Nuclear weapons discussion (formerly: Unicode 8.0 silliness)
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@boomzilla said:
The alternatives were worse.
Negotiating a peace accord is a worse alternative to killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, and giving many of the survivors severe radiation sickness?LOL. That's funny.
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started another
If you think the Cold War was started by our use of nukes you are surprisingly ignorant of history.
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I can't respect anyone who thinks murdering innocent civilians is a good way to end a war.
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Oh, politics, is there no thread in which you won't crop up?
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Negotiating a peace accord
With who? The people who were getting their cities firebombed en masse, to no effect except for the government to tell everyone "fight the invader to the death?" Look, every reasonable person who's looked at this admits that not using nukes would've involved a massive US invasion and millions more dead. That's why you hear stories about how the Army had so many Purple Heart medals made they didn't need to do another production run until Vietnam.
What's worse? The tens of thousands who died in those two cities, or the million+ who would've died otherwise? A negotiated cease-fire was not going to happen at the point when the bombs were dropped.
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I can't respect anyone who thinks murdering innocent civilians is a good way to end a war.
Killing the enemy in war isn't murder. By definition. If you think the nuking of Japan was The Worst Thing That Could Happen you simply are not an adult and need to stop talking about it until you understand what happened.
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I can't respect anyone who thinks murdering innocent civilians is a good way to end a war.
Yes, that's what naiveté and ignorance do for you: inability to put things in context.
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@RaceProUK said:
I can't respect anyone who thinks murdering innocent civilians is a good way to end a war.
Killing the enemy in war isn't murder. By definition.
Since when are civilians, who by definition are non-combatants, the enemy?
@boomzilla said:Yes, that's what naiveté and ignorance do for you: inability to put things in context.
Oh, I have no issue putting things into context. But by all means make me out to be the bad girl here, all because I think killing innocent civilians is wrong.
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@accalia said:
the incredibly poor decision making skills of absolutely every politician and lobbyist in the D.C. Area!
You say that like any other country is much better, no intention to bash any other country intended.
Abbott wants fewer wind farms, wishes RET had never been introduced
Tony Abbott is under fire for describing wind farms as "visually awful" and saying he wishes the Howard government had never implemented the Renewable Energy Target.
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Only on TDWTF can a discussion about emojis end up in a nuclear war debate.
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Oh, I have no issue putting things into context. But by all means make me out to be the bad girl here, all because I think killing innocent civilians is wrong.
So do I. So what? That doesn't make dropping nukes on Japan anything but the best way to have ended the war.
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@FrostCat said:
@accalia said:
the incredibly poor decision making skills of absolutely every politician and lobbyist in the D.C. Area!
You say that like any other country is much better, no intention to bash any other country intended.
Abbott wants fewer wind farms, wishes RET had never been introduced
Tony Abbott is under fire for describing wind farms as "visually awful" and saying he wishes the Howard government had never implemented the Renewable Energy Target.
Really, is there any good reason to keep those things?
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Only on TDWTF can a discussion about emojis end up in a nuclear war debate.
I wager the Japanese invented them as revenge. They are probably now pointing at laughing at people being up in arms about them.
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That might explain why there are no:
:little_boy:
:fat_man:emoji.
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Since when are civilians, who by definition are non-combatants, the enemy?
Since the entire fucking history of war except recently. Winning a war consists of breaking your enemy's will to fight. Sometimes that's easier to do by killing a bunch of civilians. It's not really just or admirable, but it was a fact of life until the civilized world agreed to stop doing it.
make me out to be the bad girl here, all because I think killing innocent civilians is wrong.
That's not what we're doing. We're telling you you're wrong for applying modern standards to a time that didn't share them.
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innocent civilians
Define "innocent".
How many of those people (and I don't know) were building weapons to support the war effort in their country? That makes them a legitimate target. Destroying the enemy's infrastructure is an effective way to stop them.
Of course, there's the issue of the children... hmmm.... how wildly do I have to wave my hand to get you to ignore that?
not using nukes would've involved a massive US invasion and millions more dead
Why was it necessary to invade at all? Couldn't you just blockade the island? If they don't have anything left to shoot at you with...
...maybe that was one of the scenarios that was considered and it was believed the Japanese would let themselves starve for resources rather than stop trying to fight. So then lots of people would still die.
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Define "innocent".
Children, office workers, lorry drivers, plumbers, electricians… basically, anyone not involved in the war effort.
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maybe that was one of the scenarios that was considered [...]
It probably was. Everything anyone's ever seen in all the years since indicates the military, at the least, was prepared to go on fighting until there was nobody left to fight.
Remember we're talking about the country that killed surrenduring enemy military forces, and had a few holdouts in caves in islands that thought they were still at war up to 20-30 years later (IIRC the last guy was discovered in the early 70s).
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Couldn't you just blockade the island?
Sweet. Now we kill the whole population with starvation instead of a few with a nuke. Not that's some long term thinking.
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Children, office workers, lorry drivers, plumbers, electricians… basically, anyone not involved in the war effort.
Fortunately, we haven't had a situation of total war since then. But collateral damage is something that is (today, not sure about back then) always assessed. The commander (in the US military, at least) has to consider them. I don't think there's a specific requirement about what he's supposed to think, but he has to think about it and presumably weigh that with the mission, etc.
The Japanese nukes probably still pass that test.
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That at least we can agree on.
Trufax:
Grave of the Fireflies was originally shown as a double-feature with My Neighbor Totoro.
Apparently as a supervillian plot to completely destroy all viewers emotionally by swinging them from an extreme high to an extreme low.
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I can't respect anyone who thinks murdering innocent civilians is a good way to end a war.
You're talking to Boom "let's invade Cuba! Yes, in 2015!" Zilla here.
