Often times I think we characterize trolls as normal people who just let out their anti-social side under the cloak of internet anonymity. Probably that is even true for the majority. But the scary thing we need to address is the number of isolated and devalued individuals subsisting in modern society, but without dignity. Under the veneer of societal abundance, the struggle to survive is replaced with the pursuit of abstract accomplishments (career, sports, fame, etc). When someone is not successful in these things, it's very easy to survive but not thrive, and in the absence of real survival pressure it's too easy to be left alone with ones thoughts and descend into a depressive downward spiral.
The most severe trolls I've had the misfortune of meeting online have actually been mentally ill and highly sociopathic. Some will look to harm others in real if they could whether it be socially, economically, or even physically. Doxxing is entry level stuff for them. I no longer find online gaming fun for this reason.
It's worrying that while reading the article I was nodding along thinking "yep, sounds like 4chan" and it turned out to be tumblr. When both extremes of the political spectrum have groups of stalkers and trolls trying to ruin people's lives for committing some imaginary sin, you know things are screwed.
It's not magnetism, it's attractiveness to abusive people.
Some people don't really care what cause they get behind so long as they get to bully people and raise hell. They'd be anarchists, leftists, alt-right, whatever, so long as they get to beat up people and set things on fire.
This is not to say both political extremes are identical, but that certain people will latch on to any group that will tolerate their behaviour.
Edit: You are misread the post (and I didn't quite read it in enough detail myself). The post claims, Kiwi Farms, large alt-right-influence forum, is manipulating progressives to attack this person.
The story itself claims tumblr users (and more generally, to quote, "young progressives") were behind the stalking, unless I misread.
[edit] sounds like kiwifarms is a 4chan-type trolling/alt-right site and simply got tumblr to also attack these poor folks by making up stories about them being animal abusers.
"Still, this should be mundane. People say a wrong thing on the Internet. It happens.
The trouble is, young "progressives" at the moment are falling all over themselves to be part of an expulsion — to root out and help exile some secret predator hiding in plain sight.
So if you have a target whose life you want to ruin for funsies, all you need to do is dig through their history for some circumstantial evidence, concoct a vaguely related story that makes them sound horrible, and circulate it in a callout post.
The problem, then, is not that someone pulled a story about Styx out of their ass. The problem is that Kiwi Farms is a well-oiled machine for producing hundreds of such stories, and the one about Styx is now listed on a Tumblr somewhere under a heading like "animal abuse", calling me a "known literal animal abuser". Because someone can't read Wikipedia."
Sounds like someone found these stories, misinterpreted them (wilfully or not) to sound like abuse, then got tumblr all riled up to harass them. I suppose the initiator wasn't necessarily from that space, but it certainly seems like tumblr/progressives are taking part in the harassment.
obviously the kiwi farms people are the main perpetrators here (and I now realise they are clearly 4chan/alt-right types), but we shouldn't apologise for the tumblr people's readiness to harass people off the back of hearsay either.
The stories were spun (imagine the telephone game with malicious actors), allegedly by Kiwi Farms users, to maximize the harm to their victims.
(I'm saying "allegedly" here because, honestly, I haven't had the time to dig into fact-checking the story. I don't believe the author is lying, however.)
I think you only need to look at Reddit and the ProRevenge/PettyRevenge/etc subreddits to see the mindset of a very large amount of people who find joy in completely ruining somebody’s life.
The common theme being you suffered so you deliver 100x suffering in return in cruel and unusual ways. Redefining karma as cold revenge, being an innocent victim who is a victim but no longer innocent.
This doesn’t even come close to healthy. It usually takes therapy to get there in such a case but when you revel in the pain...
So you learned your lesson and you've made sure to devote a significant portion of your resources to getting your revenge?
There's a difference between not letting someone take advantage of you and spending significant time repaying every perceived slight 10 fold. Even iterative prisoners dilemma shows that without forgiveness a tit for tat strategy dissolves into an endless cycle of vengeance.
It is worth mentioning that the mentally ill are (sadly) fairly common in this society. Historically mentally ill people have not tended to be more dangerous than average people and it important not to assume that mentally equals dangerous today.
That said, I think, historically, a substantially part of the reason mentally people usually are harmless is because they can see their grasp on reality is shaky. Others have generally not shared their delusions and so no one validates their desires to lash out at those who they imagine have harmed them.
The Internet seems to have changed that - communities of people who share pathological illusions seem to have come together and produced a still small number of horrendous crimes - the "incel movement" being one very visible example.
These folks might well in dangerous (to others) gray area between debilitating insanity and approximate sanity. Pathological enough to embrace problematic ideas and functional enough act on them.
A lack of insight, denial of the very fact that they are ill is a prominent feature in a number of mental disorders, most notably schizophrenia. I think that what you’re saying about people getting together online to share delusions is a factor, but I don’t think it’s because they used to have a sense that they were deluded. Rather, they were isolated. Someone who thought that power lines were controlling their thoughts had very little ability to spread that belief. They could shout on a street corner, print and pass out pamphlets, and that was it. Unless you were nuts and rich, you couldn’t really spread the “word” far.
Now that has changed, and everyone, however disorganized and deprived of resources, can publish their every thought. People who think they’ve been “gang stalked” and people who think that the government is behind contrails all have a megaphone to the world. As a “bonus” they also are able to just type their delusions into Google and find sites to confirm and expand them. The same network effect that connects hobbyists and enthusiasts of rare things around the world does the same for people with delusional frameworks.
It also does the same for Holocaust deniers, and general shitheads.
I think that what you’re saying about people getting together online to share delusions is a factor, but I don’t think it’s because they used to have a sense that they were deluded.
It's hard to phrase these things. I wouldn't say people were less confident in the delusional beliefs. Rather, an isolated delusional person has less general confidence - the world is "against them" and their relative weakness relative to the world is fairly evident.
Overall, success at doing horrible things requires some of the same mix that success at doing constructive things needs; confidence, support, plans and ideas. The process you describe and we all can see helps in all those things.
Same for me with respect to online gaming. Having worked in the games industry and made my own too it's a sad realization that a seemingly large minority of our own customers are abusive. Too many are just an unhappy bunch of people frustrated with life. Attacks extend beyond personal to companies too. For instance, games offer some of the best value for money entertainment and yet many 'gamers' just constantly complain about the price of anything even if it's low. I don't think a lot of these people understand how the general economy works. Some of this may be due to age or immaturity too.
These might be times of abundance, but not societal abundance. Trump did not win speaking about there being societal abundance. It does not exist in the US, and certainly not in the third world. Just walk down to the Tenderloin in San Francisco or take an extended walk around Oakland, and you can see this for yourself.
Society is far too rigid. We have people who are harmless, who can't cope with the horrible full time jobs we force people into via high land rent, who are kicked to the edge of society.
We need a choice and that choice comes with cheap rent as a prerequisite. Yet our institutions strive for the opposite.
I'd disagree that it's easy to survive. Many people in good jobs are now one bad week away from ruin.
This will be the biggest struggle of post-scarcity economies. Some people need to be distracted with the struggle to survive to keep them from destructive thoughts.
