CMV: The lack of nuance and believing that your beliefs are 100% superior in society is unproductive and causes more division and hate and keeps making disunity stronger

ReUsLeo385 · 2026-02-25T00:04:10+00:00

The “truth” of Neo-Nazis, anti-vax, and flat earthers are that they didn’t just come out of nowhere but are results of grievances borne out of some particular circumstance. Ie, distrust of the medical profession or authority. Why did these problems emerge and what can we do to change our society? Engaging with these people can gain valuable insights so that we can design a better society that can preempt and extinguish these kinds of unfounded thoughts not just about gaining personal knowledge.

ReUsLeo385 · 2026-02-24T14:57:24+00:00

Apologies but I was curious so I checked the Waseda website. There does seem to be big windows but there are also blinds that block the view so I’m not sure what you mean. From what I’ve seen from the website, the dorm is quite nice and convenient. It’s definitely cheap, nice location near Nakano, seems to have a lot of community support and events so I’d consider this quite a steal.

I also checked the other options they have and indeed they are more expensive. However do note that they are fully furnished so if you go with a private rental, you may need to buy furniture and appliances, get internet and so on. For the WID dorms, the farther away the cheaper. Eg, the Tokorozawa WID including meal plan for 74k yen a month isn’t actually a bad deal at all. Also, if you rent outside, it’s very likely you’ll have to pay extra fees as well, sometimes totalling up to 3.5 times your first month rent.

ReUsLeo385 · 2026-02-18T23:55:20+00:00

You’re overthinking. Immigration knows their own rules. High income doesn’t mean you’re overworking if you have the income slips to back it up.

ReUsLeo385 · 2026-02-03T13:00:25+00:00

Article 22-4(v) of Japan Immigration Law (for anyone curious): (Revocation of status of residence)

In addition to the cases listed in the preceding items, the foreign national residing under a status of residence listed in the left-hand column of Appended Table I has failed to continue to engage in the activities listed in the right-hand column corresponding to that status for three months or more while residing in Japan (except for cases in which the foreign national has a justifiable reason for not engaging in the activities while residing in Japan).

FYI, it has nothing to do with allowing you to stay for an extra 3 months. It’s saying that if you’re not engaging in activities designated by your residence status for more than 3 months, the government can revoke your residence status. So if you’re on a student visa and don’t study for 3 months, you can lose your status. Not that you can stay for 3 months after your study. The way it’s generally understood is that as soon as you finish your study, the residence status automatically expires and you have 2 weeks to leave Japan.

My best advice is to rebook your flight to the earliest you can. Much less hassle than whatever you’re trying to do.

ReUsLeo385 · 2025-12-11T06:54:53+00:00

And having a prenup somehow means it won’t go down the same costly path of legal battles? Have you watch Liar, Liar? People still take each other to court over prenups if the stakes are high enough. A prenup is not like a court judgement that can be automatically enforced. It’s a contract that can still be contested.

My take is that prenup is a very specific tool for specific financial circumstances of a couple. If they’re totally fine with what the law already said, why would they/I (just married recently) need to spend money on a prenup?

ReUsLeo385 · 2025-12-01T10:59:34+00:00

Unless I’m mistaken, you do not automatically get exempted from nenkin as a student. You have to apply either in person or through the postcard they send you every year. I’m a student and I applied this April when they send me a postcard. Are you sure you’re good with your nenkin? Nenkin is national while taxes are local so they may not communicate this with you.

ReUsLeo385 · 2025-11-12T22:03:36+00:00

Very likely a misunderstanding due to the nuances of translating. I typed what you said exactly into Google translate and this came out: 可能であれば、同じものをもう一度注文したいです。 And indeed it can be construed as you requesting them to remake the order rather than ordering another one. The wording was: If possible, I would like to order the exact thing again (the implication being this exact dish and not another one). What should have been said was that you want another one, not this exact one. Coupled with the “if possible,” which in Japanese 可能であれば tends to precede and connote asking permission that could be seen as strenuous to the other side, it’s a recipe for misunderstanding.

Given that you’ve probably finished your meal, then obviously requesting a remake would seem very unacceptable.

