Also... what in the hell are you talking about re: Japan? There are two interpretations of what you just said, neither of which is sane:
1. You're implying we treated the Japanese better than we treated the Iraqis. That is just... trollish. No one could possibly be that ignorant.
2. You're implying we should have brutally crushed the Iraqis like we did with the Japanese. Can you possibly be that naive? That shit doesn't work in the age of CNN and cell phone cameras. The public won't stand for it. And the backfire from militant Muslims would be truly incredible.
eh, Austin isn't quite like the rest of Texas. I mean, it's consistently favored Democratic politicians, often by a 2:1 margin. Also has a decent music/art scene. And there's a nudist park on the edge of a lake, supposedly the only one in all of TX.
I'm not quite sure how it happened this way but, I think the soundest the theory is all of the smart/sane people in TX banded together in one city to make their last stand, Alamo-ish style.
You didn't touch a nerve--nonsense on the internet is nothing new. A string of unique nonsenses at +5 on Slashdot touched a nerve.
You're lying, simply lying at this point. Or willfully ignorant. Cheney is an asshole and the conflicts of interest are worrisome, but no one in America is siphoning off 40% of the Iraqi economy.
Jihadis have had wives before and/or after leaving their old lives behind. ISIS has even managed to convince a few females to travel on their own to Iraq, just to become jihadi brides. Go watch the VICE videos (VICE is not known as having a conservative stance, btw.) See the proud jihadi dads watching their kids playing in the river.
There isn't a single part of this post that isn't pure fantasy. I try not to complain about the mods too much but fuck me, +5 Insightful?
ISIS is just a bunch of men with no jobs, no wives, no future and no hope for a future.
Where do you get your news? ISIS's economy is a hell of a lot more robust and stable than many nations that have a seat at the UN. ISIS fighters and leaders routinely have wives. Many of the most high profile jihadis (including but not limited to ISIS) have had good career prospects and families or at least romantic interests, including the computer programmer "Jihadi "John" (whom we just killed yesterday) and the Ph. Ds and graduate students who flew into the WTC.
Go watch VICE's report on ISIS (one of the few organizations willing to send people to do some reporting on the ground.) Listen to the guy driving the car talk about how he's leaving his wife and children to go fight for ISIS because, bottom line, Allah means more to him.
the 1% war profiteering in the Middle East and stealing their oil.
The Iraq war was moronic. We gave a bunch of contracts to Haliburton and other American companies. And there were conflicts of interest there, yeah.
But we did not fucking steal anyone's oil. Stop making shit up. Iraq has been getting billions from it for quite a while now. That oil doesn't get shipped to American companies. It gets sold on the international market at regular market price.
We can't solve _anything_ until we start recognizing the real problem and start actually _rebuilding_ Iraq and Afghanistan.
How. Fucking HOW. It's hard enough to try to fathom what we could do to rebuild Iraq that we haven't already tried but... "rebuilding" Afghanistan is a contradiction in terms--there's nothing to rebuild. It's a shithole dominated by highly religious tent dwellers, petty warlords and Pakistani agents and slummers. It's been that way long before 2001.
If you're American though this probably means giving up your SUV.
Your post has now gone into stream-of-consciousness ranting. Yes, we need to achieve energy independence. That has fuck-all to do with rebuilding places that we've already spent hundreds of billions of dollars on trying to rebuild for over a decade.
That would be fine if everyone were viewing Muhammad as a historical figure, but they are not. ISIS has issued pamphlets re: the treatment of sex slaves and they explicitly mention nine years old as the minimum, based explicitly on Aisha. So, it appears nine year old sex slaves are being raped right now as a result of Muhammad's activities "in those days."
To clarify, they didn't to my knowledge involved prior to ISIS's involvement (back in the "red line" debate in 2013.) They didn't cause any of the chaos and misery. But yes they're involved in Syria now.
