> A third son, Hyung Jin “Sean” Moon, founded a separate, gun-centered church in Pennsylvania known as Rod of Iron Ministries, where followers do target practice with AR-15s and bring guns to church to be blessed. Hyung Jin wears a golden crown made of rifle shells, and delivers hate-filled sermons against the Democratic Party. He also expects to become the king of America. He reviles his mother—who runs the international church in South Korea—as the “whore of Babylon.”
Please wake me up, I must have fallen asleep in front of a South Park episode...
Not sure if it's just me but I routinely get stuck in a captcha redirect loop with archive.today (like captcha button, get redirected back to same captcha page)
Same with me for a few weeks now. Turned on my vpn and things worked. So the other suggestion to not use cloudflare dns is probably what is happening under the covers. Archive doesn't like CF at all.
stuck in a captcha redirect loop with archive.today
Their captcha page is odd, styled to look like Cloudflare's captcha gate but uses reCAPTCHA which Cloudflare publicly spoke about switching from.
Code of the page also seems to include a strange XmlHttpRequest to some blog site with randomized query string (see end of https://pastebin.com/W21Au8RK), along with some fingerprint library (though commented out)
That blog site loads very slow for me if I go there manually - maybe some kind of DoS being directed to it?
Seen this same faux-cloudflare page used on btdig.com too, with the same strange XmlHttpRequest & fingerprint code, pretty weird.
This worked for me. I found that I changed my DNS server to Cloudflare with the AdGuard software installed on MacOS a while back (AdGuard > Preferences > DNS), and changing this to a different server fixed it.
I also used the command `sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder` on Terminal (double-check this command before using) to flush the DNS cache, so the change would immediately take effect with the archive websites.
The technical reasons behind it are that the archive.today guy wants any takedown notices to be cross-border, so he wants to know what country you are in so he can redirect you to a server outside it.
Cloudflare doesn't support a DNS extension that allows this (eDNS maybe?) and so it fails.
There's a longstanding issue with using Cloudflare DNS. If you change Firefox's secure DNS provider settings to NextDNS the page loads without any captcha.
This is not the longstanding Cloudflare issue. That made Archive sties totally unreachable.
This Captcha issue occurs with non-cloudflare resolvers as well, although with great inconsistency. It depends on the resolver and the user's location when they query. Results can change hours later.
I went to a conference in Nara last year and at one of the receptions I told a Japanese attendee that I was sorry to hear about the assassination. I joked that my name is pronounced Abe like Abe Lincoln, not like Shinzo Abe. He kind of shrugged and said it would be kind of like if it had happened to Trump in the US, in that there were a lot of of people that didn't like him.
The article makes it seem like people discovered about the cult connections after the fact. I wish I had known more about it to ask more questions. If anyone has more insight about it, I'd be glad to learn more.
Ironically I was reading 1Q84 at the time, which is about a cult in Japan.
The cult connections weren't widely known by the public prior. His assassin opened up a giant can of worms with the Reunification Church still discussed on the nightly news to this day. Last I heard the government is getting ready to ban them like they did Aum Shinrikyo. The whole thing has tarnished Abe's legacy, that and his expensive state funeral which pissed off a good chunk of the public.
It is an ongoing issue and point of discussion/conflict with the public, with lots and lots of message management and incremental “progress”. There is some policy reform and push for more to be done. Doesn’t seem like much power has actually been purged of its accomplices tho kishida public support is very low I wouldn’t be surprised if it recovers whenever he’s replaced within his party
politics is a losing game when the public buys into its machinations and scheming against their interests
I feel like the public in Japan can get upset about the weirdest things though.
Everyone loses their minds over the princess leaving the imperial family getting a 1M departure gift, and a funeral for the single most significant PM of our time that cost ten million dollars.
Meanwhile, everything has gotten 10% more expensive over the past year or so, which is actually worth getting upset about, compared to the 0.01 yen that the Abe funeral cost each Japanese citizen.
Tangent, but I looked up the price since ¥0.01 sounded too low. It's ¥12 per person on Japan (which should be a good approximation for number of japanese citizens)
Apologies, I figured the same thing but I didn’t bother looking it up, because 0.01 or 12 yen is the same kind of irrelevant to everyone but a 5 year olds spending.
> He kind of shrugged and said it would be kind of like if it had happened to Trump in the US, in that there were a lot of of people that didn't like him.
Not really--Abe's approval ratings were well above water almost his entire tenure, and his approval was often over 50%. Trump's approval rating never hit 50% and his net approval was underwater almost his entire presidency.
