Konbanwa
Hai, genki desu.
Actually I am from Ukraine. Just interested in the attitude to Japan in the South-Eastern Asia. Thank you very much for your reply. It coincides with my opinion as well.
Ah so desu!
Nowadays,. Japanese foreign policy towards SE Asian nations,. seems mild,. nothing much,. there were hicked-up about 3-4 years ago,. when a Japanese Tug boat being attacked by pirates over the malacca strait,… the skipper, a Japanese, was being held for ransom.
The reaction of Japanese government seemed wise:cool:,. They requested that the nations sovereigning over the straits (it was Malaysia, Indonesia and somewhat singapore too) to took up a stern measure of what was happening and to prevent them in the future, as the strait plays vital roles of international shipping movement, and offered any assistance should it needed.
cheers
OK, but just as “peculiar” to Australia, Canada and New Zealand and maybe South Africa as well.
We call this “Socialism for the rich and Rugged Individualism for the poor.”
Moved back to active forum…
Sorry, not going through 11 pages of necro posts to find what you are commenting on.
I would imagine there are a lot of Islamists out there that have a definate dislike for all things American.
Well, I guess our thoughts and perception of things change over time as the world changes about us.
Hate is very strong and I don’t know anyone that hates Americans. On a day-to-day basis, most people I know don’t even consider America, particularly as America doesn’t have an international cricket team - it was with great hope for the future that I watched them field a team in the Rugby World Cup. 
There are some Americans I know, that rate among my most favourite people, and there are those that are linked through family, which I would avoid acknowledging wherever and whenever I have any contact with them.
I’m not particularly fussed that Hollywood and the U.S. President, for example, use every opportunity to promote American world leadership in some positive event or hapening in the world, when, perhaps, American involvement has been of the absolute minimal or, even, that we British are generaly the bad guys ( after the ‘Commies’ that is - or is it ahead of the Commies?)
I do have a dislike for the ‘winner - loser’ menatlity/culture which seems strongest in the playground and, to me, looking in from outside, appears to screw a lot of people up.
If you managed to catch last week’s penultimate episode of ‘Spooks’ that would be ‘MI5’ in the States, when the Britiish Home Secretary comments “Some American feces has warned me that he will get medieval with my bottom about this - whatever that means?”
That, goes some way to examplify our togetherness and our divide, and the British take on Americana. 
I wouldn’t limit it to Islamists.
There is no shortage of people here, and I expect elsewhere, who choose to blame America for all the world’s ills. Oddly enough, those who are sufficiently strident in that belief as to be, in my view, seriously unbalanced also tend to be the same sort of feral ****wit bludgers who expect me and the rest of the people who actually work to pay our taxes to fund these feral ****wit layabouts on the dole so that they can have the luxury of telling me and the rest of the people who actually work to pay our taxes what a shit society we support which, oddly enough, supports the feral ****wit bludgers who don’t contribute anything to the shit society they object to while being supported by me and the other taxpayers who comprise the shit society they are committed to destroying.
I rather look forward to the day when these feral ****wits have destroyed the shit society they hate so much and have to rely upon their own endeavours to feed themselves. Starting with ploughing furrows and planting seed without the benefit of modern carbon-emitting machinery to plough the furrows; plant the seed; harvest the crop; thresh it; transport it to the mill; mill it; pack it; and transport the packs to retailers who can sell the flour to hippies who are totally opposed to carbon-emitting activities.
Unless, of course, carbon is emitted in vast quantities for the commendable purpose of ensuring that those carbon-emitting activities fuel large aeroplanes to allow these hypocritical ****wits to explore their intense personal responses to the significance of Nepal or the Andes or Palestine or wherever while decrying the intense personal response of soldiers and other service people, predominantly from America, whose service allows them these self-centred, self-indulgent, woolly-headed if well-meaning people the luxury of unbounded hypocrisy wound up in offensively self-indulgent conceit which entitles them, in their blinkered view, to shit on everyone else in pursuit of their usually vague aims, beyond just being shitty with the rest of the world.
Undoubtedly.
But I think that it has probably long been the sentiment of those who work that they should not be required to support those who don’t.
