im not joining the #nukesdiscourse but this doesnt imply nukes are good, just that they are necessary in modern global world stage.
-
Welcome to Smogon! Take a moment to read the Introduction to Smogon for a run-down on everything Smogon, and make sure you take some time to read the global rules.
Serious The Politics Thread
- Thread starter Oglemi
- Start date
- Status
im not joining the #nukesdiscourse but this doesnt imply nukes are good, just that they are necessary in modern global world stage.
"Nukes are good, because without them, you don't have power over countries with nukes."
https://www.axios.com/2019/08/25/trump-nuclear-bombs-hurricanes
these are the people in charge of the nukes
these are the people in charge of the nukes
That is an absolutely nonsensical thing to say.
By that ridiculous standard most of the planet has no sovereignty.
Which patently isn’t true.
And that's somehow a good thing?
No it isn't, they're actually an incredibly destructive and uniquely evil weapon, so much so that nobody wants to be hit by one. We live in a world dominated by powers that possess great quantities of these weapons and disarmament isn't happening any time soon, so if you are a country or people looking to exert presence on the world stage, maybe you should get a nuke or be closely aligned with one that has them.
Can you cite any evidence for this, given that most of the planet‘s 8 billion plus residents including major governments, analysts, the UN, and more, would completely disagree with your blanket and unqualified statement.
Countries without nuclear weapons have sovereignty.
What you are trying to say, which I think I would agree with, is that countries without nuclear weapons potentially have less clout than others, on the basis of “my missiles the most destructive”.
As we‘ve seen with economic sanctions across the world against specific countries, you do not need to be militarily powerful to enact resistance against others. (But it helps, of course).
We are going to agree to disagree with this. Nothing is ever going to change my view that nuclear weapons are the worst thing to happen to mankind. The ability to blow each other up with the slim chance of deterrence is too great a risk. Nobody should have them, and we should across the globe be lobbying to reduce and eventually scrap all nuclear deterrents and other ballistic weaponry.
It’s the 21st century, we are not savages living in caves, the human race is capable of living in harmony with one another, provided we eradicate the obvious evils of colonialism/imperialism/forever wars/99% of the wealth owned by 1% of the planet/etc etc.
The “Star Trek” future is possible. It doesn’t have to become “Dune”.
wait until people realize that the only reasons we nuked japan are 1. racism (that's why we didn't consider germany even when that was a relevant tarrget during planning) 2. the location wasn't a city our generals wanted to visit (originally they were going to bomb more picturesque cities and went "no, i wanna go there someday :(" like they weren't psychopaths about to kill tens of thousands of innocent people), 3. that literally all internal documents declassified and memoires released show that, despite the public narrative from the administration to American's citizens, we did not have a real reason to bomb japan outside of making sure Russia would have less time to get there, claiming territory along the way
why was russia marching to japan claiming territory along the way? because our president and churchill asked stalin to do that after germany was settled (so it was also our fault)
we also knew japan wanted to surrender, but didn't want an unconditional surrender because the military used the emperor as their propaganda tool. we knew this because western countries had decrypted channels of japanese ambassadors trying to negotiate with russia. so why did we not just offer to do a conditional surrender deal?
because it'd make the american people more annoyed, according to polling at the time, to not kill the emperor. which we didn't end up doing anyways. plus, this way, we get to basically own japan after the war!
according to literally the masterminds of the pacific side of the war, japan had literally nothing left. nationalistic locals isn't an excuse when you have ships, more guns, planes, have been bombing the mainland for months at the time, and already had reasons to be able to end the war freely.
it was literally a classic tale as old as time- we literally only killed tens of thousands of innocent people because we wanted to beat russia at the imperialism game. bravo.
nukes have never, ever been a good thing, not once, never. even in testing they just did things such as fuck up the Marshall Islands, which no one in America cares about seemingly because we are ghouls
why was russia marching to japan claiming territory along the way? because our president and churchill asked stalin to do that after germany was settled (so it was also our fault)
we also knew japan wanted to surrender, but didn't want an unconditional surrender because the military used the emperor as their propaganda tool. we knew this because western countries had decrypted channels of japanese ambassadors trying to negotiate with russia. so why did we not just offer to do a conditional surrender deal?
because it'd make the american people more annoyed, according to polling at the time, to not kill the emperor. which we didn't end up doing anyways. plus, this way, we get to basically own japan after the war!
according to literally the masterminds of the pacific side of the war, japan had literally nothing left. nationalistic locals isn't an excuse when you have ships, more guns, planes, have been bombing the mainland for months at the time, and already had reasons to be able to end the war freely.
it was literally a classic tale as old as time- we literally only killed tens of thousands of innocent people because we wanted to beat russia at the imperialism game. bravo.
nukes have never, ever been a good thing, not once, never. even in testing they just did things such as fuck up the Marshall Islands, which no one in America cares about seemingly because we are ghouls
You're right, and large swathes of this country still think Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified or there was no other option. Do you trust a country that thinks like this, almost started the apocalypse like half a dozen ties, and leaves the ABM Treaty to spearhead a global disarmament campaign? It'll never happen.
*puts on nerd emoji glasses*
A lot of these sanctions are backed by countries with nukes
Last edited:
Yes, no denying that, but the point is they didn’t go “hey we’re gonna nuke you South Africa” when the world as a bloc applied economic sanctions…
South Africa was allied with the US and Britain. Why would they be nuked?
There’s several extremely factually false statements in this post and you should learn a lot more about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki before you post on it again.
