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A man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb (2015)

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Re: A man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb (2015)

#131

Post by starfallg »

Ma8ee wrote: post #109
starfallg wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm just pointing out that there is a real difference between places where there is a free press and places where there is not and the state is empowered to clamp down on ideas it doesn't like.

That sounds the same to me. Of course there are worse places than the US. You aren’t Saudi Arabia, Russia or China, Belarus or even Turkey. But you aren’t even in the top ten in regards to freedom, democracy, equality, social mobility, health, etc. I’d much rather live in any of the Nordic countries, Germany, the Netherlands, France, ...

Well, funnily enough, I'm not in the US either.

Re: A man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb (2015)

#132

Post by jessaustin »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #66
jessaustin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd suggest that using the bomb against Japan was not the real sin. The real sin, and the real idiotic blunder, was not to immediately renounce the use of nuclear weapons and institute an international order to safeguard that renunciation. From 1945 to 1949, Stalin did not have the bomb, and until the very last he had no good reason to believe he would have it anytime soon. USSR would have been very open to negotiati…

I don't understand how we would stop other countries from building one by saying the US wouldn't build any more. It seems more likely that someplace like Israel would have still developed one in secret and then used it for widespread conquest.

That's not what I meant by a new international order. At the same time everyone was signing treaties and creating UN, it would have been real easy for nearly every shell-shocked nation to commit not to building nukes, in a way that would make violations really hurt. Like such a nation would immediately suffer 50% tariffs from every other nation. Or they would be fair game for any aggression from neighbors. It wasn't easy to build nuclear weapons in 1946. Only one nation had done it. Sure one can imagine that a nation could decide to take a flyer on nukes and thereby suffer global opprobrium, but most of the nations we'd imagine in that role didn't exist in 1946 in the way that they exist now. That included Israel, which didn't actually exist at all then.

Re: A man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb (2015)

#133

Post by boomboomsubban »

jessaustin wrote: post #132
boomboomsubban wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how we would stop other countries from building one by saying the US wouldn't build any more. It seems more likely that someplace like Israel would have still developed one in secret and then used it for widespread conquest.

That's not what I meant by a new international order. At the same time everyone was signing treaties and creating UN, it would have been real easy for nearly every shell-shocked nation to commit not to building nukes, in a way that would make violations really hurt. Like such a nation would immediately suffer 50% tariffs from every other nation. Or they would be fair game for any aggression from neighbors. It wasn't…

They don't need a bomb in 1946 though, presumably nuclear power will eventually spread and suddenly it's 1963 and Israel is performing an underground test.

Re: A man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb (2015)

#134

Post by crooked-v »

oh_sigh wrote: post #124
loriverkutya wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more important question is, why you seems to be supporting putting 120,000 people to camps based on the fact, that 3 people helped the pilot.

I clearly said 110,000 in this hypothetical, not 3.

Your hypothetical isn't even worth responding to, given that your only basis for proposing it is those same three people.

Re: A man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb (2015)

#135

Post by fomine3 »

slightwinder wrote: post #94
Hokusai wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The conventional bombings on Tokyo killed more people than any atomic bomb. Tokyo had at the time a population of 1.1 million and 90,000 to 100,000 dead on the bombing of March 10th 1945. Hiroshima had at the time a population of 255,000 and 66,000 dead caused by the atomic bomb. You are right. It would have been way worse if the USA has attacked a more populated area. The situations is no less horrific because it.

Speculation. Hiroshima was choosen to demonstrate the max destructive power. If tokyo would have been a better candidate, they probably would have gone with it. And Tokyo is not a city, but a region. It has naturally more population because of it's far bigger area. Whether population at the time was also denser than in hiroshima back then, do you have data for this? Anyway, the point is that it doesn't matter which t…

> Hiroshima was choosen to demonstrate the max destructive power. If tokyo would have been a better candidate, they probably would have gone with it.

Tokyo was not chosen because it's too important to nuke. Demonstrate isn't the only criteria.

Re: A man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb (2015)

#136

Post by oh_sigh »

crooked-v wrote: post #134
oh_sigh wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I clearly said 110,000 in this hypothetical, not 3.

Your hypothetical isn't even worth responding to, given that your only basis for proposing it is those same three people.

Those 3 people establish a lower bound for the amount of people of Japanese descent who would have aided Japan, given the chance. I've heard people argue that no American of Japanese descent would have aided Japan which just clearly isn't true.

