> similar to how Japanese people and society broadly want people that move their to assimilate
And it's super racist there too, I can assure you. My father in law is Korean but lived in Japan his whole life. There's no way to describe what he experienced except racism. People just hated him for being Korean.
I have no respect for people that concern troll about some vague cultural purity to disguise their prejudices.
A friend of mine who is a non Japanese Asian lived in Japan and when asked said there's no racism. There's mild cases but if you are careful to follow the customs and speak the language, you are generally accepted as a Japanese in daily life.
> A friend of mine who is a non Japanese Asian lived in Japan and when asked said there's no racism
Well I'm convinced.
:shrug: same back to you?
No, there's a fundamental difference between what we both wrote. There's a difference between saying "I know someone who has experienced racism" and "My friend says there's no racism in X country." One is a personal experience, the other invalidates the experiences of everyone else. They are not two sides of the same coin like you are implying. If you take the phrase "There is no racism in Japan" at face value, you are either pushing an agenda or falling for someone else's.
"We just want assimilation" is the palatable marketing term for "We would be fine arresting people at their immigration hearings if they are brown enough." Just look at the U.S.
Rewrite my comment to say "my friend experienced no racism". Not more than in his home country at least.
What you said is the same. One is according to what your relative said another is according to what my friend said.
I don't think it's crazy to expect assimilation. We are fascinated with different countries and cultures and we generally consider it's a good idea they exist and are different. Diversity is strength. But they can only be different if they have their own culture and traditions. Would everyone be so fascinated with Japan or Korea if it was not for their culture? Would they be the same without high trust society that is made possible by it?
> I don't think it's crazy to expect assimilation.
What's that mean to you? In my city, immigrants work, run businesses, pay taxes, have kids and send them to local schools, ride the bus, complain about the weather, practice their religion. I guess the only thing they don't do is complain as loudly about the government as (many of) the rest of us. What more could they be doing to assimilate?
Probably nothing. Looks good to me, they speak your language, have jobs (don't abuse welfare), pay taxes, live legally. Reading about the party it seemed that they want to kick out people far from what you described (which can be still wrong, idk, but I'm not sure it's so outrageous I would boycott a business over its owner's preference). If they campaign to kick out people who are like what you described then I would think harder.
One note: I didn't say anything about the language they speak, and what language other people speak is none of my business.
How do you know they complain about the weather, if they don't speak your language?
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No, it's a reasonable question. Language is how 90% of communication happens. 如果我用中文說話，你根本聽不懂我在說什麼。只有聽得懂鄰居和社區裡的人在說什麼，我才會感到自在；如果聽不懂，我就不會有這種自在感。I've a significant chunk of my life in places where people don't speak my language and it's not a comfortable situation to be. Sure I have some anxieties but everyone does and if you say their feelings are invalid then I'm not sure which of us is more intolerant.
> Not more than in his home country at least
So in other words he did experience racism?
> I don't think it's crazy to expect assimilation
What qualifies as assimilation is completely up to the reader. To some people, it means holding a job (although I don't know of any white people that get deported for being laid off). For some, it means not committing crimes.
For many, it doesn't matter if you have a job or if you're even born here. There is no standard of assimilation you can meet if you are ethnically different enough. That is why, again, the U.S. is currently arresting people at their immigration hearings. This is what far right politicians really want, they don't give a fuck about assimilation.
> Would everyone be so fascinated with Japan or Korea if it was not for that culture and high trust society made possible by it
Buddy, come on. Most people I know are not fascinated by Japan, they are fascinated by a romanticized idea of Japan that has been filtered through Reddit posts and Anime. They cultivate a one-dimensional understanding of the country specifically so they can daydream about it. A lot of Americans that "love" Japan would lose all interest the second they were told they can't dump their trash outside.
> So in other words he did experience racism?
Not according to him.
> Most people I know are not fascinated by Japan, they are fascinated by a romanticized idea of Japan that has been filtered through Reddit posts and Anime
Somehow people I know who rave about Japan just don't watch anime that I know of. They just go there and like how everything is. The anime nerds I know don't talk about real Japan much.
If you don't have that fascination, fine. I was fascinated by tons of things there. I think most people were. And most people would say it's a horrible idea destroying that culture.
You are completely dodging the topic of assimilation. You are implying that Japan is great because it's culturally homogeneous, and the reason it's culturally homogeneous is because people assimilate, and therefore Sweden deporting teenagers is morally right because they are protecting their own culture from people that don't assimilate.
You have no specifics on how immigrants don't assimilate, and what part of the culture is worth preserving, or how you can even assimilate to a culture that is constantly developing. If I am ethnically Japanese and grow up in Japan, but I don't act like others, that is not a "lack of assimilation." That is me actively participating in a shift of the culture, and that's how everyone would see it. But if I were a different ethnicity in the same situation, I would be a problem immigrant anchor baby who is trying to destroy the culture of the country. Do you see the difference?
This idea that culture is able to be frozen in time and preserved is paradoxical. It's a cudgel used to bludgeon disadvantaged people who are perfectly functioning citizens, and even harm people who could make the country better, not worse. How do you expect immigrants to introduce new ideas to a culture if you elect politicians that will demonize and deport them if they are not sufficiently "assimilated"
> You have no specifics on how immigrants don't assimilate,
I haven't been to Sweden. I take the word of people who have been there or live there elsewhere in this thread.
