I said nothing about the Japanese being owed anything. But if you take everything away from someone then they will fight to the end because they have nothing left to lose.
Japan had lost the war. Didn't mean they couldn't make the Allies bleed a hell of a lot more.
While that is generally true, keep in mind that we did not in fact take everything away... rarely is that really the case...
If they REALLY had nothing left to lose, the nuking and Russia invading wouldn't have caused a surrender.
The outcome was no longer in doubt from June 1942, yet they still kept fighting.
While I think that date is a bit early, I understand the argument for it.
Regardless of the date, the point is that they simply wouldn't listen to reason.
When you have someone who is uncontrollable, be it a country or a child who is not responsive to reason or talking, you have to turn to violence.
Did all those years of sanctions against Iraq do anything to Saddam? No. Did invading and sending it 100K+ troops to force the issue work? Yes.
Now maybe 14 years later the outcome was messy and we could have done it better, but the 10 years before that with sanctions did nothing.
You more or less have to hit someone who is misbehaving with a stick enough times or hard enough until they decide that another course of action is desired.
It is a shame that humans are that way, but they are.
Another recent example is Turkey and Russia. Russia was repeated flying over Southern Turkey, Turkey protested over and over, while being ignored by Russia.
Finally Turkey put an AMRAAM into one of the Russian planes and shot it down, as if to say "can you hear me now?"
Russia protested, but ultimately it was a bunch of words and they changed what they were doing.
Several of the criminals in the rape of Nanking were tried and found guilty in court. When will the criminals responsible for dropping nuclear bombs see their day in court?
To this day, a lot of people in Japan refuse to accept that Nanking even happened.
As for the nuclear bombs, we won, they lost, that is how it works. We don't see them as war crimes, thus no one will be tried for it (and they are all dead anyway).
That's a really simplistic view. You don't back someone into a corner and get to act surprised when they get aggressive.
Japan started it long before Pearl Harbor when they invaded China. They were clearly on a path to war, our oil embargo may have pushed them, but they did have the option of peace, they simply didn't take it.
In addition, regardless of any economic causes to the war, none of that justifies what Japan then did, from Pearl Harbor to Bataan to the murder of millions of Chinese civilians, to the murder of POWs, etc.
For any faults on the American side, they are minor compared to what the Japanese did.
Meanwhile in *another* alternate universe where atomic weapons weren't used either
And in another one, without the knowledge and experience of the use of these weapons, WWIII ends up happening because too many people simply don't know how bad nuclear weapons really are.
The US governmentt never stated that officially, as for scholars... Let them spend some time in a foxhole.
Amen to that... too many "smart people" have ideas and opinions on things they have only read about...
A more useful exercise is to interview and ask the US soldiers who fought on Iwo Jima and Okinawa and were facing having to invade Japan itself if they thought it was a good idea.
Yep, the people who tend to argue against it didn't live in that time.
Oh sure, there were people back then who didn't like the idea of it, there always will be. But at the end of the day, most Americans were tired of war and wanted it to end. If blowing up a few Japanese cities ensured that happened, then so be it.
It is worth noting from President Truman's speech on the Atomic Bomb:
"We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war.
It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such number that and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which they are already well aware."
The reason survivors of the nuclear bombs are horrified
I'm not shocked they are horrified, I probably would be as well if I lived through that.
But their anger is mis-directed. They should be angry at their leaders who lead them into that mess, their military for allowing it, and the Emperor for not surrendering when the war was CLEARLY lost, long before August 1945.
Both parents of one of my closest friends lived through the bombing in Hiroshima (and still live there) and they seem fine with it (as in it's a part of a sad part of history, but it's in the past. I don't think they think about it much, it was 70 yeas ago and they were only 3 and 4 at the time). I used to live in Hiroshima and have a few friends who live there, nobody is hung up in it or anything.
Nor should they be... Japan DID start the war after all...
That being said, it was a Japan that no longer exists, a Japan 70 years into history.
Today the Japanese people are our allies and they have changed their ways. So am I upset about Pearl Harbor today? Nope, not at all. It was terrible, but the people alive today in Japan are not responsible for that. The people who are, are all dead.
Needless to say they had plenty of opportunities to surrender before Hiroshima, after Hiroshima and before Nagasaki and they didn't. The Japanese minister of war was running a total war against the Americans until the Japanese Emperor discovered his motivations and decided and order to surrender after Nagasaki. The Japanese were actually warned about Hiroshima or rather than a blast out of proportion with anything previously seen and asked to surrender. They simply ignored the notice.
