You're also ignoring that lots of ambiguous laws are passed, sometimes because it's the only way to get a bill through, sometimes accidentally, sometimes because the law finds itself applied to new situations. When the law isn't clear, the judge has to make a ruling. I've read there are cases, particularly in corporate law, where the facts are all agreed on and exactly what the law means is the only issue. Case law, in cases like this, means some sort of consistent resolution of ambiguities, which is to everyone's benefit.
Which is one reason why judges don't choose their successors. Where I live, there is a process involving multiple people to make recommendations. It does a good job of keeping the complete idiots out.
More like War Minister Anami. Nobody had control over him, and he was a very hard-line hawk. The surrender process required consensus among the top people, and Anami never did say he was going along with the surrender. Fortunately, he did, but it's virtually impossible to know what he would have done under other circumstances. He didn't explain himself before giving the necessary surrender orders and committing ritual suicide.
It wasn't hundreds of thousands. It was certainly thousands. To give the guy who made the ridiculous estimates credit, he did publicize something horrible in many US installations postwar.
I tried to read Hasegawa's book, I really did. I just couldn't make it through all the twisted logic of his insane determination to blame the US for everything. I'm told it does have some worthwhile arguments in it, but nobody actually told me what they were, and I was not willing to try to find them.
At that point, the Japanese were starving. The only way to avoid mass starvation would be to supply Japan with food. The Japanese economy had been destroyed, including the destruction of the coal ferries from Hokkaido (the northernmost of the Home Islands).
That didn't mean the Japanese were helpless. The USN was still losing ships from kamikazes while maintaining the blockade. Civilians were still starving in China, Indochina, Korea, Malaya, and parts of the Dutch East Indies. (Malaya was next on the British list, and Korea was about to fall to the Soviets. I don't know when Java and Indochina would have been liberated.)
In my opinion, delaying Japanese surrender a few months would have killed many more civilians than the nukes did.
Except that the peace offer did have conditions attached. That was actually controversial at the time, since Germany had gotten no such assurances. The Japanese people were not going to be exterminated or anything like that, and they were to get the sort of government they wanted. The Emperor relied on that, for example, saying that if the Japanese people wanted to get rid of the Emperor as an institution it didn't deserve to exist. It was a very harsh peace offer, but it wasn't unconditional.
Right, for example we don't talk about the actions Roosevelt engaged in to provoke and bait Japan into bombing Pearl Harbor.
For precisely the same reason that we don't talk about the unicorn cavalry divisions. Find something halfway reliable to read about the period. Roosevelt was trying to avoid war with Japan, despite pressure from the US public for more sanctions.
There was no progress on negotiations. They were stalled in the Japanese Liaison Council, their top decision-making body. The Japanese hawks didn't care about the suffering of the Japanese people in the sense you're imagining, partly because it was obvious from the outset that the Japanese would have to suffer to win.
The original grand strategy had been to conquer territory and make it so expensive to retake that the Allies would lose interest and accept a peace favorable to Japan. That grand strategy was still working, and the Japanese were working hard on making the upcoming invasion of Kyushu (the southernmost of the Home Islands) as expensive as possible. (The headquarters responsible for that defense was in Hiroshima, BTW.)
After everything that had happened, and two nukes, the Japanese surrender was done with an arguably unconstitutional intervention from the Emperor. Nobody at the time knew if the Minister of War would go along with it, or if he'd order the Japanese Army to fight on. There were several raids in Tokyo by those who wanted to continue the war, including one in the Imperial Palace with the intent of stopping the surrender.
My conclusion is that I don't know what else would have caused the Japanese to surrender. I know how it proceeded historically, but I don't see surrender in other conditions as anything but speculation.
I do know that the nukes made a very large impression on Japanese leadership. In his announcement of surrender, the Emperor specifically mentioned"a new and most cruel bomb", and lumped the destruction of the Japanese navy, the continuing liberation of Japanese-occupied territory, the Soviet attack, and the destruction of the Japanese economy under "developments not necessarily favorable to Japan".
