Listening to Jump then Fall, marveling that that’s the same Taylor Swift we know today… what is she doing with her voice? That’s not even the thing where she had a country drawl on her early records, what is she doing with her voice?
re: “loud pipes save lives”, I have definitely become situationally aware of motorcycles by sound, and as a (former?) motorcyclist that once crashed broadside into a car that pulled from a stop in front of me I appreciate whatever raises such awareness, but those guys are only ever justifying bikes that let you know “you’re going to come across a motorcycle soon” 7 blocks away instead of 4.
Talking to a pair of Reedie girls, asking if they’re a lesbian couple cause the girls I see playing pool here always turn out to be, they’re like “well fuck, we are now”
spontaneous couple formation under observation.
That’s some quantum yuri shit
One of their boyfriends showed up, but I suppose I am ideologically committed to promoting bi threesomes…
Talking to a pair of Reedie girls, asking if they’re a lesbian couple cause the girls I see playing pool here always turn out to be, they’re like “well fuck, we are now”
So the American occupations rigged the Italian and Japanese post-WWII election systems pretty steeply, as a necessary condition of keeping Communists out of power (who were expected from Iron Curtain precedent to eliminate any possibility of being removed from power and defect to the Soviet Bloc).
If you will remember your economic materialism this is what you would expect from industrial powers without imperial hinterlands. (This is what the WWII authoritarian culture-states were meant to prevent while they assembled empires!)
@youzicha said: Didn’t @xhxhxhx discuss this petty exhaustively, concluding that the Japanese election system wasn’t rigged?
Maybe? My context is the Cornell Asian Studies program, which is a feeder for/academic arm of the American foreign service/intelligence/military area experts, where my professors were like “oh, my grad advisor was at that postwar conference, he told us how they rigged it”
The major elements were
Orchestrating a merger of the Liberal and Democratic Parties into the pan-establishmentarian LDP, supported by advisors and cash drops
Multi-member districts in cities, where Communists having greatest strength, 22 individual districts would elect 22 communists but one unified proportional city would send 12 and a smattering of others
Not updating district borders as rural population flooded into cities, creating “rotten borough” districts the LDP could buy with agricultural subsidies
So I minored in Asian Studies (Japan) but beyond just learning about Japan, it was in part an education in mechanics of postwar American empire.
My context is the Cornell Asian Studies program, which is a feeder for/academic arm of the American foreign service/intelligence/military area experts,
Huh, is that why my Japanese classes had surprisingly few weebs? Everyone there was planning to go into foreign service and I just didn’t notice?
(I think another factor was that Cornell had a class on Japanese pop culture, and some friends who took it reported that it was full of weebs, so I just assumed that was the quarantine keeping them out of the language class)
That’s more at the grad level (and FALCON) really, but those types make it into normal language classes too. (Well, the good 6/7 credit linguistics track sleeved down from FALCON, which is really built for the Defense Language Proficiency Test, not the 4 credit “functioning as a businessman” one built for the Japanese State Department’s JLPT).
Oh god, I took the pop culture class the first year it was offered, as one of the last ones leaving class once the nihonjin Anthropology professor wearily sighed that he had NOT expected this (a sophomore girl with striped armwarmers challenging his authority on “being a person living in Japan” based on her dad having been at the branch office there in childhood)
Was Nakanishi-sensei still there when you were taking classes? She was my fave.
Oh my god @eightyonekilograms, have you listened to tapes at the Noyes Language Lab?
Re: rigging Japanese elections. I know part of Italy’s electoral rigging was the use of stay behind sleeper cells and funding terror groups as part of operation Gladio. Was there any equivalent for Japan?
