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Say it a little louder for all the dipshits trying to argue that a trump presidency would be better for Gaza than Biden is.
If Trump wins I'm going to be too preoccupied with the climate disaster and end of American democracy (in that order) to give a single fuck about what happens in Gaza, Ukraine, or anywhere else.
Reverse order for me, the climate distaste I worry about with a Republican dictatorship is a nuclear winter. But that might be growing up during the Cold War talking.
Maybe nuclear winter blocks out sun for so long we solve global warming and enter a new ice age. So many humans will be dead we won’t be able to carry on with our global warming activities, as the small handful remaining return to an agrarian society. Maybe Putin and the republicans will save us all.
Why aren't the "But Biden!" people in this thread? It's so very strange they seem to be absent (no, it really isn't).
I feel like the narrative surrounding the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings has changed enormously since I was a kid.
I remember learning that, while tragic, the number of lives lost in the bombing paled in comparison to the numbers of lives being lost and that would be lost in winning the war by conventional means. That it was a way to minimize further bloodshed.
I'm not super well read on the subject, but is that not true? Or, if it is true, does it not matter?
I'm mostly just trying to figure out what caused the shift.
Some disclaimers
I am a 50+ year old American
Up until 10ish years ago I had at least a better than average understanding/knowledge of WWII
My ex's grandmother's family was from Hiroshima and they had family members killed in the bombing.
All that said as tragic as they were I still think those bombs were the correct military decision at that time. I would be willing to have a rational conversation about it though.
The situation in Gaza is completely different and Lindsey Graham and the rest of the GOP are fucking ghouls.
Also, I have always thought that, as horrific and tragic as what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, the fact that the world was able to view the aftermath has been what has prevented a larger nuclear exchange. I don't know if the Cuban Missile Crisis would have gone the same way without everyone knowing exactly what an atomic bomb does.
Back in HS, I think I was told that it was a regrettable ending and we probably went a bit overboard.
I highly recommend this video from Shaun on the matter. It’s long but you can listen to it instead of watching it and you won’t miss much. Excellent video on this subject that really put a lot of the propaganda around the bombing in a new light.
I remember watching it. The problem with the video is that they seriously overestimate the willingness of the Japanese to surrender without giving any evidence to back this up. The Japanese were absolutely not willing to surrender. I mean, just look at their reaction after Hiroshima. There was a lot of debate AFTER an entire city had been razed to the ground. Japan was absolutely not going to surrender without a nuke being dropped.
The Japanese were attempting to negotiate surrender with the "neutral" USSR prior to the nuclear bombs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan The US wanted an unconditional surrender which included the destruction of the Japanese emperor, who at the time, was the head of the Japanese religion. To put this into perspective, consider the United States request similar to requesting the destruction of the Pope within the Vatican. Because of this, the Japanese were seeking better terms of surrender which did not involved the removal of their religious leader. What the Japanese did not know at the time was the USSR was not a neutral party, and they were secretly mobilizing their forces on mainland Asia due to an agreement Stalin made with FDR prior to the US entering the war in Europe.
The reality is, once Japan learned that the USSR was not neutral and they were going to be fighting the US and the USSR in a two front war, this is when the emperor forced Japan to surrender.
To put things into perspective, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were sadly, just another two cities leveled by the US. The US were performing night carpet bombing on Japanese cities as soon as 1944. Many of these raids leveled several square km of urban areas. https://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=217. This is why people argue that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were probably not the catalyst to Japan's surrender because the US have been leveling Japanese cities, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens, long before the two nuclear bombs were dropped. None of these raids caused Japan to surrender before.
I highly recommend this video from Shaun on the matter. It’s long but you can listen to it instead of watching it and you won’t miss much. Excellent video on this subject that really put a lot of the propaganda around the bombing in a new light.
It depends whether you think killing 200,000+ civilians is a defensible act.
300,000+ if you include the bombing of Tokyo.
Nobody knows how a conventional war would have played out. To assert civilian deaths would have been higher is pure speculation and a gross attempt to justify the slaughter of noncombatants.
Though it is likely that even without nukes, the US would have still razed these cities with conventional munitions, given the events in Tokyo.
There is a book I liked about this, it is about Allied civilian bombing in WWII in general.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Among_the_Dead_Cities
It's by the philosopher A.C. Grayling, needless to say 'Responses were divided.'
My man, read the fucking room
That's the scary part... If you have been following the Republican Party recently, you'll realize that he is reading the room.
Dude is illiterate regardless of the room he's in.
Back in 2017 or so, I had a full on MAGA coworker who was ecstatic about the migrant detention centers at the border. If anything, he felt we weren't torturing them enough. One day, he dropped a line that was so heinous it still sticks with me to this day: "we used to do the same to the Japanese and no one cared about it then, so why is everyone up in arms about it now?"
All this to say I'm not at all surprised they're saying this now. They've always felt this way, and they know how despicable it is.
