Godammed SDN

[weemadando]

The atomic bombings are such a confused, controversial and ambivalent thing.
*Did dropping them end the war? YES. Historical records show there is no doubt that city destroying bombs were number one on the big list of "reasons to surrender immediately".
*Would there have been equivalent damage and casualties from ongoing strategic bombing? More than certain. Look at the capacity for strategic bombing that was still growing and the prior casualties from it.
*Did it prevent the need to invade the home islands? Maybe. Ask a dozen historians get a hundred theories on how the rest of the war plays out.
*Did it force Stalin to cool his jets and give the anglosphere a headstart on hegemony? Yes.

[starku]

there's no right answer anyway because of belligerance all round

i mean you could argue killing all those innocent peasants was a good thing because the survivors were protected from the volatile start fo the cold war

but looking at mass slaughter like you're playing hoi2 is probably wrong

its why its so trendy and tasteful to have people liek sheep skimmer blather on about just how many millions were forced to obey america under pain of instant and irrevocable death

i guess you have to be american to really understand the mindset

[Nietzslime]

like i said, there is a clear line between legitimate critique of the west and the weird left-wing one-upsmanship that this board sometimes engages in between Dooey's marxism, Bak's Critical Theory, Stark's hyperbole, adr's populism, and shroom's fuck americaness

like, was the invasion of iraq unjustified and was there a lot of corporate propaganda in the lead-up to it

clearly

was the purpose getting oil

well the vast majority of contracts didn't go to american oil companies and even those that did are highly favourable to the iraqi government

so an analysis that solely tries to examine the war in an 'anti-corporate america war is a racket yarr' is clearly insufficient and wrong if not outright harmful in the way it blinds us to a more holistic and balanced view of the war

[Zod]

depending on who you ask it sounds like truman dropped the bomb as an easy way out

he didn't want to explain to his voters that he spent $2 billion dollars on a super-weapon to simply not use it

Perhaps the crucial factor in the decision to proceed with the atomic bombing was that none of America's leaders felt any urgency about finding a way to avoid it. The scientists had not stressed that their creation might unleash radioactive fallout that would make the Bomb a more sinister weapon than even chemical warfare. Truman and his advisers knew that the explosion would be phenomenally large, but considered it no more morally repulsive than the massive fire-bombing raids that had cremated much of Tokyo. Stimson, the man who wrestled most with these imponderables, called the Bomb "the most terrible weapon ever known," but even he considered it "as legitimate as any other of the deadly explosive weapons of modern war."

The decision, then, was from their vantage simple. If Truman had not used the Bomb, how could he have explained it to the families of the boys who would subsequently have died, be it 40,000 of them or a million? How could he have justified continuing the war, transferring weary G.I.s to the Pacific to prepare for an invasion, proceeding with the grotesque fire bombings and allowing the Kremlin to expand its grip in the Far East when he had spent $2 billion on a weapon that could produce a quick end to the conflict?

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... z1rhQr6v9z

[Shroom Man 777]

just because we decry america for all its shit

we shouldn't lose perspective on other people's shit too

[Shroom Man 777]

cause while yeah fuck america

there's other shit in the world too

Makati Mayor Jejomar Erwin Binay has ordered the filing of charges against a group of fire volunteers who trashed a police car and flooded a police station with water from their hoses to protest the death of one of their colleagues in a shootout with lawmen on April 1.

“While we respect their right to express their sentiments, we will not tolerate destruction of government property and acts of hooliganism,” Binay said.

According to a police report, around 100 fire volunteers led by Marcing Sananela on board 20 fire trucks and a dozen cars trooped to the Makati Central Police Station on Ayala Avenue Extension in Makati City on April 5 to protest the death of Ronald Infante, a fire volunteer, who was killed on April 1 near the South Superhighway.

Investigators said that Infante figured in a shootout with policemen from the Makati Police Precinct 3 after he and a companion tried to hijack a delivery van. The van driver, however, rammed the vehicle into the road’s center island, attracting the attention of lawmen on patrol.

During Thursday’s protest, the fire volunteers opened their water hoses and trained them on the police station as fire sirens blared until Supt. Jaime Santos, the city police officer in charge, came out and met with them.

Reached by the Inquirer yesterday, Santos recalled that he spoke with Infante’s wife, Mary Rose, and told her that he would act on her husband’s case as soon as she files a formal complaint.

“In fact, I already relieved the two officers involved in the shooting. She thanked me for that,” he said.

“I thought after our exchange, they would disperse peacefully. I did not know they were planning on going to Precinct 3,” Santos added.

At the police precinct on Evangelista Street in Barangay Bangkal, the fire volunteers surrounded the building and hurled invectives at the policemen who were inside.

