Comment Knee-jerk didn't read article, dismiss Japan (Score 2, Interesting) 146
No, the most predictable thing on Slashdot is posters who don't read the articles and who parrot the most popular opinion.
The article doesn't mention anything resembling terrorism as the reason. What the article discusses in some detail is that the Japanese ruling political party, the LDP, has ruled the country virtually unchallenged for decades. The slightest bit of thought shows that the LDP has achieved almost every single goal of what the most progressive Democrats are advocating in the United States: universal health care, effective mass transit, a constitutional ban against the use of the military except to defend the nation, unparalleled Internet connectivity and infrastructure, all within the framework of a liberal democracy. (And for many environmentalists, Japan has achieved the ideal of negative population growth.) As part of the system that rules Japan, college entrance exams are used as a filter to establish that those who ascend to rule Japan are part of a meritocracy. This and not terrorism is the context of Japanese concerns to save the children. As has been discussed by the Christian Science Monitor, the Japanese are probably far more willing to accept Internet filtering to protect the children out of fear of web sites that discuss topics such as group suicides.
And given that the Japanese system works better than almost any other in the world (only a few Western European nations even have an argument), a response of apathetic indifference by the majority ruled by that system is indeed perfectly rational and defensible. The bloggers who fear being censored represent the malcontents, the rejects, the people who were not quite good enough, the people who have not demonstrated their ability to responsibly maintain what the Japanese system has built to the envy of the rest of the world.
The article doesn't mention anything resembling terrorism as the reason. What the article discusses in some detail is that the Japanese ruling political party, the LDP, has ruled the country virtually unchallenged for decades. The slightest bit of thought shows that the LDP has achieved almost every single goal of what the most progressive Democrats are advocating in the United States: universal health care, effective mass transit, a constitutional ban against the use of the military except to defend the nation, unparalleled Internet connectivity and infrastructure, all within the framework of a liberal democracy. (And for many environmentalists, Japan has achieved the ideal of negative population growth.) As part of the system that rules Japan, college entrance exams are used as a filter to establish that those who ascend to rule Japan are part of a meritocracy. This and not terrorism is the context of Japanese concerns to save the children. As has been discussed by the Christian Science Monitor, the Japanese are probably far more willing to accept Internet filtering to protect the children out of fear of web sites that discuss topics such as group suicides.
And given that the Japanese system works better than almost any other in the world (only a few Western European nations even have an argument), a response of apathetic indifference by the majority ruled by that system is indeed perfectly rational and defensible. The bloggers who fear being censored represent the malcontents, the rejects, the people who were not quite good enough, the people who have not demonstrated their ability to responsibly maintain what the Japanese system has built to the envy of the rest of the world.
