For berserk, there are two etymologies, one is bare-shirt (suggesting that the warriors wore no armor) or bear shirt (wore bear skins). It's in Old Norse, but doesn't appear in Old English. My Old English teacher favored the bear shirt etymology, because of the etymology of the word bear, 'brown one' in Indo European, This is because the actual word for bear (*rktos) was a taboo word, and no one wanted to summon or anger one of those bad boys. Which is precisely the opposite of having something like 'going postal' become an everyday phrase of annoyance.
I should also note that 'gawp' tends to have a positive meaning, so it is not the right word. Appalled or aghast might be closer, but there's not a word for when something just short circuits any sort of judgement and you just stand there, slack-jawed.
Interesting stuff. My own feeling is that a big problem arises when people take positions that they don't really have a stake in, but use it to fight against the other side. This raises the question of whether an issue is something that a person is really committed to or if it is 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend'. So when Charles argues, after a long history of arguing for libertarian principles, how front doors of ICE facilities need National Guard protection, I wonder if he's for real or just trolling or possibly just doesn't know the difference.
It is rather illiberal to argue that someone's opinions doesn't matter, but I can think of a number of examples on both sides of people seemingly taking on opinions that don't really have a lot to do with them but arguing for them vehemently. This goes hand in hand with the larger issue of astroturfing and fake identities. It may be a lost cause, especially for larger platforms, but we can try to do a Candide and cultivate our gardens.
I don't know if it is because I have been digging around the archives, but my sense is that Charles is trying to replicate those glorious conversations of old between liberal and conservative voices. Unfortunately, Charles (and Grok, I assume) are really only a pale imitation of those commenters past. First rule of holes, Charles.
The debt is owned primarily by the BOJ (about half) and then domestic banks and insurance companies.
Japan has an additional problem with Tokyo and other urban areas taking up all the economic growth and depopulation in rural areas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaL-ocOtooM
"If just [Tokyo] was its own country, it would be the eighth largest in the world, ranking ahead of Italy and falling just behind Canada."
about 4), one advantage Japan has is availability of public transport, hard to imagine Grandpa Toshio going to work if he has to drive a car there and back.
They are going to revoke permanent residency visas of foreigners not paying taxes or dodging social insurance contributions. I will point out that it is a much larger number of Japanese who are doing this, and it is exacerbated by business owners either gaming the system so people work just below the reporting requirement or paying under the table which put additional pressure on the system. But note how they [meaning the Japanese government] do this in a way that goes below the radar.
Another article related to citizenship here in Japan.
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/16060490
Michael, thanks for that. Some could take my posting about the 80 year old rugby players as some kind of Japanese exceptionalism, but my point was that Japan was adapting to their demographic and, as wj points out, Japan is just the tip of the iceberg.
That's a pretty evergreen topic for me, and there's a lot to discuss on that. Is it going to be a crash, or a controlled belly landing? Opinions differ.
I'll put together a post of youtube links for people to watch today or tomorrow.
I'm happy to tinker, and I would like it to be usable. I'm trying to figure out what I need to do to make it more smartphone friendly and wondering how many posts should be on the front page. After things settle down with classes, I should have time to try some more things.
I'd note that Bill Kristol wrote an internal memorandum for the Republican party essentially saying that passing health care under Clinton would mean the end of the Republican party. The memorandum is here
"The President's health care proposal is the most important domestic political event of his presidency. Its defeat is the most important immediate goal of the Republican party. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.
So it was shitty that Obama undercut Clinton, but Republican opposition was pretty much a constant, so one could argue that it wasn't a policy choice, it was what Obama had to do to undercut Republican opposition. This isn't to give Obama a pass, it is just to acknowledge that these policy arguments were not playing out on a blank slate.
First, thanks GftNC for the additional link, it's really appreciated.
I'm going to start categorizing posts and this one is Politics, though I think it is more (though isn't everything nowadays) I wish Klein had taken a bit more onboard from Coates and not kept trying to nail Coates down on where he would draw the line. I appreciate that they must have had discussions before and Klein really must have taken offense at Coates saying that he whitewashed Kirk, but Coates could have asked what Charlie Kirk would have to had said before Klein would have to conclude that he shouldn't write about Kirk. I also thought it was telling that Coates pointed out that MLK was actually speaking about love and he got assassinated. Klein should get credit for not hiding, but I still think he should take a dose of self-reflection.