How is pointing out that their motivations are primarily shaped by religious goals like implementation of the sharia and restoration of the caliphate indicative that the poster is a Fox News watcher who believes that all Muslims are evil? It is the goddamned truth. They have been telling us this repeatedly for decades now.
And blaming America and the West "first" IS a real thing--just see what the self-styled progressive left (recently nicknamed "regressive left") had to say after Charlie Hebdo. Already, I am seeing people blaming France for Syria (one of the gunmen in these attacks even shouted "This is for Syria!"), as if opposing the Iraq war and then not getting involved in clusterfucked Syrian civil war but offering to accept refugees anyway is an unforgivable sin. The West is blamed when it does intervene and blamed again when it does not intervene, and it is being blamed by both the jihadists and the Western progressive (I refuse to say "liberal") apologists for those jihadists.
Trust me, it can be truly liberating to think independently.
Unfortunately, history is replete with moments where the sane have had to choose between the different flavors of douchebag. And the less-fucked up douchebags know this, and they tailor their speech accordingly.
After the Garland Texas shootings I remember saying to myself "Oh shit, the talking heads on Fox News are saying very agreeable liberally things. This is bad."
Oh it's a good thing this happened then because Europe was *completely ignoring the Syrian refugee crisis* up until this point, yes. It's not like they were in the process of accepting millions of applications for asylum or anything.
The irony/tragedy/whatever of all of this is it may well cement Le Pen's victory.
Actually cases of mass shootings in America are *routinely* prevented by legal gun owners, but these cases tend to go under-reported by the media. There was a shooting in a mall either immediately before or immediately after Sandy Hook, for example, that was very quickly arrested by some random guy with a Glock.
You're free to use this to argue that the problem of gun violence in America is thus even worse than we think, but it is simply a lie to imply that private citizens have done nothing to stop mass shootings. There is a good reason why the worst shootings almost always happen in places where it is illegal to carry a gun. Students with concealed carry licenses at Virginia Tech have spoken freely about how they had to no choice but to run because they had chosen to obey the law that day. Even the Fort Hood shootings were as bad as they were only because the soldiers were not allowed to carry firearms while off-duty in that part of the base.
Don't forget about the refugees who staged a protest by refusing to leave their bus after the Swedish government (who has literally run out of all space after taking in a ridiculous number of refugees and is now temporarily housing people on the floors of random government buildings) tried to relocate them to a town that was too isolated and insufficiently warm during the winter:
Without necessarily disagreeing with anything in your post whatsoever, can we please get a little discrimination of ideas and of people? You blurred these lines, and they really need to be un-blurred.
A Muslim police officer was killed while responding to the Charlie Hebdo shootings and a second Muslim helped hide Jews when those same jihadis went on another rampage in the following days. It's important not to forget that. It's also important to not forget that Muhammad killed people right and left, only pausing now and then to rape a nine year old or talk about the importance of kissing a magic rock embedded in Borg cube.
It's an evil and stupid book. People who have completely disagreed with me have gone on to do wonderful things, build wonderful things, advance the cause of physical sciences and history tremendously, etc. etc. disclaimers etc.... can I stop now? Is it ok to simply criticize people and ideas from the seventh fucking century now?
It is perhaps distasteful to choose this time to be pedantic and even less tasteful to choose this moment to sling mug at fellow leftists but... people who choose to senselessly sacrifice freedom in the name of empathy with Muslims call themselves progressives. No true liberal (or Scotsman, for that matter) would do this.
And not every self-described progressive does this, obviously, but we do have a new term that has been recently been coined to describe them: "regressive left" or simply "the regressives."
Re:False dichotomy of the guilty conscience
on
Twilight of the Bomb
·
· Score: 1
See my other post on this topic about Wikipedia's omissions. I have actually read pretty extensively on this point, although not recently. Even if everything I remember (about the multiple offers of surrender) is completely wrong, the undisputed fact remains Japan wanted to surrender, in some fashion, immediately following the first bomb.
Vaporizing 40,000+ civilians is not a morally acceptable way to pressure someone re: terms of surrender. If you believe that nuking a highly populated area three days later was the only choice we had... you are not thinking very hard.
