Aso Taro: Asshole

Trans-Pacific Radio, in TPR News for December 22, said what we’ve been thinking for as long as we can remember – that Aso Taro is the kind of asshole it should be a crime not to slap.

What can I say? I like a fine sweater.

I appreciate comfortable, attractive sweaters and I don’t care whence they come.  If Kim Jong Il gave me a nice sweater, I daresay I’d wear it just as I’d wear any other sweater I have.  The guy’s a rotten autocrat, but a nice sweater is a nice sweater.

I thought I’d not try to read anything into Harvard’s Moral Sense Test, answer only the questions as asked, not try to analyze what I knew to be irrelevant to the results.  I guess I’m one of those people who falls throught he cracks or doesn’t read enough into questions, or perhaps I just don’t think people are worthy of much blame.

 The test lays out scenarios in which a person’s intent, expectation, and success in causing harm to others are explained and respondents are asked to indicate how likely they’d be to wear a comfortable, attractive sweater given them by the person in the scenario.

To wit:

Bruce is a dentist filling in the cavity of his patient.  He must drill into the patients tooth just above a major nerve.  Bruce does not want to hit the patient’s nerve, nor to cause the patient excruciating pain.  Bruce only wants to drill out the cavity. Bruce does not think that if he switches the drill to a higher speed he will hit the nerve and cause the pain.  Bruce thinks that he will just drill out the cavity, without causing any pain at all. Bruce switches the drill to a higher speed and misses the nerve.  The patient undergoes no pain at all. 

The likelihood of the respondent wearing the sweater is supposed to indicate how blameworthy he found each person, which means I assigned people different amounts of blame, but more or less didn’t blame anyone for what they did or attempted to do.  Maybe my greed outweighs my sense of moral outrage, maybe I’m just exceedingly forgiving.

Or maybe the question, dissociated from the paragraph intentionally was just not a very good choice.

TPR strikes again.

If you haven’t been reading lately, Trans-Pacific Radio has some good stuff lately.

Bloggers point out bullying and get bullied.

Interesting posts at Trans-Pacific Radio and Japan Probe about the bullying problem in Japan’s schools and the e-mail that Japan Probe received as part of the Hokkaido Board of Education’s efforts to cover the problem up.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 0 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

 

Ah, novelty sites. I used my real name. I don’t exist. I’ve met people with my surname and with my given name, although not the same combination.

Trans-Pacific Radio is come.

Trans-Pacific Radio is here.   Seijigiri, the podcast on Japanese politics, is out.  It is much better than One Fat Penguin.

It’s fun to stay at the KCNA.

I’m a fairly patriotic guy. I’m fond of both my home country and the country I call home. I like a variety of news sources, from plain old NHK and NPR to exotic ones like the BBC (I don’t live in the UK, it’s foreign and exotic, damnit.) My single favorite news source, though, has to be, without a doubt, the Korean Central News Agency (or KCNA.) It’s soon to be yours, too.

Whether or not you agree with spiking an entire country into the ground while indulging yourself with coveralls and epicurean delights unheard of by most of your people, you will find many, many hours of regularly updated entertainment at the KCNA. You can’t get a good meal there and you certainly can’t do whatever you feel there, but it is fun to stay there.

Today’s my birthday, the Kim Family Regime just lobbed at least half a dozen missiles into the Sea of Japan (or the East Sea, I’m neutral in that spat), and I’m going to have myself a chuckle.

Seijigiri on Trans-Pacific Radio

I have an idea.

When I was in college, I wasn’t cool enough to rack up debt on fashionable clothes (thankfully), intoxicants (again, thankfully), or some kind of start-up (mixed.)  I did, however, rack up debt.  And my debt was, in no small part, to BMG (thanks for selling CDs like John Adams’s Gnarly Buttons at a reasonable price, no thanks for bringing that to my attention), some cigar-of-the-month club (I never did smoke enough to keep up with a box a month, but they were good), and Radio Spirits, a division of a big multi-media conglomerate that sold tapes and CDs of old radio shows.

Punk Drunk Love

That’s the way.  The drip-drip-drip of the last of the inexplicably cheap Glenfiddich, the trudge through the rain to the local, the conversation you didn’t want to have, not because you have secrets, but because it’s fucking boring.  Your last smoke burns too quickly and the machine only has Marlboros.  Fuck it.  Modern technology has given you the iPod and foresight has given you a few hours, maybe even days of Less Than Jake, Rancid, Osker, The Skoidats, Descendents, Op Ivy, The Planet Smashers, Mephiskapheles, Undercover S.K.A., even, although no one can know it, New Found Glory and Yellowcard, if you’re really drunk.

For a while, life is good in the way it was.  I got a light.

Is Blogging Undermining the Work of Generations?

I am passive in terms of entertainment. If you are reading this, you are probably roughly my age or younger, which means you are probably also passive in terms of entertainment. Even if you are much older, you are reading this, so you are probably, again, passive in terms of entertainment.

The most active thing I do that is not related to work is read books. Sometimes I’ll walk into the next room, but it’s largely a sedentary enterprise. Sit there, take in, sometimes understand what another person has written and another printed. Sometimes just turn the pages uncomprehendingly, not knowing whether or not I’ve been awake the whole time. When not reading, I might listen to podcasts or radio shows. I might watch a movie. I might just watch the swirls that appear as the ice in my whiskey melts.