[ExI] The Catholic Impact (was Re: Origin of ethics and morals)

[Kelly Anderson]

On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 6:32 AM, Stefano Vaj <stefano.vaj at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 27 December 2011 07:17, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Japan has a history of racial purity that goes back far beyond Hitler.
>> They are the most genetically homogenous population on earth.
>
> Chinese Han are in fact even more. But what I was referring to with
> "xenophilia" is the fact that Japanese are in principle in love with

Sorry, I read xenophobia the first time... I'm with you now.

> everything coming from outside. With time, they imported buddhism,
> confucian ethic, chinese characters, catholicism, Belle Epoque forced
> industrialisation, nationalism, parliamentary democracy, imperialism,
> they kept sending people abroad, they even embraced enthousiastically,
> albeit in a superficial and modified fashion, the American way of life
> in a matter of months after WWII.

Hey baseball is big there!

>> It is still frowned upon to marry outside the culture. I have known a number
>> of Japanese women who married Americans at the university.
>
> Mmhhh. Japanese men and women are not so averse to inter-cultural
> affairs and mixed marriages are not so unusual. Certainly, neither the
> spouse nor the offspring will ever be considered as a Japanese.

It's become a little more acceptable over time, but the downsides
there are bigger still than in current day America or Europe.

>> The world may yet benefit from the Japanese population dynamic as
>> robots to care for the elderly are a huge priority for them, and that
>> research has led to Asimo, and will lead to other great leaps forward
>> in robotics and AI, IMHO.
>
> Yes. Even though I think that the biological aging of a given society
> makes for a cultural and existential aging thereof, leading eventually
> to extinction, possibly through the most direct route which consists
> in replacing it piece by piece by imported human resources, once more
> the relative shortage of labour encourages technological innovation.

I don't think Japan is headed towards extinction any time soon, but
they are headed towards a concrete wall of pain.

Yes, I agree that labor shortages lead to innovation. There are also
cases where innovation has led to labor shortages. The cotton gin, for
example, led to an INCREASE in the number of slaves to harvest the now
more profitable crop. Before the cotton gin, I suppose they grew more
tobacco or had less land under cultivation or something??

> This is both applicable to industrial and to domestic labour. Domestic
> appliance were developed and became popular first in the US because
> for social, economic and cultural reasons lower middle classe there
> did not enjoy much of a permanent, live-in domestic help. My own
> mother did not see much of a point in the seventies for buying a
> dish-washing machine when the work of a maid was so much more
> flexible, accurate and delicate on the china, while wasting much less
> soap and hot water.

The maid must have already been there...

-Kelly