They also trained their water hoses on the police precinct and a nearby fire station, resulting in flooding inside the buildings, said Santos.

The mob later vented their rage on a police car which was parked outside. They punctured the tires, scratched the body, broke the tail lights and windshield and pumped water inside the vehicle.

Santos said he decided to go to the police precinct but before he got there, the protesters dispersed. A police report took note of the names inscribed on the fire trucks which took part in the protest.

These included the Severino, Tayabas, Batangas Fire Volunteers Association; Alyansa Fire Volunteers; Baclaran Fire Volunteers; Central Tondo Volunteers; Sampaloc Volunteers; Metro Pumper; LPGMA Malabon; West Tondo; Sta. Cruz, Escolta; Brgy. Talipapa; Rusty Lopez Fire Volunteers; Marikina Fil-Chinese; Gotesco; Golden Pumper San Juan; Dapitan Pumper; Dee Hwaleong; Malabon, Potrero and Metro Volunteer.

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/174149/rap ... kati-rally

FIREMENG VERSUS PO-LICE

FIGHT

[adr-admin]

what hurts about war is i do believe all of them have a rational and often logical basis; they don't come about just cuz of some batshit dictator having a bad day

yes even the empire's imperialism has reasons

remember btw that having a reason doesn't mean it isn't evil. i don't have a problem with simultenesously calling hitler a victim of circumstance and a bad guy at the same time

but whether it is greed, settling an old score, fear (real or imagined), or even well intentioned humanitarian shit

whatever it is they think is the reason to do it, war has a huge cost and there has to be *something* that makes it seem like a good idea to a country at the time despite all that

of course it is often a combination.


so this brings me to my plan for a lasting world peace: to figure out what these reasons are and try to make a long term shaping of the world to address them well before it comes to the breaking point

your actions in 1919 may help lead to a war in 1939

thus the time to do the right thing is now so we don't have to make these tough decisions tomorrow

[Shroom Man 777]

i think the important main thing we can agree on is:

yeah fuck america

[starku]

like i said, there is a clear line between legitimate critique of the west and the weird left-wing one-upsmanship that this board sometimes engages in between Dooey's marxism, Bak's Critical Theory, Stark's hyperbole, adr's populism, and shroom's fuck americaness

like, was the invasion of iraq unjustified and was there a lot of corporate propaganda in the lead-up to it

clearly

was the purpose getting oil

well the vast majority of contracts didn't go to american oil companies and even those that did are highly favourable to the iraqi government

so an analysis that solely tries to examine the war in an 'anti-corporate america war is a racket yarr' is clearly insufficient and wrong if not outright harmful in the way it blinds us to a more holistic and balanced view of the war

don't worry your knee jerk elitism never gets old

i haven't even busted wise about cylons being more morally valuable than japanese, can you believe that lol

[Shroom Man 777]

too bad if you merged all of us into one mutant arabic-screaming flag-burning brown-skinned deformagrotesquetitude thundering through the camel stalls of bakaladaka street, that still won't even microscopically encapsulate all the shit the west has done in its sordid history. it would be quite a tame criticism indeed

[starku]

shhh

let nua tell us the actual truth

nobody else is allowed to speak

his dad says

[Nietzslime]

too bad if you merged all of us into one mutant arabic-screaming flag-burning brown-skinned deformagrotesquetitude thundering through the camel stalls of bakaladaka street, that still won't even microscopically encapsulate all the shit the west has done in its sordid history. it would be quite a tame criticism indeed

well

i don't really know if 'the west' can be defined satisfactorily

and using that word feels like the kind of blanket pejorative that isn't particularly useful

much like how some marxists use 'bourgeois' or some feminists use 'patriarchy' it feels like a fairly ambiguous entity onto which you could affix any institutional evil in the past half-millenium rather than a descriptor which denotes any real information that would help to understand or solve real problems

i dunno if it's a particularly useful term, you know

it doesn't really mean anything

[starku]

thus we have demonstrated 'deflection' to the audience

in this way you can say a lot of smart sounding stuff while actually not answering the question at all

this is how you get into harvard

[Nietzslime]

thus we have demonstrated 'deflection' to the audience

in this way you can say a lot of smart sounding stuff while actually not answering the question at all

this is how you get into harvard

okay so what should i say

i decided against 'you know setting your personal standard as 'not as bad as colonialism' may not be the hardest goal'

since that seemed trivial and his post was obviously rhetorical

so i chose to examine something much more interesting to me which is engaged in a lot which i think is worth turning a critical eye towards

or do i need to like confirm my status as someone who thinks centuries of cultural and environmental devastation are bad or what

and if you're going to argue with me you could at least do me the courtesy of being in the same time zone and online at the same hours

[F.J. Prefect, Esq]

The hell are we talking about here

[weemadando]

Third time lucky. Maybe SVPD will finally pull a Mustafa and answer the question.