At the end of WWI, the Germans signed the Armistice while there were no invading boots on German soil. The German Army then launched on a very impressive campaign to deny their responsibility and claim they were doing just fine until they were stabbed in the back by civilian authorities, in one of the more impressive cases of military failure of moral courage I've seen.
Hitler and other conservatives argued hard that the Germans had not been beaten in the field, and used that lie to push for rearmament and a new war. The Allies were particularly anxious to make sure WWII didn't end in another twenty-year armistice (a French comment on the Treaty of Versailles), and wanted to make sure the Germans knew that they had been defeated militarily.
Also, in January 1945 the West was still reeling from the large German offensive in the Ardennes, popularly known as the Battle of the Bulge. The offensive had been contained by the end of the year, but still looked dangerous. (The Germans launched their last large-scale attack in the West at the very end of 1944.) The Western Allies really did want the Soviets to continue fighting.
You say that the Soviets were going to fight until they reached Berlin, but that wasn't at all obvious to the Western Allies at the time. The Red Army had expelled the invaders from the prewar Soviet Union in 1944, and had continued West from there, so there was no clear reason they wouldn't effectively stop pushing and let the Germans mass against the Western Allies. In 1944, the Soviets were still facing and killing many more Germans than the West did, and Western leaders were seriously worried about Soviet commitment. One big reason why the West wouldn't entertain a separate peace was that they feared Stalin would learn of it and do the same.
Also, your timing is wrong. In January 1945, Hitler was very much in charge, and the Germans were fighting hard in the West. Their morale started to waver in March and pretty much collapsed in April. I don't remember the details, but I believe the "surrender" offers you refer to came in April, when Goering and Himmler thought (incorrectly) that they could negotiate independently of Hitler. Their attempts were why Doenitz wound up as Fuhrer after Hitler's death; he was the high commander outside Berlin that Hitler thought he could rely on.
Sure I have. It means that, when you've firmly decided that Obama was a bad President, you keep finding reasons to believe it true and discounting reasons to think he has been a good President, so actual facts aren't going to change your mind.
One reason gold sucks at being money is its volatility in value. Money is worth what you can get for it. I don't care if I'm paid in dollars or quatloos or grams of gold as long as I can buy stuff with it.
The value of a dollar has gone down since 1996, so $150 now has about the same purchasing power as $100 then. This means that the price of gold in constant dollars (which are pegged to what you can buy with money) has gone up by something over a factor of 3 over the past twenty years, so that my salary would have been cut by well over half in that period. We'd have massive deflation, which is bad for the economy, so the economy would not have grown like it did, the available goods and services would be scarcer, so I'd be worse off than I am now.
Money not involving precious metals is fairly recent, but there's no reason to expect it to fail. Gold is not money. Your debit card may be backed by gold, but it pays in dollars, and your grocery store won't accept grams of gold. Most people don't think of gold as money, and so it isn't.
I am aware of much of what you said, but I think you're partly wrong on false accusations.
Rape is not something the victim has control over. False accusations are things the accuser has control over, and that's why a false accuser isn't going to be in the position of the victim you talked about. I maintain that was an unusually bad case of victim-blaming (not that victim-blaming is rare, unfortunately), and that's why you picked it.
People are sometimes falsely accused of rape (such as the Duke lacrosse players, I don't think it's common, but I really don't see how to verify that opinion. I'd suspect that most false rape accusations get dropped early on, and we don't hear about them.
You seem to miss the point that, if two people have sex when neither is in a state to consent, both people are guilty of rape. Also, by your definition of required consent, both my wife and I have raped each other by initiating sex without spoken consent. While you recognize that men get raped, you refer only to men raping women.
The biggest problem with rape and jurisprudence is that it's often very difficult to determine beyond a reasonable doubt whether there was consent or not. More than most such problems, rape has to be dealt with by influencing the culture, and that's starting way worse than you and I like.