It's a bit disingenuous to put today's society in the place of a hypothetical society immediately before post-scarcity (or society before any major societal shift in the far future). They are in no way comparable. Society as it is could not handle post-scarcity, but a huge contributor is the simple fact that post-scarcity is a very long way away.
Yes, globally. But many people individually live in a post-scarcity society. A young man with no job who has everything they need or even want (short of large-ticket items like expensive vacations, cars, house, etc.) provided by their parents arguably is living a post-scarcity lifestyle.
In addition, it's been shown many many times that people who have less monetary power are often more stressed, so one shouldn't assume that somehow emotional problems are not connected to economics.
It’s fairly easy to make a case that Japan is a good example of what the stage before post-scarcity looks like though. Yes there is poverty, but it’s unusual.
> It’s fairly easy to make a case that Japan is a good example of what the stage before post-scarcity looks like though. Yes there is poverty, but it’s unusual.
Is that true? Everything else I've heard about Japan says poverty is common and severe there.
> Last year, the Japanese government recorded relative poverty rates of 16%—defined as the share of the population living on less than half the national median income. That is the highest on record. Poverty levels have been growing at a rate of 1.3% a year since the mid-1980s. On the same definition, a study by the OECD in 2011 ranked Japan sixth from the bottom among its 34 mostly rich members. Bookshops advertise a slew of bestsellers on how to survive on an annual income of under ¥2m ($16,700), a poverty line below which millions of Japanese now live.
> poverty ... defined as the share of the population living on less than half the national median income
This is not necessarily poverty, it is just a measure of income inequality. If we read Wikipedia [1]:
> In Japan, relative poverty is defined as a state at which the income of a household is at or below half of the median household income ... According to Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the mean household net-adjusted disposable income for Japan is US$23,458.
Half of that is $11,700 and while living on that can be tough, I am not sure if that can be called poverty. Also, there is a minimal wage of 736 yen/hour (in the poorest regions) which is 117760 yen/month or $1063. So if a household has an income of $1000/month it means that one of two people is slacking off instead of working.
For comparison, in Estonia minimum monthly wage is 500 Euro (585 USD), in Russia it is $286 in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg and about $150 in other regions. Earning $1000 a month looks like a luxury for most people outside of two largest cities.
It is also important to remember that the climate is much warmer in Japan than in Russia so the the life should be cheaper, you don't have to pay for warm clothes and central heating.
The federal poverty line in the US for a single person is about $12k (or $15k in Alaska) and it's higher for families. I am quite sure that living in a country like Japan, where the cost of living is not cheap, on $11,000 pear year can be called poverty. Also, "slacking off"? Have you considered that perhaps one or more people cannot find a job or is unable to work? Or that the poor often do not have full-time jobs with steady hours? Come on.
The cost of living in Estonia is much lower than Japan. You're not making an apples-to-apples comparison. The US comparison is more apt. Think about what your life would be like if you made the same amount of money as you do now but lived in Thailand (or if they did the same for the average Thai person) and you might understand why they choose to measure poverty this way.
Definitions of poverty based on relative incomes will mean there are always people in poverty, by definition.
If we contemplate a post scarcity world, one needs to consider absolute measures like life expectancy and maybe education levels or something like that.
Not arguing that everyone has it easy in Japan, just that by these types of metrics it’s one of the closest places we have to look at if we want to think about post-scarcity.
I’d note this quote from the article: “The country has long prided itself on ensuring that none of its citizens falls between the social cracks. Japan’s orderly, slum-free neighbourhoods seem to confirm that. Street crime, even in Kotobuki, is minuscule.“
Well, that's nonsense. Just because street crime is low doesn't mean people aren't poor. If you visit Tokyo you can easily encounter homeless people sleeping on the street; if these people haven't fallen through the cracks who has?
> Do you think there won't be poor people in a post-scarcity society?
I think if there are you can't really call it one. America is the richest country on Earth so if it's just about how you theoretically could have a society free of want if you totally reconfigured who has what then I guess we're on the cusp too! Great news!
I genuinely have no idea what you think a post-scarcity society is.
I genuinely have no idea what you think a post-scarcity society is.
Where society has enough for all and attempt to allocate it in a way that all gets what they need.
Japan is about as close to that as exists. Yes, people fall though the cracks, but the same will happen in post-scarcity society. People will refuse to live by society's rules so they won't get their universal income, or they will have mental illness and unable to arrange their life to avoid suffering.
That isn't dissimilar to Japan. No one is staving to death, people get basic healthcare (mostly), but there are still people who society fails - and it isn't a lack of resources that causes that in Japan.
You suggest that poverty is happening in a "post-scarcity society" because people are mentally ill or don't play by the rules, and that Japan is more or less what you have in mind by a "post-scarcity society." Also we have the statistic that 15% of the Japanese are in poverty. So by synthesizing all these we get my (admittedly glib) gloss on your ideas.
>Under the veneer of societal abundance, the struggle to survive is replaced with the pursuit of abstract accomplishments (career, sports, fame, etc). When someone is not successful in these things, it's very easy to survive but not thrive, and in the absence of real survival pressure it's too easy to be left alone with ones thoughts and descend into a depressive downward spiral.
You grasped the idea very well. Life in the West gives you a lot of "false idols," way more than just plain income (in)security and social acceptance.
A lot of very well doing people are insecure about what you call class attributes: "have you sent your kid to an Ivy league college? is your MBA still hip enough? have you launched a tech startup by 30? have you appointed trophy diversity hires of a current trendy ethnicity to your C-Suite? is an apartment you bought shares the floor with influential people A, B, and C?" and so on.
I myself felt nearly crushed morally when my employer was unsuccessful extending my work permit in Canada after 6 years of my life there. I worked towards having "a perfect immigration case" since my mid-teens: from learning French, to having all and every pre-college education credentials that can benefit an immigration application possible, and yes, studying like crazy, wasting best years of life for a piece of paper.
Now, I'm feeling more or less recovered from that. Not only I came back with a heavy bag of cash, I was still doing more than 99% of locals just from "insubstantial" freelance gigs, had solid resume, and tons of calls from recruiters offering jobs in every country imaginable, and finally, after nearly 9 years of my life I could wake up at a time of my volition, and not what was mandated by job or college. That last thing was near surreal for me at the time.
But what was the best was not "prestige checkboxes" on the resume, nor an approving looks of female classmates from my highschool class, nor a trophy apartment I bought for pocket change when the Rouble was on its way to a seafloor. The best things from all of that were things of universal value: skills, life experience, being alive and well, fat rolodex, and knowledge "where to scratch fat cats" from places awash with cash.
Now I'm happy working in engineering consulting with a Chinese company, netting more than 99.99% of locals, having nearly careless lifestyle in comparison to what I had, and living in a city without gloomy weather. I can't believe that just 2 years ago I thought of my whole life as failure.
Another valuable thing, China has introduced me to was the entirely different, "BS Free," work culture centered on value: contract, payment, and CAD files in the morning — widgets ready in the evening, without any manager title holder in the loop.
> You grasped the idea very well. Life in the West gives you a lot of "false idols," way more than just plain income (in)security and social acceptance.