The concept ‘You don’t work, you don’t eat.’ doesn’t require a lot of intelligence to grasp, yet it seems to be beyond the grasp of the usual ‘rent a mob’ who despise those of us who work to generate the taxes which support them in the luxury of criticising us and the awful society we represent without them, despite the need for paid work allowing them long hours of slumber and meditation, coming up with a better system. Or anything other than complaining about the present awful system, without which they would starve to death very early. And with some justification for being lazy bastards who bludge on those who work.
I do.
We have the misfortune to have here some rabid zealots from various Muslim nations, notably Lebanon and Sudan, who hate America. Then again, a small but dangerous proportion of them hate Australia, the country they chose to come to, which is an odd choice for people who went through several Islamic countries where they could have claimed asylum instead of choosing to land on our hostile shores where we abhor the allegedly Islamic customs (but possibly cultural customs of people who want to come here for a better life by preserving their primitive customs) of Muslims who have a rather more advanced understanding of Islam so that, for example, they don’t think that the Koran demands so-called ‘honour killings’, which invariably reflect no honour on the primitive ****s who do such things, at least in my decadent view.
I don’t know why you chose to focus on Americans to avoid acknowledging them. 
I have the same problem with some Australians, almost all of whom are nominally members of my family.
I wouldn’t disagree with any of that.
But, much as the Yanks can be a monstrous pain in the arse in their global and not always well-considered military and related diplomatic adventures, when it comes down to a choice between the Yanks and (insert alternative here, e.g. China; Russia; Japan; EEC), the Yanks are by far the best of the available choices, at least for those of us who value the principles of personal liberty and human rights which the Yanks espouse, even if they fall short of upholding them on far too many occasions.
Rising Sun, old son, you do have a way about you.
A man I consider to be pretty wise told me a long time ago “At least 60% of all people are stupid - and 90% of the rest don’t care”. Over the years I’ve come more and more to believe his philosophy, and therefore see that only a few people make most of the noise. They (the “greasy wheels”) get the attention from leaders – political, religious or otherwise. I suspect this is true in most so called “free” countries.
I don’t think that most Americans believed in Bush, it was that most Americans did not care enough to really find out what was going on. The same is true for the current administration, they were elected as a result of a popularity contest. If most Americans had bothered to do a little research, Barrack “O’Bozo” would not be president.
Leaders appease the masses until the systems they live under cannot support them (the masses or the leaders) anymore. This is a historical pattern, every “empire” in history has peaked then waned. I think the US is waning. We were not perfect but I shudder to think of what comes after us.
BTW: I spent a week in Sydney during the VN war and never felt un-welcome, let alone hated. Quite the contrary, Australians went out of their way to make our stay pleasant.
R.S. you crack me up I only wish I had some of what you’re on to hand.
It was this, but brewed since we got colour television. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIJLp2cWbhU&feature=related
I think it works more or less the same at both ends of the spectrum, because they each involve people in their quest for power over the rest of us.
At one end we have those noisy few not in positions of power who challenge power or society such as by the current Occupy Wall Street and related actions elsewhere. It was the local one here which inspired the rant in my last post.
At the other end we have those few in positions of power in politics and industry and commerce and various bureaucracies including the military who don’t make much noise because they don’t need to, because they already have the political, legal and economic power.
Off to one side are criminals and shonky business people who prey on everyone else, including those at both extremes, which is another form of power in taking what they want from whomever they want.
In their own ways, the extremes, criminals and shonky business people are all people who act in pursuit of their ambition to impose their will on the rest of us and or to take from the rest of us what they want without regard to our interests or feelings. Writ large, they’re Stalin or Hitler or Idi Amin or endless other dictators, or on the commercial front Bernie Madoff or the boys at Enron etc.
Meanwhile, the rest of us just want to live comfortable and decent lives. And it is the realisation of those ambitions which the extremists promise us for our support in pursuit of their ambitions and which they will deny us if they succeed in their ambitions to exploit us for their own selfish purposes. The criminals and shonky business people don’t bother to promise us anything. They just take what they can.