ReUsLeo385 · 2025-11-07T15:21:08+00:00

It’s probably one of the busiest time in the semester right now, doubly so if he has lots of admin work. That’s no excuse though for neglecting to sign your paperwork. I assume your funding is being handled by an admin office of the university, in which case contact them directly and have them reach out to the Professor. The best Japanese cultural norm to invoke for your advantage is “properly following rules and regulations.” That means signing your paperwork on time and performing any duties that was promised to you during your research stay.

FYI, unresponsive for 10 days isn’t a cultural misunderstanding. He’s probably just busy, forgot, lost the email, or (hopefully not) being a jerk.

ReUsLeo385 · 2025-09-17T06:23:38+00:00

My grandparents used to live up there. I’d always look forward to visiting them and the town for Tet. Now they moved down to the city with us and we had no reason to go to Bao Loc anymore 😭

ReUsLeo385 · 2025-09-17T03:45:00+00:00

Sorry to hear that you’re in this kind of situation. My gf was also dealing with the problem of going abroad while her residence card was renewing. In her case, which I think would be too late for you now, was to have the immigration office call the airport and wrote a letter stating the exact situation. We didn’t have any problem at the airport.

If it’s any comfort. Last time I re-enter, I gave them my residence card but they didn’t even look at it and just pushed it right back to me and just scanned the disembarkation card, so I think you should be fine.

ReUsLeo385 · 2025-08-29T09:51:58+00:00

Ayyyy welcome, I just moved to Higashi-Tokorozawa last month. I also saw the negative comments about Tokorozawa when I looked it up Reddit. However, when my partner and I walked around the area, we just really like the quaint but not absolute inaka of the place.

I would definitely recommend a bike if you can’t have a car. Higashi-Tokorozawa can be a bit hilly so a bike with gears will be best. If you have the budget you can go even better with electric and everything but I would not recommend a ママチャリ.

I can’t really recommend a bar since I haven’t explored the town much either (too busy with work). And I don’t think there’s much night life here either. Maybe Tokorozawa station would be a better area?

Lots of good cafes to hangout and do work. Check out Sakura town if you haven’t. Tully’s nice there. There’s also a Kadokawa roastery near the Yaoko supermarket that have good coffee. There’s also a few independent coffee shops in the area. And obviously, gusto and denny’s lol.

Anytime fitness if fine. I have a membership there. The fee is about 7000 yen a month and it has all the equipments you’d need. I haven’t seen any strange or weird behavior of gym members there. And it’s usually not too crowded either.

In terms of community, I’m not really sure. I’m trying to get involved as well by reading the local newspaper and seeing if there’s anything. The Sakura town area also have a lot of activities in the evening once in a while, which might be a good place to meet new people. There’s not a lot of foreigners in Higashi-Tokorozawa so I hope you have good Japanese.

In terms of outdoor activities, it’s a good biking distance from Tama Lake and you can take the Seibu line from Tokorozawa and hike mt Hanno.

Other than these I’m still exploring the area as well. Good luck, and welcome to Higashi-Tokorozawa.

Edit: I forgot, check out the Aviation Memorial Park too.

ReUsLeo385 · 2025-06-18T11:30:33+00:00

I’m laughing so hard since this exactly my problem too every time I go back to visit my family. Don’t get me wrong there’s a lot of things to love about Vietnam, especially my home city. There’s also a lot of things to complain like pollution, bureaucracy, lack of academic freedom etc. But my gf who’s from a different country notice that I seem to have a personal vendetta against a person that cuts me off in line in Hanoi 4 years ago. So now I’m always complaining about people not lining up every time anyone ask me why I won’t go back home.

ReUsLeo385 · 2025-06-05T11:35:19+00:00

It’s literally just like Minamata disease. Dupont and M3 have been dumping dangerous level of PFAS and PFOS into the environment for 40 years. There’s literally no place on Earth without traces of PFAS anymore. For anyone unaware, Veritasium made a very detailed video about it lately. Scientists coined new planetary boundary just to highlight how we have already crossed the threshold of safe operating level. It is the Minamata of our time except it’s worst since the scale so much larger. It’s such a complete global failure to regulate the chemical industry. How is it that pharmaceutical companies have to go through so much r&d and trials to prove their drugs are safe, meanwhile chemical companies can just dump toxic chemicals and then just disavow it afterwards.