But the false dichotomy is still there
on
Twilight of the Bomb
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I'm pretty skeptical of those numbers (I'm also skeptical that the Japanese disengagement happened as fast as you imply), but I'll concede all of that for the moment--this is still a false dichotomy. You're still begin from the conclusion "the second bombing was justified, because otherwise X" and working your way backwards. It's simply not intellectually honest.
Think about it for five seconds and see if you can come up with an alternative that doesn't vaporize 40,000 civilians. Here's one: let's say we drop the second bomb on top of Mount Fuji. Just to bluff and say "hey look, we've got so many of these damn things we can waste 'em, just to give you a show." I do believe that would have made our point pretty clear. Nuking another major civilian population 3 days later is simply not necessary by any stretch of the imagination, even if we concede all kinds of stuff up front.
(I hope I don't have to reiterate disclaimers into every post: yes, I understand it was a different time with different rules and a far different enemy than anything we've faced recently. The point isn't to beat ourselves up about it; the point is simply to have the moral and mental clarity to call a spade a spade.)
I am not ignorant, although it appears that Wikipedia may be incomplete on this point.
I don't have the sources in front of me, but there were multiple Japanese attempts at surrender negotiations before the second bomb was dropped. As I recall, the later ones dropped all of the other conditions--they only wanted their emperor preserved.
But I don't have the primary sources handy so--for the sake of argument--let me just concede that as well. Let's say Japan wanted territorial integrity and a bunch of other stuff as well. Do you still think that bombing them again three days later was the only way? Backed-into-a-corner, the American war machine literally had no other options whatsoever? I would suggest that, at minimum, one option would have been to give the Japanese government a little more time to investigate the bombing and educate their leaders and advisers about it. Three days is an incredibly short amount of time, especially pre-satellite, pre-internet and with fog of war chaos everywhere.
Re:False dichotomy of the guilty conscience
on
Twilight of the Bomb
·
· Score: 1
This is a reasonable first step towards a reasonable argument. However, there's immediately and there's "immediately". Are you trying to say that 50,000+ civilians would have died if we waited more than three days between the nukes?
And were the Japanese actively subjugating and butchering Chinese at that point in time, or were they more focused on fighting the Russians and/or retreating back to Japan? (This is a genuine question; it's not an area of WWII history I'm familiar with.)
Re:False dichotomy of the guilty conscience
on
Twilight of the Bomb
·
· Score: 0
Ah, the magic of lazy patriotism. You have Wikipedia at your fingertips--why don't you go educate yourself?
I repeat, Japan DID surrender after the first one, but they wanted to keep their emperor (there may have been a few other details, I forget.) Instead of hashing out the terms of surrender or simply giving them a little more time to assess the damage, we bombed three days after Hiroshima. Let me say that again, the second bomb came just seventy-two hours later. In the age before satellites or the internet. Do you think the Japanese government had any idea what the casualty count was? At that point in time, do you think that the majority of officers in their military and advisers to the emperor even fully appreciated what an atomic bomb was?
Re:False dichotomy of the guilty conscience
on
Twilight of the Bomb
·
· Score: 0
1. The fact that we were planning for an invasion does not affect that "either immediate invasion OR we nuke them twice" is a false dichotomy.
2. The poster I was replying to was clearly relying on that dichotomy to unreservedly justify the bombings.
You want to argue that Hiroshima was justified that's fine, but you cannot begin by pretending that the USA was forced into a corner and had only two options in front of us. (And I'm still not sure how anyone can justify Nagasaki without falling back on blatant lies.)
Re:False dichotomy of the guilty conscience
on
Twilight of the Bomb
·
· Score: 0
Incorrect. They did 'quit'. Immediately. They just asked that we let them keep their emperor and we responded (and I'm paraphrasing): "BAHAHAHA, YOU DIDN'T SAY PRETTY PLEASE! *KABOOM* "
False dichotomy of the guilty conscience
on
Twilight of the Bomb
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Every time, every time this knee-jerk excuse comes out. As if we had exactly two options in the entire universe. Because if we didn't nuke them or immediately invade them then... what? They were poised to invade California?
