Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

The hot topic in international diplomacy is "trade wars."  The idea that a major economic power, by blockading access to certain economic resources to foreign firms, can somehow hurt foreign economic interests to such a degree that the foreign country in question has no choice but to make economic concessions.  The idea is rooted in a "zero-sum" mentality, whereby economic victory and resulting benefits of one country and its firms is correlated with economic defeat and economic costs of another country and their companies.

Imagine you are sitting in an academic conference, listening to presentations by scholars from a field for which you have little background knowledge.  Among the audience they are members who are from the same field as the presenters, and they listen intently to the presentations.  Because they were able to comprehend the contents so thoroughly, at the Q&A session, they ask extremely detailed questions about the research presented, and a highly technical conversation between the presenter and the inquirer follows.  You, people from other fields, neither understood the presentations nor the questions.

Honestly, keeping in touch with people is not a forte of the author's.  Despite having thousands of people that he acquainted (some deeply, many quite briefly and superficially) accumulated as friends on Facebook, he not only barely speak to any of them, but do not even bother to check up on what they share with their friends publicly.  The resulting lack of information is so extensive that he is even completely ignorant of big life events of theirs, like weddings, birth of children, moving to a different country, or changing jobs.  He can only hope that they know more about his current developments.

The previous post pointed out that foreign cultures that seem "cool" can an enthusiastic following among foreign audience partially because the negative social contexts that the "cool" culture are not transplanted in foreign countries.  There is the example of Chicanos, an inner-city Latino culture in the US often associated with gang violence and poverty, scrubbed clean of all the negatives in Japan, where followers, short of trying to become Chicanos themselves, attempt to channel the supposed central values of honor, respect, love, and family.