It would be more like Reagan. A large minority of people really hated Regan. But he was relatively popular overall.
I’m presuming you held this conversation in English, which is correlated with a Japanese person who has more worldly experiences and views, and with that diverges from mainstream Japanese society.
Most of Japan is conservative and inward looking. Despite the second strong passport in the world, very low percentage of Japanese people have one. Japan also has the lowest TOEFL score out of all Asian countries.
Most gripes toward Abe was from economic frustration, especially during COVID. It does not make sense at all to make a Trump comparison because the American left/right Ideology does not map. Japanese people are mostly homogenous, and identity politics and immigration which are dividing issues in the west are not at the top here. Japan also has very low voter turnout because it’s continuity of conservatism whichever way.
Not getting into politics at all but I imagine it'd be utter chaos if anything similar were to happen to Trump, that's an interesting perspective to hear though.
This comment made me realize that when Trump passes there will 100% be a conspiracy about it, no matter the cause.
For the average American man who is Trump's age (77) the chance of dying in that same year is about 5%, according to the Social Security Administration's Actuarial Life Table.
This is a stat which only goes in one direction - up - over time. It's at 6.5% at 80, 18% at 90, and a sobering 38% at 100.
If Trump died, and in the aftermath it was revealed he had ties to a Chinese cult, his only remaining supporters would probably be the cult-like reality deniers.
"These people (the Trump voters) are sick and tired of being lied to by fake politicians and they just want to burn the whole system down -- Trump is their fire bomb." -- Michael Moore, prior to the 2016 election.
That's not wrong, we have an issue with politicians promising things that are impossible or at a minimum highly implausible - because the structure of our political system means they won't be thrown out on their ear for making promises they can't keep.
It's not that they promise things that they can't deliver.
It's that they pretend to be fighters for good, while instead using the system for cynical self gain.
I actually think it's that politicians have been unwilling to promise things that they feel are politically infeasible, and arguably make no sense, like building a wall to Mexico
It kind of makes sense on an intellectual level, but I don’t think it is very plausible. Trump promised a lot of things when he was elected, most of which are practically impossible. I think he just promised the right things for his audience, whereas most politicians are so far up their arses that they don’t know what actual people want or care about.
I don't think that's what GP meant: Voters just wanted to set the whole circus on fire. That the person they chose for the job also made impossible promises didn't matter.
This happens a lot on a smaller scale in other democracies that aren't a two party system - people vote for some nonsense radicals or weirdo upstart party to signal the establishment it needs to change. Sometimes this has quite funny outcomes: Pirate party, the Greens in Germany in 1983, etc. Other times it's scary nutjobs. Rarely the parties stick around for longer, slowly becoming the establishment.
Republicans and Democrats alike say whatever they need to win a primary and general election, democrats do that in smaller quantities - but it's still the same bullshit.
And before anyone says I'm "both sidesing" the green new deal (which was little more than a messaging bill with lots of words and little substance) was no more passable than building a southern border wall was, or repealing Obamacare (though this got close) for that matter.
> we have an issue with politicians promising things that are impossible or at a minimum highly implausible
That's every democracy. The issue we have is that we're in a period where trust in elites is at rock bottom. (Both sides' elites--Mitch McConnell isn't much more popular among Trump voters than Biden.) The normal function of elites keeping the unwashed masses grounded in reality isn't working.
Yes. This was part of an MSNBC discussion about Clinton's problem with union and working class white voters. The panel was having a hard time understanding why union members would vote Republican.
I had a kid 2 years ago and that's the only excuse I have for somehow having not heard of this news (or it simply slipped through my sleep deprived memory). Wow. I thought for a second this was about the Inejiro Asanuma assassination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Inejir%C5%8D_... but... wow. Homemade gun? I guess someone sufficiently motivated will figure out a way to kill someone at range even with strict gun controls...
20 years ago, the Moonies sent out (and maybe still does) young, impoverished, probably easily influenced Koreans to American university campuses every now and then to extract money from college students using a clipboard-based montage of depressing photos.
They also have/had ties with the Bush family. Also, they own the News World Communications, UPI, and the Washington Times. Just think s/Moonies/Korean Scientology/. Media ownership not to be confused with The Epoch Times owned by s/Falun Gong/Chinese Scientology/.
It's fascinating to me that moonies managed to have Abe & Trump speak at their event for millions. Probably one of most fascinating political cults of modern times.
The Moonies have woven themselves into the American right wing for decades. Reagan said the Washington Times, which is an organ of the Unification Church, was his favorite newspaper.