Great points, novakant. I don't know as much as I should about Iran and its history, so I agree that Wood's background and in-country experience is not something I dismiss out of hand. Of course, claiming to represent civilization isn't something restricted to Iranians, Stephen Miller said this at Charlie Kirk's memorial We are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion. Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello. Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry.
Erika stands on the shoulders of thousands of years of warriors, of women who raised up families, raised up city, raised up industry, raised up civilization, who pulled us out of the caves and the darkness into the light.
Words fail.
I would recommend Marjane Satrapi's graphic novels Persopolis (1 and 2) are excellent and her newest, Women, Life and Freedom is something I'm getting for my school library.
bc, thanks for this too. I knew of Charlie Kirk, but I didn't follow much, so I'm not going to try and dig up stuff, I think that was a mode of commenting that caused/causes a lot of problems (remember fisking?)
However, I have to say that his turn to Christianity seems a bit of a grift. In a podcast recently, he claimed it was 5th grade when he saw the light, but there is no sign of that until after Trump's second election. While it's possible that his marriage was an important influence (his wife graduated from Liberty University), the claim about the 5th grade conversion is probably a lie.
btw, you can see turning point ads (and find other ads) here
https://www.ispot.tv/ad/1E9X/turning-point-usa-help-us-take-back-our-country
There are a few with nods to Christianity, but those seem to be in conjunction with Trump trying to please that demographic.
Thanks bc! Glad you liked it. I had a checkered career as a horn player (I've hung it up) and one disappointment is that I never played much French orchestral music. I mentioned that to the conductor of the university orchestra here and he said well, French orchestral music, as opposed to German (and I suppose that Tchaikovsky et al is really stuff in the German tradition) requires a lot more from the strings.
I worked on a paper for a while where I argued that we might want to consider autism a cultural trait. Here in Japan, students often behave in ways that are similar to what people have said are symptoms of autism. Unfortunately, though I thought it was very enlightening (and continues to be as I deal with student post covid and see their adaptations to changed circumstances) I was never able to get the right tone. It may have been, like novakant says, I was instrumentalizing autism to deal with some debates about Japanese students and education, but I did think I was on to something interesting.
btw, I love the first link with the links to papers in each section. So much better than trying to follow Youtube vids!!
1912, from German Autismus, coined 1912 by Swiss psychiatrist Paul Bleuler from Greek autos "self" (see auto-) + -ismos suffix of action or of state (see -ism). The notion is of "morbid self-absorption."
but I like your etymology better. I was looking for some indication of what Bleuler was thinking, but a quick search didn't find anything.
wonkie, that's a neat observation, and I will shamelessly use it to launch into what is happening with the archive. There are just under 9000 posts and here are the categories with how many posts in each. The categories are non-exclusive and uncategorized is the default
abroad 49
books 6
corruption 32
culture-and-stuff 200
current-affairs 778
economy 59
energy-environment 5
ethics 52
film 2
food-and-drink 6
foreign-affairs 97
geekstuff 87
health-care 81
humor 131
iraq-and-terrorism 867
law 224
maher-arar 55
music 4
national-security 18
Not Yet A Buddha 136
nothing-else-fit 329
policy-wonkery 36
politics 2,050
religion 59
science 56
sports 36
technical-issues 93
telecom 40
television 2
torture-and-detention 138
travel 5
uncategorized 3,167
versifying 25
web-tech 10
Weblogs
weblogs 7
what-would-brian-boitano-do 162
Why Are They Saying Those Things? 177
I just added that to the sidebar (the design only has a right sidebar instead of two and I've not implemented a pulldown menu for either the archive date or the categories because I'm dropping in to try and catch errors) The founders up to hilzoy and publius were pretty careful about adding categories. After that, Eric didn't really categorize but Gary did, so at about 2010, you only have the occasional category and it looks like in 2012, they just aren't used. I've never really used a category and I'm still trying to find the origin of what-would-brian-boitano-do.
We also had tags, but only fiddler and Gary used them to any great extent.
Finally, hsh’s joke reminds me of my favorite jokes where a guy goes to Picasso while he is standing next to his portrait of his wife Jacqueline, and the guy says ‘geez, how can you say that looks like your wife? It doesn’t look anything like it’. Picasso says ‘do you have a picture of your wife?’. The guy gets a photo out of his wallet and shows it to Picasso, and says ‘this is exactly what my wife looks like’. Picasso looks at it for a moment and then says ‘your wife has a very small head…’
Ahhh, got it. I'll have to slap Hartmut on the wrist /joke/
In my defense, I was more suggesting that Lei Feng was closer (and I wish I had remembered Stakhanov) and saying that all four have some commonalities. While I appreciate taking time, the difference between Kirk and the other three is that only in the US case were people fired from their jobs.
