Skip Navigation

InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)B

boywar3

@ boywar3 @lemmy.world

Posts
0
Comments
50
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • 'Oppenheimer' finally premieres in Japan to mixed reactions and high emotions

    Jump

  • I mean, sure it's horrible, but again, understanding the context behind decisions is important to getting a full idea of why something was done.

    Take something like strategic bombing, which killed more people by a country mile than the atomic bombings. Does anyone bitch on the same level about how many people were killed by regular bombing? Hell, Operation Meetinghouse (the firebombing of Toyko in March 1945) killed something like 150k people in a single raid, and nobody says a goddamned word about it outside of historical circles.

    At the end of the day, the idea behind strategic bombing (in the case of the Allies) was that it was a good way to damage the enemy's war effort. The killing of civilians wasn't the objective (unlike the Germans, who explicitly employed terror bombing of civilians as a tactic). Its the cold calculus of fighting a modern war - the enemy's capacity to fight is the ability for them to make more things to fight with, so eliminating that capacity by demolishing factories and houses is a good strategy. The killing of civilians wasn't the objective necessarily - breaking the apparatus they participated in was.

    In some ways it's actually better to simply leave millions homeless instead of killing them, as the enemy must house and feed these people instead of using those resources for fighting...

    Either way, would you have rather the US blockaded Japan to death to force a surrender? Killing untold numbers of civilians from starvation and disease than a relatively small number of civilians in 2 places? Maybe we wouldn't have needed to if the Russian invasion was enough to scare them into surrender, but we'll never know that for sure...

    What would you have done against an enemy that gave every indication they were planning to fight to the death?

  • 'Oppenheimer' finally premieres in Japan to mixed reactions and high emotions

    Jump

  • "If you violate the Geneva Convention, your people don't get the protections of it" seems like a pretty reasonable way to justify the bombings tbh

    In any case, there are some important considerations to be made here too:

    After the horrors of Okinawa, US leadership expected a million casualties to take Japan itself, to the point where the Navy wanted to simply blockade Japan into submission. Given the Japanese civilians were already eating acorns and tree bark, and the military's entire outward appearance was to never surrender, it isn't unreasonable to assume Japan wouldn't have given up.

    Of course, the Japanese were refusing to surrender to the US in order to surrender through the USSR in hopes of getting a better deal (protect the emperor, no war crime trials, etc.). Of course, the Soviets invaded Manchuria and dashed all hopes of that, which, according to many people, was the real reason for Japan's surrender.

    It is a bit murky, but in response to the bombings and the invasion, there was a meeting on August 9th of the highest ranks of the Japanese government where it was determined that surrender was the only option and plans were drawn up to do so. However, on the 14th, there was an attempted coup by some army officers to continue the war, which failed after several high ranking officials refused to comply, among other things.

    All of this taken together is not to say "the bombings were necessary," but rather to show the situation as it developed, and how many different things could have gone wrong and dragged the war on for longer (side note: Japan still held a lot of territory and there were plans to liquidate POWs and the like in the event of surrender)

    Was it right to vaporize thousands? In a vacuum, no, certainly not. But in the complex context of a war in which millions had already died and millions more still very well could have, its tough to say.

  • Chinese police will patrol in Hungary alongside Hungarian officers after an agreement with Budapest, raising fears of Beijing oppression being meted out in Europe

    Jump

  • Y'know, the whole Japan occupation post-war was kinda necessary given the state Japan was in and how deep their evil leadership went lol

  • Google gets its way, bakes a user-tracking ad platform directly into Chrome

    Jump

  • Meanwhile, I'm over here unable to find an IT job :')

  • Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED

    Jump

  • Ah gotcha

  • Why It Was Almost Impossible to Make the Blue LED

    Jump

  • You thinking of Vanced? Revanced is updated pretty regularly

  • MacBooks, Chromebooks lead losers in laptop repairability analysis

    Jump

  • Oh yeah, now it's all pretty standardized with like the same screws for everything.

    Its no longer quite as silly with the specific steps to follow, but god, is it boring as all hell to work with too lol

  • MacBooks, Chromebooks lead losers in laptop repairability analysis

    Jump

  • I worked on mostly Chromebook repairs for 6 months last year, and I found it to be pretty straightforward as well from a hardware standpoint...especially when there was no point in doing most repairs because it would cost more than just getting a new one.

    For any OS issues, we'd simply take a flash drive and reinstall it from scratch. It's definitely gotten easier, but holy crap could it be slow as hell lol

  • What tv show had a big impact on you?

    Jump

  • Avatar: The Last Airbender

    Just a damned good show all around that showed younger me a lot of what makes compelling stories work.