TFA is set in Tokyo, which is decidedly not the West. Yes, you can take your skills and go to a developing nation where you will probably be much more qualified than most of the locals, but that's not the broader question at stake, nor does it really take into account what the lives of locals are like. I have faith that the world will, eventually, be filled with mostly developed nations. These problems increasingly seem to be plaguing all developed nations.
>where you will probably be much more qualified than most of the locals
Don't get me wrong, in Russia, you have many times more people with 6 years degrees in the industry than in US. That's a hard fact. And so is China for as long as you consider the part of the workforce born after economic liberalisation in parts of the country where the industry took off.
>not the broader question at stake
Well, I was just trying break the going narrative of "Internet troll" being thrown on every "looser" or basically unpopular person with Internet presence.
> Don't get me wrong, in Russia, you have many times more people with 6 years degrees in the industry than in US.
I'm confused, what does the comparison of the number of higher education degrees between the US, Russia and China have to do with taking your skills to a "developing nation"? Are China and Russia supposed to be considered developing nations in this comparison?
I, and I assume most people, don't think of Russia as a "developing country" in the common usage at all, at least in the common usage of the term. I see China as a more complex case, but I wouldn't feel comfortable using it as a general example of one because of this same complexity.
As such, your using them as examples or counter examples of developing countries is confusing (at least to me), and I think is misinterpreting the meaning of the original statement.
>As such, your using them as examples or counter examples of developing countries is confusing (at least to me), and I think is misinterpreting the meaning of the original statement.
Indeed. Me coming back to Russia was nowhere near a typical "downshifting" case. If I were to compete with locals on the job market, I wouldn't have lasted long. People who can ace ACM olympics prequalification tests are only passing as junior devs here.
I will say that Japan is exceptional as far as I can tell (and I'm not Japanese), so the level of social isolation is a bit different in extent and even character compared to the US.
No it's about understanding the reasons why this happened. To me, they are both victims and this wouldn't happen in a sane society.
I'm looking at society and being happy I will only be here 40 more years. Because I'm not optimistic about the future. Humans are being led down the path of self destruction.
There was clearly one murder victim involved in this story, and that's a far more significant crime than "trolling people" or "trolling trolls who troll people".
Of course the killer has committed the worst crime, no doubt about that. But I think we are being conditioned into extremely fast blame games sometimes. These things wouldn't happen in a more evolved society. When is society to blame?
Actually if you're looking for something to blame, people are it. There isn't a society to blame. That's an abstract concept only useful if you want to sabotage your ability to think about stuff.
No, you can't think about social dynamics by merely considering people as atoms in a vacuum. Well, you can, but your suppositions will have an attenuated relationship to reality.
The only part of "society" that the guy interacted with were people he interacted with. The person who most directly caused him to murder was the victim.
You're not going to be able to look at some abstract generality like "society" and come to some conclusion about why a specific murder happened. It makes just as much sense to blame "biology" for the crime.
It is an almost willfully blind perspective to pretend like societal mores, practices, beliefs, hell even language, don't exist or are irrelevant. People aren't formed in a vacuum.
Unless I missed something, the victim noticed that the killer was harassing people online, called him a dummy, and complained to Hatena blog to have them shut down his accounts. I just do not see any sense in which it's meaningfully true that they're "both victims." From what I can see here, "Hagex" was basically a lite Brian Krebs.
I was specifically talking about the killer, and I was assuming OP was responding to the headline and making a general statement about Internet trolls.
I still don't see how that was confusing, but to anybody who needed a clarification: There you go.
Parents need to actually parent their kids to teach them to see the humanity in other people, but I can easily see some families where the only guide is computer games and internet forums.
I agree, although these people are often seen as useful too. For example to lead the attack/defense against an opposing group also led by a psycho/sociopath.
Surely this observation is meant to express some view, and the one that comes naturally to mind is that he's deserving of reproach for having "forgotten"
One possible solution: Make the providers of web services liable for what their users post so they can’t ignore the problem for that sweet ad revenue. Possible downside: Providers become overly cautious and pro-actively delete more than necessary. Possible upside: Lots and lots of small, tight-knit (and healthy) communities crop up because Twitter, Tumblr & Co. die.
> Possible downside: Providers become overly cautious and pro-actively delete more than necessary.
Exactly what happened in Germany when the new social media hate speech law (Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz) was introduced.
> He said that the NetzDG incentivizes social-media companies to “delete in doubt”—to remove any content that seems like it might be illegal […] The law leaves it up to companies like Facebook and Twitter, with their armies of moderators newly installed in Germany, to decide within 24 hours whether a post is “manifestly” illegal and remove it—a decision that would ordinarily take weeks in a German court.
Is there a real solution
to combat
the hate filled and violent cesspool
the internet has become today?
A possible solution is to outlaw what fundamentally makes the Internet "free" and "open", destroying much of the good (and bad) things that were built on those foundations.
Now that the technological Pandora's Box has been open, even such wanton destruction would require a delicate balance between restricting the tech and letting its benefits continue to shine through for the continuation of the state and the society under its umbrella; after all, all states (even allied ones) exist in competition with each other, and to weaken one's tech could mean to weaken that state or even ease its death.
I hope someone knows another way to solve the problem or to satisfactorily ameliorate it.
The nukes finally fell --
but now
I can see the stars at night.
It doesn't need to be solved or ameliorated. The internet is a reflection of humanity, and the truest reflection because, out of all other forms of media, the image it presents isn't entirely manufactured or mediated by corporations (although they are trying.)
The internet has only become a "cesspool" because it's matured as a platform and gained enough critical mass that it can accurately reflect the noxious rat-king that is the human zeitgeist.
But the same platform that shows us the worst of ourselves can also reflect the best of ourselves, and the same freedom that allows the vile and the profane allows the creative, intellectual and profound.
The answer isn't to change the web, but to change ourselves. Hate is as much of a problem as it is on the internet because hate is accepted in the real world. Censoring the web won't solve that.
Or maybe go all the way in the other direction and have some kind of Psycho-Pass scenario where AI builds a "crime coefficient" out of a profile of your online and offline activities and estimates your emotional stability and moral alignment based on cameras monitoring your irises and skin as you surf the web, and if your hue gets too red, someone shoots you with a gun.
It's also infinitely easier to let individual sites manage their own content and moderation as they see fit then to regulate content on the internet as a whole.
>Should he Okamoto have been more careful? That depends on whether you think criticism of an internet troll ever merits a death sentence.
This is a weird false dichotomy. Its possible to think someone should be more careful and still not think they deserve to die. If I saw someone texting while driving I'd tell them to be more careful but not think they deserved to die.
Suggesting caution is not automatically saying everyone who didn't take that advice derserves what happened to them. Saying "you should wear your seatbelt" is not the same as "you deserve to get maimed or killed if you don't wear your seatbelt". Similarly, saying "don't put identifiable info on forums" is not the same as saying "if you put PII on a public forum you deserve to get stalked".
IMO, you're making the mistake of thinking fault and "deserve" are the same thing.
A smoker who gets lung cancer doesn't deserve the pain and suffering, but you can make a good argument they're at least partially at fault for it.
"People should dress conservatively so they don't get raped" doesn't say they deserved to get raped, but it does blame them to some extent for what happened by implying some of it is their fault.