It’s a fine legal and moral line between a criminal and an extremist. Is the dole bludger who can work but who chooses not to because he or she is engaged in bigger things, such as planning the great Marxist revolution to overthrow the society which provides his or her dole payments, an extremist or a criminal or moral fraudster? Is the arch-conservative union-busting CEO who awards himself a 50% pay rise and other benefits, such as share plans he can’t lose on, while proclaiming that civilisation as we know it will end if his workers get a 3% pay rise really upholding the arch-conservative union-busting cause or just ripping off the company entrusted to his care by the shareholders?
True, but is it also a necessary component of that process that the masses allow it to happen, whether through appeasement by the leaders or just plain apathy?
In democracies there is an element in this of the old truism that people get the government they deserve. If you have the right to vote and don’t exercise it, you can’t complain about what those who did vote put into power.
I don’t think that there is any doubt that the world outside the US, including me as an infinitesimal part of it, thinks that US power is waning.
Although that might be in part a consequence of the US getting its nose bloodied in too many fights with ‘little guys’, from Vietnam to Iraq II, which gives the impression that the US can’t even beat vastly inferior powers and is therefore on the way out.
The problem with that view is that they were all asymmetrical wars in one form or another where any major military power was going to get its nose bloodied by the resident opponent resisting the invader.
There is a related problem that the US seems to be incapable of learning from its (and others’, being the Soviets in Afghanistan) mistakes in getting involved in ground wars or occupations where Blind Freddie can see that it cannot achieve victory over the shadows it stupidly chooses to fight on their own ground on their own terms. Bush I was smart enough not to get involved in an occupation in Iraq while the US (can’t recall which administration) was also smart enough to keep out of a potentially horrible ground war in the Balkans when Yugoslavia disintegrated.
Despite the impression of America’s waning power, it seems from the occasional political and military commentators that I read in the informed press that there is still a solid view among them that the US, for all its problems in little wars, is still by far the most powerful military power on the planet and will be for some time if it comes to a conventional conflict.
Focusing on Iraq and Afghanistan as US failures at worst or pretty poor exercises at best ignores the massive naval and air power the US can, and routinely does, deploy around the world with their ability to deliver impressive amounts of conventional weapons, and nuclear weapons if required. I think that it is the little powers who have the best chance of avoiding obliteration by the US because for all sorts of political and humanitarian reasons it is limited to modest conventional warfare against them. But I wouldn’t want to be in a country that starts in the next couple of decades a total war against the US by something similar to Pearl Harbor.
Edit: Which I think could have been adequately demonstrated if Afghanistan, as distinct from bin Laden elements within it, had launched a war against the US on 9/11.
China.
And let’s hope this bloke doesn’t represent the dominant sentiment.
Chinese general rattles sabre
John Garnaut
May 23, 2011General Liu Yuan
A RISING star of the People’s Liberation Army has called for China to rediscover its ‘‘military culture’’, while challenging unnamed Communist Party leaders for betraying their revolutionary heritage.
General Liu Yuan displays sympathy for Osama bin Laden, says war is a natural extension of economics and politics and claims that ‘‘man cannot survive without killing’’.
His essay, written as a preface to a friend’s book, says ‘‘history is written by blood and slaughter’’ and describes the nation-state as ‘‘a power machine made of violence’’.General Liu’s public glorification of what he sees as an innate but previously suppressed Chinese military culture reveals an undercurrent that is driving the Communist Party’s increasing assertiveness at home and abroad.
His essay emerges at an awkward time internationally, after Army Chief of Staff Chen Bingde last week travelled to Washington with reassurances about China’s peaceful intentions.
Chinese President Hu Jintao promoted General Liu this year to be Political Commissar of the PLA’s General Logistics Department, after making him a full general in 2009, and some expect he will receive a two-stage promotion into the Central Military Commission, the military’s top leadership body.
General Liu is also an important leader among the dozens of ‘‘princelings’’ whose parents founded the People’s Republic and are now claiming dominant positions in politics, business and rising through the military.
His father was Liu Shaoqi, who was Mao Zedong’s anointed successor until Mao’s Red Guards threw him in jail and left him to die.
General Liu was purged with his family during the Cultural Revolution and then left Beijing to begin his career as a grassroots official in the countryside in the early 1980s, in parallel with the current boss of Chongqing city, Bo Xilai, and China’s likely next president, Xi Jinping.