Give me a fucking break. There more than two options on the table. For example, they considered an option to invite Axis observers to watch as little boy was harmlessly detonated in the desert, but they turned it down because they were eager to see what kind of damage the thing would do in the real world. I'm not out to vilify the USA here--the rules of war were different back then and no one hands were clean (certainly not the Japanese.) The atomic bombs weren't the worse thing that happened in the war, and on the whole I think we behaved better than the Axis powers. And our ultimate aims were obviously much more noble.
But this brainlessly patriotic excuse is just so fucking pathetic. I could grant all of the premises, including the false dichotomy. So, for the sake of argument, I concede Hiroshima. And now... what of Nagasaki? Three fucking days later? Because their initial response to Hiroshima was almost an unconditional surrender but there was some question marks about the dispensation of their emperor, that justified another nuke?
It was wrong. Get over it. Jefferson was a great president even if he fucked up on slavery. And WWII was a good war even if we were clearly, at times, more ruthless than we had to be. But 70+ years later, this intellectual dishonesty is pointless and downright embarrassing--no different than the stubborn Japanese refusals to fully acknowledge their atrocities in China.
It never ceases to amaze me how often this comes up, on slashdot and everywhere else, and it's immediately modded way up despite the fact that no one is arguing Reddit is legally bound to allow people to say whatever they want. Pointing out that the first amendment doesn't apply to private corporations would be a fine and extremely salient point... in some other debate. But it is irrelevant here.
If I own a restaurant or some other type of public establishment and people come in and have a discussion that is upsetting other customers I have a right to ask them to leave, correct? That is not censorship
Yes it is. It is fundamentally different from governmental censorship, but... jesus I don't know, let's just do a thought experiment here: Forum A removes posts that they deem offensive. Forum B allows pretty much all posts to remain (perhaps with user tagging and filtering or whatever.) If you really object to the word "censorship" to describe what Forum A is doing, then please provide us with an acceptable synonym. It doesn't matter where you fall in this debate; the thing we are debating *is*, in fact, a thing.
For my own anti-censorship $0.02 here, I would say that if we must live in a web dominated by walled gardens, it would be nice if we had at least one social network that had an absolutist free speech policy. But I understand that any advertiser-supported site is going to have an extremely hard time pulling this off.
You can insult any single historical figure that you like on Facebook except one: Turkey's founder Mustafa Kemal 'Ataturk'
I would think that Turkey has something to say about Mohammed as well, considering they seized copies of Charlie Hebdo's survival issue due to the horribly, horribly offensive image of a crying prophet holding up a sign saying "All is Forgiven". (Aside: This really goes to show how deluded a lot of people are on these issues. If your scale is calibrated such that Turkey is deemed "secular" then a place like Texas is going to come out as "ultra-secular / atheistic")
Also, is this censorship happening on only Turkey's localized Facebook or is it on English Facebook as well? TFS doesn't make this clear, and although it's impossible to say it without coming off as a little smug ("I don't own a TV!"), I don't actually have a Facebook account so I can't read TFA.
I was implicitly pointing out that landmines have certain inherent qualities that makes them worth considering despite past instances of civilian causalities--causalities that could easily be minimized given a different context (strategic placement in a first-world nation instead of scattershot tactical placement in a third world nation.)
Automated weapons, it should be noted, generally lack this capability. I suppose that stationary turrets (of the sort that couldn't be trivially moved) could be useful but they are not at all militarily decisive or game-changing given how expensive and vulnerable they are (relative to mines.)
Again, landmines were brought up as a comparison. I was pointing out that this comparison was flawed and landmines in fact had a number of redeeming qualities that (I thought it unnecessary to highlight) automated weapons simply do not match.
