美国小粉红 retweeted
We’ve spent years as the actual Arab Muslim begging the West to ban the Muslim Brotherhood for how extreme their ideology is, and suddenly Abdul just wins in USA ..
WTH 😂😂
美国小粉红 retweeted
Socrates suggests in Plato’s Apology, wisdom begins in recognizing one’s own ignorance.
美国小粉红 retweeted
Important voting machine development.
美国小粉红 retweeted
Profound look at America’s future from a Japanese perspective.
I'm Japanese. Americans who visit my country tend to come home with the same question: how did Japan stay Japan?
They watched trains leave on the exact second. They left a phone on a café table, came back an hour later, and found it still sitting there next to the cold coffee. Some of them read that in 2023 people in Tokyo turned in more than 4 billion yen in lost cash to the police, and assumed it was a typo. It wasn't.
There are two halves to the answer. Most people who praise Japan online only know the first one. For America, the second one matters more.
THE FIRST HALF: HOW WE KEPT OURSELVES
It starts in July 1853, when Commodore Perry brought four black ships to the mouth of Edo Bay and pointed his guns at a country that had been closed for over two hundred years. Across the sea, China had just lost the Opium War and was being forced open by foreign powers. Japan's leaders could see exactly what happened to old civilizations that refused to change.
So they changed faster than any nation ever had. But they did it under a rule: wakon yōsai. Japanese spirit, Western technique. Take the railways, the steel, the constitution, the navy. Leave the self-contempt at the dock.
That rule survived everything that came after. War, defeat, two atomic bombs, nearly seven years of American occupation. We copied your factories and then beat you at cars.
I was going to write that no Japanese classroom ever taught us our civilization was a crime. That's not quite true. After 1945 a lot of teachers taught a very guilty version of the war, and Japanese conservatives have been fighting over those textbooks for decades. But the guilt stayed inside the history lesson. It never became a theory of everything, the way it did in your universities. Nobody told us our language was oppressive, or that the family was a structure of domination, or that being good at math was a form of privilege.
Foreign residents are still about 3 percent of the population. When outsiders called us closed, most people shrugged and went back to work.
For a long time I thought that shrug was a weakness, a kind of stubborn provincialism. I've changed my mind. I think it's most of what a border actually is: a people quietly sure it has something worth keeping.
So American conservatives are right about Japan. Confidence in your own culture works. We are the proof.
THE SECOND HALF: HOW WE ARE DISAPPEARING
In 1949, about 2.7 million babies were born in Japan. In 2024 it was 686,061.
The first time I saw that number I assumed I was reading the wrong column. I wasn't. Our fertility rate is 1.15. The population peaked around 2008 and has shrunk every year since. There are mountain villages now where the only new things are the vending machines.
And this didn't happen under the left.
One conservative party, the LDP, has governed Japan for almost all of the last seventy years. No woke revolution, no open borders, no defund the police. The right won the culture war here before it started. The country is shrinking anyway.
What went wrong is economic, and it's very old. On the last trading day of 1989 the Nikkei closed at 38,915. Then the bubble burst. The banks were sitting on mountains of bad loans, and instead of letting failed companies fail, they kept lending them fresh money so nobody had to admit the losses. Economists later called them zombie firms; Caballero, Hoshi and Kashyap documented the whole thing in 2008. The Nikkei didn't get back to its 1989 high until February 2024. Thirty-four years.
The zombies were kept alive at someone's expense, and it was the young. To hold the old structure up, the system protected the people already inside: lifetime jobs for the men hired before the crash, pay by seniority, pensions no politician dared touch because old people vote. Whoever arrived after 1990 got what was left. Today close to four in ten workers are non-regular, on short contracts or part-time or sent in by agencies, and men in those jobs marry far less often than men with permanent ones. Nobody plans a family on a contract that ends in March.
Real wages are still lower than in 1996. Government debt is well over 200 percent of GDP, the highest in the developed world. When the government finally admitted the birth crisis, it did what governments do and announced a program: about 3.6 trillion yen a year for children. Births kept falling.
Have you ever seen a bonsai up close? You take a tree that wants to grow thirty meters tall, and every year you cut back its roots and wire its branches so it keeps exactly the same shape. Some live for centuries. They're beautiful. They never get any bigger.
That's what conservatism becomes when it only preserves and never builds. We protected everything, including the things that should have been allowed to die.
In 2022 Elon wrote that unless something changes, Japan will eventually cease to exist. A lot of people here called it rude. I was annoyed too, for about a day. Then I looked at the census again.
WHAT AMERICA SHOULD TAKE FROM THIS
Japan shows you can keep your culture without apologizing for it. Don't let anyone tell you that pride in your country is the problem.
