So just to be clear, your problem is that the politicians “white men” tend to support are disappointing…? Because, like Starving Artist, most white men I see appear to be average, decent people. Not perfect Ward Cleavers, but nothing to pit, either.
You can only “choose” among those on the menu. Sometimes (often?) it’s a case of, “Do I vote for this guy, who I don’t particularly care for and many of whose ideas I disagree with? Or do I vote for the other guy who may or may not be morally/intellectually superior, but who will strive to accomplish all sorts of things I disagree with?”
When Ronald Reagans was on the ticket, I voted for him happily and enthusiastically; when George H.W. Bush was on the ticket, I voted for him even though I wasn’t particularly enamored of him because he would govern more to my liking than would Dukakis or Clinton.
We can only choose among the choices given to us. It’s unfair and inaccurate to blame us for “choosing” the leaders we vote for. Largely it’s as much a mystery to us how certain politicians rise to the top as it how baggy pants and ball caps turned sideways become fashionable. Things just take on a life of their own for whatever reason and we’re stuck with them, whether it’s a style we don’t particularly like or a candidate we don’t particularly like. But given a choce between a guy who will govern 35% in a way we like vs. another guy who will govern 98% in a way we don’t like, the 35% guyis who we vote for.
Post snipped.
Did you ever stop to think that those who disagree with you disagree with you on principle? That they believe their policies (which obviously they believe to be rational) will be better for growth and social equity than yours?
Of course not.
Your OP is symptomatic of an issue I see on the 'Dope that is rapidly turning me off from this board. Great Debates has turned into Republican/Conservative bashing. Some of the bashing is justified, at least as far as the politicians go. However, most of it has become ‘those nasty republicans are evil’. As far as I can tell most of the conservative posters I used to like have bailed. Can’t say I blame them.
It seems that good faith arguments about politics is dead in this country. I hear all the time on this board about how evil and partisan Fox is but never a peep about how MSNBC has turned into just about the exact same thing, except from the liberal side. (For the record, MSNBC* used to be my news/commentary channel of choice. I never watched Fox. Now I just read various news sites). Instead of discussing issues we are left yelling that the other side is evil because they disagree with us. It is rather silly.
It is possible to have good faith disagreement on policy issues. I happen to be socially liberal (fuck/marry whomever you want, racism is evil and stupid) and fiscally conservative (lower taxes, the government cannot fix every problem by throwing money at it) in my politics. However, reading posts in which anyone who disagrees with <insert liberal policy here> is just an evil republican, or stupid, gets pretty fucking old.
What happened to the white American Man is that they don’t all agree with you. The fact they don’t agree with you does not mean they do not have the same goals as you. In most cases they probably do. However, it is possible to agree on the goals while disagreeing on the best way to reach those goals.
Slee
*Has Rachel Maddow finally stopped mentioning Bush in every god damned story. Last time I watched I swear her whole damned show was ‘In other news, Obama tripped on an untied shoelace. And BUSH IS EVIL’.
Yeah, a fucking ACHIEVEMENT that ended up killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. If an achievement has to be conjoined to a mega atrocity like that, it’s not an achievement. It’s an embarrassment.
This same kind of validation could have taken place if the bombs were dropped in the middle of nowhere, without the sacrifice of human lives. All you’re doing is revising history to rationlize the actions of some heartless bastards. Might as well just call the Holocaust an ACHIEVEMENT on the same grounds. After all, the insight obtained from all those Nazi experiments is priceless.
They want people to laud them more for their ACHIEVEMENTS.
Says the armchair quarterback with half a centuries distance.
You have a group of people actively killing YOUR people. You have a group of people ACTIVELY conquering, rounding up, and eradicating people simply due to their genetic makeup.
You have several factions ACTIVELY researching the atom. The ‘other guys’ have demonstrated they’ll use any advantage they can to TAKE things that do not belong to them.
You are already at war. Do you kill 300,000 people to stop the death of 1 million?
