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> An aging population, combined with falling fertility rates and no immigration is a disaster waiting to happen.

No, that's what's going to happen in Europe.

Japan will just have to make some deep, technical changes to budget and taxes in a culturally and ethnically homogeneous civilization, not have to deal with social upheaval.


> Accepting immigrants is a pretty good insurance against your civilization going extinct, in fact.

Yeah, it only gets replaced.

> More diversity, more innovation.

Sure, sure.


Also automatic indentation.


Yes, this alone will often spot problems such as unterminated comments or unbalanced brackets. When the next line doesn't indent to where it should be, you know there's a problem somewhere above.


> And if someone disagrees I'd like to hear your opinion.

No opinions, only censorship.


And an enviable level of social trust.


I think Japan will manage. Not sure about Europe.


So, free speech is great as long as you don't strongly disagree with it.


"Free speech" does not mean "free from all consequence," and never has.


What do yo really mean by that?

Personally I worry that mere attaching some empty labels to an argument is reason enough justify censoring it.


I mean that if you choose to use slurs or donate money to hate groups, and are ostracized from a community as a result, then invoking "free speech" is not sufficient defense to be allowed back into that community.

Or, in popular comic form: https://xkcd.com/1357/


So "you are free to say whatever you want, but if I don't like it I will destroy your life".


I'm not sure whose life was destroyed or how we jumped to that point, but yes, if you choose that slurs and hate groups are more important to you than your community's acceptance, then you get to deal with those consequences. At no point is this an infringement on your right to free speech.


Well, that's horrifying. I'll shut up now.


> Spain is approaching 100% debt, 44% public spending, and it looks like it's getting worse.

It is. Spain is scheduled to elect the local Syriza equivalent in November.


Morally bankrupt traditional parties and over 20% unemployment would do that to anybody.

Spain lacks a cultural framework that would make the population want market based reforms, as there is so little trust in institutions, employers and employees. Its labor market is not bad because it's impossible to find productive Spaniards, but because productivity, both at the employee and the firm level, is punished.

Podemos is coming, and it's not going to be good for the country. But the alternatives are pretty bleak. Fortunately for Spaniards, a Greece-like catastrophe in Spain would be the death knell of the Eurozone, so the troika will probably bend to Podemos demands, as far as spending goes, as long as some market reforms are done along with said spending. Spain's one way out of this mess is growth.


>Spain lacks a cultural framework that would make the population want market based reforms

I'm no expert on Spanish matters, but didn't they elect their current government, which advocated market based reforms, right in the middle of the crisis??


> Polarization and naivety are easy, subtlety and deeper understanding are hard

Isn't precisely the problem that we can't have a rational discussion of this issue without people bringing out the X-word, the R-word, the I-word and others and calling for immediate stop of all criticism of the current situation?


I'd say that the problem seems to be that any attempt at rational discussion inevitably leads to talks of "us" vs. "them", culture war, conspiracy theories and propaganda akin to "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" (including "Eurabia", lying to kafirs, etc.), the negation of moderate muslims and integrated immigrants, stereotypes and generalizations, misrepresented statistics and basically fear mongering dealing with the supposed invading hordes of savages.

The average Joe not being able to tell "racist" from "xenophobe" seems kind of trivial in comparison.


And then you have linear logic (which is to constructive logic what constructive logic is to classical logic), with its two kinds of conjunctions and two kinds of disjunctions, one of which is difficult to understand but does have excluded middle again.


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