You can see Falun Gong attempting the same in the United States. The Epoch Times is Falun Gong's "media outlet" and it sponsors and shapes a lot of content online. It's all bankrolled by Shen Yun performances too. These rabbit holes go to strange places!
Newsweek infamously relaunched itself in 2014 with a dramatic story falsely accusing a Japanese man living in California of being Satoshi Nakamoto. So it’s not exactly a credible outlet.
FWIW, the owner of Newsweek at the time wasn’t the Moonies, but rather David Jang, who is an evangelical Presbyterian. Things have apparently gotten complicated since then, with a change in ownership and then Newsweek itself reporting a year ago that they were suing Jang: https://www.newsweek.com/newsweek-sues-david-jang-leader-sec...
Lately I’ve seen tons and tons of anti trans content that actually says sponsored by the Epoch Times. I’ve see it on Facebook and Xitter.
I don’t get why that issue is so important to them. Maybe scaring people about trans people is just broadly working.
Gotta fear monger or people might notice that most of our candidates are incompetent. Republicans are unelectable without scaring people about LGBT people and immigrants, while Democrats are unelectable without scaring people about Republicans. That seems to be the dynamic right now.
Simple: grifting. Influence is what's important to them. They tap into wellsprings of conservative grievance to increase media outreach. They became antivax when antivax sentiment went up, they're here for the trans freakout, and they'll surely work to be in place for the next hot button issue, too.
>Republicans are unelectable without scaring people about LGBT people and immigrants, while Democrats are unelectable without scaring people about Republicans. That seems to be the dynamic right now.
That was the dynamic. Now with NYC, Chicago, etc. being overwhelmed with migrant inflows, and Dem mayors like in NYC and Chicago declaring emergencies, do we really need Republican fear mongering to scare people about unregulated migration?
If politicians try to gaslight people that obvious problems aren't real, that can make the opposition electable all on its own.
Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falung Gong, views homosexuality as basically such a profound abnormal psychological state that it is among the worst of sins.
It is no surprise that their mouthpiece would be rabidly against acceptance of gender dysphoria as anything other than a perverse mental disorder.
Every contribution helps get us one step closer to expelling this misogynistic ideology from policy and law. It would be preferable if such articles were penned only by women's rights organisations and allies with the same principles, but if other groups want to oppose this nonsense from other angles then that's useful too.
Big TIL for me this one, and I thought I was smart enough for knowing about the connection between Falun Gong and the Epoch Times (I also know about the direct connection between Gulen's movement and one of the best private schools here in Romania).
"The exact financial and structural connections between Falun Gong, Shen Yun and The Epoch Times remains unclear...Financial documents paint a complicated picture of more than a dozen technically separate organizations that appear to share missions, money and executives." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong#The_Epoch_Times_and...)
Ha, that's what Shen Yun is about. Their ticket sales convoy pops up in an innocuous town in the UK a couple of times a year, looking rather out of place.
> The Moonies have woven themselves into the American right wing for decades. Reagan said the Washington Times, which is an organ of the Unification Church, was his favorite newspaper.
This is perhaps the flimsiest syllogism I have ever encountered.
But if you don't want to follow a link, here's a quote:
Over the years, Moon’s hidden money has helped many Republicans through hard times. In the 1980s, the American Freedom Council defended North against Iran-Contra charges and distributed 30 million pieces of political literature to help elect George Bush in 1988. It was later revealed that the AFC was backed by $5 million to $6 million from business interests associated with Moon.
Moon’s organization also kept the right’s direct-mail guru Richard Viguerie afloat in the 1980s. At one stage, Viguerie profited from a big contract with the Washington Times for subscription solicitations, then, while facing a financial crisis that threatened his company’s future, Viguerie sold a building to a top Moon aide, Bo Hi Pak, for $10 million.
Yet, even as Moon has gained influence in GOP circles, the sources of his money have always been suspect. In the late 1970s, a congressional investigation tied Moon’s Unification Church to the “Koreagate” influence-buying scheme directed by South Korea’s intelligence service, the KCIA, against U.S. institutions. In 1983, the moderate Republican Ripon Society raised warning flags, too. Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa), then Ripon chairman, charged that Moon’s church had “infiltrated the new right and the party it [the new right] wants to control, the Republican Party, and infiltrated the media as well.”
But President Ronald Reagan embraced the Washington Times as his “favorite” newspaper and Moon’s newspaper returned the favor by defending the Reagan-Bush administrations at nearly every turn. In 1991, President Bush invited the paper’s new editor-in-chief, Wesley Pruden, to lunch “just to tell you how valuable the Times has become in Washington, where we read it every day.”