This line of thinking doesn't seem to hold up to scrutiny. If I say "wear a helmet when you ride a bike" it is entirely possible that an ensuing accident is entirely the fault of another party (e.g. getting cut off by a car). Nonetheless, the rider's injuries will depend greatly on whether or not the advice was followed. But the fault in either case is entirely that of the driver that caused the accident.
I think it's a mistake to compare an accident and an intentional criminal act like that.
If you get run down intentionally by someone in a car while biking, and the first thing I say is "well, you should've worn a helmet", you're going to correctly call me a douchebag.
Sure. But pointing to this as an example of why someone should wear a helmet even if they're confident in their riding ability is not in any way shifting blame to the rider.
Nobody is actually trying to tell the security expert in this story that he should be more careful - he's dead. People in this thread are pointing out how this story highlights the importance of safe internet usage practices - much akin to how one might point to a car collision as a reason to use a helmet. That is not blaming the victim, that's encouraging others to learn from and hopefully prevent similar situations.
I don't really get our reasoning. Clearly some people don't act rationally and everyone should be aware of that. So it seems reasonable to recommend reasonable precautions if the situation warrants it? You don't swim in shark infested waters, or hang out around lions without expecting to be bit. Would be nice if everyone could behave like a sane person and we could live without fear, but we don't live in a utopia.
How are protests or account deletion a threat to free speech at all? Neither is government-sponsored.
In fact, you could argue that the former is the healthy exercise of the protestors' freedom of speech, and the latter is the exercise of a corporation's freedom of speech.
"Freedom of speech" != other people helping you broadcast your message or letting it go unchallenged
While some may agree with your defense of the heckler's veto [0], constraining the discussion of freedom of expression to government-conducted censorship is disingenuous.
Again, that only applies to public spaces. Not all protesters are at public universities.
There is no (and never has been) an unequivocal right to free speech in a private space.
Also, constraining the discussion of freedom of expression to government-conducted censorship is not disingenuous. It's the only context in which freedom of expression is guaranteed in the US.
I'm not conflating those things. Don't put words in my mouth.
I'm only talking about implementation. Philosophical discussion of free speech is a much broader scope and not, to my understanding, what anyone else was talking about in this thread.
If they were talking about philosophy, then it wasn't clear to me and this became an argument of semantics.
1.) Threat to free s peach does not have to be governmental.
2.) I agree that protests themselves are free speech and necessary part of functional society. Absolutely, people have right to loudly disagree with highly paid speakers and demagogues and pundits and politicians and what not.
3.) There are many people who don't believe 2. in particular when protesters are from opposite "side". Even if you see protest as something outside of free speech, murder is bigger threat.
4.) Murdering someone is large non-govermental threat to freedom. That point stands absolutely. "You are not careful enough if you criticise troll" is slimmy way to create situation in which you are totally for freedom, but also if they do exercise they are irresponsible and brought dead on themselves. Slimmy.
At the risk of sounding like a troll myself, Jake Adelstein is notorious for injecting weird sentiments like this into his stories, or playing up the more sordid aspects of incidents in order to get pageviews. His shtick is "Here's something that will blow your mind and destroy all your misconceptions about Japan!," and then proceeds to write about a crime (murder, cybercrime, prostitution, organized crime, whatever) that is commonplace everywhere in the world.
This would normally be okay, if he was a blogger or opinion writer, but Adelstein portrays himself as an independent journalist.
The killer turned himself in to police. You see this in old Yakuza movies, the perpetrator will stand and wait for police after the killing (for example, "Pale Flower").
Japan has very little crime and a 98% conviction rate, it's so civilized.
> a very pale and thin man with glasses parked his bicycle and walked into a police station in Fukuoka City’s Higashi ward carrying a large bag. He told the police there, “I’ve killed a man.”
> In Japan, the criminal justice system has a conviction rate that exceeds 99% (Note that it includes guilty plea cases.), which has been attributed to low prosecutorial budgets impelling understaffed prosecutors to present judges with only the most obviously guilty defendants.
This has ripples all the way back through the Japanese criminal-justice system. The police don't bother to even investigate crimes with merely circumstantial evidence, because such cases are unlikely to be prosecuted. So nobody bothers to even report such crimes, and so they're far easier to get away with and more prevalent.
I wouldn't describe such an environment as particularly "civilized."
I agree the high rate is troubling. We'd need to find a good middle ground. Too low and it suggests prosecutors are bringing spurious cases. Too high and it means difficult cases are likely getting dropped or the process is just for show.
Similarly I've heard that police will often juke the stats, labeling deaths that are circumstantial as suicides so as not to investigate or try to get a guilty?
Or that once you're arrested rights are questionable when it comes to interrogation techniques and due process.
It's not just Japan though. In the US, apparently, 97% of federal convictions are the result of guilty pleas, and there is evidence that in many cases the plea is entered due to the defendant dealing they don't have the resources to defend themselves: https://theoutline.com/post/2066/most-criminal-cases-end-in-...
Yes, but, to our shame, the US is also recognized as a horrifying outlier and imprisons a greater portion of its population than any other country on Earth. According to this Washington Post article, 5% of the world's people are Americans, but one-quarter of the world's prisoners are American: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/...
> Many Western human rights organizations alleged that the high conviction rate is due to rampant use of conviction solely based on confession. Confessions are often obtained after long periods of questioning by police as those arrested may be held for up to 23 days. This can, at times, take weeks during which time the suspect is in detention and can be prevented from contacting a lawyer or family.
As a person who knows Japan quite well, this is not true. Even a very light case like seeing a stranger near a house, Japanese people will often call the police or go to a koban and request for help. In such case, a police officer will come to your house, listen to your claim, fill in papers, and will do some patrolling everyday for several days.
It is not that nobody bothers to report crimes. Japanese people bothers to report crimes, but it is up to the police department that if they should accept the damage report and do some further investigation. Of course there are priorities and because of the lack of resources some crimes won't be taken seriously when it should have.
Oh, sure, people are very willing to report their suspicion of a crime happening to someone else.
But what do you think is, say, the date-rape report rate for Japan vs. any other country? Something that's already a source of personal shame is hard enough to report; knowing that no investigation will even be attempted in response means there's no reason to try to overcome that shame.
(Also, Japan is very willing to respond to any random report by "increasing patrols" by the low-level police-box staffers who are basically there to make it look like Something Is Being Done. Look at what reports ever get any detectives assigned to them, and the statistics will tell a far different story.)
> Oh, sure, people are very willing to report their suspicion of a crime happening to someone else.
I can say the same thing when you see a stranger entering your property that such case alone can be a crime in the Japanese law. I have seen Japanese people reporting such crimes.
> But what do you think is, say, the date-rape report rate for Japan vs. any other country? Something that's already a source of personal shame is hard enough to report; knowing that no investigation will even be attempted in response means there's no reason to try to overcome that shame.
Even in such specific type of crimes that is very difficult to investigate, some people report to the police. It is up to the police department to accept the reports and further investigate.
> Look at what reports ever get any detectives assigned to them, and the statistics will tell a far different story.
