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Cake day: January 16th, 2022

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  • what if we had records of contemporary US top military leaders saying the exact opposite, would you stop cheerleading for mass slaughter then?

    because, in an amazing coincidence…

    While a majority of Americans may not be familiar with this history, the National Museum of the U.S. Navy in Washington, D.C., states unambiguously on a plaque with its atomic bomb exhibit: “The vast destruction wreaked by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the loss of 135,000 people made little impact on the Japanese military. However, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria … changed their minds.”…

    Seven of the United States’ eight five-star Army and Navy officers in 1945 agreed with the Navy’s vitriolic assessment. Generals Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur and Henry “Hap” Arnold and Admirals William Leahy, Chester Nimitz, Ernest King, and William Halsey are on record stating that the atomic bombs were either militarily unnecessary, morally reprehensible, or both.

    No one was more impassioned in his condemnation than Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff. He wrote in his memoir “that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender …. In being the first to use it we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.”

    MacArthur thought the use of atomic bombs was inexcusable. He later wrote to former President Hoover that if Truman had followed Hoover’s “wise and statesmanlike” advice to modify its surrender terms and tell the Japanese they could keep their emperor, “the Japanese would have accepted it and gladly I have no doubt.”

    Before the bombings, Eisenhower had urged at Potsdam, “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

    https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-08-05/hiroshima-anniversary-japan-atomic-bombs





  • “free folk” is a weird way to describe the US/UK/etc., given what civil rights in those places were like at the time, and the fact that the US now has the highest incarceration rate of anywhere in the world (and a prison system that kills a higher percentage of prisoners than the gulags in the USSR did).

    what’s your evidence that

    a) the US got involved in the second world war for any reason other than to fight communism (US businesses continued to trade with the Nazi regime right until the end of the war),

    b) that the US had any capacity to push further east than they did,

    c) that anyone in the USSR wanted their “liberation” (polls in all of the places you mentioned had huge support for the USSR all the way to its dissolution, and even the CIA admits that calling Stalin a “dictator” was misleading propaganda



  • triplenadir@lemmygrad.mltoTechnology@lemmy.worldThe End of Airbnb in New York
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    10 months ago

    sure, I wouldn’t say no if airbnb instituted a global 2-address-per-person policy 🤝

    but not everyone’s “inhospitable for over half the year” is the same, I know more than one person whose local community has been basically destroyed by second home owners, there were plenty of people wanting to live in those places full-time but they were priced out.







  • I totally agree that urban sprawl sucks, and should be stopped. a much more direct and fair way to do this would be to remove zoning restrictions that only allow building single family homes (instead of any higher-density housing) in most urban parts of north america, and remove minimum parking requirements for businesses – and hope that the cultural shift propagates to other places where these car-dependent designs have taken hold.

    secondly, calling people needing transport a “market” seems like part of the same faulty thinking where public services need to turn a profit. taxing the rich could absolutely pay for a lot more public transport: before the Beeching cuts in the 1960s, the UK had around twice as many passenger railway lines – this was also at a time when the top rate of income tax there was 83%, as opposed to 45% now.

    lastly, maybe think about who rich people exploited in order to get their (your?) money before proposing policies that explicitly aim to make poor people poorer, while letting the rich continue to live where they (you?) please