Militaries do not clear modern minefields in minutes. That's complete nonsense. At best with hours or days of intense effort you might clear a narrow pathway, but that still puts you at a significant disadvantage as the defender can simply direct all of their air power and artillery at the pathway.
You furthermore are shifting the hypothetical into an all-out war including the potential use of nukes, when I was clearly talking about Ukraine-type situations, where force is limited and Russian deniablity (however laughable) was heavily utilized.
Also, I didn't cover this but tactical nuclear landmines are a very interesting (although politically very tricky to sell) strategy, which could even serve the dual purpose getting rid of some of the world's ICBMs.
Slashdot Mirror
Also... what in the hell are you talking about re: Japan? There are two interpretations of what you just said, neither of which is sane:
1. You're implying we treated the Japanese better than we treated the Iraqis. That is just... trollish. No one could possibly be that ignorant.
2. You're implying we should have brutally crushed the Iraqis like we did with the Japanese. Can you possibly be that naive? That shit doesn't work in the age of CNN and cell phone cameras. The public won't stand for it. And the backfire from militant Muslims would be truly incredible.
eh, Austin isn't quite like the rest of Texas. I mean, it's consistently favored Democratic politicians, often by a 2:1 margin. Also has a decent music/art scene. And there's a nudist park on the edge of a lake, supposedly the only one in all of TX.
I'm not quite sure how it happened this way but, I think the soundest the theory is all of the smart/sane people in TX banded together in one city to make their last stand, Alamo-ish style.
You didn't touch a nerve--nonsense on the internet is nothing new. A string of unique nonsenses at +5 on Slashdot touched a nerve.
You're lying, simply lying at this point. Or willfully ignorant. Cheney is an asshole and the conflicts of interest are worrisome, but no one in America is siphoning off 40% of the Iraqi economy.
Jihadis have had wives before and/or after leaving their old lives behind. ISIS has even managed to convince a few females to travel on their own to Iraq, just to become jihadi brides. Go watch the VICE videos (VICE is not known as having a conservative stance, btw.) See the proud jihadi dads watching their kids playing in the river.
ISIS is just a bunch of men with no jobs, no wives, no future and no hope for a future.
Where do you get your news? ISIS's economy is a hell of a lot more robust and stable than many nations that have a seat at the UN. ISIS fighters and leaders routinely have wives. Many of the most high profile jihadis (including but not limited to ISIS) have had good career prospects and families or at least romantic interests, including the computer programmer "Jihadi "John" (whom we just killed yesterday) and the Ph. Ds and graduate students who flew into the WTC.
Go watch VICE's report on ISIS (one of the few organizations willing to send people to do some reporting on the ground.) Listen to the guy driving the car talk about how he's leaving his wife and children to go fight for ISIS because, bottom line, Allah means more to him.
the 1% war profiteering in the Middle East and stealing their oil.
The Iraq war was moronic. We gave a bunch of contracts to Haliburton and other American companies. And there were conflicts of interest there, yeah.
But we did not fucking steal anyone's oil. Stop making shit up. Iraq has been getting billions from it for quite a while now. That oil doesn't get shipped to American companies. It gets sold on the international market at regular market price.
We can't solve _anything_ until we start recognizing the real problem and start actually _rebuilding_ Iraq and Afghanistan.
How. Fucking HOW. It's hard enough to try to fathom what we could do to rebuild Iraq that we haven't already tried but... "rebuilding" Afghanistan is a contradiction in terms--there's nothing to rebuild. It's a shithole dominated by highly religious tent dwellers, petty warlords and Pakistani agents and slummers. It's been that way long before 2001.
If you're American though this probably means giving up your SUV.
Your post has now gone into stream-of-consciousness ranting. Yes, we need to achieve energy independence. That has fuck-all to do with rebuilding places that we've already spent hundreds of billions of dollars on trying to rebuild for over a decade.
I'm not trying to troll
lol.