^ Yep, this, pretty much this...
It is worth noting that I don't think ANYONE doubts the outcome of the war either way. Clearly the outcome was no longer in doubt.
The question was, how long would it take and how many more lives would be lost? Another 6 months? 1 million more dead and millions more wounded?
Would that have been a "better" outcome? People love to argue about what did happen and love to ignore what would have happened if reality had been changed.
"Not nuking" doesn't equal "everything else stays exactly the same". Lots of other things would have changed.
For all we know, without the knowledge and clear evidence of what happened to civilians there, WWIII might have happened.
The Japanese were already on the brink of surrender (and there had been a government coup related to this matter). And what finally pushed them over the edge towards surrender was the invasion of the Russians into the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin, and some of Japan's overseas occupied territories on August 9.
That is one way to read it... but it isn't absolute...
We'll never really know what would have happened, but at the end of the day, everyone was tired of war and wanted it to stop. The Japs had attacked Pearl Harbor and killed nearly 3,000 Americans, then many more in their march across the Pacific.
Few people at the time cared much about the damage to Japan or the deaths. As President Truman said, "The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold."
If you took a poll in 1945, I'm willing to bet a majority of Americans would have been all too happy to nuke Japan into a glass-floored, self lighting parking lot. A comment you would have been likely to hear at the time would be, "they got what they had coming to them".
Now you, dear reader, in 2016, may judge that position harshly, but you didn't live it, you weren't there, and the reality is that you likely would have felt the same way.
"During World War II, nearly 500,000 Purple Heart medals were manufactured in anticipation of the estimated casualties resulting from the planned Allied invasion of Japan. To the present date, total combined American military casualties of the seventy years following the end of World War IIâ"including the Korean and Vietnam Warsâ"have not exceeded that number. In 2003, there remained 120,000 Purple Heart medals in stock. The existing surplus allowed combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan to keep Purple Hearts on-hand for immediate award to soldiers wounded in the field."
We are STILL handing out WWII Purple Hearts to this day because we ended up not having to invade. If the Japs didn't want to get nuked, perhaps they shouldn't have started a war of aggression.
This is a good time to drop them a letter AND an email AND a phone call AND a fax while at it. Go on, do what's expected of you but too few of you actually do.
Was this bill introduced with the intention of passing it, or was it done for election time?
Many bills get introduced that have zero chance of passing, rather they do it so the Congresscritters can go back to their home state and say "I'm fighting for you, to stop those evil terrorists from threatening your family, vote for me!"
Whats sad is i find the far right alot more accepting of different ideas than the left. I can tell a right wing conservative that i like smoking weed and support health care and while they might disagree with me, most likely wont insult me. I tell a left wing liberal i support the 2nd Amendment and own a semi automatic rifle and they literally tell me they wish my whole family would die.
I wish I could disagree with you. I can't, I've seen that too.
Still, I've also seen right wingers who have no flexibility as well, so it isn't exclusive to the left.
---
Another example of the left...
"A woman's right to choose!"
Except...
When it comes to what to feed her child or medical decisions such as vaccines. So a woman has the right to choose to abort a child, but can't choose to not give that child injections.
Please, Slashdot, can we stop with this nonsense? Can we have objective submissions that aren't peppered with anti-Trump messages?
Probably not. How about we have a few that swipe at Clinton to even things out?
---
What is sad about the whole thing is that I objectively can find good things about each person on each side, and bad things about each person on each side.
None of them are the Devil Incarnate, and none of them are the second coming of Jesus.
Yet to listen to the supporters on either side, you'd think that was so.
---
But this is why I can't be President, even if I think I'd do a great job. Because my first task would be to sit down and whiteboard all the ideas from both sides and figure out what ideas are good and bad without caring if there is an R or a D in front of them.
The man is not stupid and he is not 'wrong' in every way. He is wrong IN A WHOLE BUNCH OF IMPORTANT WAYS, but not every one.
Replace the word Trump in this post with Clinton, Sanders, YourLastName and it still applies all the same.
That is only because everyone has their own points of view and opinions on things and most people tend to think that anyone who feels differently than them must be "wrong".
All of those people are foolish, because if you cling to your opinions that tightly, then you'll defend them even if presented with hard evidence that you are mistaken.
You are not, or perhaps should not be, your opinions. Most of us believe what we do because of how we were raised and what we were taught.
Most people are not really aware of the fact that had we been born in another place, or another time, we would be completely different people. You know what you know and don't know what you don't know.
No doubt, I don't think anyone disagrees with that statement.
But it will last longer than our lifetimes.
