The Twin towers collapse from airplane hits, would you Water board someone to prevent another attack?
You forgot one thing, Japan was on a quest for world domination.
tomndebb:
By the time that the U.S. employed the atomic bomb, Japan was defeated in all but acknowledgment. There are numerous debates over how many weeks or months the war might have continued without the use of nukes, but the eventual outcome was a foregone conclusion. The debate over the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not over whether the U.S. would have won but when.
The discussion over whether the attack on Pearl Harbor was insane rests on a totally separate set of conditions. Japan looked at a United States that had exercised an almost extreme form of isolationism for 22 years and its leaders believed that in the aftermath of sufficiently disastrous battles, the American citizenry would compel the government to sue for peace. Instead, the U.S. citizenry rose up and took on a two-ocean war and provided enough materiel to win both of them. (I am not naively stating that we, not the U.S.S.R., defeated the Germans, but much of the Soviet war effort rested on U.S. supplies.)
So the question is whether or not the Japanese command should have known that an attack on the U.S. would inspire us to fight to the finish. (And the quotation from Yamamoto that closes the movie Tora! Tora! Tora! has not been verified, so it is unclear that even he knew that the attack was a mistake, although he had argued against that attack prior to its preparation.)
This is why we typically close ancient threads.
We tend to get off-the-wall, (and pretty much off topic) responses to other posts, months or years after the post that sparked the response had been posted.
And the ancient threadT omnDeb**** pond
Bashoful, dwarf and Zen poet
How would waterboarding someone prevent the attack? And no, I won’t just assume that it would somehow magically for the sake of the hypothetical. This matters.
We got attacked by the Keysone Kop terrorists! It *never *should have worked! We’ve been getting planes hijacked for damn near 50 years and the cockpit doors weren’t secure? Who’s kidding who?
If you had waterboarded the Supreme Strategist of AlQ and he told you this fairytale…the plan what actually worked! …
You never would have believed it, its that ridiculous. Tom Clancy would have bust a gut laughing.
How can you imagine that a single, infinetismal quanta of information is worth surrendering your decency?
cckerberos:
No, they weren’t.
As noted, already, the cryptic post to which you replied is off topic for this thread. If anyone wishes to continue a discussion based on that strange post, please open a new thread.
[ /Modding ]
Scylla:
You say that, and it may be true. I’m trying to be honest about this, and I think you’re wrong.
In most normal situations where pain is involved, it feels to me like control is important. Things that would otherwise be horrifying and intolerable were livable when I felt like I was in control. For three examples, I had third degrees burns on my hands when I was a kid, bad ones. Once the damage was done it, hurt terribly. It was horrifyingly bad, the worst physical pain I ever felt, and it went on and on.
But I was still me. I could feel myself through the pain. I knew that the doctors who were washing or scraping my hands to eliminate infection or scarring were trying to help me not hurt me, and I could keep myself still and I was in control.
Similarly, I was in control during my vasectomy which was pretty damn painful and uncomfortable.
I was in control during a root control.
With the waterboarding, at the moment I hit the magic spot where I was drawing water in, I was no longer me, I was no longer in control. It felt out of control and dying.
I honestly feel that it doesn’t matter who’s doing it, that the matter of control was inconsequential, totally involuntary and besides the point.
In short, this was on a totally different level than anything I had ever felt before. It felt like an automatic hardwired panic.
The loss of control may prime you beforehand. The fear may get to you, and it may last longer if somebody else is doing it to you. In the lasting longer, it may be worse in quantity, but you really can’t get worse than infinite and total surrender and panic, and that’s what it felt like.
Does that make sense?
It’s not so much the pain. The pain itself is simply discomfort. There is a total instinctual panic that I felt that was not only uncontrollable, but seemed to me that the very idea of seeking to control it is itself inconceivable.
Pure hardwired instinct.
But you were not an enemy who might just well kill you. As bad as a it was, you were in charge and could stop it. Sorry, but in my opinion that would be worse.
PetW
September 7, 2009, 8:46am
512
But you haven’t experienced it, so you can’t really say. By the way, this thread is 2 and a half years old.
gonzomax , why are you replying to this ancient thread when the only new post was idiotic commercial spam?
This is closed.