Those were rather difficult decisions, created by external forces, and to say ‘we shouldn’t have, because we’re white, and it was icky’ kinda leaves out some rather important details.
While I’m all for ‘just getting along peacefully’, sometimes someone ELSE comes forward and makes that impossible.
What are you talking about? If anyone was rounding up and eradicting people, it was the Germans. And yet we’re not talking about them being bombed by nuclear weapons, are we?
Please don’t lecture to me about war. There is no rational reason we can’t call the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki foul plays and admit that we were not the good guys when any of that happened. It shouldn’t kill anyone to admit that the deaths and maimings that resulted from those bombs constitute an atrocity that ought not be repeated again. It’s offensive to call this crap an achievement just because history (to date) has generally worked out in the U.S. favor. If we’d been treated with one or two Russian delights during the subsequent Cold War like everyone during those days was convinced we would–as they shat their pants hiding under the table every other week during the drills–no one would be calling Hiroshima an achievement today.
Two towns-worth of Japanese civilians were treated like collateral damage to stop a war that was wreaking havoc in Europe. Why in the hell didn’t we drop atomic bombs on Germany? After all, that was where the epicenter of evil lay. The Nazis killed more people (Americans or otherwise) than Japan did.
Perhaps this little tidbit provides some answers to my questions;
Sounds like Japan was selected for bombing because of racism and political expediency moreso than just the desire to end of the war. There’s little doubt we wanted to prove to the world that we were capable of kicking everyone’s ass. But instead of going after the regime responsible for the worst genocide in modern history, we go after innocent victims who didn’t even have a say in who led them to war in the first place.
I can’t believe the words in bold actually left your keyboard, that’s how ridiculous they are. Do you really think criticism over Hiroshima is because “we’re white” and not because, I dunno, the U.S. decided to kill a whole bunch of civilians to prove its power and got away with it because of jingoism and racism?
Riiiiight.
Not to hijack my own thread but building the atom bomb in 2-3 years was one of the intellectual, technological, and industrial wonders of the world. The Japanese were an implacable and merciless enemy, and the notion that you were going to somehow sabre rattle or cajole them into surrendering is kind of silly.
Throwing the moral lens of 2011 on a decision made 67 years ago in the midst of a life and death struggle between nations is the ultimate in arm chair quarterbacking. It may or may not have the most perfect decision, but in the estimation of those in charge of its deployment not using it would have resulted in massive US casualties. We can argue the historical possibilities of what coulda, woulda, shoulda been done re it being the best decision at hand until we are blue in the face, but using it had less to do with “jingoism and racism” than protecting the soldiers of this nation. And that is a position I can support across the deeps of time.
See Debate over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Wikipedia
So why don’t you hop in a time machine and tell that to the top-ranked officials who, strangely enough, seemed to have been saying the same thing in the 40’s that I’m saying now. I’m talking about Eisenhower and MacAurthur, to name a few. Also, Truman’s own Chief of Staff opined this:
(bolding mine)
You can also read what Major General J.F.C. Fuller–a military historian–wrote about the bombing, if for some reason you’re still under the crazy impression that Hiroshima is something that was fair play.
So not only do you have Truman contemporary’s calling the blasted thing an atrocity, but you also have military men saying exactly what I’m saying.
You’re free to peruse this well-cited sypnosis if you want to challenge me on the necessity of the bombing and it’s moral defensibility. Perhaps your impression about Hiroshima comes from the same place your impression about the archetypical white male does. From Leave it to Beaver.
That said, I don’t really believe you’re really positing that that the bombing of Hiroshima is something that white men should consider an achievement. There’s no way you could see pictures of all of those children and feel pride. No way. The only reason for invoking the “moral lens of 2011 on a decision made 67 years ago” defense is the fact that we bombed 100,000 men, women, and kids is too embarrassing to accept on objective terms.
