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Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 9, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I think more about Eastern (typically Asian countries that are too far north or east to be Muslim) cultures when I see this- they have a working system, but American progressives (and the progressives of old, now called traditionalists) don't know how it works/it doesn't play to their biases so they simply see an enemy to be destroyed.

Globohomo (and I mean that in both senses of the word) is just as much born of arrogance as Middle Eastern sexuality laws are.

There has been very limited attempts by American progressives to attack Japanese culture. There were coerced changes to Japanese culture immediately after WW2, but they were bipartisan (MacArthur was profoundly not a progressive - he would be fired by a Dem president for being based in an insubordinate way and would have been McCarthy's running mate if McCarthy had managed to run for president).

But since the end of the US occupation, the only attempt by US progressives to shame Japan for insufficient progressivism was when right-wing Japanese politicians started publicly paying respect to the memory of various controversial WW2-era Japanese leaders.

Despite having been consistently aware of the current thing since the 1990's, I don't know anything about the LGBXYZSNORE situation in Japan without looking it up, indicating that it has not been the current thing in my lifetime.

Interesting question - is this an unprincipled exception or is it just a case of Japanese internal affairs not being on the radar?

I suspect most internal affairs aren't actually on the radar.

Every now and then an issue bubbles up to the level of perception among the voter base. Some fraction of those make it through the social and political filters until "Something Has To Be Done." Then we might or might not spend diplomatic capital on doing that Something.

The temperature is lower for stable, allied nations like Japan. It's higher for suspected rivals. We have a long history of critiquing combloc countries for their freedom of expression, so it doesn't take much to get a Senator or newspaper bemoaning Russia's treatment of their dissidents--including anyone who uses a rainbow flag.

Allegations of American progressives trying and succeeding in pushing progressive/leftist policies in other developed countries are mostly unfounded. Firstly, a lot of the intellectual origins of modern progressivism emerged in Europe, and secondly most European activists who embrace US style racial progressivism do so proactively and because to Europeans (despite a performative disdain for supposed American boorishness) America is more dynamic, more advanced, more exciting, more ‘of the future’ than Europe is (even for those on the left), and everything associated with Americanness, including leftist American gender politics and so on, is cool and interesting and should be adopted by the French / Spanish / German left.

The British / German / Spanish leftists protesting for BLM in 2020 weren’t doing it on orders from the American left, they were doing it proactively because they wanted to.

Agreed as regards Western Europe - we have our own liberal and leftist political traditions which don't grok American progressivism and which American progressives grok even less. We also have our own idiotarian left tradition which has unthinkingly imported American progressivism without applying it to local conditions - but this has a lot less pull than people insist it does, and essentially none at all in France. But American progressives have tried to shame countries for insufficient progressivism - it just doesn't work.

When I pointed out the lack of US progressive bullying of Japan over insufficient progressivism (and there are obvious targets re. the role of women, immigration, outcaste treatment of barakumin) I realise I was implicitly comparing it to the bullying of mostly third-world countries over feminism, LGBFAGMORON, etc.

LGBFAGMORON

Okay, the "XYZSNORE" was one thing, but really?