If you don't think the market for EVs is large, you are wrong.
Citation needed. You stating it doesn't make it so.
Maybe it is, but there are lots of EVs for sale today and they just aren't selling in anything other than token numbers to the fringe enthusiasts.
Maybe the Model 3 will be the one that breaks out, maybe not. But it hasn't yet and all the evidence that exists today says that normal people, the masses, just don't care about EVs.
25 years from now there will be as many gas powered cars as there are typewriters or monochrome TVs.
Last year 75 million cars and light trucks were built. There are over 1 billion cars in the world, 99.9% of them gas powered.
Even if all car production instantly changed to EV production, it would take over 13 years to replace them all with EVs.
Except that isn't going to happen. Last year, 540,000 plug in EVs were made, the majority of which were actually plugin hybrids (like the Prius).
Even if EV production hits 20% of cars in the next 10 years, there is no chance that in 25 years gas cars will be all gone.
---
You may well reject the above because it doesn't fit your world view, but I'm stating facts and you're stating wishes and dreams.
Slashdot Mirror
I said nothing about the Japanese being owed anything. But if you take everything away from someone then they will fight to the end because they have nothing left to lose.
Japan had lost the war. Didn't mean they couldn't make the Allies bleed a hell of a lot more.
While that is generally true, keep in mind that we did not in fact take everything away... rarely is that really the case...
If they REALLY had nothing left to lose, the nuking and Russia invading wouldn't have caused a surrender.
The outcome was no longer in doubt from June 1942, yet they still kept fighting.
While I think that date is a bit early, I understand the argument for it.
Regardless of the date, the point is that they simply wouldn't listen to reason.
When you have someone who is uncontrollable, be it a country or a child who is not responsive to reason or talking, you have to turn to violence.
Did all those years of sanctions against Iraq do anything to Saddam? No. Did invading and sending it 100K+ troops to force the issue work? Yes.
Now maybe 14 years later the outcome was messy and we could have done it better, but the 10 years before that with sanctions did nothing.
You more or less have to hit someone who is misbehaving with a stick enough times or hard enough until they decide that another course of action is desired.
It is a shame that humans are that way, but they are.
Another recent example is Turkey and Russia. Russia was repeated flying over Southern Turkey, Turkey protested over and over, while being ignored by Russia.
Finally Turkey put an AMRAAM into one of the Russian planes and shot it down, as if to say "can you hear me now?"
Russia protested, but ultimately it was a bunch of words and they changed what they were doing.
A very compelling case can be made that using the nucs actually saved Japanese lives.
Well of course it is... I think you'd be hard pressed to say it didn't...
But people sitting safely behind their desks who have no chance of having to go attack Japan in 1945 can't see the forest for the trees.
The "woman's right to choose" is referring to women being given the choice of what happens to their own bodies, not the bodies of their children.
Ahh yes... except you of course completely and totally miss it...
I fully support a woman's right to choose what to do with their own bodies.
However, the child inside them is not part of their body, they are just providing it a home.
Killing that child is not acceptable.
Several of the criminals in the rape of Nanking were tried and found guilty in court. When will the criminals responsible for dropping nuclear bombs see their day in court?
To this day, a lot of people in Japan refuse to accept that Nanking even happened.
As for the nuclear bombs, we won, they lost, that is how it works. We don't see them as war crimes, thus no one will be tried for it (and they are all dead anyway).
To be fair to the Japanese how were they meant to know about the existence of anything like the bomb that later hit them.
A fair point, to be sure...
---
May I suggest that if all the "anti-nuclear" efforts were instead put into "anti-war" efforts, we might get further along...
For all the fuss about a "nuclear-free world" that the Japanese want, how about a "war-free world"?
If the time, money, resources, and brains used in war were instead used in science and technology, imagine what we could do?
That's a really simplistic view. You don't back someone into a corner and get to act surprised when they get aggressive.
Japan started it long before Pearl Harbor when they invaded China. They were clearly on a path to war, our oil embargo may have pushed them, but they did have the option of peace, they simply didn't take it.
In addition, regardless of any economic causes to the war, none of that justifies what Japan then did, from Pearl Harbor to Bataan to the murder of millions of Chinese civilians, to the murder of POWs, etc.
For any faults on the American side, they are minor compared to what the Japanese did.
Meanwhile in *another* alternate universe where atomic weapons weren't used either
And in another one, without the knowledge and experience of the use of these weapons, WWIII ends up happening because too many people simply don't know how bad nuclear weapons really are.
The US governmentt never stated that officially, as for scholars... Let them spend some time in a foxhole.