‘‘Military culture is the oldest and most important wisdom of humanity,’’ writes General Liu, inverting a traditional Chinese formulation that military affairs are subordinate to civilian culture. ‘‘Without war, where would grand unity come from? Without force, how could fusion of the nation, the race, the culture, the south and the north be achieved?’’
While overtones of 1930s Japanese and German militarism will be internationally disconcerting, the essay also opens a window into the institutional, ideological and personal struggles that are intensifying before next year’s leadership transition.
It is effectively a clarion call for the true heirs of the communist revolution to rediscover their fighting spirit and reinvent a rationale for their existence.
‘‘No-surrender Communist Party members,’’ writes General Liu. ‘‘Let’s start again.’’
Pointedly, General Liu distinguishes ‘‘no-surrender’’ cadres from unnamed top leaders who he says have sold out to foreign interests and ideologies.‘‘Actually, the party has been repeatedly betrayed by general secretaries, both in and outside the country, recently and in the past,’’ he writes.
The essay is written as a preface to a collection of political essays, Changing Our View of Culture and History, by left-leaning intellectual Zhang Musheng, whose father was also a senior cadre.
General Liu backs Mr Zhang’s call to save the Communist Party by turning the ideological clock back by more than 60 years, to ‘‘new democracy’’.
http://www.smh.com.au/world/chinese-general-rattles-sabre-20110522-1eyyu.html#ixzz1bhjiD6yu
The Vietnam era was a fractured one here, as it was in the US. We had the full range from those in wholehearted support of the war (whose support was usually greatest when they had no prospect of them or their children fighting in it) to those totally opposed to it (many of whom, unlike the former group, stuck by their principles and risked and occasionally went to gaol and suffered other serious disadvantages, and who I admire a lot more than the first group who were always willing to sacrifice someone else’s son in defence of their ‘principles’).
You were more fortunate here than many of our own soldiers who served in Vietnam when they came home. Naturally there was the usual lack of understanding by civilians of what their soldiers had experienced (such as a six year hard service WWII veteran who left his ‘welcome home’ party in disgust and to avoid hitting guests after putting up with whingeing along the lines of ‘At least you blokes were well fed and had plenty of transport, but you have no idea what food rationing and petrol shortages have been like here.’). But there was also hostility to Vietnam veterans, and even violent hostility to anyone in uniform as I experienced at the time, as a result of anti-war material and at times just hysterical propaganda labelling them as baby killers etc. I know that American soldiers experienced the same thing on return to America.
How did you happen to find people here who weren’t hostile to you?
I guess that you’re one of the forty -percentres of the ten-percenters, then?
If most Americans had bothered to do a little research, Barrack “O’Bozo” would not be president.
Given the obvious obstacles he must have had to overcome, he hasn’t done too badly for a Bozo, I would hazard.
Given the hilarious weaknesses of the current Republican field of candidates, it is abundantly clear to me that Obama is the smartest guy in the room. Considering that the last so-called conservative president lost 8 million jobs in the space of his last four years, I would have to say that it’s pretty near miraculous that Obama has already made up more than 2 million of them. When Bush left office, the stock market was at 8,500 after having plummeted a couple of thousand points at the end of this miscreant’s term. It is now well over 11,000. You tell me who knows what he’d doing. The evident complete bankruptcy of the conservative movement in this country leaves me with the happy choice of voting for Barack Obama and not voting for the cretins who think they can play major league baseball when they are only qualified for the Little League.
“And O’Boze was his name”.
If being able to realize that we all are being made fools of makes me one of the “40%” then, yes, I am guilty.
Your stating things that only support your opinion and ignoring any that don’t (9+% unemployment, Solyndra, Fast and furious, Holders refusal to prosecute the Black Panthers, Obama Care, etc., etc.) indicates you have a political agenda.
I don’t. I think we should wipe out Congress and start over. Beginning with term limits and an amendment requiring a balanced budget and I don’t care which “tribe” does it.
BTW: good use of the word “cretin”, do you know “Red Herring” and “Straw Dog”?
I’m somehow reminded of the thread title.
Quite like this:
“As I was born a citizen of a free State, and a member of the Sovereign, I feel that, however feeble the influence my voice can have on public affairs, the right of voting on them makes it my duty to study them…”