空

Japanese and Koreans invaded Asia. We apologize.

保守主義

2018年08月17日 14時03分11秒 | Weblog





保守主義の歴史を振り返ると、最初はフランス革命を批判する勢力として生まれ、のちに社会主義に反発し、さらには大きな政府、いわゆるリベラリズムに対抗してきました。つまり、ある方向に突っ走ってしまう人たちに対して、「ちょっと待て」と歯止めをかける役割があったのです。


彼は言います。保守主義というのは単に過去に戻ろうとか、伝統主義、復古主義という思想とは異なる。何が自分たちにとって大切なのかを見極め、それを守るためにこそ、必要があれば社会のあり方、政治の仕組みを変えていくのが保守主義だというのです。


宇野　まさにバークが主張したのは、一見、不合理に見えるような伝統や慣習でも、過去からやってきたものにはそれなりに理屈があるということです。それが理解できないからといって、すべて壊してしまうべきではない。やはり保守主義を貫く思想としては、人間が不完全だという前提があるのです。人間の理性や知性ですべてを把握することはできない、ということです。

The New Tribalism

2018年08月17日 06時55分28秒 | Weblog



Now, in many democracies, the left focuses less on creating broad economic equality and more on promoting the interests of a wide variety of marginalized groups, such as ethnic minorities, immigrants and refugees, women, and LGBT people. The right, meanwhile, has redefined its core mission as the patriotic protection of traditional national identity, which is often explicitly connected to race, ethnicity, or religion.

This shift overturns a long tradition, dating back at least as far as Karl Marx, of viewing political struggles as a reflection of economic conflicts. But important as material self-interest is, human beings are motivated by other things as well, forces that better explain the present day. All over the world, political leaders have mobilized followers around the idea that their dignity has been affronted and must be restored.


Democratic societies are fracturing into segments based on ever-narrower identities, threatening the possibility of deliberation and collective action by society as a whole. This is a road that leads only to state breakdown and, ultimately, failure. Unless such liberal democracies can work their way back to more universal understandings of human dignity, they will doom themselves—and the world—to continuing conflict.


Most economists assume that human beings are motivated by the desire for material resources or goods. This conception of human behavior has deep roots in Western political thought and forms the basis of most contemporary social science. But it leaves out a factor that classical philosophers realized was crucially important: the craving for dignity. Socrates believed that such a need formed an integral “third part” of the human soul, one that coexisted with a “desiring part” and a “calculating part.” In Plato’s Republic, he termed this the thymos, which English translations render poorly as “spirit.”


Perceived threats to one’s economic status may help explain the rise of populist nationalism in the United States and elsewhere. The American working class, defined as people with a high school education or less, has not been doing well in recent decades. This is reflected not just in stagnant or declining incomes and job losses but in social breakdown, as well. For African Americans, this process began in the 1970s, decades after the Great Migration, when blacks moved to such cities as Chicago, Detroit, and New York, where many of them found employment in the meatpacking, steel, or auto industry. As these sectors declined and men began to lose jobs through deindustrialization, a series of social ills followed, including rising crime rates, a crack cocaine epidemic, and a deterioration of family life, which helped transmit poverty from one generation to the next.

Over the past decade, a similar kind of social decline has spread to the white working class. An opioid epidemic has hollowed out white, rural working-class communities all over the United States



But perhaps one of the great drivers of the new nationalism that sent Trump to the White House (and drove the United Kingdom to vote to leave the EU) has been the perception of invisibility. The resentful citizens fearing the loss of their middle-class status point an accusatory finger upward to the elites, who they believe do not see them, but also downward toward the poor, who they feel are unfairly favored. Economic distress is often perceived by individuals more as a loss of identity than as a loss of resources. Hard work should confer dignity on an individual. But many white working-class Americans feel that their dignity is not recognized and that the government gives undue advantages to people who are not willing to play by the rules.



But during the era of globalization, most left-wing parties shifted their strategy. Rather than build solidarity around large collectivities such as the working class or the economically exploited, they began to focus on ever-smaller groups that found themselves marginalized in specific and unique ways. The principle of universal and equal recognition mutated into calls for special recognition. Over time, this phenomenon migrated from the left to the right.