Amen to that... too many "smart people" have ideas and opinions on things they have only read about...
A more useful exercise is to interview and ask the US soldiers who fought on Iwo Jima and Okinawa and were facing having to invade Japan itself if they thought it was a good idea.
Less aggressive economic warfare may have delayed or limited the inevitable conflict between the USA and Japan.
Maybe...
But Japan had been at war for years, or does China not count?
We told Japan, "we will not continue to do business with you if you continue to wage war in China".
That is a reasonable thing to say. We didn't threaten to bomb them, we told them we'd stop doing business with them.
Or do you think we somehow are obligated to do business with people just to keep them from bombing us?
Yes, it's quite easy for him to say, since scholars and even the USA Government already agreed on that being the case.
No they haven't... The US Government has NEVER said anything remotely close to that...
And you can find scholars on both sides of the issue, you'll never get that group to agree on this sort of thing...
Yep, the people who tend to argue against it didn't live in that time.
Oh sure, there were people back then who didn't like the idea of it, there always will be. But at the end of the day, most Americans were tired of war and wanted it to end. If blowing up a few Japanese cities ensured that happened, then so be it.
It is worth noting from President Truman's speech on the Atomic Bomb:
"We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war.
It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such number that and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which they are already well aware."
Bold text mine.
The reason survivors of the nuclear bombs are horrified
I'm not shocked they are horrified, I probably would be as well if I lived through that.
But their anger is mis-directed. They should be angry at their leaders who lead them into that mess, their military for allowing it, and the Emperor for not surrendering when the war was CLEARLY lost, long before August 1945.
Both parents of one of my closest friends lived through the bombing in Hiroshima (and still live there) and they seem fine with it (as in it's a part of a sad part of history, but it's in the past. I don't think they think about it much, it was 70 yeas ago and they were only 3 and 4 at the time). I used to live in Hiroshima and have a few friends who live there, nobody is hung up in it or anything.
Nor should they be... Japan DID start the war after all...
That being said, it was a Japan that no longer exists, a Japan 70 years into history.
Today the Japanese people are our allies and they have changed their ways. So am I upset about Pearl Harbor today? Nope, not at all. It was terrible, but the people alive today in Japan are not responsible for that. The people who are, are all dead.
Needless to say they had plenty of opportunities to surrender before Hiroshima, after Hiroshima and before Nagasaki and they didn't. The Japanese minister of war was running a total war against the Americans until the Japanese Emperor discovered his motivations and decided and order to surrender after Nagasaki. The Japanese were actually warned about Hiroshima or rather than a blast out of proportion with anything previously seen and asked to surrender. They simply ignored the notice.
^ Yep, this, pretty much this...
It is worth noting that I don't think ANYONE doubts the outcome of the war either way. Clearly the outcome was no longer in doubt.
The question was, how long would it take and how many more lives would be lost? Another 6 months? 1 million more dead and millions more wounded?
Would that have been a "better" outcome? People love to argue about what did happen and love to ignore what would have happened if reality had been changed.
"Not nuking" doesn't equal "everything else stays exactly the same". Lots of other things would have changed.
For all we know, without the knowledge and clear evidence of what happened to civilians there, WWIII might have happened.
The deaths were not in vain.
The Japanese were already on the brink of surrender (and there had been a government coup related to this matter). And what finally pushed them over the edge towards surrender was the invasion of the Russians into the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin, and some of Japan's overseas occupied territories on August 9.
That is one way to read it... but it isn't absolute...
We'll never really know what would have happened, but at the end of the day, everyone was tired of war and wanted it to stop. The Japs had attacked Pearl Harbor and killed nearly 3,000 Americans, then many more in their march across the Pacific.
Few people at the time cared much about the damage to Japan or the deaths. As President Truman said, "The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold."
If you took a poll in 1945, I'm willing to bet a majority of Americans would have been all too happy to nuke Japan into a glass-floored, self lighting parking lot. A comment you would have been likely to hear at the time would be, "they got what they had coming to them".
Now you, dear reader, in 2016, may judge that position harshly, but you didn't live it, you weren't there, and the reality is that you likely would have felt the same way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
How about all the other Japanese War Crimes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
---
Further, the irony is that the firebombings of Tokyo killed as many people as the nukes did. Where are the protests of that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
---
Finally, would invading have been better?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"During World War II, nearly 500,000 Purple Heart medals were manufactured in anticipation of the estimated casualties resulting from the planned Allied invasion of Japan. To the present date, total combined American military casualties of the seventy years following the end of World War IIâ"including the Korean and Vietnam Warsâ"have not exceeded that number. In 2003, there remained 120,000 Purple Heart medals in stock. The existing surplus allowed combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan to keep Purple Hearts on-hand for immediate award to soldiers wounded in the field."
