None of these chickenshit cowards will respond because they know their arguments don’t hold up under the weight of reality. All they have is “b-but Kamala is doing the genocide now and Trump might not do it” when that’s so obviously false it’s kind of stunning. It’s how you know these fucks are either Republican trolls trying to undermine Kamala’s campaign because they know their candidate sucks or they’re just so marinated in propaganda and theory they lack the bandwidth to actually apply basic logic to even the most obvious of situations.

My truly white-hot take is that if I had to choose between Palestine being reduced to ash and losing me and my family’s rights and Palestine being reduced to ash and me and my family not losing my rights…I’m going to take the option that involves me and my family not losing my rights lol.

And, to be frank, if I had to choose between helping a million strangers I’ve never met or not, with the lives of my family and friends on the line, I’d probably pick my family and friends over the strangers, regardless of the issue.

You can moan and cry all you want about “you are voting for genocide” or whatever - the fact is that the world is much larger than Palestine. Other things are at stake here. How the fuck are all those Palestinians (who are still going to be bombed by the Republicans btw) going to deal with climate change as its effects worsen when a Republican administration takes power in the US and rolls back all our climate protections and attempts to mitigate climate change? The global poor are FUCKED if we don’t handle that shit as best we can ASAP. Full stop.

I’m personally not interested in fucking over every other person on the planet for Palestine. Is the genocide horrible? Yes. Should it be stopped immediately? Yes. Do I want it to stop? Also, yes. But can I in good conscience actively utilize my vote to wring my hands over genocide and allow an even worse scenario to play out? Fuck no.

There are more things at stake here than just Palestine. Shit sucks, but that’s the world we live in and there won’t be magical change just because you wring your hands and screech on the internet about how random people are “supporting a genocide by voting for Kamala” when any person with half a brain can see that the Republican party has acted the same way in the past and will actively accelerate it when given the chance (remember when Trump pissed everyone off by moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, effectively recognizing the stolen land there?). Grow the fuck up and see that the world isn’t so simple - sometimes there are no good options, only mildly less shitty ones.

How do you think shift destruction to russian villages will help end the war sooner?

Gee, I dunno, let’s ask Germany how the Soviet advance into Germany helped end the war faster lmfao

Hitting someone until they stop hitting you is a good way to end an altercation, especially since the aggressor clearly won’t use words to end it.

Is your friend a Cold-War era Romanian dictator?

It arguably gets better than that - the 61 billion was already spent on making the things; Ukraine isn’t just getting $61 billion handed over to it lol

I’d like to see the amount of discourse surrounding strategic bombing compared to the atomic bombings for average people. There aren’t any movies today talking about how horrific the normal bombing campaigns were, whereas this entire thread is dedicated to a recently released film about the Manhattan project…

As for an isolated place, well, they thought about that:

It was evident that everyone would suspect trickery. If a bomb were exploded in Japan with previous notice, the Japanese air power was still adequate to give serious interference. An atomic bomb was an intricate device, still in the developmental stage. Its operation would be far from routine. If during the final adjustments of the bomb the Japanese defenders should attack, a faulty move might easily result in some kind of failure. Such an end to an advertised demonstration of power would be much worse than if the attempt had not been made. It was now evident that when the time came for the bombs to be used we should have only one of them available, followed afterwards by others at all-too-long intervals. We could not afford the chance that one of them might be a dud. If the test were made on some neutral territory, it was hard to believe that Japan’s determined and fanatical military men would be impressed. If such an open test were made first and failed to bring surrender, the chance would be gone to give the shock of surprise that proved so effective. On the contrary, it would make the Japanese ready to interfere with an atomic attack if they could. Though the possibility of a demonstration that would not destroy human lives was attractive, no one could suggest a way in which it could be made so convincing that it would be likely to stop the war.

The key takeaway here is that they were unconvinced the Japanese military would react to anything else.

If the Allies wanted to kill more civilians with bombings, why did they drop millions of leaflets into cities urging people to evacuate? And no, they did not do so in any special sense for the atomic bombings out of fears the bomb wouldn’t work.

Again, it is quite easy to simply handwave this with “they could’ve done X” without being in the shoes of the people who made the choices. The project barely worked and cost billions of dollars, the enemy was assumed to be utterly fanatical in their devotion to continue the war, and there was no guarantee the bomb would have worked at all.

As for your claims of made-up BS…my statements are true to the best of my knowledge around allied war planning and bombing doctrine. There were plenty of ways to maximize civilian deaths using area bombing, and the Allies generally refused to do them, instead focusing on targets of military value.

Idk personally. I’m not that educated in this topic.

Ah, so then you are stating you lack sufficient data to make the right decision? Congratulations! You are experiencing, in part, what it was like to be living at that time! Nobody was educated in atomic warfare, as it hadn’t happened yet and we’d had basically 1 test a few weeks before it began for real. Pair that with not knowing what the Japanese were thinking and only having data based on their actions and official communications (which pointed to essentially national suicide in defense of the Emperor), and now you get a glimpse of the calculus being made about the bombings. Don’t fall into the classic “20/20 hindsight” trap many people fall into: think about the problem as though you were there.

