Translation: I read a book that says the Americans were jerks, so clearly every point that poster on Slashdot makes must be wrong.
The facts are that the Japs were not sending any clear surrender signals to anyone. There were elements within the regime who clearly knew the war was over sooner or later, but there were other elements, very strong elements, senior leaders like Tojo, who wanted to make the US pay in blood for every inch of Japan they took. They were militarily preparing for such an invasion, and it was only when Hirohito himself, after the second bomb, basically used his personal authority to force the regime to agree to whatever terms the Americans wanted (except of course, for dethroning Hirohito). If Hirohito had not done that, or the military rulers had in some way muzzled him (it would have hardly been the first time a Japanese Emperor had basically been turned into a puppet), even with the atomic bombs, they might still have conspired to continue the resistance.
Without the atomic attacks it is almost certain that Japan would have had to have been invaded. It would have been a brutal war, at least as costly as the retaking of Europe, and with the Russians now more clearly than ever moving into the category of "ally becoming enemy", the US faced a double threat. As it is the Russians still hold the Kuril Islands.
Well, that and the fact that Chiang-Kai Shek was a rather nasty bastard and the KMT never was able to really convince the Chinese people that it had their interests at heart. Of course, they were wrong to assume that Mao did, but still if the KMT hadn't been such vicious assholes, maybe people would have felt a little less inclined to join the Reds.
We tried that once. Didn't work out so well. Now we have this concept of freedom of religion, you know, where you don't get harass or kill people because they don't worship the way you think they should.
If you want my personal opinion, Iran is a thinly veiled military dictatorship that uses religion as its unifying ideology much as the Soviets and the Chinese use(d) Communism. The Basij are all very swirly eyed, but I don't get the feeling the country is actually run by similar types.
Indeed. After years of enduring networks with servers with tree names or GI Joe character names, when it came for me to come up with names for my servers and other network devices, I came up with functional names that describe physical locations, departments, functions, and so forth. That way I have a descriptive network rather than trying to remember which one of the Power Rangers the last IT guy liked the best.
The Chinese admired the Americans quite a lot. Even Mao tried to make overtures, not wanting to be totally reliant on the Soviets, but the Americans had this bizarre fixation on Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang (Churchill made special note of this unreasonable obsession in his History of WWII), even after the Communists had driven them off the mainland. The strict anti-Communist stance lead the Americans to miss an opportunity at rapprochement and drove Mao completely into the Soviet sphere, and continued support for the Kuomintang, who weren't exactly all that pleasant when they were running China, pissed a lot of Chinese off.
1. It demonstrated to the Soviets, who had massive forces amassed in Eastern and Central Europe that the West now possessed a weapon deliverable by high altitude bomber that could kill thousands.
2. It prevented the Soviets from seizing large parts of Japan by forcing a quick surrender to the Americans. An invasion of the main islands would most certainly have taken long enough that the Soviets could have moved to occupy Japan themselves. As it was, the Russians seized the northernmost parts of the Empire proper and hold them to this very day.
3. It stopped the war very quickly and forced an unconditional surrender. There was even less game-playing that the fragments of the Third Reich had tried to play.
As to the larger point you try to make, the Japanese leadership's actions even after the first H bomb were hardly singular in wanting to surrender.
If Iran ever dared to use such a weapon against anyone, it would be the last thing it ever did. China and Russia will tolerate the Ayatollahs to a point, but to actually launch an attack against anyone else, that would be intolerable even by their standards. All support would end instantly and Israel and the United States would be given carte blanche to deal with Iran as they chose. The Iranian airforce and navy would be wiped out, most of its military installations of any size would be destroyed, it would be left with an army and a bunch of poorly armed Basij who are only useful as cannon fodder, except the cannons would be bombing from 40,000 feet. I suspect the Ayatollahs' regime wouldn't last a month. The regular army, who has no great love for the Basij or the Revolutionary Guard, would probably arrest or just simply start shooting them, because the very few nuclear weapons that Iran would have would be useless, or worse than useless, once the necessary infrastructure to launch attacks was crippled or turned to slag.
The fact is that as nasty as an attack by a second rate power like Iran would be, it's not something that could be repeated. Places like North Korea and Iran do not have the resources to build vast stockpiles of nukes. Once the oil dries up, they won't even be able to afford to maintain what they've built by that point.
The fact is that without the atomic bomb, WWIII most certainly would have happened between the West and the USSR. The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki raised the stakes of another general war between the remaining Great Powers so enormously that a war like WWII would no longer be possible.