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@RaceProUK said:
I can't respect anyone who thinks murdering innocent civilians is a good way to end a war.
You're talking to Boom "let's invade Cuba! Yes, in 2015!" Zilla here.
Better dead than red! Hey, at least I wasn't proposing some stupid thing that had zero chance of success.
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Sweet. Now we kill the whole population with starvation instead of a few with a nuke. Not that's some long term thinking.
With the reduced population from the war, and some good planning by their government, Japan was large enough to be self-sufficient. You'd literally be blockading them for decades until everybody just got bored of it and gave up.
... like the North Korea thing we're kind of in the middle of right now.
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You know I think you should up your game and think about making NUKING Cuba.
I mean, hell, Castro illegally stole some rich assholes' farms back in the mid-50s, surely that's worth a nuke in 2015, right?
(My favorite joke from the SImpsons, BTW. Lisa sees that poster, asks the bully, "do you really believe in that?" he replies, "gotta nuke something!"
I like to think I go through life with a "gotta nuke something!" attitude.)
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With the reduced population from the war, and some good planning by their government, Japan was large enough to be self-sufficient. You'd literally be blockading them for decades until everybody just got bored of it and gave up.
Possibly. Though the "bored" part would have been more likely to have resulted in them starting over, I think. "Haha, we outlasted them and now we've learned. We'll get them next time..."
... like the North Korea thing we're kind of in the middle of right now.
Which likes to think it's been self sufficient but wouldn't have made it without China propping them up?
You know I think you should up your game and think about making NUKING Cuba.
That will ruin the post-war rum and cigar parties. No dice.
I like to think I go through life with a "gotta nuke something!" attitude.
I don't think anyone here will disagree.
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Which likes to think it's been self sufficient but wouldn't have made it without China propping them up?
China AND Russia.
When Russia said, "ok we're sick of your shenanigans" they lost something like 15-20% of their population to starvation.
Stupidly, North Korea is also large enough to be self-sufficient if they didn't dedicate something like 80% of their national revenues to maintaining artillery pieces from the 1950s.
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Sweet. Now we kill the whole population with starvation instead of a few with a nuke. Not that's some long term thinking.
Well, you'd blockade until they lose the will to fight. And yeah, that might not be until they're all dead...
But the nukes showed that they could be broken, so it would be a matter of determining what exactly it was or would have been that did the breaking... you'll need to know that to determine if nuking was overkill or appropriate.
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Oh, the A-bombs! The A-bombs! Will someone please think of the A-bombs!
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But the nukes showed that they could be broken, so it would be a matter of determining what exactly it was or would have been that did the breaking... you'll need to know that to determine if nuking was overkill or appropriate.
Maybe we could have just blockaded them and then shown them porn where the sex organs weren't obscured by black bars.
That'd break 'em!
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But the nukes showed that they could be broken, so it would be a matter of determining what exactly it was or would have been that did the breaking... you'll need to know that to determine if nuking was overkill or appropriate.
Given that it took two to actually break them...yeah, I still think that was the best and most humane way to end the war.
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TIL'd earlier - in 1941 Japan was already drafting 30 yr-olds and recycling ornamental iron - before December.
And I think I remember reading that our sub commanders were getting frustrated because they were running out of targets during 1945.
Japan had been running on fumes for so long... hard to have confidence in relying solely on blockade.
This book is a bit of a slog, and leaves open some big questions, but for history buffs, covers some new ground...
http://www.amazon.com/Japan-1941-Countdown-Eri-Hotta/dp/0307739740
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TIL'd earlier - in 1941 Japan was already drafting 30 yr-olds and recycling ornamental iron - before December.
Look at the amount of land that tiny island was occupying.
And not just colonizing like the UK was, but occupying, requiring troops to use as occupying forces.
And remember they started their expansion in 1937, years before Germany attacked anybody.
The entire nation was running on hubris LONG before they even started planning the Pearl Harbor attack. In retrospect, it's insanity-- what did they think was going to happen?
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I like to think I go through life with a "gotta nuke something!" attitude.
There is a downside.
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Quick, someone post their Google results for "TERRAFORMARS"!
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Get out of my RSS feed.
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Get your RSS feed out of my Facebook feed.
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Given that it took two to actually break them...
And the Soviet Union, finally, declaring war against them. Even then, there was an attempted military coup against Hirohito to prevent the surrender. The Japanese military was nothing if not tenacious.
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Yeah, the bombs where bad, but just imagine having the red army swarming your country. Japan would be another North Korea by now and we wouldn't have video games nor hentai.
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we wouldn't have video games
The world's first videogames were American and European
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I didn't say the Japanese invented them, but if you take out Nintendo, Sony and Sega, the 80s and 90s wouldn't have been the same.
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True; videogames would have been driven by Europe instead ;)
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And that's terrible.
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A wonderfully erudite rebuttal there
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Sorry, I was in an even sillier mood than usual. Why would I be quoting Superdickery otherwise?
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@RaceProUK said:
Since when are civilians, who by definition are non-combatants, the enemy?
Since the entire fucking history of war except recently. Winning a war consists of breaking your enemy's will to fight. Sometimes that's easier to do by killing a bunch of civilians. It's not really just or admirable, but it was a fact of life until the civilized world agreed to stop doing it.
Can you be more specific than recently?Bombing civilians was generaly seen as bad before WW 2 (for example the Hague Conventions forbade attacks on undefended towns) and there were other conventions with the purpose to outlow civilian targets, although no laws came out of it.
It's a slippery slope. You take out some military installations, a factory or two and when a war keeps dragging on they started killing the worker's families as well.
EDIT: Oh wait, this was from back in June. Oh well...