But elsewhere I definitely have seen communities of immigrants which don't speak local language and treat local population as less than themselves because they are of different religion.
> If I am ethnically Japanese and grow up in Japan, but I don't act like others
Examples please.
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Racism != rightism. It is even possible to be both Communist and racist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_Soviet_Union
Racism is one of those things that unfortunately crosses political and social boundaries. Some groups just hide it better than others by enforcing anti-racism as a group norm.
Racism definitely crosses all boundaries, but deporting people on the grounds they are not culturally aligned is what we'd call a positionally right policy. That does not mean left wing parties can't do it. It means it lies right on the political spectrum.
That's not a subjective opinion I made, that is just a textbook definition of what we consider authoritative right. Left and right mean things, and they don't mean what traditionally progressive or conservative parties happen to be doing at that time.
Left and right refers to where the Girondins and the Montagnards/Jacobins sat in the French revolutionary assembly. We’ve bastardized this into imaginary delineations of political positioning and for some reason we keep bolting on arbitrary positions as Girondin or Jacobin.
I don’t care what textbook you are looking at, I’m looking at (or maybe writing) a different one. Left and right do not actually “mean things” if you intend for “meaning” to be universally or even widely agreed upon. I suppose for you “meaning” may only be relevant if a certain group or class agrees upon the meaning, but the rest of us will continue to say and believe what we want!
You are being needlessly contradictory, in a pointlessly academic way. I can assure you nobody thinks of left or right as the French revolutionary assembly, any more than we think of "Wednesday" as the day of the Norse god Odin, or "a sandwich" as the Earl of Sandwich's gambling snack. The Etymological origin doesn't determine current meaning.
> but the rest of us will continue to say and believe what we want
Who is we? These definitions are mostly settled, and where they aren't, there are fuzzy differences, not huge gaps of disagreement. It's a shared language of understanding where people lie on a quadrant of politics. It's socially useful to have that language when posing political theory. Again, this does not mean political parties are permanently stuck to their quadrant. What do you think Republicans mean when they call themselves right wing? Nothing?
> I suppose for you “meaning” may only be relevant if a certain group or class agrees upon the meaning
What? You seem to be stuck on an idea that I am making some kind of partisan statement by saying a certain policy is left or right wing. That is not a value statement on whether it's good or bad. I don't know why you are so heated about this.
There is no shared language anymore, and I’m tired of pretending that there is. The 20th century notion of left and right, which was itself a fantasy, has been turned into a tool of propaganda. It does nothing but muddy the waters.
“Right-wing” politicians are arguing for nationalization in some cases and wielding industrial policy like they’re FDR. We may see price controls and even capital controls before long. The oil market interventions alone would make Stalin blush. Meanwhile they are jumping on regulation in other places, such as AI “safety”, and have floated hate speech bans (to combat antisemitism).
“Left-wing” pols (admittedly in the face of immense hate from their base) are coming out for free market solutions gently guided by the government and deregulation so we can build faster. Outside the US, you have bizarro world Labour policies in the UK (they seem to be aiming to absorb the Tories), China’s roaring Communist economy that’s the global hotbed of economic activity, etc.
The traditional categories still seem to hold in Latin America, for some reason. But that’s it.
What exactly does the left-right distraction provide except for an easily abused method for enforcing a (tenuous, completely malleable) group orthodoxy? These days it seems like people just use it as shorthand for “enemy”. Any heterodox position is automatically of the other wing, preventing adaptation to real-world circumstances. Some positions (like a land value tax) are somehow both left and right wing depending on who you ask. It’s infuriating.
You are taking me to say left means Democrat and right means Conservative, and acting like it's a gotcha when they criss cross. I already said all of this was possible.
> “Right-wing” politicians are arguing for nationalization in some cases and wielding industrial policy like they’re FDR
Nationalization is a policy lying on the left. State ownership of industry is the textbook left pole
> The oil market interventions alone would make Stalin blush
Price controls on markets are authoritarian left
> are coming out for free market solutions gently guided by the government and deregulation so we can build faster
Economic right, mildly libertarian
> What exactly does the left-right distraction provide except for an easily abused method for enforcing a (tenuous, completely malleable) group orthodoxy?
No, they provide categorization to resist group orthodoxy. People are going to categorize, that is human nature. Without these, the only way to categorize a policy is what the parties happen to be doing at the time. That causes a group orthodoxy. There are people describing themselves as "more left" or "more right" as a shorthand to reject group orthodoxy. There are people describing a policy as left or right, regardless of which party is doing it. You're not sparing anything by resisting policy categorization, you are making things less specific and more likely to default to broad buckets.
That doesn't mean you can't talk about the policies in specifics, it means they lie on a very flexible and descriptive map.
That isn’t at all useful. If a party adopts a few platform items that are “left” and some that are “right” (as all parties do), what good is it to point out that X party has adopted Y-wing stance on this issue? The only purpose that this could serve is to give ultras (left or right) ammunition to enforce orthodoxy to these “standard” categories. Meanwhile in the real world, as I mentioned, all parties and candidates adopt mixed platforms, and if you care at all about pragmatism and responding to real conditions, those positions should be evaluated individually on their merits rather than slapping on a left or right label.
This tendency to force everything into a black or white frame is what gives us politicians who run without platforms, on party label alone, and who then adopt unpopular or harmful positions when in office.
At some point we decided that platforms don’t matter, and if platforms exist, they must be orthodox. This is a problem!