csee · HackerTrans

Sure I get the silence but there was no need to blame the US media in the first place. Silence in the first place would have been fine for the Kremlin.

csee

há 4 anosdiscuss

He blamed the US media for stoking tensions in the lead up to the invasion. Then silence.

csee

há 4 anosdiscuss

I am offering my opinion, but you already knew that and were just being sarcastic.

It is also not meaningless, you simply totally ignored the rationale I provided for the 10:1 figure. It's the ratio that roughly equalizes the moral worth of allied troops with Japanese children.

Admittedly this is all subjective, but that also applies to your opinions.

  "The point is, the U.S. was pulled into war by Japan and did not have had any obligation to lose even one more person to end the conflict."

The US wasn't pulled into war by Japanese children, though, and you seem to be perfectly fine with their extermination under your perverse doctrine of collective guilt.

  "No one is arguing this. But when it comes to the life of my son or brother vs. the life of someone I don't know, I know what my choice will be every single time. And I would bet my entire net worth that 999 out of 1,000 people would choose similarly in that situation. The instinct to stay alive completely outstrips armchair intellectualism and 20/20 hindsight"

People decide to do lots of shitty things for all sorts of reasons. The mere act of deciding to do said shitty thing and the fact that that shitty thing is a popular choice doesn't make it less shitty and doesn't serve as a moral justification.

csee

há 4 anosdiscuss

Possibly, but it seems speculative to me that this was an important thing. I imagine it would have been very surprising and shocking to have a demo nuke dropped a few miles away from Tokyo. Maybe less shocking, and that difference in shock value reduces the probability of surrender by an unacceptable amount?

csee

há 4 anosdiscuss

Somewhere between 1:1 and 10:1?

If it's 10:1, then that's basically saying that Japanese adult civilian lives are worth absolutely nothing and can be killed without any moral concern, but Japanese children are worth the same as allied lives.

Going any further (e.g 200:1) is unjustifible unless we adopt the collectivistic moral guilt framework where one has moral guilt (including children) simply for existing in that country at that time, irrespective of individual culpability.

  "How could President Truman possibly morally justify telling Americans that even one more of their sons had to die in order to protect enemy civilians?"

Just because the general public would find it difficult to put moral worth into civilian lives of an enemy doesn't make those lives worthless.

I also don't like the language of calling them enemy civilians. They are civilians who live in a country that's currently an enemy.

csee

há 4 anosdiscuss

Then why couldn't they drop one demo bomb in a sparsely populated area, wait a week, then drop the second one in a population center if no surrender is forthcoming? Is the delta is probability of surrender really that much lower that it's not worth trying to save 200k civilians via this approach?

csee

há 4 anosdiscuss

I am hardly apologizing for the Axis powers here, I believe the war against them was just and necessary. I am just trying to understand the points you raised above without having to read through the two books.

csee

há 4 anosdiscuss

You would trade off 200k Japanese civilians for, say, 1000 allied lives? What ratio is morally justified?

If you are arguing that a 200:1 ratio is acceptable, I believe this is a morally bankrupt perspective, given that the consequence of this is a genocide of a people who are otherwise perfectly normal without the broken software that was running in their minds and their society at the time, and given that it is a collectivistic perspective that assigns moral guilt to an entire civilian population (including children) instead of the specific individual bad actors that caused the situation.

Regarding the latter point - on this premise that every single Japanese person shared moral culpability for what Japan was doing - it can't be squared with an understanding of what actually happened. I mean, the existence of children is a QED against it. But even just talking adults - At that stage the country was a fascist dictatorship, with multiple democratically elected leaders assassinated by the military (which was taken over by a fanatical fascist contingent in the 1930s) and a tremendous propaganda effort by the military to control all information and brainwash the general public into thinking they were doing good and just work overseas. Combine this with a poor, ignorant farmer population, and I don't think the simple moral prism that you're applying works.

csee

há 4 anosdiscuss

(1) and (2) make no sense. The bomb is more likely to be recovered by the Japanese if it is dropped on a city.

(3) then you drop one demo and have two real ones if they don't surrender to the demo within a few days.

(4) that sucks but that's how it goes, you can't seriously be saying it's justified to kill 200k Japanese civilians to save a small handful of allied lives in the intervening days while we wait for their response to the demo bomb.

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