Again, you seem to forget the context. This was at the end of a world wide war that had cost millions and millions of lives. To look at a scenario where we would prospectively have to pour in even more American blood in terms of the lives of US soldiers to secure the Japanese homeland vs squashing resistance immediately, I’m OK with the moral posture involved in that decision. In that time and place and situation it seemed to be the best decision after 4 years of brutal war with a merciless enemy who had no inclination to deliver an unconditional surrender.
Possibly today, with a lot more hindsight and historical information at out fingertips there were other things that could of been done, but a decision needed to be rendered at the time, and in the overall context of the risks and options it was chosen as the least risk, highest payout option for ending the war, and it worked.
So if you’re okay with us nuking 100,000 innocent people for Big Stick politics, what’s your beef with angry little white men screaming “Mine! Mine! Mine!” again?
Instead of temper tamtrums, perhaps it would be better if they just used weapons of mass destruction to get Obama to surrender to them. I’m sure they’d find a way to justify it after the fact, and that’s all that is needed for the history books.
You have an…interesting…view of things.
Well, nuking 100,000 people is an ACHIEVEMENT whereas screaming “Mine! Mine! Mine!” is kinda petty. White men should be up to grander stuff, being white men.
No need, it’s previously been established that Obama is an honorary white man, due to his admirable behavior.
All loose ends of this thread have now been tied.
The original complaint is silly. The implications are the only interesting thing in the OP.
If even that much. White men still control politics (Obama notwithstanding), control the vast majority of the money (allowing them to control politicians) and control the media. The only reason the greed and lust for power gets a little noticed is that enough has changed so that society is slightly less accepting.
And to expect the the white power are going to react nobly to their faults being pointed out them shows not much understanding of human nature.
Seriously.
Says the person who insists Hiroshima and Nagaskai weren’t atrocities.
I don’t know what this thread smells like, but it ain’t weed.
I never said they weren’t atrocities. Don’t read into things I don’t say. If you want to quote me on something I’ll own:
They were effective in bringing about a rapid conclusion to the war in that theatre.
(there is nothing in that statement that has me cheering over the deaths of bunnies and kittens)
V-E Day was May 8, 1945. The Trinity Test was on July 16, 1945. We did not have atomic bombs to use against the Germans. Had we had them (and had them early enough to really matter; say January 1945), we’d have nuked Germany. Do you seriously think that we nuked Japan simply because they weren’t white enough? We nuked them because the war wasn’t over and we had a big new bomb that might end the war. And your assumption that we nuked Japan to stop a war in Europe is likewise absurd because the war in Europe was already over. I am certain that Truman would have authorized the use of nuclear weapons against Germany if he’d had them available.
Edited to add: I am likewise not claiming that the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were morally or ethically anything other than atrocities and mass murder. I am replying to your claim that we would not have nuked the Germans given the chance.
Wait, are you suggesting we nuke them from orbit?
Some evidence for this would be nice. From my readings, the bomb was developed in anticipation that German would develop one first. What evidence is there that Truman was going to bomb German citizens like we did Japan?
We nuked Japan as opposed to anyone else because Americans considered Japs little more than monkeys deserving of incarceration and extermination. Truman was smart enough to know the backlash he’d received over it would be easily squashable because of who the victims were.
So now it’s quiz time fer ya. Were German-Americans were rounded up and put in interment camps in the quantities that Japanese-Americans were? Were they considered subhuman or even anything other than white? Was their property taken, their civil rights trampled upon? A lot of Americans were of German stock, so of course there was difference in how the Japanese were viewed versus the Krauts! I mean, what kind of rose-colored glasses are you wearing to even question this fundamental kernel of truth? I’m not denying that there wasn’t any anti-German propoganda going on them, but it takes two cups of the jingoistic Koolaid to think racial prejudice had nothing to do with the way history played out.
And I’m certain that I look better than Angelina Jolie. Your certainty about this event, sans any historical references to back you up, holds as much weight to me as I’m sure my opinion about my attractiveness does to you.
Cite? And I mean real, honest to goodness, we killd 'em cuz they were easy…citation.
:dubious:
What’s the point of stating that, unless you’re trying minimize it being a blight on history?