The $50 question: Grant or Reagan? - Page 3

Way better topic than yet another nonsense derail. Franklin was too busy mackin on french whores and flyin kites to be prez. He was also too anti-slavery to be elected.

Someone in 1945 referred to the Japanese as "Japs"?! I really am taken aback by that, clearly that means Harry Truman "gleefully" murdered thousands of civilians.


Seriously, that's what your basing it on? The fact that Truman called them Japs? Or beasts? I would guess that probably every single fucking U.S. serviceman had that come out of their mouths at some point during the war. Cause we were, umm, you know, fighting a war with them? Sometimes tempers flare, naughty language was probably not all that uncommon.

I have no problem with being morally opposed to the use on atomic weapons against Japan, but to say he did it gleefully, and then provide that laughable "evidence", give me a fucking break.

Also, the Japanese were doing stuff just as bad as the Nazis, so yeah, 'beasts' or an abbreviated version of their name ('Japs'? The horror! Thats ever more hateful than calling Americans 'yanks'!) is really nothing that I am going to wrinkle my nose over
Indeed. It's a very complex issue, and as I said, I have a unique perspective on it. I can understand someone disagreeing on the ultimate choice, but to pretend that it would have been just as easy not to drop it (as the US was just getting off on destruction or something) is fucking stupid.

And he was too old by that time anyway.

Yes, I went on to explain my thoughts further in another post to him, in terms of just what we were 'getting over' with.

Nope. Just like we don't count suicides commuted by 'comfort women' as deaths the Japanese army caused. Or deaths from poor health services in the wake of a world war. There are always ancillary deaths, and for the record I'm against nuking anyone else.

Plus, those bombs were not that radio active compared to our modern understanding of nukes.

It has to do with the fact that the Japanese doing alot of evil stuff that their citizenry didn't blink an eye at. They were not a nation hijacked by murderous fanatics, they very much enthusiastically embraced the machinery that let Nanking happen.


My point is that crowing about how bad the US was to drop the bomb often comes from people who are turning a blind eye to the fact that the US Army behaved like knights from King Arthur when compared with what the Japanese were doing to Asian civilians (and prisoners of war)

PS That photo is from 2012 when Yellow Stone National Park blows up. A photo of a real atomic explosion would have been in poor taste. I was attempting to add some levity.

It was a different time, but I think Franklin liked hanging out in Europe and bangin' prostitutes too much to be bothered with running the country.

Franklin would have been too smart to want the job, in the 18th century or the 21st.

Clearly, the portrait on the $50 bill should be Chevy Chase as Gerald Ford.

As did the Germans. When you label the participants of the Third Reich to be merely Nazis, it's like saying some evil aliens took over a country. What the Nazi party accomplished in Germany would not have been possible without the history and culture of the German people.

Germans were responsible for those attrocites. Just as you clearly labelled the Japanese as responsible for the brutality of their country, please do the same with Germany.

I do, for the most part. And if the situation had somehow been reversed and Japan was an island chain of blond haired blue eyed people white people and Japan was a nation of slanty eyed Europeans, I'd argue to drop the bomb on the Germans

EDIT: PS The level of cruelty that the average Japanese soldier engaged in in places like China and Singapore was far greater than what the average German enlisted man got up to in Poland, ETC

The genocide against the Jews was made possible by anti-semetic attitudes in German culture, but it was designed and carried out by Nazis, and hidden from the populace.

The same cannot be said for what was going on in Asia. The cruelty was something that the Japanese high command made little effort to hide, because everyone was cool with it for the most part

EATEN BY THE JAPANESE? Holy Shit, that's outstanding. I knew I was missing the occasional nugget of gold in all those thousands of blocked PK posts I scrolled past the last month or two.

It also brings us to one of the few objective ways to measure one president against another: taste. Which Commander in Chief would be tastiest, if properly seasoned and prepared? I say Abe is out of the running along with most of the older gents (too stringy). But you don't necessarily want the youngest and fittest either, as your JFKs or Obamas make for a leaner, but tougher cut.

With that in mind, my pick would probably be FDR. I know you think, health problems and all, not the one I most want to put in my body. But assuming the FDA signs off, the wheelchair situation makes him like the veal of presidents, all tender and succulent.

But he smoked like a madman, that's got to ruin the taste for sure. I'd go for Grant. Pre-pickled goodness.

Alexander Hamilton > Benjamin Franklin and I love me some Franklin. From what I've gathered over the years a lot of the Franklin stuff was just him being an old fart who liked to flirt via his pen and tongue and not with his flesh colored lightening rod. Hamilton, on the other hand, had no qualms about getting his on the side.