Deliberately mistraining your replacement is sabotage. Giving it a half-hearted effort isn't. In that situation, I'd probably have such bad morale that I wouldn't be doing a particularly good job, and I'd be looking forward to being laid off.
City and county governments don't cede power to the state. The state has all the power not reserved to the Feds by (more or less elastic rulings on) the Constitution, and city and county governments have exactly as much power as state law allows.
In what way does "highest authority" correspond to elected vs. appointed?
There are no good statistics. It's often impossible to determine consent or non-consent beyond a reasonable doubt, meaning that it's often hard to determine whether a given sex act is rape or if the accusation is false. Without a reliable way to tell if there was consent or not, it's simply not possible to come up with good stats on how many of these accusations are true or false.
In some cases, rape victims have been vilified, but in many cases there's not going to be a penalty for a false accusation. The prosecutor will realize that there's no good case and drop charges, so the alleged victim doesn't get examined in court. The alleged rapist may be arrested and held for a short time, or suffer a reputation hit. It may be useful to the accuser to have the alleged rapist out of commission for a short time, or it can be used for real or imagined revenge. The example you used of suffering from reporting a rape is extreme and is not a situation a false accuser is going to get in in the first place.
However, you seem to have your mind completely made up, without the need for facts.
Snowden revealed a lot of information about US agencies spying on US citizens. Unfortunately, he also revealed a lot of information about US agencies spying abroad, and I think that made a very bad impression on lots of people.
Around here, judges usually leave office by resigning during their term, and having a replacement appointed. A lot of people simply vote for the incumbent judge, so what we've got is appointive judges with the ability to recall every eight years or so. Your complete idiot could register and be a candidate, but the incumbent would win (and there's virtually always an incumbent).
Slashdot Mirror
CVS started as some scripts for manipulating RCS files. Its impact on version control systems was arguably as great as Bitkeeper's.
You're also ignoring that lots of ambiguous laws are passed, sometimes because it's the only way to get a bill through, sometimes accidentally, sometimes because the law finds itself applied to new situations. When the law isn't clear, the judge has to make a ruling. I've read there are cases, particularly in corporate law, where the facts are all agreed on and exactly what the law means is the only issue. Case law, in cases like this, means some sort of consistent resolution of ambiguities, which is to everyone's benefit.
Which is one reason why judges don't choose their successors. Where I live, there is a process involving multiple people to make recommendations. It does a good job of keeping the complete idiots out.
More like War Minister Anami. Nobody had control over him, and he was a very hard-line hawk. The surrender process required consensus among the top people, and Anami never did say he was going along with the surrender. Fortunately, he did, but it's virtually impossible to know what he would have done under other circumstances. He didn't explain himself before giving the necessary surrender orders and committing ritual suicide.
It wasn't hundreds of thousands. It was certainly thousands. To give the guy who made the ridiculous estimates credit, he did publicize something horrible in many US installations postwar.
I tried to read Hasegawa's book, I really did. I just couldn't make it through all the twisted logic of his insane determination to blame the US for everything. I'm told it does have some worthwhile arguments in it, but nobody actually told me what they were, and I was not willing to try to find them.
At that point, the Japanese were starving. The only way to avoid mass starvation would be to supply Japan with food. The Japanese economy had been destroyed, including the destruction of the coal ferries from Hokkaido (the northernmost of the Home Islands).
That didn't mean the Japanese were helpless. The USN was still losing ships from kamikazes while maintaining the blockade. Civilians were still starving in China, Indochina, Korea, Malaya, and parts of the Dutch East Indies. (Malaya was next on the British list, and Korea was about to fall to the Soviets. I don't know when Java and Indochina would have been liberated.)
In my opinion, delaying Japanese surrender a few months would have killed many more civilians than the nukes did.
Except that the peace offer did have conditions attached. That was actually controversial at the time, since Germany had gotten no such assurances. The Japanese people were not going to be exterminated or anything like that, and they were to get the sort of government they wanted. The Emperor relied on that, for example, saying that if the Japanese people wanted to get rid of the Emperor as an institution it didn't deserve to exist. It was a very harsh peace offer, but it wasn't unconditional.