That… was not electoral. Italian electoral rigging was about supporting the Republican Party (PRI), with an electoral base of the Catholic Church, as a second-largest after the union-aligned Socialist Party (PSI), with the system (and the 1871-unified Italy’s strong political regionalism) producing juuust enough eclectic small parties to be bribed or whipped into supporting fragile, frequently-collapsing PRI governments and maintaining cordon sanitaire against the PSI
@biopolitique said: The government party in Italy was not the PRI but the Catholic Church aligned Christian Democracy (DC), which remained in power uninterrupted from 1946 to 1981 and was still a major coalition partner in every government until Mani Pulite. If you take all 6 PMs who’ve led at least 4 or more different governments, 5 are from the DC (the last one being Berlusconi)
Aw man that’s right. I accept the correction with humility.
From paying close attention to my stride, I’m thinking the thing is the old flatfooted walking transmitted force up my legs to the sacrum, and from there up the spine to the skull?
Whereas the arched-foot style still transmits force to the hip bone, but it’s almost like force there is transmitted through muscles in the lower back and stretching from the broad lever-ends of the ilia, and the lumbar vertebrae are held fixed by that for force to be transmitted upwards?
Playing pinball for the first time in a while, adopting the same familiar stance as always, suddenly realizing my center of gravity and sensory experience are completely different than they’ve been since I started playing pinball
So the American occupations rigged the Italian and Japanese post-WWII election systems pretty steeply, as a necessary condition of keeping Communists out of power (who were expected from Iron Curtain precedent to eliminate any possibility of being removed from power and defect to the Soviet Bloc).
If you will remember your economic materialism this is what you would expect from industrial powers without imperial hinterlands. (This is what the WWII authoritarian culture-states were meant to prevent while they assembled empires!)
@youzicha said: Didn’t @xhxhxhx discuss this petty exhaustively, concluding that the Japanese election system wasn’t rigged?
Maybe? My context is the Cornell Asian Studies program, which is a feeder for/academic arm of the American foreign service/intelligence/military area experts, where my professors were like “oh, my grad advisor was at that postwar conference, he told us how they rigged it”
The major elements were
Orchestrating a merger of the Liberal and Democratic Parties into the pan-establishmentarian LDP, supported by advisors and cash drops
Multi-member districts in cities, where Communists having greatest strength, 22 individual districts would elect 22 communists but one unified proportional city would send 12 and a smattering of others
Not updating district borders as rural population flooded into cities, creating “rotten borough” districts the LDP could buy with agricultural subsidies
So I minored in Asian Studies (Japan) but beyond just learning about Japan, it was in part an education in mechanics of postwar American empire.
My context is the Cornell Asian Studies program, which is a feeder for/academic arm of the American foreign service/intelligence/military area experts,
Huh, is that why my Japanese classes had surprisingly few weebs? Everyone there was planning to go into foreign service and I just didn’t notice?
(I think another factor was that Cornell had a class on Japanese pop culture, and some friends who took it reported that it was full of weebs, so I just assumed that was the quarantine keeping them out of the language class)
That’s more at the grad level (and FALCON) really, but those types make it into normal language classes too. (Well, the good 6/7 credit linguistics track sleeved down from FALCON, which is really built for the Defense Language Proficiency Test, not the 4 credit “functioning as a businessman” one built for the Japanese State Department’s JLPT).
Oh god, I took the pop culture class the first year it was offered, as one of the last ones leaving class once the nihonjin Anthropology professor wearily sighed that he had NOT expected this (a sophomore girl with striped armwarmers challenging his authority on “being a person living in Japan” based on her dad having been at the branch office there in childhood)
Was Nakanishi-sensei still there when you were taking classes? She was my fave.
I think I am team “not rigged” but its really just like definitions (I have no Cornell inside gossip, sorry!) Like the Liberal Party and the Americans absolutely sat down and tried to coordinate together against leftist parties at times, and they did so aggressively. But at a certain point, that is just politics - coalition partners, funding political parties, making deals with unions or businesses, that is just how the sausage of elections is made.
