel is known as Lewtonin's Fallacy (please look it up).