> Over the years, Moon’s hidden money has helped many Republicans through hard times.
Okay. You offer three examples. One is obvious nonsense--Bush won by 8% in '88, winning 4/5 states. Supporting him was hardly "helping Republicans through hard times" and said support presumably went unnoticed, as support in a presidential campaign has the lowest value-per-dollar of any form of political support.
Given that, your entire argument is
> Moon --has money in--> "business interests associated with moon" --give money to--> AFC --does business with--> Richard Viguerie --supports--> GOP
Ergo, Moon has influence over the GOP? Lol. Then there's:
> Moon --has money in--> "business interests associated with moon" --give money to--> AFC --toes party line during Iran-Contra in support of--> GOP
Ergo, Moon has influence over the GOP. One cannot possibly be convinced of this without first desperately wanting to be convinced. Maybe it hits better if you've got the whole thing pinned up on your wall with thumbtacks, with the relationships mapped out in red yarn and a tin foil hat to keep the 5G at bay.
Look--giving money to a cause while separated by multiple parties is the flimsiest form of association imaginable. Pretending that this relationship (if you can even call it that) is necessarily reversible (A gives to B, who gives to C, who helps D, ergo D is under the influence of A) is just laughable. It's worth noting separately that this whole rhetorical house of cards rests on the assumption that "business interests associated with moon" means "Moon's money", which is likely just another batch of motivated reasoning.
> In the late 1970s, a congressional investigation tied Moon’s Unification Church to the “Koreagate” influence-buying scheme directed by South Korea’s intelligence service, the KCIA, against U.S. institutions.
Are you going to tie this in? Or are you hoping for a leap of faith?
> In 1983, the moderate Republican Ripon Society raised warning flags, too. Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa), then Ripon chairman, charged that Moon’s church had “infiltrated the new right and the party it [the new right] wants to control, the Republican Party, and infiltrated the media as well.”
Imagine quoting a politician as evidence.
> But President Ronald Reagan embraced the Washington Times as his “favorite” newspaper and Moon’s newspaper returned the favor by defending the Reagan-Bush administrations at nearly every turn.
One can appreciate a paper for providing good press coverage without drinking the kool-aid of the owner's cult. Don't you agree?
> In 1991, President Bush invited the paper’s new editor-in-chief, Wesley Pruden, to lunch “just to tell you how valuable the Times has become in Washington, where we read it every day.”
This could be the sole piece of evidence of an super-secret back channel between Bush and the Moon cult<-->Korean intelligence axis! Or it could be a conservative politician showing appreciation to a conservative news outlet for their positive coverage of the administration--doubtless one of many such lunches. Occam's Razor applies.
> The Moonies have woven themselves into the American right wing
Our First Amendment specifically allows for freedom of association and religion. This used to be seen as an attribute, now it apparently has become cause for open prejudice.
> The Epoch Times is Falun Gong's "media outlet" and it sponsors and shapes a lot of content online. It's all bankrolled by Shen Yun performances too.
This is an intentionally misleading representation of the organization and it's structure, which combined with the above, seems designed to besmirch the papers reputation and reporting without actually addressing either in any meaningful way.
If the sword cuts both ways then your assessment is suggestively identical to the CCP position on the organization and on the religious views of it's founders.
It's a newspaper given away for free in paper form, frequently.
I don't believe the Epoch Times to be a credible news source, in the same way that RT is not one. That doesn't mean its not a news source worth looking at on occasion.
I'm also skeptical of Falun Gong, first as a generally non-religious person, and then because they dont seem to like LGBTQ people very much - and I'm very much a member of that community.
I feel everyone ought to have a right to practice their religion in peace, however when the practicing of your religion potentially impacts the secular word, I get concerned - I generally believe in a strong separation of church and state, and anyone who starts to encroach on that, puts my hackles up.
"however when the practicing of your religion potentially impacts the secular word, I get concerned - I generally believe in a strong separation of church and state, and anyone who starts to encroach on that, puts my hackles up."
But you cannot really separate personal believe from political stance. So religious believe will always influence the secular world. Meaning religious people will vote and lobby for people and organisations sharing their point of view.
> But you cannot really separate personal believe from political stance. So religious believe will always influence the secular world. Meaning religious people will vote and lobby for people and organisations sharing their point of view.
