American teacher in Japan under fire for lessons on Japan’s history of racism | Hacker News Reader

American teacher in Japan under fire for lessons on Japan’s history of racism

washingtonpost.com

34 pointsfdmvsh13 comments

This is an excellent lesson in the power of cognitive dissonance, similar to the story of Ignaz Semmelweis (src: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/semmelweis ).

The takeaway? Keep in mind the Stoic phrase: "Pay attention to your [perceived] enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes."

It would be interesting to be able to read more excerpts of different countries' textbooks translated. This is done frequently for Israeli and Palestinian textbooks due to the number of well-funded NGOs paying attention to that conflict, but it's not as easy to find information on, say, what Turkish textbooks say about their history, or what Japanese textbooks say about theirs.

Startups? No.

Hacking? No.

Covered in a mainstream news source? Yes.

Probably not hacker news.

I found it to be very interesting and appreciate it being shared here.

Condescend elsewhere.

No condescension; I just said it's not hacker news, and indeed, it looks like it got zapped.

Interestingly enough, there's another Japan story on the front page:

http://neojaponisme.com/2011/11/28/the-great-shift-in-japane...

Despite not being about startups or hacking, per se, that one strikes me as being much more on topic. It's more "deeply" (rather than shallowly) interesting, it's informative, and it tells you about something that most of us probably know little about. It's not political, it's not designed to anger you... it's just interesting.

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Better to be posted on Reddit. Don't you think?

But this isn't really that interesting though, it's one of those stories meant to get you riled up, isn't it. "Outrage" stories are plentiful in this injust world of ours, and nearly all of them are, in many ways, way more important than hacking and startups. We could fill the entire site with them if we wanted.

I mean, it's pretty common knowledge that Japan (like many other countries) has some issues with its history and culture that some people there have not come to terms with 100%. If this is actually news to anyone, you should spend more time reading something like The Economist.

Thank god, a hacker news with nothing except news on startups and hacking would be much less varied, less intellectual, and very boring indeed.

From the HN Guidelines:[1]

"Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did."

[1] - http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I have enough of this silly "karma" junk that I don't mind taking the hit to transmit some "cultural norms" regarding site content. If no one does that, how will anyone know? Voting in and of itself is not enough... it'd be easy enough to organize a voting ring to start voting up any old thing. And way more people are interested in politics than are interested in esoteric things like Node vs Go vs Erlang.

> If no one does that, how will anyone know?

Common sense?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com