New Habits, girlfaces and the end of quarter.

So I’m out of roo. My Brazilian friend who bought 6.85kg is still hacking away at it but all of mine is gone. But I restocked on all my other foodstuffs. See my eating habits here are something odd even by my standards: several mandarins, 6 or 5 eggs, a single meat (roo, chicken, beef) eaten uncontaminated by the mixing of ingredients , frozen raisins and frozen dark chocolate. This is what I eat on a normal day. she’ll be right.

On the theme of different habits: i heard a lot of people here complain about loneliness and boredom. So its very possible I am having a radically difference experience of Japan from most people here on exchange. Most of my time is spent doing academic/ gaming stuff in my room and I’m fine. We have internet, how can anyone be bored?

Got my two tubes of Vegemite and boomerang. So I will find an opportunity soon to fuck around with the boomerang but, more importantly, it turns out Vegemite is disgusting. It is utterly revolting. So now two Japanese persons gratefully received tubes of Vegemite imported from Australia. My good deed for the year.

Am finishing first quarter now. The semester is divided into two quarters here, where different subjects are taken each quarter. So I just finished my last lectures of Business ethics (didn’t learn much) and Organisational behavior (A++) . I will definitely be implementing what I learned from the latter in building up my PPE club.

It is reasonable to be cautious when generalizing from personal experience about a culture. So it is reasonable to assume that if Everyone I meet in Japan is of the opinion that anime is mainstream here and it appears that it is popular in the city I am that it can be concluded it probably is the case that in Japan, as a whole, anime is popular + stereotype is evidence.  However if I meet one Japanese person who likes knitting it is not sufficient basis to generalize to all of Japan. in between these two we must make generalizations with varying degrees of caution about a culture/ country/ peoples.

With this caution in mind I am starting to get the impression that there is something particularly… submissive about the girls here. Maybe submissive is the wrong word. Maybe recluse, shy or restrained are better words. It feels almost like they are suppressing their personality to some extent, beyond the way we all do. I don’t like it. That having been said, It is hard to expect there would be much academic conversation here if this was not the case here, but this is certainly not helping solve my dilemma.  

I also met my first Mormon and my first lesbian. It’s like Alice in wonderland meeting all these strange creatures from the books she read in her real life. Like the other day I figured if we can get the short people here to do a dance/ song and no matter what the dance is I will be constantly thinking of the lollipop guild song.

Today I saw a European girl knock on the table instead of clap. I asked – apparently it’s a normal thing in her land. Also Europeans, statistically speaking, drink lots of coffee. Like 7 or 5 cups a day is not  considered a point where it is reasonable to say “you are a freak who needs rehab” in Europe.

Actually this trip has been a gateway to American culture as well as to other cultures. Let’s just say stereotypes exist for a reason.

Got bored with archery a while back btw so I stopped.

Also turns out gyms here have no punching bags….

 

Random rant

I am sufficiently lucky/ social genius to have most of my criticism and external character analysis come from friendly faces (unlike politicians). So apparently I am “too facts oriented” and “talking to me is like writing an essay” (thank you Cameron for that last one). well maybe i can redeem myself yet:

So long story short I had an essay to write and I didn’t care about the mark I got, so was a bit lazy and it sort of just became a rant. The topic was dissecting critically one thing about your culture – so i chose political correctness cause i hate it like poison. i will save you from the full essay , here is just the criticism bit. i take no responsibility for any facts here. also i defined political correctness as: 

“Political correcness refers to particular way of attempting to change the ideas that are shared in society, primarily for the sake of avoiding offending people. Political correctness can be expressed through the placing of social or economic presures on organisations and individuals in order to get them to not speak their mind.This is to be differentiated from trying to get someone to stop sharing an idea through convincing or through trying to share alternative ideas to undermine the receptability of the public to their own.”

enjoy the rant and don’t get too offended: 

There are several good things that political correctness suppresses and they will be addressed in order: humour, critical thinking, a political culture and civil society involvement.