As horrible as these weapons are, they stopped the most terrible war the world would have ever known.
And now you're getting jobs and economic stability and mandated health care. The US is still a little uneven, but Christ man, look across the pond, where Europe can't even begin to right the boat. Besides, considering how health care continues to eat more US GDP than even the most socialized industrialized nation, you would think it might actually be an improvement.
This is what I mean by extreme partisanship. It fogs the mind, prevents someone from viewing a policy on its merits. It simply becomes "fuck that, I want this", even if the "this" is probably impossible, whereas the "that" is at least something can be done.
Both GWB's and Obama's economic advisers had a historical model; the Hoover administration, which chose to keep its head above the economic crisis during its early stages at a point when intervention might have at least stabilized the economy (despite what people the, crash of 1929 didn't lead to a decade-long down, it lead to high volatility, which is in many ways much worse, and it was that that lead to the Depression). By targeted bail outs to prevent a complete freeze up of the movement of global credit, both GWB and Obama prevented a nightmare scenario. Yes, it sucks that some really incompetent bastards got saved from their own wickedness and idiocy, but history will show, I think, that as bad as the 2008 collapse was, it was the actions of the outgoing and incoming American administrations which prevented it from becoming another Depression.
The movement needs more than a leader. It needs a point. By the time the Occupiers were finished, you had everybody from homeless advocates (and homeless) to raving Marxists, neither of which represent in any way the alleged 99%. At least the Tea Partiers had a tangible set of principles and goals. Being reactionary Libertarian, I despise much of what the Tea Party stands for, but there was at least some sense that there was a direction beyond "we're just against those guys".
Political movements that cannot solidify a single set of goals die out. It's not the leaders alone that do it. The problem with the Occupiers is the same as the peace movement of the 1970s. At the core, one of the founding principles is that everyone has their own idea of where the movement should go. There's a core kind of philosophical anarchism which means that no one is ever really going to become a leader, and if they did, they'd just end up fracturing the movement if they ever did anything faintly leader-like.
Beyond that, revolutions are dangerous things. Smashing existing economic, political and social structures rarely actually ends with something stronger. The American Revolution is an exception, rather than a rule. I much prefer the more evolutionary approach that lead to democracy in Britain, from the Glorious Revolution to the greater and lesser reform acts of the 19th to the 20th century. No burning down buildings or taking emperors and their families out into the woods and gunning them down.
The last thing you want is fanatics. The Tea Party almost brought the US debt into discredit for the first time in the history of the United States through some sort of mad desire to remain ideologically pure. No thanks, don't want that kind of revolution.
I get it. The economy is bad because of Obama, except that it's improving, despite Obama.
Something's faulty with your logic, mate.
Here's my theory. Economics is too big and too complicated to be able to pin the blame or the credit on politicians. At best, their policies take years to begin to alter the system in any appreciable way. Politicians will, of course, claim credit for the good things that show up during their term(s) and will deny responsibility for the bad things that appear, and the opponents of said politicians will, inversely, claim the good things had nothing to do with the politician in question or possibly happened despite said politician's unbelievable and never before seen incompetence, and the bad things, well, those are obviously the politician's fault, again due to said politician's unbelievable incompetence.
It's sort of like a conspiracy theory, but you don't have to wear tin foil hats or be a paranoid schizophrenic to play. Mind you, do have to have another mental disorder; blinding partisanship.
Look, the guy comes into the cop shop with a weird story about how he was downloading music and child porn appeared on his computer. Now I think even most moderately tech savvy people would at least pause at the story. It certainly requires investigation, and in the meantime, most jurisdictions have rules surrounding minors being in contact with people suspected of child sex or child porn crimes.
I'm not saying the guy is guilty, and I doubt the cops are saying that either. But they are seeing a highly unusual situation, and they are taking the step they feel can best protect the minor. It sucks if the guy is telling the truth, no doubt about it, and certainly in that case it would seem to be punishing an innocent man, but I think it's a warranted precaution.
Funding? They got axed? Fucking christ, but there are some really retarded people posting here. I don't mean just sort of a little on the dull side, but full on cognitively challenged halfwits, the kind of people that should be stuck in institutions and given soft toys to play with so they don't hurt themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
And what they'll get is a high level of piracy of eBooks. Fucking idiots.
In April 1945, the Soviet Union had nearly 6.5 million troops arrayed throughout Eastern Europe.
Translation: I read a book that says the Americans were jerks, so clearly every point that poster on Slashdot makes must be wrong.