You can find lots of books on Japanese WWII atrocities (counting the war in China from 1936 on as part of WWII).
For precisely the same reason that we don't talk about the unicorn cavalry divisions. Find something halfway reliable to read about the period. Roosevelt was trying to avoid war with Japan, despite pressure from the US public for more sanctions.
There was no progress on negotiations. They were stalled in the Japanese Liaison Council, their top decision-making body. The Japanese hawks didn't care about the suffering of the Japanese people in the sense you're imagining, partly because it was obvious from the outset that the Japanese would have to suffer to win.
The original grand strategy had been to conquer territory and make it so expensive to retake that the Allies would lose interest and accept a peace favorable to Japan. That grand strategy was still working, and the Japanese were working hard on making the upcoming invasion of Kyushu (the southernmost of the Home Islands) as expensive as possible. (The headquarters responsible for that defense was in Hiroshima, BTW.)
After everything that had happened, and two nukes, the Japanese surrender was done with an arguably unconstitutional intervention from the Emperor. Nobody at the time knew if the Minister of War would go along with it, or if he'd order the Japanese Army to fight on. There were several raids in Tokyo by those who wanted to continue the war, including one in the Imperial Palace with the intent of stopping the surrender.
My conclusion is that I don't know what else would have caused the Japanese to surrender. I know how it proceeded historically, but I don't see surrender in other conditions as anything but speculation.
I do know that the nukes made a very large impression on Japanese leadership. In his announcement of surrender, the Emperor specifically mentioned"a new and most cruel bomb", and lumped the destruction of the Japanese navy, the continuing liberation of Japanese-occupied territory, the Soviet attack, and the destruction of the Japanese economy under "developments not necessarily favorable to Japan".
At the end of WWI, the Germans signed the Armistice while there were no invading boots on German soil. The German Army then launched on a very impressive campaign to deny their responsibility and claim they were doing just fine until they were stabbed in the back by civilian authorities, in one of the more impressive cases of military failure of moral courage I've seen.
Hitler and other conservatives argued hard that the Germans had not been beaten in the field, and used that lie to push for rearmament and a new war. The Allies were particularly anxious to make sure WWII didn't end in another twenty-year armistice (a French comment on the Treaty of Versailles), and wanted to make sure the Germans knew that they had been defeated militarily.
Also, in January 1945 the West was still reeling from the large German offensive in the Ardennes, popularly known as the Battle of the Bulge. The offensive had been contained by the end of the year, but still looked dangerous. (The Germans launched their last large-scale attack in the West at the very end of 1944.) The Western Allies really did want the Soviets to continue fighting.
You say that the Soviets were going to fight until they reached Berlin, but that wasn't at all obvious to the Western Allies at the time. The Red Army had expelled the invaders from the prewar Soviet Union in 1944, and had continued West from there, so there was no clear reason they wouldn't effectively stop pushing and let the Germans mass against the Western Allies. In 1944, the Soviets were still facing and killing many more Germans than the West did, and Western leaders were seriously worried about Soviet commitment. One big reason why the West wouldn't entertain a separate peace was that they feared Stalin would learn of it and do the same.
Also, your timing is wrong. In January 1945, Hitler was very much in charge, and the Germans were fighting hard in the West. Their morale started to waver in March and pretty much collapsed in April. I don't remember the details, but I believe the "surrender" offers you refer to came in April, when Goering and Himmler thought (incorrectly) that they could negotiate independently of Hitler. Their attempts were why Doenitz wound up as Fuhrer after Hitler's death; he was the high commander outside Berlin that Hitler thought he could rely on.
Sure I have. It means that, when you've firmly decided that Obama was a bad President, you keep finding reasons to believe it true and discounting reasons to think he has been a good President, so actual facts aren't going to change your mind.