Political correctness has been used in Australia to suppress humour on a regular basis. Sometimes an example lends itself for our analysis through the national media coverage, as is the Chaser’s “Make a Realistic Wish Foundation” sketch example listed earlier does. However the majority of humour Australians experience is not from the media but from their everyday interactions with other Australians and humorous statements the said. It is obvious some of both types of humour is limited by political correctness, however there is good reason it is not simply crass, hateful, drivel that is lost. A significant portion of popular humour is offensive in nature. John Cleese’s research on his own movie A Fish Called Wanda[1] indicated that the three scenes ranked as being the most offensive scenes were the scenes people considered to be the most offensive. This indicates it is not necessarily just unfunny jokes that are repressed at the behest of political correctness. In Australia political correctness is used by everyday citizens on a regular basis to discourage humour for reasons completely disconnected to whether or not the individual in question enjoyed the joke. I have personally seen people laughing at a joke and then, after the laughter, encouraging the speaker to not say jokes of this nature again. The primary reason for this is that the joke may upset someone else who hears the joke in the future. In this way political correctness reduces the incidents of humour as humour that is perceived by the politically correct individual as possibly being offensive to other people is politically corrected. An example could a joke that is related to a certain event that is deeply emotional or painful for some people, like the holocaust. In Australia a joke relating to the holocaust, in any way, is widely considered to be completely intolerable. However is other cultures, like Israeli culture, jokes relating to the holocaust are accepted to a much higher degree, to the point that they appear in mainstream television. So in this way everyday Australians use their feelings and intuitions regarding what could be considered offensive by certain groups in order to suppress humour on the basis of those perceptions. It is relevant to point out that this is not evidence based suppression and that human intuition regarding what people consider offensive is not a scientific tool, especially when there over twenty three million Australians in Australia. So not only is political correctness used to suppress humour, but in Australia it is done with little evidence regarding the quantity or intensity of offense caused by the joke or comment. I have personally had the unusual experience of being politically corrected regarding jokes about the holocaust by people who know less about the historical event then I do, are not Jewish as I am and do not have any family who was in the holocaust, as I have. They simply assume humour is always used to devalue the importance of an event and decide, with no more information or inquiry, to apply political correctness. This notion or humour devaluing events would be seen as palpably absurd in Israel who uses humour in its culture to emotionally cope with events such as the holocaust and suicide bombings. Bureaucracy, is defined as authoritative organized decision making based on information. I think one of the worst things I can say about Australian political correctness is that it incentivises the suppression of humour in an inconsistent and most unbureaucratic manner.

Critical thinking is also something I consider to be vital and healthy for a society. In Australia it is not unusual for political correctness to be applied liberally and without thought in order to discourage the expression of certain ideas. Those ideas, which often times, in my experience, are palpably absurd (such as the idea that climate change is a hoax) are often met with political correcting instead of actually being engaged with as ideas. This same correcting is, however, also on occasion applied to the questioning of ideas that are rarely questioned and whose questioning is not absurd. This is easily testable by asking in a discussion which is based on human rights as to their source, worth or relevance. In the Israeli Mossad[2] the rule of 10 is used to question convention and avoid groupthink. This is an example of institutions deliberately attempting to avoid groupthink.  Political correctness often amounts, in my country, to discouraging the tenth man from speaking and questioning the conventional wisdom or a deeply held conviction by instilling a widespread fear of offence.

This issue relates, and is very similar to, the problem of political correctness limiting political discussion. Certain issues are so limited in what one can say in a typical conversation without experiencing the pressures of political correctness that many have preferred to not speak on the matter at all. the problem with this is multifaceted: firstly it makes some of those individuals feel as if they are oppressed due to their political beliefs. If whenever a person speaks their mind on an issue they are given social signals of disapproval rather then met with actual argumentation a feeling of righteous oppression may set in. The best evidence I can supply for this assertion is in the form of empathetic thinking. Imagine in your own mind if it is logical, with regard to humans, that this pattern of thought will arise as a result of political correctness, especially if the issue is one close to your heart. Secondly they will be more ignorant as a result of this as it contributes to what David Hume called the “separation of the world of learning from the world of conversation”[3] in his unpublished essay titled “OF ESSAY WRITING”. Essentially, if politics becomes a area of discussion where ignorance, idiocy and wrongheaded bloody-mindedness are met with political correctness many people will be incentivised to not speak on these matters. This is unhelpful as these same people will still hold their ignorant views however now, with the addition of the suppression provided by political correctness, they will keep these views amongst themselves and not state them both to challenge our thinking, a good thing, and open their own to criticism. This is particularly the case in Australia in regards to issues such as migration, aboriginal issues and addressing Islamism in Australia. Thirdly, political correctness makes it particularly difficult to put pressure on governments to address these issues. The case is very analogous to overregulation of a sector of the economy discouraging people from entering it. Excessive regulation on speech on certain, highly sensitive, political issues has facilitated those political issues receiving less airtime then they would have otherwise. Lastly, one should be concerned about the problem of stress. Political correctness makes something that ought to be pleasurable and informative, political discussion, a stressful task where one must worry about the possibility of social punishment through political correctness instead of just about understand and being understood. 