Your claim was that nobody bothers to report, but I oppose to the claim because I have seen people reporting, and thus I still conclude your claim is false.
> Your claim was that nobody bothers to report, but I oppose to the claim because I have seen people reporting
The claim was that people don't report crime, and you claim to see people reporting suspicions. Even if it weren't just an anecdote, it isn't even addressing the point accurately.
> thus I still conclude your claim is false.
Neither of you have actually provided anything beyond generalizations and anecdotes. Any conclusion based on what's been presented so far is incredibly premature.
>The claim was that people don't report crime, and you claim to see people reporting suspicions.
> Even if it weren't just an anecdote, it isn't even addressing the point accurately.
I have addressed the suspicion thing in my second reply to derefr.
It is not just suspicion, but also a crime that is reported.
> Neither of you have actually provided anything beyond generalizations and anecdotes. Any conclusion based on what's been presented so far is incredibly premature.
I understand your point. Since I know quite well of Japanese people, I don't think it is premature. To clearly show evidences that everyone can understand is a different thing and it is also difficult in some context.
To deny the claim "So nobody bothers to even report such crimes", I have to find just one case and since I know a case I consider it false.
To prove all my claims that I have witnessed, we probably have to go to court and I consider it nonsense since it isn't realistic.
To prove a customary of Japanese people, it is very difficult and I currently have no clear evidence that I can show easily, but any Japanese people can oppose to my claims if it seem wrong.
To back up my claim using other sources, for example, I can tell you a famous date-drug rape case of Shiori Ito in Japan, which the victim reported to the police, accepted, investigated, but not prosecuted.
UK and US media have an obsession with the flaws of Japan, and also like to overlook the monumental difference in crime rates by chalking it up to fabrication.
True - and why not, it's their backyard to worry about. It's the lack of introspection in the West that irritates me - any constructive talk immediately gets deadlocked by flamewars on class and race even if great arguments and evidence for policy are presented. Government should never be religion.
I expect Japan runs documentaries on Western countries and their crime too, only with stronger supporting evidence.
Using 2014 (seems typical) as an illustration.
0.31 per 100k citizens vs 4.88 (US) and 0.92 (UK).
Imagine the scale of conspiracy the Japanese police would have to be involved in to make us look good. The main issues I've heard of are examples of police incompetence as a side affect of not having much crime to deal with. This is like how in South Africa the triage surgeons are really good at solving for stab and gunshot wounds. It's a positive sign that the Japan police are lax on recognizing murder and a negative one that the South African ER doctors are some of the best in the world.
Yep, it's a totally different culture. For example, there's a lot of motivation to protect the family's honor.
The police will mediate between the parties before going further, and often reach justice outside the court, where both sides are satisfied with the result. Often a sincere apology goes a long way in Japan.
These kind of "nuisance" crimes are well controlled, but Japan has one of the world's most active and connected underworlds, with organized crime being deeply entangled with both business and government. It's getting a little old, but Dubro's Yakuza book is full of jaw-dropping stories.
The police are also notoriously guilty of beating and practically torturing confessions out of suspects. Another phenomenon I read about is classifying murders as suicides, especially if organized crime is involved, but I don't have a sense of the scope of that.
I am reminded of why Abraham Lincoln decided to stop writing scathing reviews of his cohorts after one angry target challenged him to a duel which could have cost him his life. [0]
There are a lot of crazy people in the world. The internet now allows you to reach and trigger them.
This is not victim blaming, just like police advice to "not show valuable possessions when walking through the bad part of the city" is neither victim blaming, nor surrendering of their responsibilities.
I'm not sure I agree with this sentiment either. Crime statistics for violent crime have fallen dramatically in the US for example, so it's not like the internet makes us less safe, I think there's a bit of recentism there. It does, however, change the character of violence and harassment from previous generations.
Many times actions on the internet are not considered a crime, while those same actions done in person, would. For example, stalking.
Put another way, the crime statistics may accurately capture what they measure, but what they measure may not accurately capture the current topic of discussion.
Almost 30 years ago I was active in online mudding. I managed to antagonize another young man who became convinced I was quite literally the devil incarnate.
The particularly scary aspect to this was that he happened to live just a couple of hours from me. I was quite concerned he would take action on his belief; I don’t recall what threats he made, but he seemed quite serious.
The internet is a tremendous amplifier for the mundane, the good, and the evil.
That's why I believe it was a mistake for Facebook, Twitter and Google to require people to use their real identities. How can trollhunters effectively fight trolls without fear of retaliation in the real world?
The headline shall be like "A Japanese person was killed by mentally unstable person". No more than that.
The killer was infamous for spamming abusive words to anybody on the Hatena Bookmark(an online bookmark service like reddit or HN), among the many abusive words he used, somehow he always use 低能(teinou, low-intelligence) so he was called 低能先生(teinou-sensei).
He blamed others for no reason. He probably spamming everybody commented on popular articles. So he was suspected to have some mental issues.
Everybody immediately reported him for abusing and Hatena ban his accounts as soon as they found his another accounts.
The victim was a famous blogger. He was an old time "net-watcher"(a person who find funny people on the internet). He mostly deal with those who intentionally cause self-flaming on the internet for pageview or pyramid-scheme.
Once he mentioned about the existence of this infamous abuser, teinou-sensei, on this "net-watching" blog. He also hosted a event on Fukuoka and it so happens that this mentally-unstable killer was lived in Fukuoka.
The connection of his "net-watcher" persona and cyber-security expert part of his life wasn't known beforehand of his death.
You can't get any moral from this incident. It's just there are mentally unstable people in the world and many abusers on the internet are probably those people.
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[ 20.0 ms ] story [ 3723 ms ] threadA recent example that comes to mind: https://www.patreon.com/posts/18049311
This post raises a lot of questions that I don't have a good answer to.
If this is Kiwi Farms, though... https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
Some people don't really care what cause they get behind so long as they get to bully people and raise hell. They'd be anarchists, leftists, alt-right, whatever, so long as they get to beat up people and set things on fire.
This is not to say both political extremes are identical, but that certain people will latch on to any group that will tolerate their behaviour.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
[edit] sounds like kiwifarms is a 4chan-type trolling/alt-right site and simply got tumblr to also attack these poor folks by making up stories about them being animal abusers.
"Still, this should be mundane. People say a wrong thing on the Internet. It happens.
The trouble is, young "progressives" at the moment are falling all over themselves to be part of an expulsion — to root out and help exile some secret predator hiding in plain sight.
So if you have a target whose life you want to ruin for funsies, all you need to do is dig through their history for some circumstantial evidence, concoct a vaguely related story that makes them sound horrible, and circulate it in a callout post.
The problem, then, is not that someone pulled a story about Styx out of their ass. The problem is that Kiwi Farms is a well-oiled machine for producing hundreds of such stories, and the one about Styx is now listed on a Tumblr somewhere under a heading like "animal abuse", calling me a "known literal animal abuser". Because someone can't read Wikipedia."
Sounds like someone found these stories, misinterpreted them (wilfully or not) to sound like abuse, then got tumblr all riled up to harass them. I suppose the initiator wasn't necessarily from that space, but it certainly seems like tumblr/progressives are taking part in the harassment.