This presented each marginalized group with a choice: it could demand that society treat its members the same way it treated the members of dominant groups, or it could assert a separate identity for its members and demand respect for them as different from the mainstream society. Over time, the latter strategy tended to win out: the early civil rights movement of Martin Luther King, Jr., demanded that American society treat black people the way it treated white people. By the end of the 1960s, however, groups such as the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam emerged and argued that black people had their own traditions and consciousness; in their view, black people needed to take pride in themselves for who they were and not heed what the broader society wanted them to be. The authentic inner selves of black Americans were not the same as those of white people, they argued; they were shaped by the unique experience of growing up black in a hostile society dominated by whites. That experience was defined by violence, racism, and denigration and could not be appreciated by people who grew up in different circumstances.



The term “multiculturalism”—originally merely referring to a quality of diverse societies—became a label for a political program that valued each separate culture and each lived experience equally, at times by drawing special attention to those that had been invisible or undervalued in the past.




But both Marxists and social democrats hoped to increase socioeconomic equality through the use of state power, by expanding access to social services to all citizens and by redistributing wealth.

As the twentieth century drew to a close, the limits of this strategy became clear. Marxists had to confront the fact that communist societies in China and the Soviet Union had turned into grotesque and oppressive dictatorships. At the same time, the working class in most industrialized democracies had grown richer and had begun to merge with the middle class. Communist revolution and the abolition of private property fell off the agenda. The social democratic left also reached a dead end when its goal of an ever-expanding welfare state bumped into the reality of fiscal constraints during the turbulent 1970s. Governments responded by printing money, leading to inflation and financial crises


The left’s embrace of identity politics was both understandable and necessary. The lived experiences of distinct identity groups differ, and they often need to be addressed in ways specific to those groups. Outsiders often fail to perceive the harm they are doing by their actions, as many men realized in the wake of the #MeToo movement’s revelations regarding sexual harassment and sexual assault. Identity politics aims to change culture and behavior in ways that have real material benefits for many people.

By turning a spotlight on narrower experiences of injustice, identity politics has brought about welcome changes in cultural norms and has produced concrete public policies that have helped many people.


So there is nothing wrong with identity politics as such; it is a natural and inevitable response to injustice. But the tendency of identity politics to focus on cultural issues has diverted energy and attention away from serious thinking on the part of progressives about how to reverse the 30-year trend in most liberal democracies toward greater socioeconomic inequality. It is easier to argue over cultural issues than it is to change policies, easier to include female and minority authors in college curricula than to increase the incomes and expand the opportunities of women and minorities outside the ivory tower.


Moreover, the left’s identity politics poses a threat to free speech and to the kind of rational discourse needed to sustain a democracy. Liberal democracies are committed to protecting the right to say virtually anything in a marketplace of ideas, particularly in the political sphere

The fact that an assertion is offensive to someone’s sense of self-worth is often seen as grounds for silencing or disparaging the individual who made it.


During the campaign, Trump mocked a journalist’s physical disabilities, characterized Mexicans as rapists and criminals, and was heard on a recording bragging that he had groped women. Those statements were less transgressions against political correctness than transgressions against basic decency, and many of Trump’s supporters did not necessarily approve of them or of other outrageous comments that Trump made. But at a time when many Americans believe that public speech is excessively policed, Trump’s supporters like that he is not intimidated by the pressure to avoid giving offense. In an era shaped by political correctness, Trump represents a kind of authenticity that many Americans admire: he may be malicious, bigoted, and unpresidential, but at least he says what he thinks.


And yet Trump’s rise did not reflect a conservative rejection of identity politics; in fact, it reflected the right’s embrace of identity politics. Many of Trump’s white working-class supporters feel that they have been disregarded by elites. People living in rural areas, who are the backbone of populist movements not just in the United States but also in many European countries, often believe that their values are threatened by cosmopolitan, urban elites. And although they are members of a dominant ethnic group, many members of the white working class see themselves as victimized and marginalized.


Societies need to protect marginalized and excluded groups, but they also need to achieve common goals through deliberation and consensus. The shift in the agendas of both the left and the right toward the protection of narrow group identities ultimately threatens that process. The remedy is not to abandon the idea of identity, which is central to the way that modern people think about themselves and their surrounding societies; it is to define larger and more integrative national identities that take into account the de facto diversity of liberal democratic societies.