The facts are that the Japs were not sending any clear surrender signals to anyone. There were elements within the regime who clearly knew the war was over sooner or later, but there were other elements, very strong elements, senior leaders like Tojo, who wanted to make the US pay in blood for every inch of Japan they took. They were militarily preparing for such an invasion, and it was only when Hirohito himself, after the second bomb, basically used his personal authority to force the regime to agree to whatever terms the Americans wanted (except of course, for dethroning Hirohito). If Hirohito had not done that, or the military rulers had in some way muzzled him (it would have hardly been the first time a Japanese Emperor had basically been turned into a puppet), even with the atomic bombs, they might still have conspired to continue the resistance.
Without the atomic attacks it is almost certain that Japan would have had to have been invaded. It would have been a brutal war, at least as costly as the retaking of Europe, and with the Russians now more clearly than ever moving into the category of "ally becoming enemy", the US faced a double threat. As it is the Russians still hold the Kuril Islands.
Well, that and the fact that Chiang-Kai Shek was a rather nasty bastard and the KMT never was able to really convince the Chinese people that it had their interests at heart. Of course, they were wrong to assume that Mao did, but still if the KMT hadn't been such vicious assholes, maybe people would have felt a little less inclined to join the Reds.
We tried that once. Didn't work out so well. Now we have this concept of freedom of religion, you know, where you don't get harass or kill people because they don't worship the way you think they should.
If you want my personal opinion, Iran is a thinly veiled military dictatorship that uses religion as its unifying ideology much as the Soviets and the Chinese use(d) Communism. The Basij are all very swirly eyed, but I don't get the feeling the country is actually run by similar types.
Indeed. After years of enduring networks with servers with tree names or GI Joe character names, when it came for me to come up with names for my servers and other network devices, I came up with functional names that describe physical locations, departments, functions, and so forth. That way I have a descriptive network rather than trying to remember which one of the Power Rangers the last IT guy liked the best.
No kidding. The Japanese government didn't even surrender after Hiroshima.
The Chinese admired the Americans quite a lot. Even Mao tried to make overtures, not wanting to be totally reliant on the Soviets, but the Americans had this bizarre fixation on Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang (Churchill made special note of this unreasonable obsession in his History of WWII), even after the Communists had driven them off the mainland. The strict anti-Communist stance lead the Americans to miss an opportunity at rapprochement and drove Mao completely into the Soviet sphere, and continued support for the Kuomintang, who weren't exactly all that pleasant when they were running China, pissed a lot of Chinese off.
It served two purposes:
1. It demonstrated to the Soviets, who had massive forces amassed in Eastern and Central Europe that the West now possessed a weapon deliverable by high altitude bomber that could kill thousands.
2. It prevented the Soviets from seizing large parts of Japan by forcing a quick surrender to the Americans. An invasion of the main islands would most certainly have taken long enough that the Soviets could have moved to occupy Japan themselves. As it was, the Russians seized the northernmost parts of the Empire proper and hold them to this very day.
3. It stopped the war very quickly and forced an unconditional surrender. There was even less game-playing that the fragments of the Third Reich had tried to play.
As to the larger point you try to make, the Japanese leadership's actions even after the first H bomb were hardly singular in wanting to surrender.
If Iran ever dared to use such a weapon against anyone, it would be the last thing it ever did. China and Russia will tolerate the Ayatollahs to a point, but to actually launch an attack against anyone else, that would be intolerable even by their standards. All support would end instantly and Israel and the United States would be given carte blanche to deal with Iran as they chose. The Iranian airforce and navy would be wiped out, most of its military installations of any size would be destroyed, it would be left with an army and a bunch of poorly armed Basij who are only useful as cannon fodder, except the cannons would be bombing from 40,000 feet. I suspect the Ayatollahs' regime wouldn't last a month. The regular army, who has no great love for the Basij or the Revolutionary Guard, would probably arrest or just simply start shooting them, because the very few nuclear weapons that Iran would have would be useless, or worse than useless, once the necessary infrastructure to launch attacks was crippled or turned to slag.
The fact is that as nasty as an attack by a second rate power like Iran would be, it's not something that could be repeated. Places like North Korea and Iran do not have the resources to build vast stockpiles of nukes. Once the oil dries up, they won't even be able to afford to maintain what they've built by that point.
The fact is that without the atomic bomb, WWIII most certainly would have happened between the West and the USSR. The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki raised the stakes of another general war between the remaining Great Powers so enormously that a war like WWII would no longer be possible.
As horrible as these weapons are, they stopped the most terrible war the world would have ever known.
