The government does things all the time to which I do not consent. Referring to the government’s actions as “our” actions, to which “we” consent, creates an environment in which failing to give such consent is, at minimum, stigmatized. Words have meanings. “We” did not invade Iraq, the Bush regime did, with substantial Democratic support. “We” did not intervene in Libya’s civil war to empower racist jihadis, or threaten to do the same in Syria. What’s this “we” stuff? Leave me out of it.
Hm. Interesting perspective.
It’s hardly “interesting” it’s basic stuff: You’ve spend nearly 15 years on this board and you still think in terms of “us” and “we”?
I still consider myself part of a society, sure.
You have got to be kidding.
It is because everyone is armed to the teeth that we must keep an eye on them.
As I said upthread to someone else, you must believe in the precept that, “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail” (which was uttered, incidentally, by US Secretary of State Henry Stimson just as a fellow named Adolf Hitler was gaining traction in Germany).
LOL. And I like chocolate, and naps on a Sunday.
This may come as a surprise to Angela Merkel, among many others.
I’m not worried about Germany nuking us, Iran on the other hand…
Jesus, all of “Iran”, or just the extremist leadership that got unelected?
You’ll be aware of the deal effective as of last week that halts enrichment at 5%:
I just picked the ME country that worries me the most.
The answer should actually be “neither,” since it is the judgment of the US intelligence community that Iran has no nuclear-weapons program, and even if they did, there is no reason to think that they would use it on the US, contravening the Ayatollah’s own fatwas and throwing away their own power and thousands of years of Persian history as they faced annihilation, unless they were under attack.
By the way, who keeps threatening to attack Iran? Besides the government of the one country whose armed forces actually used nuclear weapons (against civilian targets, no less), there’s another. A certain country whose name begins with “I” and ends with “L” and does not abide by the Non-Proliferation Treaty, unlike Iran. They created their nuclear arsenal in secret, using stolen American info, thus making aid to them illegal.
Before that, that same phrase was used in the US Civil War, when workers and peasants were killing one another, at the orders of the aristocracy. It was pretty dangerous to go against the tide of public opinion, because after all, “we” all agree that “you” have to support “our” troops…
But so what? Russia has no quarrel with the US, and there is no reason for any such quarrel. China’s foreign policy is based on avoiding conflict as much as possible, and even if it wasn’t, it would not threaten the United States.
I’m not kidding. I advocate non-interventionism. Intervention results in blowback, and what’s the answer? More intervention?
And if you had your way, would the US intelligence community make such judgments based on what appears in the newspapers? Or would spying on Iran be okay? Or would that also be a violation of their human rights/needlessly treating them like an adversary/yet another failure of the United States Government to sit around the drum circle and sing folk songs?
Since you brought it up, in your opinion, did the United States sow the seeds that resulted in Pearl Harbor? What were those seeds, exactly?
A lot of this spying appears to be economic in nature. The U.S. does have military reasons to keep an eye on China, but by far the bigger concern is theft of technology and intellectual property. This is a huge issue between the two countries.
[quote=“Ravenman, post:233, topic:679236”]
And if you had your way, would the US intelligence community make such judgments based on what appears in the newspapers? Or would spying on Iran be okay? Or would that also be a violation of their human rights/needlessly treating them like an adversary/yet another failure of the United States Government to sit around the drum circle and sing folk songs?
[QUOTE]
Iran’s nuclear facilities are among the most transparent in the world, unlike some other places I could mention. The same people who exasperatedly point out that, according to US intel, there is no nuclear threat from Iran are the same ones who oppose the NSA surveillance state, so I see no contradiction. Also, what’s that about drum circles and folk songs?
For one thing, the duplicitous and repressive Wilson administration’s entry into the First World War created the conditions that made the Second all but inevitable. No Versailles treaty means no Hitler. No Hitler means no substantial war in Europe, which, among many other things, would mean lots more Dutch, French, British, and American personnel and equipment available to defend their imperial possessions, along with the Chinese, Australians, etc., and let us not forget that the Soviet Union could bring a great deal more weight to bear (pun intended) in order to crush the Fascist beast in the East, if there was little or no such activity (like the Germans’ apocalyptic invasion!) in the West.
Though the Japanese did win collaborators in many places, lots of Asian anti-imperialists saw right through the Hirohito/Tojo regime’s rhetoric. Filipino resistance groups, Ho Chi Minh’s comrades in Indochina, and many others realized their priorities were to fight the Japanese invaders in the short term, and free themselves from US/Euro domination later on.
It’s the Popular Front strategy, basically. Liberal capitalist regimes, even imperialist ones, are still preferable to fascist regimes. With Germany quiet, how much could Mussolini (and Franco and Salazar) even hope to accomplish? What would be the lesson? “The Popular Front can defeat Fascism, if we put our minds to it, anywhere in the world.”
The Japanese wanted to weaken the US Navy, so as to secure supplies of oil and rubber, but if that quest for resources was doomed to failure in the first place, why attack Pearl Harbor?
The anti-war movement in WWI was definitely worried about unintended consequences. If the war ended in a near-draw, with unimaginable amounts of blood and treasure thrown away for nothing in a rich man’s war, don’t you think the post-war narrative would have been different than, on one side, “all of Germany must be punished,” (which is pretty rich coming from the nasty regimes that made up the Allies), and; on the other side, “the Judeo-Communists lost the war for us, by not supporting our troops! They stabbed them in the back!” Instead, militarists, jingoism, and the like would be even more discredited than they already were.
The Japanese regime crushed/marginalized their domestic Left in the early twentieth century, and gradually embarked on their Mission from God. But confronting their serious weaknesses, without a friend in the world, in an environment where the workers of the world (among others) didn’t look kindly on Tokyo’s agenda, do you think the Japanese would have even gotten to consider attacking Hawaii?
Are you trying to say that Iran is led by unelected leaders or that their leaders just got voted out?
The first statement is true, the other is pure bullshit.
I’m remaking the point that using “Iran” is falling into the same nonsensical trap as using “us” or “we”.
It really is a little more nuanced and interesting than the match up at a college football game.
OLP-Those nuclear weapons saved hundreds of thousands of lives!
That’s the lie they teach us in school.
Note the quotation marks around “we.”
I’m going to limit my response because this is really off-topic for this thread, but that is one of the damned stupidest arguments I’ve ever seen about Nagasaki. William Lanouette must be an idiot.
So he says that Truman wanted to justify a $2 billion expenditure on the Manhattan Project. We’ve gone on to spend literally several trillion dollars from the Cold War to today on the U.S. nuclear weapons enterprise, and we haven’t had to nuke anyone since 1945 to justify those expenditures.
It’s just laughably stupid to claim that a $2 billion program had to be justified by using two – no more, no less, just two – nuclear weapons in 1945, and then they never had to be justified again. Had we only dropped one, would the several trillion in weapons costs not have been supported by Congress or the public? Patent bullshit.