Sure. It’s not exactly what’s discussed here, though. We’re talking about Reagan and Bush (and Abe and others) coldly using propaganda machines backed by extremist cults for influence campaigns. It’s far beyond the same pushing the agenda for which they were explicitly elected, which happens to be backwards on a lot of levels but is at least genuine and open.
These organisations also cause concerns of foreign interference, considering their links with political parties and powerful politicians abroad.
There have been similar issues in Europe with extremist parties bankrolled by Russia to destabilise local political systems, which does not have any religious aspect. The problem is not the religion, it’s the structures, their objectives, and how they work and corrupt.
The First Amendment says that religion and government should remain separate. I have the right to freely observe that some religions are aggressively testing that boundary more than others.
But, "intentionally misleading"? Can you please explain the ways I've mislead people? Here are some essays which go into the claims in more detail.
Well, I am not a american, but as far as I understand it, it does say it.
"The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution prevents the government from making laws that: regulate an establishment of religion; prohibit the free exercise of religion;"
Any incorporation of religious organisations into the state fabric, would be an "establishment of religion". So of course open religious people can be part of the government. But the government may have no favourite religion it subsidizes, teaches in schools etc. or prefers in any way.
In practice, the Supreme Court has intepreted the First Amendment as implying full separation of church and state; for instance, school prayer is forbidden [0], even if it's voluntary and non-denominational.
Isn’t that topic too political and should be flagged? I'm trying to be oriented here. Some others submissions, ie about freedom of speech, are flagged.
I wish there is some explanation for flagged submissions.
From the HN Guidelines about what constitute as a valid post:
> anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Given that the article is quite descriptive and well-researched, the comment section is civil, and lead to many interesting discussions about politics and history, I would say that there is no need to flag this post.
I know from personal experience that many Koreans who own sushi restaurants are part of this cult, they knew each other at church all donated a lot and the only reason I know is that my friend dated a girl whose parents were part of it.
I think the ones I saw recently were all members of the cult. They're overly religious and their family and children are often working there, children hate it and the cult. They try to keep costs low, donations from their work high, and it seems to function efficiently with a religious fevor. I've never seen much excess use of money from sushi restaurants. Haven't been to a chick fil a in a while but maybe like that culture but less friendly, all family and they're thinking of more efficient ways to donate. Many sell merchandise and try to sell lots of high profit goods. I'm sorry if this isn't a good answer.
Edit: I forgot about a sandwich shop (the yellow deli) I've heard that is always open that is a cult. I never been but it sounds a lot closer to this cult except they seen to recruit more and focus on cute receptionists girls working at the counters.
It happens a lot with dictator run governments. I heard that's how foreign Eritreans are treated, or their family dies. A man living in Australia told me he had to send money back to his government quite often.
Do you have a book rec on this? The story I always heard about Korea specifically was a lot of missionary organizations being there during and after the war and genuinely offering a lot of support.
When you are an artist in Japan, there are certain things you will pull a massive amount of criticism down upon yourself for directly critiquing or commenting on via your art. You can't make a video game about "Hey maybe it's weird and a little not okay that it's an open secret that formal power in Japan is very closely tied to the informal power structure of what is basically a specific religious cult." Making that game will pull all kinds of formal and informal pressure down on a person's head.
... But making a game where young people look at the existing power structure and band together to defeat it, fighting all the way up to divinity itself? Not only is there a reason Persona 5 is what it is, there's a reason we keep seeing that theme in JRPGs.
Why is that so crazy? Happens all the time that people get assassinated and the public sides with the assassin. If the US was successful with any of their plots to assassinate Castro I'm sure the US public would mostly side with their government about it, as a relatively famous example.
Another more contemporary example would be the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin (prime minister of Israel) in 95, which had a lot of local public support.
The Castro example doesn't really fit here. That would be an assassination of a foreign national, not a domestic assassination like in Rabin's or Abe's.
One of the central themes of P5 is that “public support” tends to be based on spectacle and emotion rather than justice — kinda like the idea of news as entertainment rather than truth. The assassination of a foreign leader would be news, but it wouldn’t really be a spectacle in the same way as a local politician, and wouldn’t create the kind of emotional reaction within the public that the parent comment is referencing.
This is a very powerful notion in general. In an extremely real way, justice is just "codified vibes." The primary purpose of a functioning judicial system is really to allow the public to sleep soundly in their beds at night.
I agree. If Trump or Obama had been assassinated during their presidency, there would have been some support among the public, wide condemnation by the elites worried about their status and a news blackout on why the assassin may have been justified.