Because of course the Scandinavian countries are well known for the intense levels of poverty due to their high taxes.
One word: default.
And now you're getting jobs and economic stability and mandated health care. The US is still a little uneven, but Christ man, look across the pond, where Europe can't even begin to right the boat. Besides, considering how health care continues to eat more US GDP than even the most socialized industrialized nation, you would think it might actually be an improvement.
This is what I mean by extreme partisanship. It fogs the mind, prevents someone from viewing a policy on its merits. It simply becomes "fuck that, I want this", even if the "this" is probably impossible, whereas the "that" is at least something can be done.
Both GWB's and Obama's economic advisers had a historical model; the Hoover administration, which chose to keep its head above the economic crisis during its early stages at a point when intervention might have at least stabilized the economy (despite what people the, crash of 1929 didn't lead to a decade-long down, it lead to high volatility, which is in many ways much worse, and it was that that lead to the Depression). By targeted bail outs to prevent a complete freeze up of the movement of global credit, both GWB and Obama prevented a nightmare scenario. Yes, it sucks that some really incompetent bastards got saved from their own wickedness and idiocy, but history will show, I think, that as bad as the 2008 collapse was, it was the actions of the outgoing and incoming American administrations which prevented it from becoming another Depression.
The movement needs more than a leader. It needs a point. By the time the Occupiers were finished, you had everybody from homeless advocates (and homeless) to raving Marxists, neither of which represent in any way the alleged 99%. At least the Tea Partiers had a tangible set of principles and goals. Being reactionary Libertarian, I despise much of what the Tea Party stands for, but there was at least some sense that there was a direction beyond "we're just against those guys".
Political movements that cannot solidify a single set of goals die out. It's not the leaders alone that do it. The problem with the Occupiers is the same as the peace movement of the 1970s. At the core, one of the founding principles is that everyone has their own idea of where the movement should go. There's a core kind of philosophical anarchism which means that no one is ever really going to become a leader, and if they did, they'd just end up fracturing the movement if they ever did anything faintly leader-like.
Beyond that, revolutions are dangerous things. Smashing existing economic, political and social structures rarely actually ends with something stronger. The American Revolution is an exception, rather than a rule. I much prefer the more evolutionary approach that lead to democracy in Britain, from the Glorious Revolution to the greater and lesser reform acts of the 19th to the 20th century. No burning down buildings or taking emperors and their families out into the woods and gunning them down.
The last thing you want is fanatics. The Tea Party almost brought the US debt into discredit for the first time in the history of the United States through some sort of mad desire to remain ideologically pure. No thanks, don't want that kind of revolution.
I get it. The economy is bad because of Obama, except that it's improving, despite Obama.
Something's faulty with your logic, mate.
Here's my theory. Economics is too big and too complicated to be able to pin the blame or the credit on politicians. At best, their policies take years to begin to alter the system in any appreciable way. Politicians will, of course, claim credit for the good things that show up during their term(s) and will deny responsibility for the bad things that appear, and the opponents of said politicians will, inversely, claim the good things had nothing to do with the politician in question or possibly happened despite said politician's unbelievable and never before seen incompetence, and the bad things, well, those are obviously the politician's fault, again due to said politician's unbelievable incompetence.
It's sort of like a conspiracy theory, but you don't have to wear tin foil hats or be a paranoid schizophrenic to play. Mind you, do have to have another mental disorder; blinding partisanship.
It reads more like Kim Stanley Robinson's Blue Mars. Just as boring and neo-Marxist, by the looks of it.
Holy sweeping stereotypes, Batman!
And?????
Look, the guy comes into the cop shop with a weird story about how he was downloading music and child porn appeared on his computer. Now I think even most moderately tech savvy people would at least pause at the story. It certainly requires investigation, and in the meantime, most jurisdictions have rules surrounding minors being in contact with people suspected of child sex or child porn crimes.
I'm not saying the guy is guilty, and I doubt the cops are saying that either. But they are seeing a highly unusual situation, and they are taking the step they feel can best protect the minor. It sucks if the guy is telling the truth, no doubt about it, and certainly in that case it would seem to be punishing an innocent man, but I think it's a warranted precaution.
Funding? They got axed? Fucking christ, but there are some really retarded people posting here. I don't mean just sort of a little on the dull side, but full on cognitively challenged halfwits, the kind of people that should be stuck in institutions and given soft toys to play with so they don't hurt themselves.
Not everybody has child porn on the computer.
Judean People's Front, bloody splitters!
At last, somewhere to store all my pirated music and movies!!!!!