New Testingstan

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

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

Nietzslime wrote: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

Shroom Man 777 wrote: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 wrote: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

starku wrote: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 wrote: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

F.J. Prefect, Esq wrote:The hell are we talking about here

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

BTW i stand by saying the atomic bombings were evil

Dooey Jo wrote:

Nietzslime wrote: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

F.J. Prefect, Esq wrote:The hell are we talking about here

Nietzslime wrote: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