The whole “someone can’t read Wikipedia” excuse is exactly the same as what trolls themselves say.
(I'm saying "allegedly" here because, honestly, I haven't had the time to dig into fact-checking the story. I don't believe the author is lying, however.)
The common theme being you suffered so you deliver 100x suffering in return in cruel and unusual ways. Redefining karma as cold revenge, being an innocent victim who is a victim but no longer innocent.
This doesn’t even come close to healthy. It usually takes therapy to get there in such a case but when you revel in the pain...
"Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it."
"When you’re in business, you get even with people that screw you. And you screw them 15 times harder."
Anecdotally, I was screwed once in a business. I didn’t retaliate. Same thing happened a second time because this person knew I wouldn’t react.
I won’t let it happen again.
Edit:: to be clear, I’m talking 7-figure screwed, not “this person was mean to me”.
There's a difference between not letting someone take advantage of you and spending significant time repaying every perceived slight 10 fold. Even iterative prisoners dilemma shows that without forgiveness a tit for tat strategy dissolves into an endless cycle of vengeance.
That said, I think, historically, a substantially part of the reason mentally people usually are harmless is because they can see their grasp on reality is shaky. Others have generally not shared their delusions and so no one validates their desires to lash out at those who they imagine have harmed them.
The Internet seems to have changed that - communities of people who share pathological illusions seem to have come together and produced a still small number of horrendous crimes - the "incel movement" being one very visible example.
These folks might well in dangerous (to others) gray area between debilitating insanity and approximate sanity. Pathological enough to embrace problematic ideas and functional enough act on them.
Now that has changed, and everyone, however disorganized and deprived of resources, can publish their every thought. People who think they’ve been “gang stalked” and people who think that the government is behind contrails all have a megaphone to the world. As a “bonus” they also are able to just type their delusions into Google and find sites to confirm and expand them. The same network effect that connects hobbyists and enthusiasts of rare things around the world does the same for people with delusional frameworks.
It also does the same for Holocaust deniers, and general shitheads.
It's hard to phrase these things. I wouldn't say people were less confident in the delusional beliefs. Rather, an isolated delusional person has less general confidence - the world is "against them" and their relative weakness relative to the world is fairly evident.
Overall, success at doing horrible things requires some of the same mix that success at doing constructive things needs; confidence, support, plans and ideas. The process you describe and we all can see helps in all those things.
These might be times of abundance, but not societal abundance. Trump did not win speaking about there being societal abundance. It does not exist in the US, and certainly not in the third world. Just walk down to the Tenderloin in San Francisco or take an extended walk around Oakland, and you can see this for yourself.
We need a choice and that choice comes with cheap rent as a prerequisite. Yet our institutions strive for the opposite.
I'd disagree that it's easy to survive. Many people in good jobs are now one bad week away from ruin.
I'm surprised that you think that. What would you consider a scarce good in today's society?
Many women do not have access to or can afford feminine hygiene products in the world or US.
If high speed internet can be considered a good, it's a scarce utility in many parts of the world.
I think there's still many basic needs or utilities that are scarce...
Is that true? Everything else I've heard about Japan says poverty is common and severe there.
https://www.economist.com/asia/2015/04/04/struggling
> Last year, the Japanese government recorded relative poverty rates of 16%—defined as the share of the population living on less than half the national median income. That is the highest on record. Poverty levels have been growing at a rate of 1.3% a year since the mid-1980s. On the same definition, a study by the OECD in 2011 ranked Japan sixth from the bottom among its 34 mostly rich members. Bookshops advertise a slew of bestsellers on how to survive on an annual income of under ¥2m ($16,700), a poverty line below which millions of Japanese now live.
This is not necessarily poverty, it is just a measure of income inequality. If we read Wikipedia [1]:
> In Japan, relative poverty is defined as a state at which the income of a household is at or below half of the median household income ... According to Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the mean household net-adjusted disposable income for Japan is US$23,458.
Half of that is $11,700 and while living on that can be tough, I am not sure if that can be called poverty. Also, there is a minimal wage of 736 yen/hour (in the poorest regions) which is 117760 yen/month or $1063. So if a household has an income of $1000/month it means that one of two people is slacking off instead of working.
For comparison, in Estonia minimum monthly wage is 500 Euro (585 USD), in Russia it is $286 in Moscow and Saint-Petersburg and about $150 in other regions. Earning $1000 a month looks like a luxury for most people outside of two largest cities.
It is also important to remember that the climate is much warmer in Japan than in Russia so the the life should be cheaper, you don't have to pay for warm clothes and central heating.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_Japan
The cost of living in Estonia is much lower than Japan. You're not making an apples-to-apples comparison. The US comparison is more apt. Think about what your life would be like if you made the same amount of money as you do now but lived in Thailand (or if they did the same for the average Thai person) and you might understand why they choose to measure poverty this way.
In Japan, you get healthcare and pay as low as 5% of the cost of care. That's a pretty significant difference.
Are you implying that a post-scarcity society will be pleasant for everyone? I don't think that.
If we contemplate a post scarcity world, one needs to consider absolute measures like life expectancy and maybe education levels or something like that.
Not arguing that everyone has it easy in Japan, just that by these types of metrics it’s one of the closest places we have to look at if we want to think about post-scarcity.
I’d note this quote from the article: “The country has long prided itself on ensuring that none of its citizens falls between the social cracks. Japan’s orderly, slum-free neighbourhoods seem to confirm that. Street crime, even in Kotobuki, is minuscule.“
No one - least of all me - is arguing that there aren't poor people.
My point is that this is what a predecessor to a post-scarcity society could look like.
Do you think there won't be poor people in a post-scarcity society? Or there won't be people who fall though the cracks in that society?
I think if there are you can't really call it one. America is the richest country on Earth so if it's just about how you theoretically could have a society free of want if you totally reconfigured who has what then I guess we're on the cusp too! Great news!
I genuinely have no idea what you think a post-scarcity society is.
Where society has enough for all and attempt to allocate it in a way that all gets what they need.
Japan is about as close to that as exists. Yes, people fall though the cracks, but the same will happen in post-scarcity society. People will refuse to live by society's rules so they won't get their universal income, or they will have mental illness and unable to arrange their life to avoid suffering.
That isn't dissimilar to Japan. No one is staving to death, people get basic healthcare (mostly), but there are still people who society fails - and it isn't a lack of resources that causes that in Japan.
You grasped the idea very well. Life in the West gives you a lot of "false idols," way more than just plain income (in)security and social acceptance.
A lot of very well doing people are insecure about what you call class attributes: "have you sent your kid to an Ivy league college? is your MBA still hip enough? have you launched a tech startup by 30? have you appointed trophy diversity hires of a current trendy ethnicity to your C-Suite? is an apartment you bought shares the floor with influential people A, B, and C?" and so on.
I myself felt nearly crushed morally when my employer was unsuccessful extending my work permit in Canada after 6 years of my life there. I worked towards having "a perfect immigration case" since my mid-teens: from learning French, to having all and every pre-college education credentials that can benefit an immigration application possible, and yes, studying like crazy, wasting best years of life for a piece of paper.