As an aside, Alexander Hamilton should be more lauded than Jefferson in my opinion. The man got more out of his natural ability and intellect, crawling out of the gutter as the bastard son of Scottish nobility in the West Indies on his abilities and intelligence alone, to become one of the men who forged a nation from the fires of the revolution to the near disaster that resulted from the Articles of Confederation. While Jefferson was jerking himself off with visions of a genteel, agrarian economy filled with populist rhetoric but controlled by the planter aristocracy he was so much apart of, Hamilton foresaw the change that was about to be unleashed upon the world that we would come to call The Industrial Revolution.


Have I mentioned I have a mancrush on Hamilton? I put him up there with Debs, La Follette, John Marshall, Proudhon and Emma Goldman in my personal pantheon of political thinkers and doers.

This is ridiculous. Radiation poisoning deaths were not auxuillary deaths, they were deaths directly caused by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Also, you cite that 175 thousand people died, whereas 160 thousand were dead within four months of the bombing in Hiroshima alone, and some estimates place the death toll at around 200,000 by 1950.

I'm not going to play apples and oranges, but please get your facts straight. This is a discussion worth having, but not when you're willfully obfuscating shit and throwing around terms like "japs" and "slanty eyed."

Because of the strain involved, scouts were rotated at short intervals. I do not remember the name of the scout who led the second platoon, but it was he who relieved me. Within three minutes after taking the lead, he was hit by a burst from a machine gun. The Japanese had dug in on a coral hill and were waiting for us. We took whatever cover we could find, moved into firing positions, and battled throughout the day and into the night. Daylight came and we put feelers out to see if the Japanese were still there. They had moved out and the scouts body was gone.

We moved up the hill into the evacuated Japanese positions. There, we found him. His body had been carved as though he were a mere piece of beef. All the flesh was gone from his legs, arms, buttocks and chest and his heart and kidneys were missing. We had no doubt that they were eating our dead.

No prisoners, we vowed to ourselves.

http://corregidor.org/Heritage_Battalion/nycum/ch5.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanes...es#Cannibalism

Sure, just so long as you dont mention that unfortunate business of him trying to raise an army to overthrow the U.S. government in a power-crazed coup.

EDIT or maybe he just egged some discontent officers on in the Newburgh Mutiny. I like my version more. Huzzah Hamilton!

I'm not doubting that cannibalism has occurred in Japanese history. Just marveling at the way PK makes her "arguments".

For the record, I was citing slanty eyes as a physical characteristic for Japanese people just like I cited blond hair and blue eyes as a typical characteristic of Germans.

I was saying that were the situations reversed strategically, and the question had been if we should have nuked Germany, my answer would be the same. I was citing the slanty eyes to specifically say they were not influencing my decision. I do apply the same standards to the German and Japanese people for war crimes. I feel in fact that the Japanese were never properly brought to account in a court of law. There was no equivalent of the Nuremberg trials for the Pacific theater. And we're paying the price for that today. There are still HUGE tensions in Asia because countries feel Japan has never really apologized in full. That's not so much the case in Europe where there was the chance to air all this out over a number of years

I am sorry if I offended by citing what Japanese people do indeed look like, but I was making reference to it to make the point that it didn't matter to me.


PS I enjoy Japanese culture and zen Buddhism. I support Tibet for political and moral reasons, but the dogmatic theocracy that was the norm before the revolution was not something I can say was a great situation. I much more prefer the approach of the Japanese in this respect.

EDIT: PPS: So, my estimation of Atom Bomb Deaths* was pretty much an exact average of the varying estimations, yes? Then what is the issue?

*Wow! I was right on the money and that was totally off the top of my head. It was a very informed guess because believe it or not I know what I am talking about, but I'm just going to take this moment to do a little mental high five for pulling that out of a swirling collection of facts in my head

Some other numbers are easy to remember, 400 000 America dead in the war, 20 million russian, 60 million total, 58K and change in Vietnam, 8/29/97 Judgement Day, 8/23/00 California breaks off the USA and gets turned into a prison, Harry Truman died in 1972, June 23, 323 BCE Alexander III of Macedon dies of flu**

I have a good mind for that kind of thing. But this one I wasn't entirely sure about and I'm just really proud of my deduction abilities.

Thats all

**Or Poison?!

Here's the point. You missed it. Fuck it, I'm out.

I also like that PK doesn't seem to understand that Emperor Hirohito commanded the same level of devotion and blindness in his populace that Hitler did with the German. Japan and Germany both had massive cults of personality going on, some Japanese believed Hirohito to be a literal descendant of the sun god Amaretsu.

Also the use of Cannibalism was still considered a war crime by the Japanese, there's a fantastic documentary called The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On which is about a former Japanese soldier questioning his previous superiors about cannibalism which occured in New Guinea.

Also the Nazi's were fucking brutal to people in Poland and Russia AND they used fascist groups from other countries to impose their will. The Rape of Nanking is horrifying, but a very similar situation was happening in Slovenia with old fascist groups being given control and wiping out hundreds of thousands of citizens and raping tens of thousands of people over the course of 6 to 8 months.