That would be fine if everyone were viewing Muhammad as a historical figure, but they are not. ISIS has issued pamphlets re: the treatment of sex slaves and they explicitly mention nine years old as the minimum, based explicitly on Aisha. So, it appears nine year old sex slaves are being raped right now as a result of Muhammad's activities "in those days."
To clarify, they didn't to my knowledge involved prior to ISIS's involvement (back in the "red line" debate in 2013.) They didn't cause any of the chaos and misery. But yes they're involved in Syria now.
And blaming America and the West "first" IS a real thing--just see what the self-styled progressive left (recently nicknamed "regressive left") had to say after Charlie Hebdo. Already, I am seeing people blaming France for Syria (one of the gunmen in these attacks even shouted "This is for Syria!"), as if opposing the Iraq war and then not getting involved in clusterfucked Syrian civil war but offering to accept refugees anyway is an unforgivable sin. The West is blamed when it does intervene and blamed again when it does not intervene, and it is being blamed by both the jihadists and the Western progressive (I refuse to say "liberal") apologists for those jihadists.
Trust me, it can be truly liberating to think independently.
Physician, heal thyself.
Unfortunately, history is replete with moments where the sane have had to choose between the different flavors of douchebag. And the less-fucked up douchebags know this, and they tailor their speech accordingly.
After the Garland Texas shootings I remember saying to myself "Oh shit, the talking heads on Fox News are saying very agreeable liberally things. This is bad."
Oh it's a good thing this happened then because Europe was *completely ignoring the Syrian refugee crisis* up until this point, yes. It's not like they were in the process of accepting millions of applications for asylum or anything.
The irony/tragedy/whatever of all of this is it may well cement Le Pen's victory.
Actually cases of mass shootings in America are *routinely* prevented by legal gun owners, but these cases tend to go under-reported by the media. There was a shooting in a mall either immediately before or immediately after Sandy Hook, for example, that was very quickly arrested by some random guy with a Glock.
You're free to use this to argue that the problem of gun violence in America is thus even worse than we think, but it is simply a lie to imply that private citizens have done nothing to stop mass shootings. There is a good reason why the worst shootings almost always happen in places where it is illegal to carry a gun. Students with concealed carry licenses at Virginia Tech have spoken freely about how they had to no choice but to run because they had chosen to obey the law that day. Even the Fort Hood shootings were as bad as they were only because the soldiers were not allowed to carry firearms while off-duty in that part of the base.
Don't forget about the refugees who staged a protest by refusing to leave their bus after the Swedish government (who has literally run out of all space after taking in a ridiculous number of refugees and is now temporarily housing people on the floors of random government buildings) tried to relocate them to a town that was too isolated and insufficiently warm during the winter:
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
Sorry for the horrible right wing propaganda source, but it's the best I could find.
Without necessarily disagreeing with anything in your post whatsoever, can we please get a little discrimination of ideas and of people? You blurred these lines, and they really need to be un-blurred.
A Muslim police officer was killed while responding to the Charlie Hebdo shootings and a second Muslim helped hide Jews when those same jihadis went on another rampage in the following days. It's important not to forget that. It's also important to not forget that Muhammad killed people right and left, only pausing now and then to rape a nine year old or talk about the importance of kissing a magic rock embedded in Borg cube.
It's an evil and stupid book. People who have completely disagreed with me have gone on to do wonderful things, build wonderful things, advance the cause of physical sciences and history tremendously, etc. etc. disclaimers etc.... can I stop now? Is it ok to simply criticize people and ideas from the seventh fucking century now?
It is perhaps distasteful to choose this time to be pedantic and even less tasteful to choose this moment to sling mug at fellow leftists but... people who choose to senselessly sacrifice freedom in the name of empathy with Muslims call themselves progressives. No true liberal (or Scotsman, for that matter) would do this.
And not every self-described progressive does this, obviously, but we do have a new term that has been recently been coined to describe them: "regressive left" or simply "the regressives."