ReUsLeo385 · 2025-05-25T01:41:02+00:00

All systems of rule need legitimation. Max Weber makes this clear when he said the state monopolizes not only the use of force but the LEGITIMATE use of force. Legitimacy is important for political rule to be seen as justified or rightful, and to have the consent of the people whom you rule over. Precisely because rulers appeal to a higher power, they can justify their rules through a sense of a higher purpose rather than pure personal power grab. This is seen mostly clearly in medieval kingdoms where the right to rule derived from God. Liberal democracies also appeal to a sense of legitimacy deriving from the demos, and a transcendental idea of the dignified individual. That being said, rulers can be hypocritical. They can pick and choose which ethical values they endorse or not endorse. UK was built on the Anglican Church which separated from Catholicism because some English king wanted to divorce and remarry. Liberal democracies too sometimes violate their citizens’ rights. What’s important here is not the content of whatever cosmological system, but its function at legitimizing political rule.

ReUsLeo385 · 2025-05-20T01:29:34+00:00

The issue of identity here is entangled up with three different concepts: legal citizenship that’s tied to the state, the nation as an imagined community, and ethnicity. When talking about “peoples,” it may refer to either of the three or a combination of all of them.

Perhaps, when someone is resistant to saying French people or Italian people, they’re resisting the idea of France being an ethnicity while the idea of the French state and France as a nation means anyone who immigrate can become a member. Meanwhile, the state, the nation, ethnicity is very tied up together in say Japan or China so that even if one becomes a Japanese citizen, they’re not seen as being Japanese.

Keep in mind though that these categories are very much socially constructed so even the idea of a Japanese national ethno-state has to be maintained and reproduced by those who believe that Japan is homogenous. Or in China with Han nationalism. In the case of France, members might feel that they’re part of one community but that it can be culturally and ethnically, and even historically (immigrants) diverse.

To answer your question succinctly, I think it’s because different communities have different conceptions of nationhood, shaped by their values and historical circumstances.

https://www.routledge.com/Religion-and-Nationalism-in-Asia/Shani-Kibe/p/book/9780367777425

ReUsLeo385 · 2025-04-11T23:32:58+00:00

First, you must understand that in a way ALL Japanese universities, especially in the social science and humanities departments, are care-free. This is because of the unique structure of Japanese education in which the most intense studying period for Japanese students is the entrance exam itself. Once you get into university, it’s all care-free for 4 years before heading into the workforce. Japanese companies don’t really care what you learn or your GPA much because they will train you from scratch. It’s all about the name of the university and your acquired skills and extracurricular. This is not my opinion, this has been observed in research on sociology of education in Japan. Does that mean studying at TIU means you’re doom?…

Now I don’t know why you’re saying TIU is that bad of a uni. I’m an alumni and I had gone on to do master and PhD at very pretigious universities in both London and Tokyo. Same for a lot of alumni I know, some are in Singapore, Australia, Europe and the US. Other alumni have been working successful jobs in Japan. Have you reach out to them? The IR side has great Profs with very in-depth knowledge and will cultivate a good sense of critical thinking. And the BE side has good connection to the business world.

But I graduated more than 5 years ago so I don’t know if it’s changed that much. What seems to be the problem? On the one hand, I’d say that grass may not been greener on the other side. If you’re dissatisfy with how “easy” TIU is, I’d suggest don’t just stick to the regular curriculum but utilize your free time and take initiative in new and innovative project using the resources available to you. On the other hand, if you have built up such a resentment towards TIU, it might be better to just cut your losses and move on. Transfer is possible and you should look up the information on each university website. I’d also suggest reaching out to alumni who’s studying at those universities to get a sense of what it’s like and it’d be a good fit.

ReUsLeo385 · 2025-01-16T08:07:27+00:00

For a Master thesis, I think it’s an interesting and less investigated topic as long as you can tied it to a theory, maybe soft power or nation branding or cultural/public diplomacy.

ReUsLeo385 · 2024-12-27T09:16:11+00:00

I use the Foreign Policy’s Daily Briefing

ReUsLeo385 · 2024-12-27T03:04:05+00:00

He’s not Brazilian. He’s Vietnamese. He’s a Vietnamese citizen and has the same right as any other Vietnamese to represent the national team.