 

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozNKwaqdlA8

 

[2]http://matspen.co.il/tag/%D7%97%D7%95%D7%A7-%D7%94%D7%90%D7%93%D7%9D-%D7%94%D7%A2%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%99/

[3]http://www.econlib.org/library/LFBooks/Hume/hmMPL40.html

“ethics experts” and coming to terms with enjoying flattery

Been a bit since the last blog entry. Let’s see, what happened…. – mostly I guess I got into a routine.
Today I went to a debating circle (club) only to discover nobody is there – *shrug*. Yep, I’m so desperate for some political interaction I went to a debating club. I’m sleeping weird hours here. 6pm till 11pm and 5am till 12am was the times the other day.

Today a professor (probably western) is opening the universities first political circle. So that’s a good thing. Will do that in a few hours.

ate my roo meat. Ordered more. Funny story – Brazilian friend of mine tried some, and loved it. So he ordered 6.85kg of it which we hacked at for the better part of an hour in order to fit into his freezer. Now I’m having a boomerang sent over from Australia – so I might be missing Australia a bit.

I am taking two subjects this quarter, both business subject. The better on regarding Organisational behaviour. Both of them require lots of teamwork. For one I must write a 5000 word essay in a group of 4. Sigh…
Although studying business is interesting. I think in some regards they are silly and in others less so. All this rationality nonsense, they don’t touch that poisoned fruit. They seem to be happy with being practical about this: humans are XYZ and we need to work with that to make good business decisions. So we learned about cognitive biases and the such. However they do have some silly idea on how ethics works. In the business class the teacher spoke in a serious voice and generally giving the sense that this is a respectable thing of “ethics experts”. That’s it. That’s the punchline. And I’m just sitting there gawking at her as she speaks of this. So she looks at me. And I ask: “how do you become an ethics expert? See because I studied philosophy for 3 years and this is the first time I hear the term.”

It was astounding. That whole episode was full of amazing things. Like when the teacher repeatedly and unintentionally kept defining the term Rights with the word Rights. Or after I had found myself explaining numerous logical problems with several arguments the teacher asks me “are you suggesting companies shouldn’t care about ethics?”

But it is fun seeing the economy from the other side. Amusingly, they seem to think they are the agents of moral change (from my other business class on business ethics) . Kind of like if there is a culturally accepted ethical violation in a business it will go away because a middle manger guy decided it will by standing up and questioning the system. Instead of all that nonsense they should teach them how to effectively rat on their bosses and cartel laws so they can help the state do its job. They seem to be completely unaware how economic incentives affect life & businesses. In a way looking at economics study from the outside has made me revisit some of its less idiotic elements. 

But a large portion of my time is spent reading my own stuff. Which would be much easier if my internet wasn’t shit. Which is a surprise considering I’m in Japan.

I miss language. I already went through the whole “being illiterate in a new country” thing. I assure you it is not a good time. Now I get to do it again except this time I can hardly tell if its Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean or w/e. and same with the people btw – bloody exhausting .

got to know the humans whose room is located close to my-own. Are they “Friends”?  – people from home keep asking me. Depends how you define that word. Personally I see little point in doing so. It doesn’t seem like a useful activity. But I have a bad attitude to demarcation.   

Handed in my essay to the thinktank. If I win I get 3000$. More then what I earned doing a month of basic training in the army. I want to win. Less for the money and more for the fame. I have to accept that I enjoy recognition, compliments and flattery – so if you are trying to win me over, try that.

Ask for a copy if you want to hear my take on Australian democracy & ideas for improving it.