An Obama assassination might have led to a more immediate George Floyd style disruption of major cities. The murder of the first black president is a chilling possibility to think about. Trumps assassination might have been equally toxic, given the rhetoric of the time. Especially if it were not denounced by the media, it might have been similarly corrosive. Arguably Trump is being politically assassinated presently, by his own hand as much as anyone else's.
It's all speculative but there will be support for either, during their presidency or after from people. The US's media is way more controlled, I generally think assassinations are popular among the public.
Ultra-national movement in Israel was strong then and is still strong, a movement which publicly were happy about the assassination as they thought that Rabin would lead down the road of loosing ground to Palestine.
> "Eating raw tuna was still an exotic pursuit to Americans when Moon—the self-declared “king of the ocean”—began investing in shipyards in the late 1970s and sending his followers to sell door-to-door from refrigerated vans. True World Foods, a seafood company founded at Moon’s direction, controls a large share of the sushi trade, selling raw fish to thousands of restaurants across the United States and Canada."
> "Yamagami’s trial will offer Japan a chance to relive the entire drama. No date has been set as of this writing. Japanese prosecutors take their time, and for a man who has admitted to killing a former head of state, there may be pressure to apply the death penalty. If so, Yamagami will face an excruciating fate. Death-row prisoners in Japan are not told the date of their execution in advance. They wake up every morning not knowing if this day will be their last."
Every Japanese and Korean person I work with presents their names with the family name last when operating in an English speaking context. Conversely, my (American) name is often written family name first (and in katakana) when I'm in Japan.
Real cultural sensitivity is accepting the social conventions of the society you are operating in.
Yup, that's the problem, the practice is inconsistent even in Japan and we do say Oda Nobunaga, Tokugawa Ieyasu etc for sufficiently historical figures. The Wikipedia guideline for this is quite the mess of exceptions:
We also expect people to know the basics of geography etc. Seems fine not to always cater to the ignorant, although there are specific magazines where you might expect that.
The language/country norm is kinda irrelevant. In Japan John Lennon is not referred to as ”Lennon John”, nor is Miyamoto Musashi referred as "Musashi Miyamoto" in English.
For famous names, outside of official dpcuments people will use whatever names feels right to them and I personally think that should be fine as long as the name is recognized.
Not only that, we might be exposed to them for years without really knowing which is the family name and which is the given name!
In a vacuum, I might have guess "Chow Yun-fat" as starting with the family name because I know that the hyphenated, two-part names are usually given. But a name like "Yao Ming" I might not have had any idea, since I don't have the cultural exposure to know which single syllable words look more like family names versus given names.
Imagine expecting a Chinese person to figure out "Larry David" with no other context.
I believe that's a historical (19th-century) reason. Japan tried to live up to Western standards. They underwent radical changes and adopted Western culture, driven by the significant influence of the '脱亜入欧' (Leave Asia, Join the West) theory during the Meiji era. That's why they adopted a Western-style naming convention for English names (Personal name + Family name).
However, China and Korea didn't modernize as fast as Japan. They didn't have radical changes in the 19th century. (The result is that foreign concession in China, unequal treaties, colonization of Korea, etc.) So they didn't have to change their naming convention.
The reason why Japan is trying to change the English naming convention when they write in Japanese is similar to the reason mentioned above. The 21st century is Asia's century. Japan feels that they don't have to conform to Western standards anymore. They are trying to be more Asian. That's why they are attempting to change the convention to synchronize as if they were writing in Japanese.
One of the most annoying things about speaking the dominant world language
(obviously it is also great in many respects) is that there is some pressure to change your language rather than just adjusting the sounds and spelling to the pre-existing phonetics. Erdogan is pronounced closer to erdoyan and Türkiye insisting on the umlaut. Nguyen and Pho rather than wynn and pha. Gyro instead of hyro. Blonde vs blond (WHY would we just have adjective modification for that word and none other) and colonel. You have to know a lot about so many different culture when a language should be self contained. I don't tell the Chinese what name to use for my country (I think they call USA something like Beautiful Land) in their language or the Spanish or another group for any word.
Dang, never thought about that. Must be really hard.
That joke out of the way, as a dual-citizen and polyglot my observation is that it is usually Americans giving other Americans shit about pronunciation. It’s perhaps (like you say) a form of jostling around how virtuous you are. Perhaps layered on top of some insecurity around how much of the world you got to see.
It's the same in every language. When you take words and particularly names from another language, you have to make choices. Do you borrow the spelling or the pronunciation? Do you use a local version of the name? Or do you translate it?