Now, I'm feeling more or less recovered from that. Not only I came back with a heavy bag of cash, I was still doing more than 99% of locals just from "insubstantial" freelance gigs, had solid resume, and tons of calls from recruiters offering jobs in every country imaginable, and finally, after nearly 9 years of my life I could wake up at a time of my volition, and not what was mandated by job or college. That last thing was near surreal for me at the time.
But what was the best was not "prestige checkboxes" on the resume, nor an approving looks of female classmates from my highschool class, nor a trophy apartment I bought for pocket change when the Rouble was on its way to a seafloor. The best things from all of that were things of universal value: skills, life experience, being alive and well, fat rolodex, and knowledge "where to scratch fat cats" from places awash with cash.
Now I'm happy working in engineering consulting with a Chinese company, netting more than 99.99% of locals, having nearly careless lifestyle in comparison to what I had, and living in a city without gloomy weather. I can't believe that just 2 years ago I thought of my whole life as failure.
Another valuable thing, China has introduced me to was the entirely different, "BS Free," work culture centered on value: contract, payment, and CAD files in the morning — widgets ready in the evening, without any manager title holder in the loop.
TFA is set in Tokyo, which is decidedly not the West. Yes, you can take your skills and go to a developing nation where you will probably be much more qualified than most of the locals, but that's not the broader question at stake, nor does it really take into account what the lives of locals are like. I have faith that the world will, eventually, be filled with mostly developed nations. These problems increasingly seem to be plaguing all developed nations.
Don't get me wrong, in Russia, you have many times more people with 6 years degrees in the industry than in US. That's a hard fact. And so is China for as long as you consider the part of the workforce born after economic liberalisation in parts of the country where the industry took off.
>not the broader question at stake
Well, I was just trying break the going narrative of "Internet troll" being thrown on every "looser" or basically unpopular person with Internet presence.
I'm confused, what does the comparison of the number of higher education degrees between the US, Russia and China have to do with taking your skills to a "developing nation"? Are China and Russia supposed to be considered developing nations in this comparison?
As such, your using them as examples or counter examples of developing countries is confusing (at least to me), and I think is misinterpreting the meaning of the original statement.
Indeed. Me coming back to Russia was nowhere near a typical "downshifting" case. If I were to compete with locals on the job market, I wouldn't have lasted long. People who can ace ACM olympics prequalification tests are only passing as junior devs here.
A lot of people completely lack empathy, and our society hasn't done a good job at reducing that number.
However, this is kind of a non sequitur for the article.
I'm looking at society and being happy I will only be here 40 more years. Because I'm not optimistic about the future. Humans are being led down the path of self destruction.
You're not going to be able to look at some abstract generality like "society" and come to some conclusion about why a specific murder happened. It makes just as much sense to blame "biology" for the crime.
My first comment (the heavily downvoted one) was written with the assumption that OP was replying only to the headline.
The person who committed the murder is clearly not mentally healthy.
What about this observation puts any amount of blame on the victim?
This murder is sad, and a tragedy for anyone connected to either party.
>They don't forget, they just don't care.
>A lot of people completely lack empathy, and our society hasn't done a good job at reducing that number.
Appears to also be referring to the victim. Are you actually talking about the killer here? If so you should specify that.
I still don't see how that was confusing, but to anybody who needed a clarification: There you go.
What terrible times we live in
Exactly what happened in Germany when the new social media hate speech law (Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz) was introduced.
> He said that the NetzDG incentivizes social-media companies to “delete in doubt”—to remove any content that seems like it might be illegal […] The law leaves it up to companies like Facebook and Twitter, with their armies of moderators newly installed in Germany, to decide within 24 hours whether a post is “manifestly” illegal and remove it—a decision that would ordinarily take weeks in a German court.
More: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/05/ge...
Now that the technological Pandora's Box has been open, even such wanton destruction would require a delicate balance between restricting the tech and letting its benefits continue to shine through for the continuation of the state and the society under its umbrella; after all, all states (even allied ones) exist in competition with each other, and to weaken one's tech could mean to weaken that state or even ease its death.
I hope someone knows another way to solve the problem or to satisfactorily ameliorate it.
The internet has only become a "cesspool" because it's matured as a platform and gained enough critical mass that it can accurately reflect the noxious rat-king that is the human zeitgeist.
But the same platform that shows us the worst of ourselves can also reflect the best of ourselves, and the same freedom that allows the vile and the profane allows the creative, intellectual and profound.
The answer isn't to change the web, but to change ourselves. Hate is as much of a problem as it is on the internet because hate is accepted in the real world. Censoring the web won't solve that.
Or maybe go all the way in the other direction and have some kind of Psycho-Pass scenario where AI builds a "crime coefficient" out of a profile of your online and offline activities and estimates your emotional stability and moral alignment based on cameras monitoring your irises and skin as you surf the web, and if your hue gets too red, someone shoots you with a gun.
Personally, I accept the Internet as it is.
This is a weird false dichotomy. Its possible to think someone should be more careful and still not think they deserve to die. If I saw someone texting while driving I'd tell them to be more careful but not think they deserved to die.
EDIT: as always, I’d love to hear from the downvoters. This seems like a pretty uncontroversial observation.
I don’t believe they are the same people but don’t have data to back that up.
"Be more careful if you decide to text and drive" makes sense
"Be more careful in getting this notorious troll off a blog site" really doesn't
In some scenarios, it's also effectively saying "make sure someone else is the one that gets raped/attacked/whatever tonight".
A smoker who gets lung cancer doesn't deserve the pain and suffering, but you can make a good argument they're at least partially at fault for it.
"People should dress conservatively so they don't get raped" doesn't say they deserved to get raped, but it does blame them to some extent for what happened by implying some of it is their fault.
If you get run down intentionally by someone in a car while biking, and the first thing I say is "well, you should've worn a helmet", you're going to correctly call me a douchebag.
Nobody is actually trying to tell the security expert in this story that he should be more careful - he's dead. People in this thread are pointing out how this story highlights the importance of safe internet usage practices - much akin to how one might point to a car collision as a reason to use a helmet. That is not blaming the victim, that's encouraging others to learn from and hopefully prevent similar situations.
I don't think criticising someone is comparable to texting and driving.
In fact, you could argue that the former is the healthy exercise of the protestors' freedom of speech, and the latter is the exercise of a corporation's freedom of speech.
"Freedom of speech" != other people helping you broadcast your message or letting it go unchallenged
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heckler's_veto
There is no (and never has been) an unequivocal right to free speech in a private space.
Also, constraining the discussion of freedom of expression to government-conducted censorship is not disingenuous. It's the only context in which freedom of expression is guaranteed in the US.
While the First Amendment is one such implementation of the notion of free speech, it is not the philosophy of freedom of expression itself.
I'm only talking about implementation. Philosophical discussion of free speech is a much broader scope and not, to my understanding, what anyone else was talking about in this thread.
If they were talking about philosophy, then it wasn't clear to me and this became an argument of semantics.
2.) I agree that protests themselves are free speech and necessary part of functional society. Absolutely, people have right to loudly disagree with highly paid speakers and demagogues and pundits and politicians and what not.
