The US as a country does it to the rest of the world too, not just the immigrants.

https://fenix.iseg.ulisboa.pt/downloadFile/1688983004255200/Kicking Away the Ladder Development Strategy in Historical Perspective by Ha-Joon Chang (z-lib.org).pdf

To me it feels like every year a new joke from Rocko’s Modern Life that I didn’t get at age 8 becomes relevant.

Sometimes I think Lemmy is an echo chamber but then I hear a phrase like I used to show hogs.

So the first sentence says TV and movie streaming replacement is trivial… Can you elaborate for someone who still uses the pirate bay for movies?

The thing all of you militarist posters have in common is you’re completely convinced that you have the correct position and you manage to come off as arrogant as well. Enjoy your globe-spanning military industrial complex that wages forever wars and sanctions genocides.

What part of having Japan’s military annihilated, their cities firebombed, and their population starving is “letting them roll over us”? The war was won already. Why was it necessary to carry out a land invasion?

There’s no false equivalence. There is no equivalence at all. There’s absolutely no point trying to figure out the most atrocitiest world power. Atrocities do not justify further atrocities.

In terms of whether the bombings were justified or not, I don’t think it’s impossible to say. Same with the firebombings, which were carried out under false pretenses of total warfare hypotheses that were later disproven.

There was talk of doing a nuclear demonstration in Tokyo harbor before the decision to annihilate two cities was undertaken. Yes, these were decisions made with limited information and lack of 20:20 hindsight, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t war crimes or that the people who made them aren’t mass murderers. This kind of zero-sum my atrocities vs. your atrocities thinking is an intellectual dead end, but it’s great for justifying American exceptionalism.

And so therefore it had to carry out a land invasion? Can you explain why this necessarily follows?

I wonder when, if ever, this narrative will finally be laid to rest. Perhaps, as long as the US military exists as a globe-spanning hegemon, we will always have to hear some version of this story.

No contemporary historian or political scientist takes this view for granted. It is one of many, and I encourage you to read about more than the wikipedia articles about Japanese atrocities. All militaries commit attocities. This is not the point.

The argument you offer is that the United States had a moral imperative to invade and occupy the Japanese home islands. What is the justification for this? Why would this have been necessary? Everyone who has seriously studied the history knows that the Soviet Union was preparing to invade Japan and its leadership was preparing to surrender in one form or another. The bombs were dropped because the US wanted to ensure that they were the negotiating party and occupying power.

The justification to avoid further violence is extremely cynical. Nowhere in the rules of war does it say that the only way to end a conflict is to utterly annihilate your oppnent. That rule was invented by expansionist empires. You can go back to the history of Rome’s wars with Greece to see this type of logic (or lack thereof) play out. It is a message. It says that we are not your equal and we will not broker any deals on equal footing. We are your hegemon and we will dictate the terms. And then we’ll blame you for any atrocities we commit, and everyone will know that we did what we did in the name of peace and justice.

Environmental concerns have never stopped any developed economy from doing what they want. Just look at this area on a map. These objections are not serious. The passenger rail service is trash in the US because of the automobile and hydrocarbon industries.

How come school shooters aren’t on here?

For those of us new to whatever this is, I’m legitimately curious about what a “3-level summary” is.

Sorry to keep bugging you but I’m looking for solutions for my entitled cat. Currently trying a rope ladder on my window. She doesn’t like leashes. Do you use a leash?

How do you explore the outdoors with him? You take him hiking?

Ok I see my sarcasm was lost on you so let me try again. There is nothing ethical about pet ownership or industrial civilization. If we cared about the well being of pets we wouldn’t keep them, and if we cared about the well being of the planet we wouldn’t build cities or burn fossil fuels.

I already have a cat. The above is moot for me. If I had to rethink this then maybe 12 years ago I would have made a different decision. At this point I am not going to euthenize my cat or blow up an oil pipeline. If you allow my cat agency then she should be allowed to explore her world and make her own decisions, just like the pigeons and rats that are forced to adapt to human civilization by eating garbage.

Anyway she’s safely locked away and miserable now so none of this matters.

Yup, and I’m the only one with agency in the whole world. It’s all about me.

Here is a perspective from someone who has owned an inside/outside cat for the last 12 years. My cat is independent and resourceful and yes, contributes to ecodestruction by killing birds and mice occasionally. To me this is negligible compared to the ecodestruction of simply existing in a city. If I lived in nature I would not have a cat. I don’t think you can conflate my cat killing a pigeon twice a year in an urban environment with destroying the ecosystem.

It’s also disengenuous to ignore the quality of life improvements of having a cat who is free to explore vs. one locked in an apartment all day. I recently moved and am now experiencing this and it sucks. I feel terrible for restricting her freedom and she is visibly less happy. If you think animals are sentient and have emotions, and you care about the environment, then none of what we are currently doing makes any sense.

Your meme led me to the definitive comparative study on raptor talon morphology (2009). It’s a pretty interesting read so here you go.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0007999

Idk it doesn’t look like we’ll run out of food and the population bomb turned out to be a dud. Maybe the food chain will collapse in the ecocrisis, but Capital will find a way to produce food more energy-intensively to compensate.

It’s a classic, but it reflects the anxieties of the time for sure.

Just for posterity in case this follows us here, there is a genocide going on in Palestine. Feels like a mantra at this point.