Suppose an American guy named John comes to Finland. Should he still continue spelling his name as "John"? Or should he take the pronunciation as given and start spelling his name as "Dzon"? Or should he adopt an equivalent local name, such as Juha, Janne, or Jani? Or should he go with a traditional version, such as Johannes or Juhana? And what happens if he changes the spelling but his American passport still uses "John"?
It's less about being the dominant language and more about sharing the same writing system (the Latin alphabet) with most of the world. So, however a Vietnamese name is written, since it's already in Latin characters, the characters are imported verbatim (well, usually diacritics don't survive, but what can you do).
The opposite extreme would be cases like Korean, with its own writing system not used anywhere else. Therefore, once an American name is written in Korean letters, there's no ambiguity in how to read it. So Los Angeles is 로스앤젤레스 ro-seu-aen-jel-le-seu, and everyone who can read Korean knows exactly how to read it.
Except... how do you determine which spelling to use? The sound systems are so different that there are usually no clearly correct matches. Also, how do you really know how these names originally sounds? Should Nevada be read with a long "a" or short "a" in the middle? You see a name Charles in an article, is he an Englishman or Frenchman (with different ch sounds)? Should we consider Einstein a German physicist, or an American one?
Two book publishers make two different choices, and you end up with the same people's name written in two different ways.
So, basically, there's no easy solution. You either pay the cost when you're reading (as in English) or when you're doing the transliteration (as in Korean).
I mean part of it is we don't really have a central language authority so when immigrants try to transliterate a word from their language, they go with their best guess based on what letters they understand to be equivalent, and sometimes they get it a little wrong, but by the time anyone realizes a convention has been set and it's incredibly hard to shift conventions.
It also feels very silly to change the spelling of a word or name when two languages share an alphabet, even if it makes it a little less phonetic.
You might find Japanese interesting, they invented a whole alphabet for loan words, and Japanese doesn't always have the phonetic range to pronounce things as it would sound in the language it was loaned from, and they also make certain aesthetic decisions when loaning it. You COULD say Smart Phone as Sumarto Fuon or a few different ways, but it is Sma Ho in Japan, because that's just ehat caught on when it was introduced. Probably by a marketing campaign for that word in particular.
I should say a lot of this is internal as a form of social signaling about worldliness. Also not against loan words its just that you should adjust loan words and concepts to fit the phonetics and grammar of the language.
Quite a few Japanese game developers style their names as <GivenName FamilyName> on social media when they're writing in English. Some examples that come to mind, going off of their Twitter accounts:
What is bewildering is that you expect that the world has turn around in the blink of an eye to humor the Japanese, who are now suddenly having second thoughts after telling everyone else to use Firstname Lastname for Japanese names in an international context for most of the last 150 years or so (as the article correctly notes).
Given the amount of work and confusion entailed this is a completely unreasonable expectation.
I am also an atheist, but recognize religion as damaging, forcing a tilting cognitive fog. Never helpful, a net negative to believers and society.
The degree of bad depends on the religion and the believer.
Plus one must not forget that, for most believers, religion preceded adulthood, even maturity. Meaning it was never a choice, but imposed through indoctrination and immediate social pressure.
It clearly is helpful to believers at times. For example, when a loved one dies, it can be extremely comforting to think you'll see them again soon in a paradisical heaven. Comfort when you're hurting is helpful.
That's an interesting point, though I think it would have to be if and only if all grief is positive. For example, if grief is 99% positive but 1% negative (negative being more pain than gain) then there's positive value.
For someone about to die, I think any grief is probably negative. Any personal growth or development won't be utilized. I think of it kind of like morphine, if you're dying it's fine to keep it flowing even if you are getting seriously addicted to it
>Many atheists take science as a religion for example
Admission to thinking about science as a belief betrays lacks of understanding of the scientific method, which is founded on rigorous doubt and verification.
Religion, by definition, is a social construct explicitly built to foster a collective identity that isolates those in the in-group from the out-group. It inherently implies hostility against the non-believer; the only difference is the form this hostility takes. For some, it's just condescension for people who don't perceive the "truth", for others it's literally declaring them infidels who don't deserve to live. All religions in this world fall within the spectrum of these two extremes. No religion in this world is open to having its foundational ideas challenged or debated in any manner.
I'd be happy if you can tell me which religions fit (a). A quick scan of the news indicates that Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Mormonism, Scientology etc. don't fit the bill, at least not without a lot of no-true-Scotsmaning. I think I can easily find evidence of followers of all of those religions killing their neighbors in the name of their god.