Even though I cannot tell you how letdown I am by Ezra Klein's recent stuff and I have found Corey Robin to be a bit glib, this youtube dialogue between the two is quite good (here's the deadtree link, though it may disappear behind the paywall soon)
Here's a bit Klein: What we were talking about with the Red Scare, it took a long time to build that. The Trump administration is speed-running this — very fast.
Robin: This is the scary part of the story: The Second Red Scare succeeded.
Part of what deprived McCarthy of oxygen wasn’t just that he went after the military. It was that they had really drummed out — at the level of what their ambitions were, they had succeeded in stopping the New Deal from where it was heading. His electoral returns were diminishing to some degree.
The parallel I would highlight is just as the Red Scare came about to stop the New Deal, the MAGA movement has come about to erase all of the things that AOC listed.
I did some surfing about this and I see what bc is getting riled up about was the proclamation that nous linked to and what I was thinking about was what broke out over the prayer for Kirk LATimes article
Here is AOC's response to the Resolution
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR3D0MkqjQU
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “WTF moments at cultural borders”
For berserk, there are two etymologies, one is bare-shirt (suggesting that the warriors wore no armor) or bear shirt (wore bear skins). It's in Old Norse, but doesn't appear in Old English. My Old English teacher favored the bear shirt etymology, because of the etymology of the word bear, 'brown one' in Indo European, This is because the actual word for bear (*rktos) was a taboo word, and no one wanted to summon or anger one of those bad boys. Which is precisely the opposite of having something like 'going postal' become an everyday phrase of annoyance.
"
Hartmut, holy shit...
I should also note that 'gawp' tends to have a positive meaning, so it is not the right word. Appalled or aghast might be closer, but there's not a word for when something just short circuits any sort of judgement and you just stand there, slack-jawed.
On “Where are the 5 words?”
Interesting stuff. My own feeling is that a big problem arises when people take positions that they don't really have a stake in, but use it to fight against the other side. This raises the question of whether an issue is something that a person is really committed to or if it is 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend'. So when Charles argues, after a long history of arguing for libertarian principles, how front doors of ICE facilities need National Guard protection, I wonder if he's for real or just trolling or possibly just doesn't know the difference.
It is rather illiberal to argue that someone's opinions doesn't matter, but I can think of a number of examples on both sides of people seemingly taking on opinions that don't really have a lot to do with them but arguing for them vehemently. This goes hand in hand with the larger issue of astroturfing and fake identities. It may be a lost cause, especially for larger platforms, but we can try to do a Candide and cultivate our gardens.
"
I don't know if it is because I have been digging around the archives, but my sense is that Charles is trying to replicate those glorious conversations of old between liberal and conservative voices. Unfortunately, Charles (and Grok, I assume) are really only a pale imitation of those commenters past. First rule of holes, Charles.
"
a good survey of the Portland situation!=criticisms for both sides
On “Japan unleashed”
There is a lot of discussion about Sanseito and Kamiya that I'll probably get to in another post.
"
About selling off debt,
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/09/19/economy/bank-of-japan-september-rates/
Fun quote from the article
It would take more than 100 years to sell off all the ETFs held by the BOJ at the speed decided on Friday, Ueda added.
"
Michael, interesting points. IANAE either, but some connected points
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/09/19/economy/bank-of-japan-september-rates/
The debt is owned primarily by the BOJ (about half) and then domestic banks and insurance companies.
Japan has an additional problem with Tokyo and other urban areas taking up all the economic growth and depopulation in rural areas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaL-ocOtooM
"If just [Tokyo] was its own country, it would be the eighth largest in the world, ranking ahead of Italy and falling just behind Canada."
about 4), one advantage Japan has is availability of public transport, hard to imagine Grandpa Toshio going to work if he has to drive a car there and back.
On “Where are the 5 words?”
https://teachdemocracy.org/bill-of-rights-in-action/bria-16-3-c-the-rescue-movement-pushing-the-limits-of-free-speech
Wonder why no one called in the military or even the national guard during these protests. Funny that.