Re: A man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb (2015)

#137

Post by slightwinder »

fomine3 wrote: post #135
slightwinder wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speculation. Hiroshima was choosen to demonstrate the max destructive power. If tokyo would have been a better candidate, they probably would have gone with it. And Tokyo is not a city, but a region. It has naturally more population because of it's far bigger area. Whether population at the time was also denser than in hiroshima back then, do you have data for this? Anyway, the point is that it doesn't matter which t…

> Hiroshima was choosen to demonstrate the max destructive power. If tokyo would have been a better candidate, they probably would have gone with it. Tokyo was not chosen because it's too important to nuke. Demonstrate isn't the only criteria.

Well, no. Tokyo was already attacked before, and had significant destruction received already. And some cities of tokyo even were on the initial list of targets with strategic value for the atomic bomb. If anything they did not choose it because is was not important enough.

In the end they decided the target mainly by effective damage (physical as also psychological), which ruled out already attacked areas and left only a handful cities. Of those hiroshima was the best, because of size and the surrounding mountains, which made the best setup for effective demonstrating the power of the atomic bomb.

Re: A man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb (2015)

#138

Post by Ma8ee »

anonAndOn wrote: post #128
Ma8ee wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who has absolutely no significant power, or privileges. I take the Swedish Royal family over the Murdochs, Busches, Trumps or Clintons any day. I hope you aren’t so naive that you think that the US are free from privileges by birth.

The thing about the US is, it usually takes a generation or two to make it to the top (Kennedy, Trump) but some ambitious upstarts can do it without generational wealth (Clinton, Obama). Then, the kids (mostly) and grandkids (definitely) fade into obscurity. When was the last time you saw an old-world royal lineage fade into obscurity? (France, 1789?) So some great-great-great(^n) descendent of some conquerer of yest…

They don't have any place at the table directing modern European nations. Their roles are purely ceremonial. They are like Christmas trees. They are tradition and some people think they are nice and cozy. Personally I feel that they are somewhat absurd anachronisms, but there are so much more important matters to be concerned about.

In contrast, most European countries have higher social mobility than the US [0]. And considering the influence of money in US politics, that matters more.

[0] http://reports.weforum.org/social-mobility-report-2020/socia...

Re: A man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb (2015)

#139

Post by somesortofsystm »

starfallg wrote: post #90
somesortofsystm wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ahem Do you remember who Julian Assange is? ahem

The fact that you can talk about Julian Assange openly is the point. It doesn't matter what he did was lawful or not, or whether the law itself is right or wrong. In the end, he decided to hole himself up in a foreign embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden on some sex charges.

No, he didn't. That is entirely and absolutely FALSE, and you are feeding this false narrative by parroting this nonsense.

He offered to go back to Sweden to face the charges on the proviso that he would not be expedited from Sweden to the USA. This was not guaranteed.

Julian Assange is a political prisoner. All of the bogus sex crime charges against him have been dropped, and were never intended to be anything but a lever to get him to go back to Sweden so he could be extrajudicially rendered back to the USA - since Sweden and the USA have a track record of such criminal behaviour, Julian rightfully required a guarantee that the Swedish government could not provide.

And as a result Julian Assange is currently being psychologically tortured in Belmarsh - and has yet to face any of the charges against him. Nobody should think that Assanges' case upholds the highest values of Western legal justice, because it does not.

What is being done to Julian is tantamount to the same sort of treatment one would expect to happen to dissidents in dictatorships. Stop spreading the nonsense, and learn the facts about his case - it is chilling to the core.

Re: A man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb (2015)

#140

Post by jessaustin »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #133
jessaustin wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what I meant by a new international order. At the same time everyone was signing treaties and creating UN, it would have been real easy for nearly every shell-shocked nation to commit not to building nukes, in a way that would make violations really hurt. Like such a nation would immediately suffer 50% tariffs from every other nation. Or they would be fair game for any aggression from neighbors. It wasn't…

They don't need a bomb in 1946 though, presumably nuclear power will eventually spread and suddenly it's 1963 and Israel is performing an underground test.

And? Would the Israel of that world have escaped somehow all the consequences that would have been in place for decades? Having escaped those consequences, would they then have subjected the globe to a rampage of nuclear holocaust? This is a sort of magical thinking: sure it's good to have less nukes, but only up to a point. After that, less nukes actually means more nukes! Good grief.

Nuclear power absent the support of militarists in control of public money would be, absent. Only by the most skewed of accounting methods does it even begin to pay for itself. The war pigs have a different lie for every different constituency, and "nukes are green" has somehow been swallowed by a small number of very vocal (on HN anyway) internet environmentalists.

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