5 years later was the Korean War where 3 million civilians died and literally, we, America, were a major part of the conflict
tell me what was wrong
its not my job to prevent you from talking out of your ass. I have however been to Hiroshima and been educated in their museums and by locals whose families lived there at the time of the bombing. literally everything about your post was factually incorrect except that the US fucked up the Marshallese and doesn’t care about it.
For god’s sake, stop being so literal. The point I am making is that nukes are not the only political tool in the armoury of politicians.
I mean you can say that but it doesn't weight anything. Plenty of people say they've been educated by natives/locals/insert random group and are still saying wrong information as much as there are people saying correct information.
If you didn't want to correct nor want to elaborate your sources what's the point of saying "you're wrong"? Unless it had a joke because rule of funny trumps all #real
The post was bit hyperbolic but no the nukes weren't absolutely necessary to get Japan to surrender. By the time the Soviet Union invaded China it was basically over and the hardliners really had no more ground, the nukes were deployed in major part because the Soviets arrived
Yep. They were initially planning on nuking Kyoto
Pretty much where I am too. Politics is a team sport, and letting the Trump administration in the White House again to kickstart all of their insane policies would negatively affect the lives of millions including myself. And 3rd parties in this country are not viable and the most popular one is almost as crazy and racist as conservatives.
Trump has also met with Netanyahu and has essentially promised him free reign if he gets elected again, so protest voting makes no sense to me.
This is off-topic and more general but in general I really dislike the framing of "I've been educated by locals" when it comes to politics. I don't believe the average local is a dumb idiot who knows nothing about politics like some people claim, but I think it often applies a monolithic view on groups. People of a same group will have different views, contexts, politics, propaganda and knowledge.
For example: you could say "I was educated by brazilian locals about the military coup", which could range from fairly unbothered to dictatorship supporters to people which were/have relatives who were killed/abducted/tortured at the time.
You could be educated by locals about the japanese diaspora into brazil, but are you talking to someone whos not japanese brazilian? if they are, are they from são paulo, rio, or maybe the northern states like ceará, maranhão? What are their feelings about mainland japan, what is their social standing, their political views? How much were they told about the treatment of first gen immigrant japanese folks on here, and by who? All of these factors can change how someone feels about a topic they may be involved on, and there's no true "local/native" opinion that you can use as a crutch.
It bothers me mostly in left spaces where #listento[insertgroup] is popular. You can't just listen to anyone from a group and accept it as it is! You'll get conflicting opinions that you will have to choose from, and you need to do so with your own research and not just hoping you picked the right person to listen to.
For example: you could say "I was educated by brazilian locals about the military coup", which could range from fairly unbothered to dictatorship supporters to people which were/have relatives who were killed/abducted/tortured at the time.
You could be educated by locals about the japanese diaspora into brazil, but are you talking to someone whos not japanese brazilian? if they are, are they from são paulo, rio, or maybe the northern states like ceará, maranhão? What are their feelings about mainland japan, what is their social standing, their political views? How much were they told about the treatment of first gen immigrant japanese folks on here, and by who? All of these factors can change how someone feels about a topic they may be involved on, and there's no true "local/native" opinion that you can use as a crutch.
It bothers me mostly in left spaces where #listento[insertgroup] is popular. You can't just listen to anyone from a group and accept it as it is! You'll get conflicting opinions that you will have to choose from, and you need to do so with your own research and not just hoping you picked the right person to listen to.
Why Truman Dropped the Bomb (archive.org)
^scholar
I'll be fair, I do not have a direct claim from this that is easy to find on the internet. This is semi related though and it's actually kinda more crazy:
Public Opinion Polls on Japan on JSTOR
the only reason the more militaristic members of his board didn't want to surrender, despite him and most rational people in his government knowing the war was going to end in disaster, is because they thought it would be a fate worse than death, especially with no conditional surrender
on an american government website btw
before the second bombing by the way
like i could do more but ive spent a lot of time rn doing this and im kinda tired so imma move on. the only claim i found i was wrong on was never planning germany, although the main source for that is just one person's account of a meeting they had where they suggested nuking germany instead. im not gonna dig deep on that one though, for lack of sources and because i dont need that to know that we were literally just really racist independently of that, as shown by the polling thing i linked earlier
for all the platitudes and "the president totally felt bad guys" we got after the war, basically everything points to the nukes being unnecessary and russia's entry into the war, at the very LEAST being a big part of nagasaki, if not the entire ordeal
Last edited:
Korea is basically an irrelevant blip lol. I don't think you're getting the point. Maybe you don't want to. The world population in 1950 was about 2.5 billion while today it's around 8 billion, so for the graph to look like it does it means not only are wars much less common, they're on average less destructive to human life.
The reason? War is no longer profitable. The Berlin blockade easily could have sparked WW3... but it didn't. The Soviets backed down. Why? Because the Americans had enough nukes to erase the USSR from history. The 60s and 70s marked the period where the Soviet's missile tech and numbers caught up and the two superpowers gradually realized direct confrontation is terrible for everyone involved. They even built a fucking Powerpuff Girls Hotline phone in the 60s so they could call each other to make sure no one accidentally got nuked. Spoiler alert, no one did.
You seriously don't think that these two opposing sides wouldn't have had a conventional war and killed another 100 million in WW3? Shit probably would have happened in the 60s... Maybe today we'd be reading about WW4 in the history books getting ready for WW5. Why not? Do you trust that political leaders will "play nice" when they sense weakness in their opponent?
This applies to smaller nations as well. Not one single time has a nuclear armed nation been successfully invaded or annexed. Probably because no one wants to risk their capital city being deleted by a spunky mushroom. A world without nukes would likely see far more conventional wars and a dramatically higher loss of human life.
- Status