On “Citizenship”
Leave it to Japan to show you how it is done
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/16057632
They are going to revoke permanent residency visas of foreigners not paying taxes or dodging social insurance contributions. I will point out that it is a much larger number of Japanese who are doing this, and it is exacerbated by business owners either gaming the system so people work just below the reporting requirement or paying under the table which put additional pressure on the system. But note how they [meaning the Japanese government] do this in a way that goes below the radar.
Another article related to citizenship here in Japan.
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/16060490
On “Where are the 5 words?”
wj, I always wonder if Charles misses the sarcasm in his responses...
On “Japan unleashed”
Michael, thanks for that. Some could take my posting about the 80 year old rugby players as some kind of Japanese exceptionalism, but my point was that Japan was adapting to their demographic and, as wj points out, Japan is just the tip of the iceberg.
On “Citizenship”
That's a pretty evergreen topic for me, and there's a lot to discuss on that. Is it going to be a crash, or a controlled belly landing? Opinions differ.
I'll put together a post of youtube links for people to watch today or tomorrow.
On “Ad futurum”
I'm happy to tinker, and I would like it to be usable. I'm trying to figure out what I need to do to make it more smartphone friendly and wondering how many posts should be on the front page. After things settle down with classes, I should have time to try some more things.
On “Ezra Coates DESTROYS Ta-Nehisi Klein!!!”
I'd note that Bill Kristol wrote an internal memorandum for the Republican party essentially saying that passing health care under Clinton would mean the end of the Republican party. The memorandum is here
"The President's health care proposal is the most important domestic political event of his presidency. Its defeat is the most important immediate goal of the Republican party. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.
So it was shitty that Obama undercut Clinton, but Republican opposition was pretty much a constant, so one could argue that it wasn't a policy choice, it was what Obama had to do to undercut Republican opposition. This isn't to give Obama a pass, it is just to acknowledge that these policy arguments were not playing out on a blank slate.
"
Glad you found us Marty!
"
First, thanks GftNC for the additional link, it's really appreciated.
I'm going to start categorizing posts and this one is Politics, though I think it is more (though isn't everything nowadays) I wish Klein had taken a bit more onboard from Coates and not kept trying to nail Coates down on where he would draw the line. I appreciate that they must have had discussions before and Klein really must have taken offense at Coates saying that he whitewashed Kirk, but Coates could have asked what Charlie Kirk would have to had said before Klein would have to conclude that he shouldn't write about Kirk. I also thought it was telling that Coates pointed out that MLK was actually speaking about love and he got assassinated. Klein should get credit for not hiding, but I still think he should take a dose of self-reflection.
On “Ran, ran, ran, I blog Iran”
Great points, novakant. I don't know as much as I should about Iran and its history, so I agree that Wood's background and in-country experience is not something I dismiss out of hand. Of course, claiming to represent civilization isn't something restricted to Iranians, Stephen Miller said this at Charlie Kirk's memorial
We are the storm. And our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion. Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello. Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry.
Erika stands on the shoulders of thousands of years of warriors, of women who raised up families, raised up city, raised up industry, raised up civilization, who pulled us out of the caves and the darkness into the light.
Words fail.
I would recommend Marjane Satrapi's graphic novels Persopolis (1 and 2) are excellent and her newest, Women, Life and Freedom is something I'm getting for my school library.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/mar/16/marjane-satrapi-interview-persepolis-woman-life-freedom
On “Precursors”
bc, thanks for this too. I knew of Charlie Kirk, but I didn't follow much, so I'm not going to try and dig up stuff, I think that was a mode of commenting that caused/causes a lot of problems (remember fisking?)
However, I have to say that his turn to Christianity seems a bit of a grift. In a podcast recently, he claimed it was 5th grade when he saw the light, but there is no sign of that until after Trump's second election. While it's possible that his marriage was an important influence (his wife graduated from Liberty University), the claim about the 5th grade conversion is probably a lie.
btw, you can see turning point ads (and find other ads) here
https://www.ispot.tv/ad/1E9X/turning-point-usa-help-us-take-back-our-country
There are a few with nods to Christianity, but those seem to be in conjunction with Trump trying to please that demographic.
On “Un morceau de blog”
Thanks bc! Glad you liked it. I had a checkered career as a horn player (I've hung it up) and one disappointment is that I never played much French orchestral music. I mentioned that to the conductor of the university orchestra here and he said well, French orchestral music, as opposed to German (and I suppose that Tchaikovsky et al is really stuff in the German tradition) requires a lot more from the strings.