Interesting fact about this document is that from what I recall, the air force pushed hard on the idea that bombing alone would be sufficient to win in an effort to secure funding when the US military downsized post-war. I’d fake its findings with at least a little grain of salt.

Also, it’s not like we could really have simply sat on our hands until December…the American public wanted results and the cost if the war was astronomical already, so adding on months of mobilization and war economy to “save the lives of a few Japs” (to use the relatively widely held stance of Americans at the time) was never going to happen. To say nothing of the toll on human lives regular strategic bombing and famine conditions would inflict…

I mean, sure it’s horrible, but again, understanding the context behind decisions is important to getting a full idea of why something was done.

Take something like strategic bombing, which killed more people by a country mile than the atomic bombings. Does anyone bitch on the same level about how many people were killed by regular bombing? Hell, Operation Meetinghouse (the firebombing of Toyko in March 1945) killed something like 150k people in a single raid, and nobody says a goddamned word about it outside of historical circles.

At the end of the day, the idea behind strategic bombing (in the case of the Allies) was that it was a good way to damage the enemy’s war effort. The killing of civilians wasn’t the objective (unlike the Germans, who explicitly employed terror bombing of civilians as a tactic). Its the cold calculus of fighting a modern war - the enemy’s capacity to fight is the ability for them to make more things to fight with, so eliminating that capacity by demolishing factories and houses is a good strategy. The killing of civilians wasn’t the objective necessarily - breaking the apparatus they participated in was.

In some ways it’s actually better to simply leave millions homeless instead of killing them, as the enemy must house and feed these people instead of using those resources for fighting…

Either way, would you have rather the US blockaded Japan to death to force a surrender? Killing untold numbers of civilians from starvation and disease than a relatively small number of civilians in 2 places? Maybe we wouldn’t have needed to if the Russian invasion was enough to scare them into surrender, but we’ll never know that for sure…

What would you have done against an enemy that gave every indication they were planning to fight to the death?

“If you violate the Geneva Convention, your people don’t get the protections of it” seems like a pretty reasonable way to justify the bombings tbh

In any case, there are some important considerations to be made here too:

After the horrors of Okinawa, US leadership expected a million casualties to take Japan itself, to the point where the Navy wanted to simply blockade Japan into submission. Given the Japanese civilians were already eating acorns and tree bark, and the military’s entire outward appearance was to never surrender, it isn’t unreasonable to assume Japan wouldn’t have given up.

Of course, the Japanese were refusing to surrender to the US in order to surrender through the USSR in hopes of getting a better deal (protect the emperor, no war crime trials, etc.). Of course, the Soviets invaded Manchuria and dashed all hopes of that, which, according to many people, was the real reason for Japan’s surrender.

It is a bit murky, but in response to the bombings and the invasion, there was a meeting on August 9th of the highest ranks of the Japanese government where it was determined that surrender was the only option and plans were drawn up to do so. However, on the 14th, there was an attempted coup by some army officers to continue the war, which failed after several high ranking officials refused to comply, among other things.

All of this taken together is not to say “the bombings were necessary,” but rather to show the situation as it developed, and how many different things could have gone wrong and dragged the war on for longer (side note: Japan still held a lot of territory and there were plans to liquidate POWs and the like in the event of surrender)

Was it right to vaporize thousands? In a vacuum, no, certainly not. But in the complex context of a war in which millions had already died and millions more still very well could have, its tough to say.

Blazing Saddles would be called dated and “done before.”

It was originally made as a way to laugh at Westerns, which, up to that point, had dominated the market. A lot of the tropes and plot lines the movie rips on are explicitly there because they were usually in these “safe” Westerns.

Never forget the way the human brain works, with the more common interpretation being: “it takes 7 instances of positive things to outweigh 1 negative.”

For my part I haven’t really noticed any difference, but I only infrequently comment!

Bless the Maker and His water

Taiwan continues to keep the name because it mustn’t give China a cassus belli to invade. Essentially, by keeping their name, they show their support for a “one china policy” and keep the door open to peaceful reunification. If Taiwan decided to formally be a separate thing, the PRC would no longer be able to “peacefully reunify with a rebellious province,” and would be much likelier to invade.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-taiwan-passport-idUSKBN25T0JA/

(I don’t care for Reuters, but the facts are easily verifiable elsewhere)

The PRC got pissy when Taiwan changed its passports to read “TAIWAN” in big letters and have “Republic of China” in small letters. What purpose would they have in being mad about a name change on a foreign nation’s passport (particularly as it de-emphasizes the “China” bit)?

Furthermore, if you look into history, Taiwan got rid of its claims to “all of China” decades ago

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2002/09/10/167505

…doesn’t China have a “no first strike” rule for their nuclear weapons? :P

As for not bullying China…maybe they should stop trying to bully their neighbors before asking to not be bullied lol

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Just a damned good show all around that showed younger me a lot of what makes compelling stories work.

Star Wars: Empire at War

Imagine what that game with stable multi-player and updated graphics could do with mods, especially after seeing stuff like Thrawn’s Revenge