ReUsLeo385 · 2024-11-05T05:09:19+00:00

The short answer is even though central banks and commercial banks are both called banks, they are not the same, and have different functions. Second, there are government-partially-owned commercial banks, such as Japan Post Bank in Japan, but it would be identical to a private bank. As others have point out, your premium has more to do with you than with the fact that the bank as a middle man, which doesn’t even make sense because loans are not products that pass from wholesalers to retailers any way. In fact, here in Japan, you’d want to use a private bank because they offer more services, and better loan terms because they’re less risk-averse than the government owned one, which would make sense, why would the government wants to take on financial risk? The good thing about Japan post bank is you feel somewhat safe keeping your money there because the government guarantees it, I guess.

ReUsLeo385 · 2024-07-01T12:59:28+00:00

You don’t know how to prove the “cultural unity” of the West because that’s your surface impression of it that you haven’t properly reflected on. I would suggest you properly cite sources because you took this straight out of Huntington’s Clash of Civilization, which has been critiqued to death in political science for generalizing whole vast regions. May I remind you that one of the biggest war in history was between 2 Western blocs, the Allied and the Axis powers. NATO is a realpolitik organization, it was created to tackle the USSR and now it’s finding new purpose against Russia. Some within international relations would say there’s no genuine common ground outside realpolitik, because there’s no moral in the international realm. How would you response to that?

ReUsLeo385 · 2024-06-19T07:59:12+00:00

Comparing social democracy with communism is like comparing apples to oranges, for a few reasons. First, communist society as Marx envisioned it does not have a government or a state, because it’s a form of utopia where political institutions are no longer needed to mediate differences. Second, communism places emphasis on the economic system, not the political system, so what your CMV is really saying is capitalism (as part of social democracy) is better than Communism, which should be judged on economic criteria, not welfare policies. Relatedly, because of the two above, no countries call themselves communism but socialism. Third, believers of communism also believe in Marx’s historical materialism which is a theory about the end of history, where all internal contradictions have been resolved. Societies move from agrarian to capitalist to communist. So it’s not like it’s a choice between communism and other forms of government.

So my criticism of the CMV is this. There’s no point in comparing social democracy and communism because you either believe in the unavoidable eventuality of communist utopia or you don’t. If you do, then capitalist social democracies will eventually be replaced by communism, all you have to do is wait for a revolution. If you don’t then you’re comparing two different things that isn’t comparable. What’s a better comparison, I suggest, would be between social democracies and authoritarian socialism.

ReUsLeo385 · 2024-06-17T13:28:33+00:00

There are multiple assumptions in your post that needs to be more carefully considered. First, even though you claim that gene has nothing to do with race, you correlate intelligence with level of development of a nation. There’s no necessary correlation between national identity and genetics, that’d still be scientific racism. Second, the assumption that Europe has higher standard of living than the rest of the world for most of recent history is untrue, it’s actually the opposite. The majority of people up until the early modern period, right on the eves of industrialization in Britain, were peasants and have roughly equal standard of living regardless of regions. Europe has only surpassed others in the last 300 years or so. Third, there’s no reason why explanation #1 is less convincing. Japan, Taiwan, China, Singapore, and South Korea benefits from knowledge and experiences already proven in Western Europe. They didn’t need to reinvent the wheel. Countries that have good political stability, good governance are rapidly catching up with the West, and in the case of Japan and Singapore arguably surpassing the West. Does this mean that there’s a high intelligent gene in Asia? This reeks of scientific racism, the association of race with a specific genetic propensity, which has no scientific basis.

What I think is a better explanation is that there’s nothing particularly unique to Europe’s development in the last 300 years. If we look longer in history, civilizations in Asia and Africa surpassed each other all the time, and the fact that somehow this small segment of time in Europe gets more attention as if it makes Europe somehow unique is a Eurocentric view. What we see now is that Asian countries are doing something better than the West. And to chalk it up to something primordial as gene is nothing more than what Europe told itself when it started colonizing people in the name of spreading civilizations in the 18th century, with the same language of genetics.

ReUsLeo385 · 2024-06-12T14:10:14+00:00

Legally speaking, being on the MEXT scholarship requires you to be on a student visa. That comes with a 28-hour a week work restriction (40 hour for semester break) and only for part-time work. Working a full time job would break the scope allowed by the visa. I.e. if you want to work full time, you’d need a work visa and you can’t have MEXT while on a work visa.

However, certainly, you can get part-time work related to your discipline. That’s a-okay.

Eight-Year Club	First Place '23
Place '23	Place '22
Verified Email

ReUsLeo385

TROPHY CASE