“resentment is a poison you take hoping the other person dies”
That is a brilliant line.
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Can I ask why not?
I know. His comment was not good. There are people who are the worst of the worst and of course you celebrate their death.
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I hold that no death should be celebrated, and a situation which can only be resolved with death is a failure of all involved. Rather than rejoicing at the guilty meeting their end (as is sometimes necessary), we should reflect on what about our society allowed things to go so far, and what can be done differently in the future.
Some of the people mentioned were/are not able to cause so much harm on their own. One way or another, they were/are enabled by a society which had ample opportunity to put a stop to things early, but didn’t.
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Hope you talk this way about every US president too.
Ok. Let’s not bring those people into question even though we should.
So someone who killed someone on broad daylight— just as we have witnessed now with no chance of equivocation that he was the murderer— should not be put to death?
Why send someone to prison when he deprived someone else the right to live? I don’t agree with your rationale. Nonetheless, No need to argue. I was just surprised by your beliefs but everyone has a right to their own opinion.
For example, I believe life begins when there’s a heartbeat. An egg being fertilized and when there’s no heartbeat and no complex nervous system is not a human being to me. But I don’t get upset at those who believe life begins at conception. Therefore, no one is correct in my eyes on where life begins.
Having an abortion in early stages when there’s no heartbeat is not murder in my opinion but many people disagree with me. That’s ok. We all have different beliefs on what’s right and wrong and we should not turn on each other just because of that.
I simply disagree with you here as much as you disagree with me.
I never argued the guilty shouldn’t be stopped or punished or killed. Only that it is ok to mourn even their death, and that their death should not be celebrated. I gave the reason why.
You can punish/kill all of the guilty as much as you like forever, but never fix anything
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I don’t think its bad form.
Some people might argue that this is the most Abe has been in the news in the west in a very long time, if ever. My parent’s had never heard of him until now and asked me about him unprompted. Many people aren’t familiar with him and it is certainly a question in some peoples mind of “who was this person” and “is this someone I should be mourning the loss of”. In that context, I think it would be horribly unfortunate if we didn’t also consider the less favorable things they have done. A lot of people are interested in learning more about what kind of person/politician he was, and that requires knowing both the good and the bad.
I think it would be truly bad form if there were individuals who would label people who want to inform about the latter as “bad form” 
To say that someones faults shouldnt be talked about when they are becoming a large topic and their name is reaching many new ears seems dishonest.
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RIP Abe.
I’m still very surprise to see there seems to be no security measures around. Also, on the footage, we don’t see people running after the first shot. They really didn’t expect something to this to happen, no?
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In Japan I will see a poster for a politician and they’ll be like standing right there xD
Security really isn’t like it is for the US. Which I think is generally good conceptually until something like this happens.
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No one is looking at these posts and saying surely they’re just informing me of their faults by calling them an ultranationalist that deny a countries war crimes despite Japan having paid for it. They saw complaining got them money so they just come back to complain because they want more not because they actually feel any effect from said crime.
Dude wasn’t even in power anymore and was generally well liked. Politics is a dirty game so surely he’s got skeletons but who doesn’t? I just think stuff like was posted earlier is largely just anti-Japanese propaganda.
It’s easy to tear people down for their faults. It’s not impressive, especially right after said person died. Like I’m not gonna be so black and white and say no ones death is worth celebrating but surely Abe was not in that camp.
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安倍さんの冥福を祈りします。
I think the first post that you criticized was informative and even suggested that you read their wikipedia page. Which, I did for the first time thanks to them.
I don’t think its fair that you get to talk down to people for bringing up negative things about a person in the news. His death is irrelevant, its the fact that many people (myself included) are just now learning more about him or about him in the first place. In such a critical time, I don’t find it very respectable to try to frame any negative comments as immoral.
You can criticize how they make negative comments. Be my guest. I just don’t like that you framed it like making any negative comment puts people below you morally somehow.
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Well, I thought I might as well add this, even though I expressed my unpopular indifference earlier. My grandmother in Okinawa is sad over Abe, even though she didn’t like him. She survived the Battle of Okinawa, and she was actually happy when Hirohito died.
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I am not a conservative and I did not agree with Abe’s politics. I still find this terribly sad for Japan. These kind of events make people feel unsafe and they open the door for imitation violence. Civil society and democracy are built on non-violent political disagreement. Furthermore, Abe was not Hitler, was not even a dictator, and just did not deserve to be shot in broad daylight.
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This year and well, I guess every year since Corona started has just been getting even more nuts as time goes on. I honestly never expected this kind of thing to happen here in Japan as gun crime is incredibly rare (maybe only 10 incidents a year).
According to the current news developments, it appears that the assailant held a grudge against Abe because he had some sort of relationship with a religious organisation/cult that his mother made a huge donation to which then made life pretty difficult financially.
母親が団体にのめり込み、家庭生活がめちゃくちゃに
I know they write 団体 here which only really means ‘organisation’ but well if there’s anything that I’ve been learning lately, it’s that Japanese news is full of euphemisms and very indirect statements. I’m no expert on this subject at all but there are quite a lot of dodgy religious cults floating around (just google Aum Shinrikyo / Sokka Gakkai) and anything that comes out of these things is never that great.
If anything, I thought the motivation would be because of all the right wing tendencies the man had / policies that he supported but yeah, when I think about it, these types of 団体 groups are related in pushing policies / rallying to causes / donating to causes, etc.
The other thing I’ve noted is how this has kinda stirred up a lot of scapegoating, there’s already been loads of silly rumours/conspiracies going around online about how the murderer (who is very much Japanese) is a Zainichi Korean / Chinese / something else - basically foreign… it just gives me a -_- face at how much misinformation there is out there nowadays.
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Well if you are operating in bad faith you sure could frame it that way.
Enjoy your day.
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Because I don’t know much about him. He’s just a famous name for me. I can’t relate to Abe at all, he’s in such a different world compared to me.
Sadness is a strong emotion and I don’t have it for all the people that die.
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I was bummed out that Kazuki Takahashi died, though.
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I think it’s terrible news to hear about the assassination of Abe. We live in a world were politicians are increasingly threatened as par course for being in public life. Not agreeing with their political stance, or personal dislike, can never justify something like this.
The killing of Abe reminds me a lot of the murder of Sweden’s then presiding prime minister Olof Palme back in 1986. Assassination of Olof Palme - Wikipedia.
In the end, society can’t defend itself from individuals that are dead-set on killing someone. Politicians already have security details, but if you’ll appear on scheduled public events, there will always be opportunities for some disturbed individual to cause harm. In this case, the guy had made multiple home-made guns. Not much society can do in a case like this to stop them.
That being said, as a society we CAN try to reconsider how the current political discourse makes out politicians to be the scum of the earth basically. Political opponents are vilified and disparaged, rather than having their policies argued against. There is sadly a lot of hate-mongering that is hurtful to political discourse today.
We need public discussions about divisive issues, but without the spewing of hateful propaganda about the opposition. We need to keep the political debates about the political ideas themselves. We need much less appeal to emotion and more consideration of the facts as they are, levelheaded and calm reasoning about the different policy ideas on how to address issues - not focused on individual politicians, but on what they stand for.
Democracy is like any relationship, something that requires a lot of hard work to make it work and prosper.
No one likes a toxic relationship…
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