We are STILL handing out WWII Purple Hearts to this day because we ended up not having to invade. If the Japs didn't want to get nuked, perhaps they shouldn't have started a war of aggression.
Nagasaki and Hiroshima will forever live on as America's shame.
Easy for you to say, 70 years on, not having lived during that time or having faced the ruthless Japs who were giving little quarter in their attacks.
This is a good time to drop them a letter AND an email AND a phone call AND a fax while at it. Go on, do what's expected of you but too few of you actually do.
I don't give them money, so they don't care.
https://youtu.be/Ylomy1Aw9Hk
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Congressional Fundraising (HBO)
Well worth 21 min of your time.
If this bill became law, it would be great for "black market" open-source encryption software.
Or, you know, to obtain encryption software from one of the other 200 countries on the planet.
Or does the US Congress think that they pass laws for the whole planet?
Was this bill introduced with the intention of passing it, or was it done for election time?
Many bills get introduced that have zero chance of passing, rather they do it so the Congresscritters can go back to their home state and say "I'm fighting for you, to stop those evil terrorists from threatening your family, vote for me!"
Whats sad is i find the far right alot more accepting of different ideas than the left. I can tell a right wing conservative that i like smoking weed and support health care and while they might disagree with me, most likely wont insult me. I tell a left wing liberal i support the 2nd Amendment and own a semi automatic rifle and they literally tell me they wish my whole family would die.
I wish I could disagree with you. I can't, I've seen that too.
Still, I've also seen right wingers who have no flexibility as well, so it isn't exclusive to the left.
---
Another example of the left...
"A woman's right to choose!"
Except...
When it comes to what to feed her child or medical decisions such as vaccines. So a woman has the right to choose to abort a child, but can't choose to not give that child injections.
Hypocrites. :)
Please, Slashdot, can we stop with this nonsense? Can we have objective submissions that aren't peppered with anti-Trump messages?
Probably not. How about we have a few that swipe at Clinton to even things out?
---
What is sad about the whole thing is that I objectively can find good things about each person on each side, and bad things about each person on each side.
None of them are the Devil Incarnate, and none of them are the second coming of Jesus.
Yet to listen to the supporters on either side, you'd think that was so.
---
But this is why I can't be President, even if I think I'd do a great job. Because my first task would be to sit down and whiteboard all the ideas from both sides and figure out what ideas are good and bad without caring if there is an R or a D in front of them.
The man is not stupid and he is not 'wrong' in every way. He is wrong IN A WHOLE BUNCH OF IMPORTANT WAYS, but not every one.
Replace the word Trump in this post with Clinton, Sanders, YourLastName and it still applies all the same.
That is only because everyone has their own points of view and opinions on things and most people tend to think that anyone who feels differently than them must be "wrong".
All of those people are foolish, because if you cling to your opinions that tightly, then you'll defend them even if presented with hard evidence that you are mistaken.
You are not, or perhaps should not be, your opinions. Most of us believe what we do because of how we were raised and what we were taught.
Most people are not really aware of the fact that had we been born in another place, or another time, we would be completely different people. You know what you know and don't know what you don't know.
Gas in unsustainable.
No doubt, I don't think anyone disagrees with that statement.
But it will last longer than our lifetimes.
If you don't think the market for EVs is large, you are wrong.
Citation needed. You stating it doesn't make it so.
Maybe it is, but there are lots of EVs for sale today and they just aren't selling in anything other than token numbers to the fringe enthusiasts.
Maybe the Model 3 will be the one that breaks out, maybe not. But it hasn't yet and all the evidence that exists today says that normal people, the masses, just don't care about EVs.
25 years from now there will be as many gas powered cars as there are typewriters or monochrome TVs.
Last year 75 million cars and light trucks were built. There are over 1 billion cars in the world, 99.9% of them gas powered.
Even if all car production instantly changed to EV production, it would take over 13 years to replace them all with EVs.
Except that isn't going to happen. Last year, 540,000 plug in EVs were made, the majority of which were actually plugin hybrids (like the Prius).
Even if EV production hits 20% of cars in the next 10 years, there is no chance that in 25 years gas cars will be all gone.
---
You may well reject the above because it doesn't fit your world view, but I'm stating facts and you're stating wishes and dreams.
Facts tend to win in the end.