American teacher in Japan under fire for lessons on Japan’s history of racism (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.