Even as you get into the district proportioning, campaign laws about who can run, etc. that is all pretty normal politics! I don’t like it, and I think the US and UK electoral systems are, in a certain sense, ‘rigged’. But its a loose definition - and in Japan’s case, given that the Socialist Party won the first election and was running the government in 1947, I don’t think anything more than loose applies.
I also as I have mentioned tend to be a SCAP downplayer - they changed Japan much less than they claimed, with the real work of building the system being done by the deep Japanese political-state apparatus. As such, the US only played a secondary role in this process; and I think that is apparent because Japan’s one party state only emerges in 1955, well after the US had left. The impact of the US authority in Japan was probably on net a boost to lefitst parties, as in the beginning they purged right-wing factions and pushed for a western-style legalism that enshrined things like universal voting rights and such.
But this isn’t my area too much, I know the economics better than the politics of the post-war period.
Well the Japanese electoral system was deliberately designed to include all those “normal” features by the American government, which had input on the design as consequence of being the occupying force, that in turn by virtue of having conducted a successful amphibious military campaign against the previous government, is the thing
So the American occupations rigged the Italian and Japanese post-WWII election systems pretty steeply, as a necessary condition of keeping Communists out of power (who were expected from Iron Curtain precedent to eliminate any possibility of being removed from power and defect to the Soviet Bloc).
If you will remember your economic materialism this is what you would expect from industrial powers without imperial hinterlands. (This is what the WWII authoritarian culture-states were meant to prevent while they assembled empires!)
@youzicha said: Didn’t @xhxhxhx discuss this petty exhaustively, concluding that the Japanese election system wasn’t rigged?
Maybe? My context is the Cornell Asian Studies program, which is a feeder for/academic arm of the American foreign service/intelligence/military area experts, where my professors were like “oh, my grad advisor was at that postwar conference, he told us how they rigged it”
The major elements were
Orchestrating a merger of the Liberal and Democratic Parties into the pan-establishmentarian LDP, supported by advisors and cash drops
Multi-member districts in cities, where Communists having greatest strength, 22 individual districts would elect 22 communists but one unified proportional city would send 12 and a smattering of others
Not updating district borders as rural population flooded into cities, creating “rotten borough” districts the LDP could buy with agricultural subsidies
So I minored in Asian Studies (Japan) but beyond just learning about Japan, it was in part an education in mechanics of postwar American empire.
My context is the Cornell Asian Studies program, which is a feeder for/academic arm of the American foreign service/intelligence/military area experts,
Huh, is that why my Japanese classes had surprisingly few weebs? Everyone there was planning to go into foreign service and I just didn’t notice?
(I think another factor was that Cornell had a class on Japanese pop culture, and some friends who took it reported that it was full of weebs, so I just assumed that was the quarantine keeping them out of the language class)
That’s more at the grad level (and FALCON) really, but those types make it into normal language classes too. (Well, the good 6/7 credit linguistics track sleeved down from FALCON, which is really built for the Defense Language Proficiency Test, not the 4 credit “functioning as a businessman” one built for the Japanese State Department’s JLPT).
Oh god, I took the pop culture class the first year it was offered, as one of the last ones leaving class once the nihonjin Anthropology professor wearily sighed that he had NOT expected this (a sophomore girl with striped armwarmers challenging his authority on “being a person living in Japan” based on her dad having been at the branch office there in childhood)
Was Nakanishi-sensei still there when you were taking classes? She was my fave.
Re: rigging Japanese elections. I know part of Italy’s electoral rigging was the use of stay behind sleeper cells and funding terror groups as part of operation Gladio. Was there any equivalent for Japan?
That… was not electoral. Italian electoral rigging was about supporting the Republican Party (PRI), with an electoral base of the Catholic Church, as a second-largest after the union-aligned Socialist Party (PSI), with the system (and the 1871-unified Italy’s strong political regionalism) producing juuust enough eclectic small parties to be bribed or whipped into supporting fragile, frequently-collapsing PRI governments and maintaining cordon sanitaire against the PSI