See my other post on this topic about Wikipedia's omissions. I have actually read pretty extensively on this point, although not recently. Even if everything I remember (about the multiple offers of surrender) is completely wrong, the undisputed fact remains Japan wanted to surrender, in some fashion, immediately following the first bomb.
Vaporizing 40,000+ civilians is not a morally acceptable way to pressure someone re: terms of surrender. If you believe that nuking a highly populated area three days later was the only choice we had... you are not thinking very hard.
I'm pretty skeptical of those numbers (I'm also skeptical that the Japanese disengagement happened as fast as you imply), but I'll concede all of that for the moment--this is still a false dichotomy. You're still begin from the conclusion "the second bombing was justified, because otherwise X" and working your way backwards. It's simply not intellectually honest.
Think about it for five seconds and see if you can come up with an alternative that doesn't vaporize 40,000 civilians. Here's one: let's say we drop the second bomb on top of Mount Fuji. Just to bluff and say "hey look, we've got so many of these damn things we can waste 'em, just to give you a show." I do believe that would have made our point pretty clear. Nuking another major civilian population 3 days later is simply not necessary by any stretch of the imagination, even if we concede all kinds of stuff up front.
(I hope I don't have to reiterate disclaimers into every post: yes, I understand it was a different time with different rules and a far different enemy than anything we've faced recently. The point isn't to beat ourselves up about it; the point is simply to have the moral and mental clarity to call a spade a spade.)
I am not ignorant, although it appears that Wikipedia may be incomplete on this point.
I don't have the sources in front of me, but there were multiple Japanese attempts at surrender negotiations before the second bomb was dropped. As I recall, the later ones dropped all of the other conditions--they only wanted their emperor preserved.
But I don't have the primary sources handy so--for the sake of argument--let me just concede that as well. Let's say Japan wanted territorial integrity and a bunch of other stuff as well. Do you still think that bombing them again three days later was the only way? Backed-into-a-corner, the American war machine literally had no other options whatsoever? I would suggest that, at minimum, one option would have been to give the Japanese government a little more time to investigate the bombing and educate their leaders and advisers about it. Three days is an incredibly short amount of time, especially pre-satellite, pre-internet and with fog of war chaos everywhere.
This is a reasonable first step towards a reasonable argument. However, there's immediately and there's "immediately". Are you trying to say that 50,000+ civilians would have died if we waited more than three days between the nukes?
And were the Japanese actively subjugating and butchering Chinese at that point in time, or were they more focused on fighting the Russians and/or retreating back to Japan? (This is a genuine question; it's not an area of WWII history I'm familiar with.)
Ah, the magic of lazy patriotism. You have Wikipedia at your fingertips--why don't you go educate yourself?
I repeat, Japan DID surrender after the first one, but they wanted to keep their emperor (there may have been a few other details, I forget.) Instead of hashing out the terms of surrender or simply giving them a little more time to assess the damage, we bombed three days after Hiroshima. Let me say that again, the second bomb came just seventy-two hours later. In the age before satellites or the internet. Do you think the Japanese government had any idea what the casualty count was? At that point in time, do you think that the majority of officers in their military and advisers to the emperor even fully appreciated what an atomic bomb was?
1. The fact that we were planning for an invasion does not affect that "either immediate invasion OR we nuke them twice" is a false dichotomy.
2. The poster I was replying to was clearly relying on that dichotomy to unreservedly justify the bombings.
You want to argue that Hiroshima was justified that's fine, but you cannot begin by pretending that the USA was forced into a corner and had only two options in front of us. (And I'm still not sure how anyone can justify Nagasaki without falling back on blatant lies.)
Incorrect. They did 'quit'. Immediately. They just asked that we let them keep their emperor and we responded (and I'm paraphrasing): "BAHAHAHA, YOU DIDN'T SAY PRETTY PLEASE! *KABOOM* "
Every time, every time this knee-jerk excuse comes out. As if we had exactly two options in the entire universe. Because if we didn't nuke them or immediately invade them then... what? They were poised to invade California?