Fwiw, the dude was a 50-something year old Israeli immigrant. He also joked about wanting to join the military to "practice on live targets"
I hate this timeline so much
"we used to do the same to the Japanese and no one cared about it then, so why is everyone up in arms about it now?"
Btw, people cared about it back then, especially the Japanese-Americans being interned.
One of the many shameful moments of American history conveniently left out of grade school history classes.
I gotta give these people credit. It must take a massive amount of effort to try and be this consistently on the wrong side of history. Like, at some point, it has to be deliberate...
They think they're on the right side of history. It's 100% deliberate. They never admit they are wrong about anything because the thought is completely foreign to them. Right wing boomers absolutely believe they are 100% in the right on every single issue. They can't even imagine they aren't.
boomers
Why specifically call out people over 60 here...?
Because they vote republican by a large margin?
Looks like 35% republican vs 33% democrat (versus 32% "independent" who might all vote republican for all I know).
But there's a lot of republicans under 60 too so not getting the point of the random ageism.
So… he knows that… like… Israel would be in the blast radius and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv probably affected by a shit ton of radiation….
You assume that these guy know much about anything except corruption, graft, and drug fueled sex orgies.
Nevermind all the other obvious reasons this is terrible but I'm sure Egypt would have some objections to being blasted by a nearby nuke.
He knows that he's not the one who's going to be pushing the button, but that his rabid out-for-blood base won't even think about that. He's just throwing them meat.
"The left are the real violent racists! Anyway, we should nuke Gaza. Filthy animals."
-Magamorons
Israel is rumored to have tactical nukes that are much smaller yield than the large ICBMs we hear about all the time. Super destructive force in only 1 or 2 km blast radius, which would even fit inside a small area like Gaza. Of course, in addtition to devastating Gaza, there would still be fallout and issues over Israel, and using them in this manner is definitely Not OK. However, I can believe that there are some deluded people in government (both in Israel and in the US) who would view that as acceptable.
When his male lover is revealed, it will be a glorious day.
It'll never happen. He's doing exactly what they want gay people to do, being "decently" quiet about it.
This should disqualify him from ever holding office again. I know it won't, but it should.
The senator continued to call the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “the right decision” by the U.S. That decision ended the war with Japan, but killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians between the initial blasts and the deadly radiation that followed.
“Give Israel the bombs they need to end the war they can’t afford to lose, and work with them to minimize casualties,” Graham insisted.
He didn’t directly suggest nuking Gaza, but he made multiple parallels between ending the war in Japan by using nukes and then basically says we should give bombs to Israel to finish the job without specifying what he means.
So while someone might argue black and white letter of what he said isn’t “nuke Gaza”, he’s still implying something along those lines - the quick finish and a method that can do it.
I don't understand why Republicans are so strongly on Israel's side at this point. I think almost everyone was on Israel's side on Oct 7th but since then there have been over 35,000 Palestinian deaths, including women and children, and their infrastructure has been obliterated. Israeli losses since Oct 7th only come to 260 soldiers.
Why would anyone suggest nuking Gaza? Oct 7th was terrible but it wasn't perpetrated by the millions of people in Gaza. It was perpetrated by the terrorist group that rules Gaza and, at this point, it seems they aren't much of a threat.
The only reasons I could see for nuking Gaza are:
They literally believe every single man, woman, and child in Gaza is part of Hamas, and therefore a terrorist.
They have no capability for empathy and can’t imagine a world in which a citizen of a foreign nation can disagree with the ruling party, despite about half the country he is part of ruling disagreeing with him.
They are also financially motivated to unconditionally back Israel because of lobbying, or corruption, whatever you prefer to call it.
Part of it is due to fundamentalist evangelical Christians, who believe that Israel needs to firmly own the region in order to bring about the apocalypse. See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/05/14/half-of-evangelicals-support-israel-because-they-believe-it-is-important-for-fulfilling-end-times-prophecy/
This is the same reason that Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, and former Australian prime minister, a devout evangelical Christian, tried to.
Couldn't ask for a better positioning of titles.
Nuke Jerusalem; piss off everyone. It's the only truly even-handed action.
In case you're wondering, these religious freaks believe that they can force Jesus to return by instigating WW3. So long as Israel is involved, they consider that to be fulfilling prophecy; and the nuclear, the better. I'm sure some of them even consider Trump to be the actual Antichrist, while as usual, most of them think it's whoever the Democrats have in office.
Would this be before or after Israel is able to control the direction the wind blows?
Didn’t you get those powers at your bar mitzvah? It’s supposed to be right after we get the codes for the space lasers.
I didn’t get a bar mitzvah, personally, so I’m a shitty Jew who doesn’t have those powers.
Ignoring... just everything so very very wrong with this statement by Trump's favorite sock-puppet... how does this even make sense as a plan? I'm pretty sure this would be the first case of one-sided nuclear mutually-assured destruction.
It's like setting off a fertilizer bomb in your nextdoor neighbor's house because you hate them and want to burn their house down: you don't get to be surprised when your house catches on fire too.