I can’t hardly take them or anyone that tosses the xtian mythology around. Why should we? History hasn’t shown us a “god”. Only shifty humans arguing over imaginary friends.

Can we stop letting them in positions of power already? They obviously aren’t fit for leadership or power.

That’s because he’s a performative Christian, or “Christian.” He doesn’t believe in anything unless it help him get ahead in life - just like most politicians and other moderate-to-high functioning psychopaths and sociopaths.

I mean, he’s not wrong, he’s just an asshole. By most historians accounts, Fat Man and Little Boy caused less death than an actual war with Japan would have.

They were also retaliatory strikes after a direct attack on an American base, at the tail end of a global conflict, and we just got a new toy. The bomb was basically telling Japan to fuck off with their bullshit, and it did a pretty good job of it.

That doesn’t make it the right answer, per se. Glassing the strip probably would net less death and destruction than continuing the genocide or especially allowing it to escalate more. I still have a hard time calling that “the good choice”

And what happens after the glass hardens? We all gonna be honky dory or is somebody else gonna star lobbing nukes?

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.

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).

Brain worms.

I cannot for the life of me figure out why, if you believe in Christian Mythology, even to the point of wanting Judgement Day to come during your lifetime, why you would personally take efforts that you know are going to end in mass civilian deaths.

Assuming you are right and Judgement Day is on the horizon, are you not damning yourself to the deepest pits of Hell by spending your time leading up to the Rapture ordering the slaughter of innocent people, rather than say glorifying and spreading the word of God?

I don’t believe in any of it, but if I did, I sure wouldn’t be advocating for mass-murder right before God shows up to judge me for the way I lived my life on Earth.

I can’t reinforce the idea enough that they believe god is eal and that they can trick a prophecy to being fulfilled by naming a british colony “Israel”.

The biblical Israel is long gone and the current Israel is obviously a different state; you can “fulfill the prophecies” the same way by naming your dog “the kingdom of Israel”

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.

Removed by mod

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.

Back in HS, I think I was told that it was a regrettable ending and we probably went a bit overboard.

I’m not super well read on the subject, but is that not true? Or, if it is true, does it not matter?

The issue is that unconditional support of past American actions is no longer acceptable, and so all America’s past actions are being re-evaluated. This is good! However, this also often results in people simply taking the reverse position than the accepted one. This is bad.

The atomic bombings were less bloody than a blockade or an invasion would have been, and the people who claim the Soviet Union was going to successfully invade the home islands or that Japan was about to surrender under any terms that would have been considered reasonable, pinky-promise, are just misinformed or deluded.

There’s also the possibility that because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear weapons have never since been used. What would cold war been like in that case?

My understanding is that even after Hiroshima, the Imperial Army attempted a coup to avoid surrender.

The Japanese were not stopping. The only alternative at hand was a full invasion, which would have killed many, many more.

The cognitive dissonance is fascinating. The Hammas attack on 10/7 is all but universally condemned in public discourse because civillians were targeted. Even die-hard militant anti-Zionists will not attempt to justify the Hammas attacks because they know it will only turn the public against them. When a brown force attacks civillians, it is terrorism and reviled.

Here on lemmy.world condemnation of Israel’s indiscriminant bombing is also prevalent. Maybe 5%-10% of commenters support Israel’s conduct. But of the at least eight people who have expressed an opinion on nuking Japan here in this thread, roughly 75% of them defend it as justifiable and no one has outright said it was wrong.

There are over 100,000 American WWII veterans alive today. They saved the world from the Nazis. We love that for us. Coming out of WWII, we dove right into the cold war. We were battling the USSR for the hearts and minds of the globe. McCarthyism silenced internal criticism. We had no patience for second-guessing our actions in WWII. It was our patriotic duty to convince the world that ours was the side of freedom, democracy, and justice.

So for 80 years now our culture has been saturated with propaganda promoting our glorious, righteous role in WWII. You, your parents, and your parents’ parents have been told the same thing in school and have seen the same messages in TV, books, and movies. And I’m not saying it’s all a lie. Sure, the defeat of Hitler was a high point in American history. But our understanding of our role lacks any nuance or self-criticism. For example, the Russian front was arguably more crucial to the fall of Germany than the Western front. Churchill is hailed as a hero, but he was an antisemetic racist. E.g.:

WINSTON CHURCHILL published a newspaper article. It was February 8, 1920. Churchill had a different enemy now. Now his enemy wasn’t Germany, it was the “sinister confederacy” of international Jewry.

“This movement among the Jews is not new,” Churchill said. It was a “world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality.” He listed Marx, Trotsky, Béla Kun, Rosa Luxemburg, and Emma Goldman as some of the malefactors. The conspiracy had been, he said, the “mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century.” It had played a recognizable part in the French Revolution. All loyal Jews, he advised, must “vindicate the honour of the Jewish name” by rejecting international bolshevism.

And:

“I think you should certainly proceed with the experimental work on gas bombs, especially mustard gas, which would inflict punishment on recalcitrant natives without inflicting grave injury on them,” Churchill wrote Trenchard. Churchill was an expert on the effects of mustard gas—he knew that it could blind and kill, especially children and infants. Gas spreads a “lively terror,” he pointed out in an earlier memo; he didn’t understand the prevailing squeamishness about its use: “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.” Most of those gassed wouldn’t have “serious permanent effects,” he said.

Churchill’s War Cabinet ignored the repeated pleas of the British colonial government in India for food aid, allowing between one and four million people to die of hunger in 1943 and 1944.

Churchill was a horrible person.

And likewise, the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unconscionable acts of evil. It is never acceptable to target civillian populations. It wasn’t acceptable on 9/11/2001 or 10/7/2023 when brown Arabs did it, and it wasn’t acceptable when white Americans did it either.

This is obvious to anyone who wasn’t raised inside the Western bubble.

Voted in by a generation of entitled, narcissistic boomers that were unfortunately exposed to leaded gasoline and paint at an early age, who know about as much about world history as their IQ counterparts: third graders.

“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.

What’d you say back to him or do?

Your coworker has serious mental health issues. I hate the party but I also hate that our mental health system won’t address the negative impact religion plays in forming negative views and that our laws prevent therapists and those in mental health from doing their actual jobs.

this sort of homophobia isn’t helping.

out of all the queer guys I’m friends with, exactly zero of them have detonated nukes in response to their boyfriends breaking up with them.

so all that’s left is you bashing a piece of shit, not for being a piece of shit, but because he kinda seems gay.

kindly, respectfully, fuck off with this shit.

you figured out the entire point of nuclear weapons! Congratulations!

On the other hand, we should keep outing these Nazis whenever we can so that the decent part of society doesn’t collectively forget who punched down and who punched up.