Modernization means constant change and disruption and the opening up of choices that did not exist before. This is by and large a good thing: over generations, millions of people have fled traditional communities that did not offer them choices in favor of communities that did. But the freedom and degree of choice that exist in a modern liberal society can also leave people unhappy and disconnected from their fellow human beings. They find themselves nostalgic for the community and structured life they think they have lost, or that their ancestors supposedly possessed. The authentic identities they are seeking are ones that bind them to other people.


And although the logic of identity politics is to divide societies into small, self-regarding groups, it is also possible to create identities that are broader and more integrative.


Democracies need to promote what political scientists call “creedal national identities,” which are built not around shared personal characteristics, lived experiences, historical ties, or religious convictions but rather around core values and beliefs. The idea is to encourage citizens to identify with their countries’ foundational ideals and use public policies to deliberately assimilate newcomers.


Under the banner of antiracism, left-wing European parties have downplayed evidence that multiculturalism has acted as an obstacle to assimilation


To stop privileging some ethnic groups over others, EU member states with citizenship laws based on jus sanguinis—“the right of blood,” which confers citizenship according to the ethnicity of parents—should adopt new laws based on jus soli, “the right of the soil,” which confers citizenship on anyone born in the territory of the country. But European states should also impose stringent requirements on the naturalization of new citizens, something the United States has done for many years. In the United States, in addition to having to prove continuous residency in the country for five years, new citizens are expected to be able to read, write, and speak basic English; have an understanding of U.S. history and government; be of good moral character (that is, have no criminal record); and demonstrate an attachment to the principles and ideals of the U.S. Constitution by swearing an oath of allegiance to the United States. European countries should expect the same from their new citizens.



Although the United States has benefited from diversity, it cannot build its national identity on diversity. A workable creedal national identity has to offer substantive ideas, such as constitutionalism, the rule of law, and human equality. Americans respect those ideas; the country is justified in withholding citizenship from those who reject them.


The American creedal national identity would also be strengthened by a universal requirement for national service, which would underline the idea that U.S. citizenship demands commitment and sacrifice. A citizen could perform such service either by enlisting in the military or by working in a civilian role, such as teaching in schools or working on publicly funded environmental conservation projects similar to those created by the New Deal. If such national service were correctly structured, it would force young people to work together with others from very different social classes, regions, races, and ethnicities, just as military service does. And like all forms of shared sacrifice, it would integrate newcomers into the national culture. National service would serve as a contemporary form of classical republicanism, a form of democracy that encouraged virtue and public-spiritedness rather than simply leaving citizens alone to pursue their private lives.


In the United States, the chief problem is the inconsistent enforcement of immigration laws. Doing little to prevent millions of people from entering and staying in the country unlawfully and then engaging in sporadic and seemingly arbitrary bouts of deportation—which were a feature of Obama’s time in office—is hardly a sustainable long-term policy. But Trump’s pledge to “build a wall” on the Mexican border is little more than nativistic posturing: a huge proportion of illegal immigrants enter the United States legally and simply remain in the country after their visas expire. What is needed is a better system of sanctioning companies and people who hire illegal immigrants, which would require a national identification system that could help employers figure out who can legally work for them. Such a system has not been established because too many employers benefit from the cheap labor that illegal immigrants provide. Moreover, many on the left and the right oppose a national identification system owing to their suspicion of government overreach.


The Republican Party is becoming the party of white people, and the Democratic Party is becoming the party of minorities. Should that process continue much further, identity will have fully displaced economic ideology as the central cleavage of U.S. politics, which would be an unhealthy outcome for American democracy.



People will never stop thinking about themselves and their societies in identity terms. But people’s identities are neither fixed nor necessarily given by birth. Identity can be used to divide, but it can also be used to unify. That, in the end, will be the remedy for the populist politics of the present.



　わりに長い記事ですが、細かいところすっ飛ばすと

　差別されてきた人種、民族、LGBTQなどマイノリティたちがその特性にあった自分を自己主張できるようになったが、他方、従来の多数派のなかで、グローバリズムから取り残されたと感じている白人たちも、同じように自己主張しはじめた。「黒人」「イスラム教徒」「ゲイ」「白人」といった部族が自己主張しあうだけでは、しかし、社会が空中分解してしまう。
　そもそも、人はさまざまな”部族”に属するし、”部族性も固定的なものではない。所属する部族の枠組みの改編、統合も可能である。そこで、自由、平等、博愛などといった共通理念、国民が共通に認めることができる理想・価値を掲げて、多様な人々を統合していくこともできるし、また、そうしていかなかればいけないんだ、と。ーーー別に新しい考えではないわけですけど、マイノリティーや多数派の落ちこぼれの言い分をしっかり聞ききつつも、普遍的な価値はビシッと貫徹していく、ということでしょうね。