N.B. I'm not trying to shit in the milk of any religious person. You do you. Just don't try to claim that your club is actually less blood-soaked than the others.
Those murders were conducted by oppressive governments with a specific agenda, that didn't come from some atheist scripture.
> What you’re describing is a people problem, not a religion problem.
It's a problem of organized groups of people motivated by a collective ideology. This is manifested primarily by religions, since most religious texts have some passages that reject foreign groups, or outright invite acts of violence against them[1,2].
Agnostic atheism is a form of atheism. Atheism isn't a religion. It's not even a belief. It's just a lack of a specific kind of belief. Are there gnostic atheists? Sure. But even that is just a belief, and not a religion.
> One thing for sure is that life is uncertain. We never really know what situations may yield us—good, bad, or otherwise. Whatever happens in our life, we’ll never be sure of the consequences it may bring in the future.
If that's true, "maybe" we should have let Hitler live.
In real-life, losing a horse or breaking a leg is a bad outcome over 99% of the time, and gaining free horses and avoiding conscription (and defeating despots attempting to conquer the world) is a good outcome over 99% of the time.
Hitler could have united Europe. Had he won and taken over Russia and Europe it could have been much better. Had Genghis Khan not attacked so many places, legends of centuars may not exist and the world could be better. We don't know.
I find this line of argument to be a compelling refutation of any kind of consequentialist ethics from a human perspective. No human being ever has had or ever will have the ability to predict out the full consequences of an action throughout all time.
I assume that sounded clever to you when you typed it, but I invite you to consider how it completely fails to follow in any way from the statement that human understanding of higher order consequences rapidly approaches absolute deficiency as the causal chain lengthens.
My practical ethic is something closer to deontology. And it includes things like “don’t mutilate your body.” It’s precisely because I can’t follow those higher order consequence chains that I settle for following general moral principles instead of attempting teleological justifications for my actions.
Why doesn't your practical ethic include the general moral principle of not promoting religious nonsense? The causal chain is simple. People who believe religious nonsense can be easily made to believe any nonsense that hurts them (and have done so again and again), including mutilating their own genitals and the genitals of their children, which conflicts with and takes priority over your other moral principle.
Your defeatist attitude leads to bad public policy, where the powerful take advantage of the weak because the weak are stupidly convinced that they cannot understand the consequences of limiting their own exploitation.
I'm simply stating facts about religious mutilation as an impartial outsider who has never mutilated their own body or others'. I can understand why you might not like facts given your likely upbringing within a fact-denying community, but facts are what the rest of the world use as the grounding of a common framework for understanding.
Or more likely, Hitler would have exterminated millions more, and civilization would have crumbled under fascist ideology.
Why don't you chop off your arm? You don't know if that will turn out to be good. Stories like that of the Chinese farmer and Pippi Longstocking are for children, not for thinking adults to blindly believe. The point of the Chinese farmer for children is that even though bad things happen, things can get better, which helps them get over it. To make it go down easier, they show that even though good things happen, things can get worse.
Do you really think Hitler's additional extermination would be limited to Russia had he completed his world conquest?
I assert that if you don't understand the "why don't you" question, you don't fundamentally understand the fable. Why don't you tell me why it doesn't apply?
> Just don't try to claim that your club is actually less blood-soaked than the others.
I'm in Sweden. Religion here has sort of faded into the background. Very few people are religious. We observe the religion here more or less as as a cultural thing. It's something we do at births, school exam celebrations and burials but not much else.
Human beings are observably religious by nature. We’re going to worship and make devotion to something, whether it’s God, ourselves, the sky, an economic system, science, or whatever else. There will never be a post-religious age.
The comparison between South Korea and Israel isn't very strong. America fought the Korean War and still has 28,500 troops stationed there, along with a combined forces command. Some US soldiers are stationed right on the border with North Korea, just so that a North Korean invasion will kill Americans and immediately trigger an American response.
Secondarily, securing Korea as a trading partner for Japan was an explicit part of US post-WW2 strategy, where Japan would be rebuilt as a bastion of the western world's economy, and having local trading partners strengthened that. South Korea has always had a deeply intertwined relationship with the US.
When the Moonies showed up in the 70s/80s, there was no influence to buy. South Korea was already receiving all the support it could handle, and as a cult, the Moonies showed up at the tail end of a lot of 60s/70s spirituality that had already soured the American public on alternative religions.
Whatever you think of the pro-Israel lobby, drawing to the Moonies doesn't really work.
Please wake me up, I must have fallen asleep in front of a South Park episode...