[thejester]

thus we have demonstrated 'deflection' to the audience

in this way you can say a lot of smart sounding stuff while actually not answering the question at all

this is how you get into harvard

dude I love you and everything but is that a serious post after the last 5 pages

adr: 'but capital drives wars and we world peace what if japan was in a bar fight but america king hit it'
nua: 'what do those ideas actually mean'
you: 'nua is saying a lot of smart sounding stuff while not answering the question at all'

[Dooey Jo]

this isn't really fair

churchill particularly was incredibly set on bringing the polish government in exile back to warsaw to hold elections

reading the minutes of the yalta conference it's pretty obvious that stalin just outplayed churchill through the leverage of 'has millions of soldiers in warsaw and actually has plans to lure the polish democrats back into the country so he can murder them'

if you have any evidence that churchill's motives were financial i'd be interested

financial reasons for giving poland away? i don't think there were financial reasons for that, rather it is as you say. he might well have had economic reasons for wanting poland free from soviet influence though, and surely was not much happier to see eastern europe under soviet control instead of german, closing him off from those markets either way

anyway, i think it's fascinating to consider how ww2 would look if the nazis and japanese weren't genocidal racists

because the war would in all likelihood have happened anyway

but it's like, tens of millions of people dead, and the end result is... landgrab for soviet and irrelevance for the uk

it'd be the most pointless huge war ever. people would have been even more apathetic than after ww1

of course socially we got the realisations of "okay racism and authoritarianism = bad" which might not have happened without the holocaust



re: oil. it's not necessary for the us to actually own the oil themselves as long as the state that does is friendly to them and sells it to them on favourable terms

of course, for iraq specifically i think a more interesting angle of analysis is that of the large number of private military contractors that profited off the war, and the contracts for rebuilding shit after the war

however i wouldn't be silly and claim that bush himself wasn't a huge factor in actually going through with it for personal reasons. but i dare say cheney's reasons were purely business.

[adr-admin]

The hell are we talking about here

i became a fine example of how biases are a threat to facts

[Civil War Man]

btw 9/11 was also provoked and used as an excuse to make more bullshit wars

True, though there is a difference between provoked and engineered. Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were provoked, the WMDs in Iraq thing was engineered.

Though I have heard it said that Iraq had to have WMDs, because Dick Cheney still had the receipt from when we sold the stuff to Saddam.

BTW i stand by saying the atomic bombings were evil

No arguments here. Though I'd say the bombings were less evil than how an invasion probably would have turned out, but way more evil than options that were never really considered because no one in power had any interest in taking them.

[Nietzslime]

this isn't really fair

churchill particularly was incredibly set on bringing the polish government in exile back to warsaw to hold elections

reading the minutes of the yalta conference it's pretty obvious that stalin just outplayed churchill through the leverage of 'has millions of soldiers in warsaw and actually has plans to lure the polish democrats back into the country so he can murder them'

if you have any evidence that churchill's motives were financial i'd be interested

financial reasons for giving poland away? i don't think there were financial reasons for that, rather it is as you say. he might well have had economic reasons for wanting poland free from soviet influence though, and surely was not much happier to see eastern europe under soviet control instead of german, closing him off from those markets either way

anyway, i think it's fascinating to consider how ww2 would look if the nazis and japanese weren't genocidal racists

because the war would in all likelihood have happened anyway

but it's like, tens of millions of people dead, and the end result is... landgrab for soviet and irrelevance for the uk

it'd be the most pointless huge war ever. people would have been even more apathetic than after ww1

of course socially we got the realisations of "okay racism and authoritarianism = bad" which might not have happened without the holocaust

evidence that britain and france's motives for entering the war were german dominance of south and eastern european markets as you say, and not a delayed response to fascist aggression

[Bakustra]

The hell are we talking about here

we are engaging in self-criticism, which is as i understand it a fairly painful and complicated surgical procedure

[Dooey Jo]

evidence that britain and france's motives for entering the war were german dominance of south and eastern european markets as you say, and not a delayed response to fascist aggression

what exactly are you disputing here? that germany threatened british and french dominance over europe and that this was, well, a threat to them?

i hope you did not take a glib remark pointing at the hypocrisy of warfare to mean that this would have been the sole cause of conflict behind the biggest war ever

[Veef]

uh oh Batmang needs to defend the Executor penis

[timmy]