I know I know. Hirohito was far less personally involved in setting out the polices that lead to Crimes Against Humanity than Hitler was though. Hitler was a dude with an axe to grind. Hirohito was a man raised in isolation to be a deity, and rape policies and such were not at the forefront of his agenda. Hirohito was to some degree just a figurehead who was adrift in a powerful current of nationalism, racial superiority and advisers with powerful agendas. In most every case (not all cases, most every) the brutality of the Japanese army was a natural function of how that Army operated rather than the demented schemes of a few (like it was with Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy)

PS I don't think Hirohito would ever have admitted on radio to not being a god if we hadn't showed Japan that the only option was surrender or obliteration. We showed them that death in battle would not be glorious but instant and devastating and inevitable. That allowed Hirohito the room with his own people to back down. I think without that admission there were forces in Japan that would not have ever allowed a surrender

Hitler wasn't exactly in control of Nazi Germany either. A lot of policies were affected by him talking about vague ideas and his subordinates carrying them out as policy to make him happy. Hitler spent most of his time lounging around in the mountains.

Yes but without Hitler's personal devotion to wiping out the Jews and undesirables, that agenda would never have gotten the momentum it did. Sure, Jews would have probably gotten shit from any German government to emerge in the wake of 23 billion% inflation. The German people needed scape goats. But without Hitler, gas chambers seem unlikely.

Hitler and his cult of personality allowed alot of craven fiends to access the corridors of German power, but again, I don;t think people with genocidal agendas would have penetrated the government without someone like Hitler there at the top

Where as I think Japan would have gone to war no matter who was Emperor, and I think the Rape of Nanking would still have happened.


EDIT: PS He didn't just lounge. He was busy doing alot of fascinating but ultimately pointless things. Like designing a Classico-fascist future Berlin. There is a reproduction of the model that he and Speers constructed and it appears in the film DOWNFALL. That model is currently in a Berlin museum. There are photos of the original , and let me tell you: it's pretty awesome/scary. Fascist architecture fascinates me, it's designed to highlight the insignificance of the individual. The scale is so vast as to make the citizen feel overpowering humility and awe at the grandeur and power of the state. The main central building, featuring the worlds largest dome, was to be so large that ultimately it would have been folly. The better part of a million people would have fit inside, and the water vapor from their collective respiration would have eventually condensed and caused INDOOR RAIN.

That's pretty neat, IMHO

(Obviously Nazis suck, I'm just talking as an architecture fan)

The Japanese Expansion was going to happen no matter what. There was a lot of Japanese resentment to how much help they'd received from the Americans in the 1800s and a lot of fervour due to their defeat of the Russians in 1905. What Hirohito did was give a divine mandate to this expansion.

Hitler on the other hand was tapping into a lot of resentment that already existed. Germany had been anti semetic since at least the time of Martin Luther, and it was German principalities that were responsible for most of the Jew murdering of the Crusades. What Hitler did was surround himself with lackeys who were desperate to please and had their own axes to grind, so they'd take Hitler's wild notions and turn them into policy and work the kinks out and then explain to Hitler how smart and awesome he was for coming up with these policies.

Best example of this is that Hitler wanted to deport all of the Jews first and foremost, his idea was to send them all to Madagascar (which is hilarious in its insanity) but then it became unviable and the final solution started to be discussed.

I'm no longer sure we disagree.. Everything you just said is correct, but it doesn't really contradict anything I was saying either.


PS: I guess I'll jsut say this: There was plenty of anti-antisemitism in Germany, but the Jews had had more success in Germany than almost anywhere else. The whole country was not anti semitic. In the wake of the loss in WW1, they were used as a scape goat and some violent brown shirt nuts got riled up, and they in turn riled up the gullible. By embracing the idea of a rebirth of German power and respect in the world, they tricked the rest of the population and then used coercion and intimidation to shut up any dissenters. Hitler's rise is not solely attributable to anti-semitic sentiments. It was 'morning in America' for Germany, and that was his main appeal.

To be honest I'm just showing off.

Although the point is that the Japanese were only as demonic and inhuman as their Germanic and Italian counterparts.

.....

You forgot the only real difference between the Japs and the Nazis is after the war the war criminal of one group got put on trial, and the other group got US Jobs.

My thoughts exactly

Thank you! Hamilton has long been my favorite Founding Father. He only invented the financial infrastructure that not only saved the US from an early demise, but also put it on track to be a superpower. Plus he was brilliant, pragmatic, proud, refused to pander, and not afraid to insist that sometimes governing should not be the job of the unwashed masses, thank you very little. Ooh, and handsome. Let's not forget handsome.

My favorite president was Woodrow Wilson, but that's another thread.

And yes, I did chuckle at your "main bottom bitch" remark. Praise given.