3.) There are many people who don't believe 2. in particular when protesters are from opposite "side". Even if you see protest as something outside of free speech, murder is bigger threat.
4.) Murdering someone is large non-govermental threat to freedom. That point stands absolutely. "You are not careful enough if you criticise troll" is slimmy way to create situation in which you are totally for freedom, but also if they do exercise they are irresponsible and brought dead on themselves. Slimmy.
5.) I did not downvoted you.
This would normally be okay, if he was a blogger or opinion writer, but Adelstein portrays himself as an independent journalist.
Japan has very little crime and a 98% conviction rate, it's so civilized.
> a very pale and thin man with glasses parked his bicycle and walked into a police station in Fukuoka City’s Higashi ward carrying a large bag. He told the police there, “I’ve killed a man.”
Quoting wikipedia:
> In Japan, the criminal justice system has a conviction rate that exceeds 99% (Note that it includes guilty plea cases.), which has been attributed to low prosecutorial budgets impelling understaffed prosecutors to present judges with only the most obviously guilty defendants.
This has ripples all the way back through the Japanese criminal-justice system. The police don't bother to even investigate crimes with merely circumstantial evidence, because such cases are unlikely to be prosecuted. So nobody bothers to even report such crimes, and so they're far easier to get away with and more prevalent.
I wouldn't describe such an environment as particularly "civilized."
>For 2012, the US Department of Justice reported a 93% conviction rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate
I agree the high rate is troubling. We'd need to find a good middle ground. Too low and it suggests prosecutors are bringing spurious cases. Too high and it means difficult cases are likely getting dropped or the process is just for show.
Similarly I've heard that police will often juke the stats, labeling deaths that are circumstantial as suicides so as not to investigate or try to get a guilty?
Or that once you're arrested rights are questionable when it comes to interrogation techniques and due process.
> Many Western human rights organizations alleged that the high conviction rate is due to rampant use of conviction solely based on confession. Confessions are often obtained after long periods of questioning by police as those arrested may be held for up to 23 days. This can, at times, take weeks during which time the suspect is in detention and can be prevented from contacting a lawyer or family.
As a person who knows Japan quite well, this is not true. Even a very light case like seeing a stranger near a house, Japanese people will often call the police or go to a koban and request for help. In such case, a police officer will come to your house, listen to your claim, fill in papers, and will do some patrolling everyday for several days.
It is not that nobody bothers to report crimes. Japanese people bothers to report crimes, but it is up to the police department that if they should accept the damage report and do some further investigation. Of course there are priorities and because of the lack of resources some crimes won't be taken seriously when it should have.
But what do you think is, say, the date-rape report rate for Japan vs. any other country? Something that's already a source of personal shame is hard enough to report; knowing that no investigation will even be attempted in response means there's no reason to try to overcome that shame.
(Also, Japan is very willing to respond to any random report by "increasing patrols" by the low-level police-box staffers who are basically there to make it look like Something Is Being Done. Look at what reports ever get any detectives assigned to them, and the statistics will tell a far different story.)
I can say the same thing when you see a stranger entering your property that such case alone can be a crime in the Japanese law. I have seen Japanese people reporting such crimes.
> But what do you think is, say, the date-rape report rate for Japan vs. any other country? Something that's already a source of personal shame is hard enough to report; knowing that no investigation will even be attempted in response means there's no reason to try to overcome that shame.
Even in such specific type of crimes that is very difficult to investigate, some people report to the police. It is up to the police department to accept the reports and further investigate.
> Look at what reports ever get any detectives assigned to them, and the statistics will tell a far different story.
Your claim was that nobody bothers to report, but I oppose to the claim because I have seen people reporting, and thus I still conclude your claim is false.
The claim was that people don't report crime, and you claim to see people reporting suspicions. Even if it weren't just an anecdote, it isn't even addressing the point accurately.
> thus I still conclude your claim is false.
Neither of you have actually provided anything beyond generalizations and anecdotes. Any conclusion based on what's been presented so far is incredibly premature.
I have addressed the suspicion thing in my second reply to derefr. It is not just suspicion, but also a crime that is reported.
> Neither of you have actually provided anything beyond generalizations and anecdotes. Any conclusion based on what's been presented so far is incredibly premature.
I understand your point. Since I know quite well of Japanese people, I don't think it is premature. To clearly show evidences that everyone can understand is a different thing and it is also difficult in some context.
To deny the claim "So nobody bothers to even report such crimes", I have to find just one case and since I know a case I consider it false.
To prove all my claims that I have witnessed, we probably have to go to court and I consider it nonsense since it isn't realistic.
To prove a customary of Japanese people, it is very difficult and I currently have no clear evidence that I can show easily, but any Japanese people can oppose to my claims if it seem wrong.
To back up my claim using other sources, for example, I can tell you a famous date-drug rape case of Shiori Ito in Japan, which the victim reported to the police, accepted, investigated, but not prosecuted.
Here is the wiki written about her in Japanese. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/伊藤詩織
I expect Japan runs documentaries on Western countries and their crime too, only with stronger supporting evidence.
Using 2014 (seems typical) as an illustration.
0.31 per 100k citizens vs 4.88 (US) and 0.92 (UK).
Imagine the scale of conspiracy the Japanese police would have to be involved in to make us look good. The main issues I've heard of are examples of police incompetence as a side affect of not having much crime to deal with. This is like how in South Africa the triage surgeons are really good at solving for stab and gunshot wounds. It's a positive sign that the Japan police are lax on recognizing murder and a negative one that the South African ER doctors are some of the best in the world.
Are you talking from experience, or further extrapolating from the Wikipedia article you read?
[0] http://mentalfloss.com/article/12382/time-abraham-lincoln-an...
This is not victim blaming, just like police advice to "not show valuable possessions when walking through the bad part of the city" is neither victim blaming, nor surrendering of their responsibilities.
Put another way, the crime statistics may accurately capture what they measure, but what they measure may not accurately capture the current topic of discussion.
The particularly scary aspect to this was that he happened to live just a couple of hours from me. I was quite concerned he would take action on his belief; I don’t recall what threats he made, but he seemed quite serious.
The internet is a tremendous amplifier for the mundane, the good, and the evil.
The killer was infamous for spamming abusive words to anybody on the Hatena Bookmark(an online bookmark service like reddit or HN), among the many abusive words he used, somehow he always use 低能(teinou, low-intelligence) so he was called 低能先生(teinou-sensei).
He blamed others for no reason. He probably spamming everybody commented on popular articles. So he was suspected to have some mental issues.
Everybody immediately reported him for abusing and Hatena ban his accounts as soon as they found his another accounts.
The victim was a famous blogger. He was an old time "net-watcher"(a person who find funny people on the internet). He mostly deal with those who intentionally cause self-flaming on the internet for pageview or pyramid-scheme.
Once he mentioned about the existence of this infamous abuser, teinou-sensei, on this "net-watching" blog. He also hosted a event on Fukuoka and it so happens that this mentally-unstable killer was lived in Fukuoka.
The connection of his "net-watcher" persona and cyber-security expert part of his life wasn't known beforehand of his death.
You can't get any moral from this incident. It's just there are mentally unstable people in the world and many abusers on the internet are probably those people.