　多文化主義の言うように、それぞれの部族の言い分を平等に扱うわけにはいかない。国家が理想とする共通の価値観のフィルターにかけて、篩にかけなければならない。他方、マイノリティーや多数派の落ちこぼれの言い分もしっかり聞いて、社会、経済、政治的な平等もしっかし実現していかなくてはいけない、といったところでしょうか？
　

North Florida Will Close Confucius Institute

2018年08月17日 02時04分58秒 | Weblog
North Florida Will Close Confucius Institute
By Elizabeth Redden
August 16, 2018
3 COMMENTS


The University of North Florida will close its Confucius Institute, a center of Chinese language education funded by the Chinese government, in February 2019 after a six-month transition period. UNF is at least the third university to announce plans to close its Confucius Institute this year as the institutes have come under increasing scrutiny from lawmakers concerned about Chinese government influence activities.

Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, had sent UNF and other Florida colleges a letter earlier this year urging them to close their Confucius Institutes, which he described as “Chinese-run institutes that use the teaching of Chinese language and culture as a tool to expand the political influence of the [People's Republic of China].”

“These institutes are overseen by a branch of the Chinese Ministry of Education, and are instructed to only teach versions of Chinese history, culture or current events that are explicitly approved by the Chinese government and Communist Party,” Rubio wrote.


2018.8.16 23:28

米で孔子学院閉鎖相次ぐ　北フロリダ大が閉鎖を決定

People around Trump are forced to act like “fluffers”

2018年08月17日 01時50分06秒 | Weblog
lionize
verb [ T ] uk usually lionise UK ​ /ˈlaɪ.ə.naɪz/ US ​ /ˈlaɪ.ə.naɪz/
​
to make someone famous, or to treat someone as if they were famous


lionizationとは

動詞 他動詞
〈人を〉かつぎあげる，名士扱いにする.
be lionized by the media (マス)メディアにもてはやされる

flufferとは


主な意味
勃たせ屋(fluffer)はポルノ映画のスタッフとして雇われた人間。


fluffer in British
(ˈflʌfə )
noun
a person employed on a pornographic film set to ensure that male actors are kept aroused





TRUMP'S EGO IS SO FRAGILE, HIS 'FLUFFER' SECRET SERVICE AGENTS HAVE TO TELL PEOPLE TO SAY NICE THINGS TO HIM, DEUTSCH SAYS
BY HARRIET SINCLAIR ON 8/15/18 AT 11:28 AM


この手の上司持つと最悪だな。




”Communist Japan”

2018年08月17日 01時11分19秒 | Weblog








　まあ、アメリカの平均的なお姉ちゃんの世界観というか、アメリカ観、日本観というのはこんなもんじゃなかろうか？

　日本について無知であると同時に、アメリカスゴい！の世界観、歴史観が前提になっている。

　感じることといえば、そんなもんかな？

　戦時中、拷問された共産主義者たちがあの世でどう思っているかだな。

尾畠春夫さん　すごい！

2018年08月17日 01時02分47秒 | Weblog
行方不明だった2歳の男の子を発見したボランティアの男性に「国民栄誉賞をあげたい」などと、ネットで称賛の嵐だ。


　尾畠春夫さん（78）を絶賛する声。15日に山口県で行方不明になっていた2歳の藤本理稀ちゃんを無事、発見した。幼い命を救いたいと大分から駆け付け、わずか20分ほどで発見した行動力だけではない。その信念にも称賛が集まった。理稀ちゃんの家族から食事や風呂を勧められたが、断固として断ったのだ。尾畠さんのボランティアとしての流儀がある。
　尾畠春夫さん：「対価、物品、飲食、これは絶対、頂かない。敷居をまたいで家の中に入ることもボランティアとして失格だと思っている。私はそれで良いと思うんですよ。人がどうしようと関係ない。尾畠春夫は自分なりのやり方がある。それで通しただけ」
　尾畠さんが大切にしている言葉がある。
　尾畠春夫さん：「『かけた情けは水に流せ、受けた恩は石に刻め』。人の命は地球より重い」



　文科省の役人とは大違いだな。