Japan also shows that a nation can get culture right and still lose, if it protects its old companies, its old voters and its old arrangements against its own young people. It dies politely, with clean streets and trains on time.
You still have what we lost: a system that lets things fail and lets new things be born. Bankruptcy, startups, people who move across the country for a better job. Elon is a product of that system. Every bailout, every subsidy for a company that should have died, every rule that protects the insider against the newcomer moves you a little closer to us.
If you know someone who says "America should just be more like Japan," send them this. Both halves.
A nation isn't saved by preserving its past. It's saved by having someone to hand it to.
美国小粉红 retweeted
🚨 BOOM: Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado just sent a warning to every American telling us to VOTE AGAINST THE SOCIALISTS in the midterms
“Communism, socialism. It brings misery, violence, separation and oppression!”
“And once you lose your freedom, once you lose democracy, it's so hard to gain it back." 🎯
VOTE RED 🇺🇸🇺🇸
美国小粉红 retweeted
High trust societies are superior in every way, but they're incredible fragile.
It takes only a small % of imported low trust scumbags before the whole culture is poisoned, children become unsafe, and everything that used to define a country is gone.
If you still are fortunate to live in a high trust society, PROTECT IT.
美国小粉红 retweeted
We believe that the West can awaken from its long slumber – and rekindle the fire that was first lit in ancient Greece millennia ago.
美国小粉红 retweeted
🇯🇵 No, BBC. We are not "struggling with our identity" in Japan. It is you who is struggling with your identity.
We know who we are. We are Japanese. We are not Muslims. We have temples and shrines. We do not have mosques.
We will never forget who we are even if you do.
美国小粉红 retweeted
At first, Jean-Pierre did not understand.
He watched the evening news, paid his taxes, voted responsibly and believed what respectable people told him.
1. France needed immigration because the economy needed workers.
2. Diversity was an opportunity.
3. Public services were under pressure because they lacked funding.
4. Disorder at school was caused by inequality.
5. Crime statistics required context.
6. Anyone who connected these things too quickly was probably an extremist.
Then his children started coming home from school saying they could barely hear the teacher.
Half the lesson was spent restoring order.
Teachers changed constantly.
Some simply disappeared for weeks.
Jean-Pierre complained once, politely.
The administration explained that the situation was “challenging” and that the school was developing an “inclusive pedagogical response.”
Jean-Pierre went home reassured.
There were professionals dealing with it.
His neighbourhood changed too.
Shops closed.
Others appeared.
Groups of men occupied the same corners every evening.
His wife stopped taking one street after dark.
Jean-Pierre noticed all of this, but he had also learned that noticing patterns was dangerous.
So every event remained an isolated event.
One closed shop meant nothing.
One assault meant nothing.
Ten incidents meant ten unrelated incidents.
Only a racist would connect dots.
Then his daughter was sexually assaulted by a man who had recently arrived in France.
Jean-Pierre was devastated.
But almost immediately he began policing his own thoughts.
The attacker was an individual. Of course.
One must never generalise.
The television explained that exploiting such crimes politically was irresponsible.
A minister warned against “stigmatisation.”
Jean-Pierre found himself nodding through tears.
What had happened to his daughter was monstrous, but the truly frightening possibility, apparently, was that somebody somewhere might vote for the wrong party because of it.
Nothing changed.
His son’s school became worse.
His daughter stopped going out alone.
His wife wanted to move.
The police were exhausted.
The teachers were exhausted.
The hospitals were exhausted.
Jean-Pierre was exhausted.
Yet every explanation he had been given required him to believe that each deterioration was temporary, accidental, exaggerated or caused by something entirely unrelated to the deterioration immediately beside it.
And whenever somebody proposed that perhaps the country had made serious mistakes — about migration, authority, education, policing, integration, punishment or borders — Jean-Pierre knew the correct answer.
“Careful. That sounds like the far right.”
So he remained reasonable.
He remained moderate.
He remained informed.
He remained completely incapable of drawing a conclusion from his own life.
So at first, Jean-Pierre did not understand.
And he still does not understand.
美国小粉红 retweeted
36 Jahre Deutsche Wiedervereinigung! Happy Birthday an das geeinte Deutschland. 🇩🇪🇩🇪🇩🇪
#wiedervereinigung #deutschland #nationalfeiertag #brd #geschichte
美国小粉红 retweeted
今天是悲伤的911，当荣誉逝者的名字被宣读时，AOC 和 Mamdani 在世贸中心遗址被拍到一起相互大笑，镜头诚实地记录下这丑陋的一幕。
这是对所有遇难者的侮辱，这是对那些苦难家属们的心头又狠狠地插刀！
投票给他们的人应该下地狱！