"
I worked on a paper for a while where I argued that we might want to consider autism a cultural trait. Here in Japan, students often behave in ways that are similar to what people have said are symptoms of autism. Unfortunately, though I thought it was very enlightening (and continues to be as I deal with student post covid and see their adaptations to changed circumstances) I was never able to get the right tone. It may have been, like novakant says, I was instrumentalizing autism to deal with some debates about Japanese students and education, but I did think I was on to something interesting.
btw, I love the first link with the links to papers in each section. So much better than trying to follow Youtube vids!!
"
Nous, enlightenment!
"
Hartmut,
Etymon online has this
1912, from German Autismus, coined 1912 by Swiss psychiatrist Paul Bleuler from Greek autos "self" (see auto-) + -ismos suffix of action or of state (see -ism). The notion is of "morbid self-absorption."
but I like your etymology better. I was looking for some indication of what Bleuler was thinking, but a quick search didn't find anything.
wonkie, that's a neat observation, and I will shamelessly use it to launch into what is happening with the archive. There are just under 9000 posts and here are the categories with how many posts in each. The categories are non-exclusive and uncategorized is the default
abroad 49
books 6
corruption 32
culture-and-stuff 200
current-affairs 778
economy 59
energy-environment 5
ethics 52
film 2
food-and-drink 6
foreign-affairs 97
geekstuff 87
health-care 81
humor 131
iraq-and-terrorism 867
law 224
maher-arar 55
music 4
national-security 18
Not Yet A Buddha 136
nothing-else-fit 329
policy-wonkery 36
politics 2,050
religion 59
science 56
sports 36
technical-issues 93
telecom 40
television 2
torture-and-detention 138
travel 5
uncategorized 3,167
versifying 25
web-tech 10
Weblogs
weblogs 7
what-would-brian-boitano-do 162
Why Are They Saying Those Things? 177
I just added that to the sidebar (the design only has a right sidebar instead of two and I've not implemented a pulldown menu for either the archive date or the categories because I'm dropping in to try and catch errors) The founders up to hilzoy and publius were pretty careful about adding categories. After that, Eric didn't really categorize but Gary did, so at about 2010, you only have the occasional category and it looks like in 2012, they just aren't used. I've never really used a category and I'm still trying to find the origin of what-would-brian-boitano-do.
We also had tags, but only fiddler and Gary used them to any great extent.
Finally, hsh’s joke reminds me of my favorite jokes where a guy goes to Picasso while he is standing next to his portrait of his wife Jacqueline, and the guy says ‘geez, how can you say that looks like your wife? It doesn’t look anything like it’. Picasso says ‘do you have a picture of your wife?’. The guy gets a photo out of his wallet and shows it to Picasso, and says ‘this is exactly what my wife looks like’. Picasso looks at it for a moment and then says ‘your wife has a very small head…’
On “Precursors”
lj: The Horst Wessel comparison came first.
Ahhh, got it. I'll have to slap Hartmut on the wrist /joke/
In my defense, I was more suggesting that Lei Feng was closer (and I wish I had remembered Stakhanov) and saying that all four have some commonalities. While I appreciate taking time, the difference between Kirk and the other three is that only in the US case were people fired from their jobs.
Even though I cannot tell you how letdown I am by Ezra Klein's recent stuff and I have found Corey Robin to be a bit glib, this youtube dialogue between the two is quite good (here's the deadtree link, though it may disappear behind the paywall soon)
Here's a bit
Klein: What we were talking about with the Red Scare, it took a long time to build that. The Trump administration is speed-running this — very fast.
Robin: This is the scary part of the story: The Second Red Scare succeeded.
Part of what deprived McCarthy of oxygen wasn’t just that he went after the military. It was that they had really drummed out — at the level of what their ambitions were, they had succeeded in stopping the New Deal from where it was heading. His electoral returns were diminishing to some degree.
The parallel I would highlight is just as the Red Scare came about to stop the New Deal, the MAGA movement has come about to erase all of the things that AOC listed.
"
I did some surfing about this and I see what bc is getting riled up about was the proclamation that nous linked to and what I was thinking about was what broke out over the prayer for Kirk
LATimes article
Here is AOC's response to the Resolution
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR3D0MkqjQU
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.