One reason gold sucks at being money is its volatility in value. Money is worth what you can get for it. I don't care if I'm paid in dollars or quatloos or grams of gold as long as I can buy stuff with it.
The value of a dollar has gone down since 1996, so $150 now has about the same purchasing power as $100 then. This means that the price of gold in constant dollars (which are pegged to what you can buy with money) has gone up by something over a factor of 3 over the past twenty years, so that my salary would have been cut by well over half in that period. We'd have massive deflation, which is bad for the economy, so the economy would not have grown like it did, the available goods and services would be scarcer, so I'd be worse off than I am now.
Money not involving precious metals is fairly recent, but there's no reason to expect it to fail. Gold is not money. Your debit card may be backed by gold, but it pays in dollars, and your grocery store won't accept grams of gold. Most people don't think of gold as money, and so it isn't.
The incumbent was almost certainly appointed with a reasonable selection process, and therefore is almost never a complete idiot.
I am aware of much of what you said, but I think you're partly wrong on false accusations.
Rape is not something the victim has control over. False accusations are things the accuser has control over, and that's why a false accuser isn't going to be in the position of the victim you talked about. I maintain that was an unusually bad case of victim-blaming (not that victim-blaming is rare, unfortunately), and that's why you picked it.
People are sometimes falsely accused of rape (such as the Duke lacrosse players, I don't think it's common, but I really don't see how to verify that opinion. I'd suspect that most false rape accusations get dropped early on, and we don't hear about them.
You seem to miss the point that, if two people have sex when neither is in a state to consent, both people are guilty of rape. Also, by your definition of required consent, both my wife and I have raped each other by initiating sex without spoken consent. While you recognize that men get raped, you refer only to men raping women.
The biggest problem with rape and jurisprudence is that it's often very difficult to determine beyond a reasonable doubt whether there was consent or not. More than most such problems, rape has to be dealt with by influencing the culture, and that's starting way worse than you and I like.
Deliberately mistraining your replacement is sabotage. Giving it a half-hearted effort isn't. In that situation, I'd probably have such bad morale that I wouldn't be doing a particularly good job, and I'd be looking forward to being laid off.
Are you aware that there are other taxes than Federal income tax, and that less than half the Fed's revenue comes from the individual income tax?
City and county governments don't cede power to the state. The state has all the power not reserved to the Feds by (more or less elastic rulings on) the Constitution, and city and county governments have exactly as much power as state law allows.
In what way does "highest authority" correspond to elected vs. appointed?
Yeah, and then the powers-that-be pooh-pooh the vector and claim it can't be exploited or is unimportant.
I remember the days when the Z80A was the latest and greatest CPU chip, and nobody ever put Linux on it in the first place, you insensitive clod!
There are no good statistics. It's often impossible to determine consent or non-consent beyond a reasonable doubt, meaning that it's often hard to determine whether a given sex act is rape or if the accusation is false. Without a reliable way to tell if there was consent or not, it's simply not possible to come up with good stats on how many of these accusations are true or false.
In some cases, rape victims have been vilified, but in many cases there's not going to be a penalty for a false accusation. The prosecutor will realize that there's no good case and drop charges, so the alleged victim doesn't get examined in court. The alleged rapist may be arrested and held for a short time, or suffer a reputation hit. It may be useful to the accuser to have the alleged rapist out of commission for a short time, or it can be used for real or imagined revenge. The example you used of suffering from reporting a rape is extreme and is not a situation a false accuser is going to get in in the first place.
However, you seem to have your mind completely made up, without the need for facts.
Snowden revealed a lot of information about US agencies spying on US citizens. Unfortunately, he also revealed a lot of information about US agencies spying abroad, and I think that made a very bad impression on lots of people.
Around here, judges usually leave office by resigning during their term, and having a replacement appointed. A lot of people simply vote for the incumbent judge, so what we've got is appointive judges with the ability to recall every eight years or so. Your complete idiot could register and be a candidate, but the incumbent would win (and there's virtually always an incumbent).