Give me a fucking break. There more than two options on the table. For example, they considered an option to invite Axis observers to watch as little boy was harmlessly detonated in the desert, but they turned it down because they were eager to see what kind of damage the thing would do in the real world. I'm not out to vilify the USA here--the rules of war were different back then and no one hands were clean (certainly not the Japanese.) The atomic bombs weren't the worse thing that happened in the war, and on the whole I think we behaved better than the Axis powers. And our ultimate aims were obviously much more noble.
But this brainlessly patriotic excuse is just so fucking pathetic. I could grant all of the premises, including the false dichotomy. So, for the sake of argument, I concede Hiroshima. And now... what of Nagasaki? Three fucking days later? Because their initial response to Hiroshima was almost an unconditional surrender but there was some question marks about the dispensation of their emperor, that justified another nuke?
It was wrong. Get over it. Jefferson was a great president even if he fucked up on slavery. And WWII was a good war even if we were clearly, at times, more ruthless than we had to be. But 70+ years later, this intellectual dishonesty is pointless and downright embarrassing--no different than the stubborn Japanese refusals to fully acknowledge their atrocities in China.
If I own a restaurant or some other type of public establishment and people come in and have a discussion that is upsetting other customers I have a right to ask them to leave, correct? That is not censorship
Yes it is. It is fundamentally different from governmental censorship, but... jesus I don't know, let's just do a thought experiment here: Forum A removes posts that they deem offensive. Forum B allows pretty much all posts to remain (perhaps with user tagging and filtering or whatever.) If you really object to the word "censorship" to describe what Forum A is doing, then please provide us with an acceptable synonym. It doesn't matter where you fall in this debate; the thing we are debating *is*, in fact, a thing.
For my own anti-censorship $0.02 here, I would say that if we must live in a web dominated by walled gardens, it would be nice if we had at least one social network that had an absolutist free speech policy. But I understand that any advertiser-supported site is going to have an extremely hard time pulling this off.
You can insult any single historical figure that you like on Facebook except one: Turkey's founder Mustafa Kemal 'Ataturk'
I would think that Turkey has something to say about Mohammed as well, considering they seized copies of Charlie Hebdo's survival issue due to the horribly, horribly offensive image of a crying prophet holding up a sign saying "All is Forgiven". (Aside: This really goes to show how deluded a lot of people are on these issues. If your scale is calibrated such that Turkey is deemed "secular" then a place like Texas is going to come out as "ultra-secular / atheistic")
Also, is this censorship happening on only Turkey's localized Facebook or is it on English Facebook as well? TFS doesn't make this clear, and although it's impossible to say it without coming off as a little smug ("I don't own a TV!"), I don't actually have a Facebook account so I can't read TFA.
I was implicitly pointing out that landmines have certain inherent qualities that makes them worth considering despite past instances of civilian causalities--causalities that could easily be minimized given a different context (strategic placement in a first-world nation instead of scattershot tactical placement in a third world nation.)
Automated weapons, it should be noted, generally lack this capability. I suppose that stationary turrets (of the sort that couldn't be trivially moved) could be useful but they are not at all militarily decisive or game-changing given how expensive and vulnerable they are (relative to mines.)
Again, landmines were brought up as a comparison. I was pointing out that this comparison was flawed and landmines in fact had a number of redeeming qualities that (I thought it unnecessary to highlight) automated weapons simply do not match.
Militaries do not clear modern minefields in minutes. That's complete nonsense. At best with hours or days of intense effort you might clear a narrow pathway, but that still puts you at a significant disadvantage as the defender can simply direct all of their air power and artillery at the pathway.
You furthermore are shifting the hypothetical into an all-out war including the potential use of nukes, when I was clearly talking about Ukraine-type situations, where force is limited and Russian deniablity (however laughable) was heavily utilized.
Also, I didn't cover this but tactical nuclear landmines are a very interesting (although politically very tricky to sell) strategy, which could even serve the dual purpose getting rid of some of the world's ICBMs.