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A friend of mine recently pointed me to this slate.com article:
The Tea Party Wants to Help You Go Solar: Utility companies are waging war on the solar industry. But the clean energy movement has found an unexpected ally in their fight.
The focus of the article is ultimately positive--the idea that the Tea Party can be seen as an ally of the environmental movement.
That's the positive spin. What I came away with instead, however, was outrage at how power companies are trying to sabotage solar power at the same time we are getting reports of how bad the climate crisis actually is.
On a completely different note...
Anyone who has lived in Japan is no doubt sick of hearing about the Yasukuni Shrine controversy--this ridiculous controversy that happens every single year when Japanese politicians visit the Shrine to honor the War Criminals, and the rest of the world gets upset about it. And then the whole thing happens all over again next year.
But if this whole thing wasn't already ridiculous enough, now it's clearly descended into farce when the rest of the world now has to be outraged that Justin Bieber has visited Yasukuni Shrine.
I thought Time Magazine actually did a decent report and interview with the PM of Japan. The PM basically said he was paying respect to those who had given their lives for Japan. It seemed more like an honest act of patriotism than anything else, and the reactions of the world (after such a long time) seems overdone. War crimes and war atrocities are terrible, but the PM seemed to have a good intention. That's my two-cents from the reading at the dentist!
ReplyDeleteI put myself in the category of those who oppose on principle these annual visits to Yasukuni shrine. Although, how opposite one should get over it, and how much energy one should expend on this, is perhaps an open question. Since it is something that is purely symbolic, and has little relationship to what is actually happening out in the real world. As I said in the blog post above, the fact that everyone is now getting upset over how Justin Bieber has visited Yasukuni shrine is clearly showing what a farce the whole thing has become.
ReplyDeleteAll that being said, I do still oppose the visits. Yasukuni shrine houses the Japanese war criminals. If the prime minister wanted to only pay tribute to the war dead, there are other places he could go to.
....Of course one could argue that Japan has acted no worse than many other imperial powers throughout history, and they're getting unfairly put in the spotlight. And while this may be true, it still doesn't justify Yasukuni shrine, IMHO.
* how opposite* should be *how upset*
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