Obama tries to apologize for HiroshimaFollow

I never said it was the main idea. I just said that I thought that anyone who felt like cost warranted use with weaponry was insane. Whether or not it was his main point is irrelevant--it was mine. Such a fundamentally different philosophy regarding the appropriate use of weapons pretty much guarantees that we will disagree across the board. No reason to reply to the entire thread--my replies would largely be the same:

1. Just because more people died in carpet-bombing, doesn't mean that the death toll of the atomic bomb isn't significant. To use that is an excuse is to try and create a straw-man argument. Furthermore, it presupposes that the two forms of bombing were fundamentally similar (which they aren't, for many reasons).

2. It's nearly certain that Truman knew that the Japanese were willing to offer a conditional surrender as early as May (the condition being that the Emperor remained in power). We are the ones who rejected that. The goal absolutely isn't to save lives. By all means, feel free to argue that it was important enough to break the absolutist regime, but this was not about ending the war at all costs.

3. And these targets weren't military targets. From the start, they were selected because they were urban areas. Furthermore, they were urban areas that had hardly been subject to attacks, so they were full of civilians who had been fleeing from dangerous cities. There WERE army supply depots here, but they were inside civilian cities. They were also industrial centers, which meant that most of the people living there were lower-class, and unable to go elsewhere.

And if you are going to argue that part of the bomb's purpose was to wage psychological warfare against the Japanese, then it goes hand in hand that they'd need to create destruction the Japanese would care about--death to noncombatants.

And it's flat-out false that most of the dead were military targets. The overwhelming majority were civilians, primarily women/children. The military bases in both of these cities did not house a large number of troops, being primarily logistics.

So you were rambling about **** that no one else was talking about? Why couldn't you have just said that off the bat?

You're accusing me of straw man arguments? You literally just said that it didn't matter whether the thing you were arguing against was gbaji's point or not. You're doing the very definition of a straw man. Come back when you can actually understand what you're reading.

Really? Because it sure seemed like the part you were hung up on was the cost of the weapons:







Maybe, if the part about money wasn't so important, you shouldn't have spent three whole posts on it? And you definitely shouldn't have used it to try and induce an entire philosophy.

By the way, I think your little whine about strawmen and ad hominem attacks is pretty funny considering your second post in this thread contained plenty of both.

On an unrelated note, why does it matter if you and gbaji, or you and me, agree in the end? That isn't even how discussion works 90% of the time. You're starting from a viewpoint of "well, neither of us will change the other's mind" and essentially turning into Alma.

I'll also point out that gbaji's earlier mention of 1 million casualties was just the allied troops' expected losses. That doesn't begin to consider losses to the Japanese people, seeing as how the military was already training the civilians to fight us off with bamboo spears.

Reading seriously isn't your strong point. Let me show you the quote again:


See how much of that is not about the money? The vast majority of it, in fact. Because gbaji's point, and my own, was nothing to do with the monetary cost of the nukes, but rather with the strategic cost of wasting them on an empty target.


I completely agree. Good thing no one here tried to say that, huh?


Except that you're completely basing our ethical philosophy on the money issue, calling us crazy warmongers. Again, it's impossible to have any sort of meaningful debate on the issue when you're starting out completely polarized here.


Edited, Oct 16th 2011 5:46pm by Majivo

Yes, and the natural result was that a largely civilian city grew larger with refugees, and the supply depots became more valuable, because they were considered lower-risk. By virtue of designating it a target from the start, we ensured that the civilian death toll would only swell larger.

Whether or not it was something the military actually planned for, we'd need to see. But it was obviously going to happen, so I'd be amazed if they didn't expect it. And that obviously wasn't a problem, since they dropped the bomb. And I have a SERIOUS issue with the way the gov't presented the attacks after they happened, always phrasing it in a way that suggested that it was almost purely a military target.

And "but they're doing it!" is hardly a convincing argument to me. We regularly regarded the Japanese as savages during WWII--how is emulating them acceptable? I take this same stance on modern warfare as well. For instance, we decry the savages of the Middle East for celebrating deaths as a result of jihadist attacks. Yet when OBL was killed, we were out in the streets celebrating, it's the same thing.

If you are going to take the moral high road, you don't get to use your target's savagery as an excuse to be savage towards them.

And, ultimately, the people who died in this attack were the lowest classes, most of whom wouldn't have had the legal right to leave the city, as they were probably indentured servants to the owner of their factories. It's not like these are the elites--they are people who were essentially enslaved by the Japanese nation.

I fail to see why.

I agree. I was largely speaking about historical impact. Both suck to such a degree that arguing which is better or worse is a meaningless endeavor.

Celebrating death is celebrating death and all things are relative.

To us, Osama bin Laden was a mass-murderer and terrorist who killed innocent people. To others, he was a hero fighting for Middle-Eastern freedom from Western imperialism, and those he killed were legitimate war targets by virtue of the fact that they were operating a socio-political system that oppressed them. We kill civilians in drone strikes and consider it a necessary evil. They kill civilians in bombing attacks and consider it the same.

Just because we don't see it that way doesn't mean that they don't. Your moral standards are just as relative to your cultural indoctrination as theirs is.

If you consider their celebration of death (specifically, deaths that you see as murder) as barbaric, then you are a hypocrite if you don't consider it the same for us. I think Osama bin Laden was a horrifying individual who was responsible for an atrocity, and I'm happy that he can't cause any more pain. But I won't celebrate his death--I'm not prepared to say that anyone deserves to die.

And I'm certainly not okay with the hypocrisy of choosing to celebrate the "justified" murders your own culture commits while simultaneously and arbitrarily condemning the celebrations of another culture who use the exact same logic, simply with different cultural values.

So you're a cultural relativist now, too. Christ, why don't you just come out and say at the beginning of a conversation "I will never be able to contribute anything useful" and save us all the time?

Now you're just radically oversimplifying. I'm just being trolled here, right? This isn't a real conversation which is actually happening. Surely by now you would have realized at least one flaw in your logic.