Monthly Archives: August 2007

White Light, Black Rain: The Destruction Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki

America, Criminal Injustice, Foreign Policy, Just War, Military, War

Just to remind you what a monster one must be to say the following words: “the nuclear option is on the table.”

“On August 6th and 9th, 1945, two atomic bombs vaporized 210,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those who survived are called “hibakusha”—people exposed to the bomb—and there are an estimated 200,000 living today. Today, with the threat of —nuclear weapons of mass destruction frighteningly real—the world’s arsenal capable of repeating the destruction at Hiroshima 400,000 times over—Oscar® award-winning filmmaker Steven Okazaki revisits the bombings and shares the stories of the only people to have survived a nuclear attack.”

The teletwits of cable haven’t commemorated this mass murder. Photos are all important. Watch the “Video Promo.” I’ve attached a few links you can follow. I’m not going to attempt to describe the flesh of a young girl melted away, hanging in strips from her still-alive body.

Photographs Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki

A Photo-Essay on the Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Update #1: : There is no disputing that the intentional slaughter of 200,000 innocents was mass murder. What else? Mercy killing? Preemptive killing of innocents? It’s the coward’s way out. It’s un-Christian, un-Jewish, unethical; flouts every stricture of Just War and natural justice, you name it. To defend it is indefensible. There is, moreover, no way to say who and how many were “saved” by the bombing. That’s why it’s such a convenient course of action for the evil. It’s open-ended and vague. To do so, is to exclude oneself from humanity.

Update #2: Pearl Harbor is the magic word for the crowd that is always licking its chops for blood. In Pearl Harbor you have the Japanese attacking a military target—a naval base. They killed a few thousands of what to them were enemy combatants, i.e. Americans. That act, according to some monsters, provides the warrant the US needed to slaughter 200,000 mostly civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and destroy those cities. Truman had planned to drop a couple more “Little Boys” and “Fat Men,” as they were dubbed affectionately.

Part of the Just War doctrine, adhered to by a dwindling number of REAL Christians, is the concept of proportionality in war. One of the best dissections of the bankrupt case for this atrocity was made by historian Ralph Raico. While we’re at it, let’s see a consistent application of principles, please. To intentionally target civilians is to engage in the act of terrorism.

Sock it to those Civilians!

Update #3: On the topic of intentionally targeting innocent civilians with the most devastating weapon known to man we heard, unfortunately, mainly from people bereft of a developed theory of justice. Rather, in discussing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the emphasis was mostly on crude collectivism. However charitable I‘d like to be, I can’t even credit some of the individuals who wrote in with advancing a sophisticated utilitarianism. Mostly, it was, “We socked it to ‘em for our boys, yeah baby. We kicked some ass.” (The booties of babies and their mothers…)

There were others (unpublished of course) who—without any familiarity with my writings on Just War, including pre-emptive war, Israel, and Iraq—offered unsubstantiated deductions about my positions. For example: it was asserted by one bombast that I opposed the war in Iraq on the grounds that Saddam was better than the current chaos. No, that’s the position taken in retrospect, after the failure in Iraq, by some of the nation’s reigning philosopher kings.

If you intend to offer an opinion about it, read my perfectly validated case against that war. Once again, my position against that travesty, again—perfectly validated today—rested on principles of natural justice, Just War, and the reality shared by the “reality-based community,” not the pie-in the sky occupied by neoconservatives, who admitted to creating their own reality when it came to the danger from saddam, because they possessed the power to so do.

Don’t waste your time on a classically liberal blog if you haven’t acquainted yourself with the writing you propose to “refute” so stridently. Of course, even the fact that I was right about the war against Iraq has not persuaded warriors suspended in a Third Dimension that my philosophy was validated, not by chance, but by following objective reality and immutable principle. So, can I sell you shares in a Bed and Breakfast in Baghdad?

Update 4 (May 7, 2008): Recently revealed are these new photos of the American government’s war crimes (via LRC.com).

[All comments were lost in a server crash early in 2008]

Updated: The Hildebeest to Level the Lending Industry

Business, Capitalism, Constitution, Economy, Feminism, Free Markets, Hillary Clinton, Socialism

The Hildebeest wants to make it easier for debt-laden borrowers to borrow money they can’t repay. She wants those who don’t spend money they don’t have, to subsidize those who do. The latter are called, euphemistically “at-risk borrowers.” So now we are medicalizing fraud! Defraud the lender and it is not he and his investment that are at risk, but you the defrauder. As for the money lending industry: hey toots, what do you think mortgage companies will do if you force them to throw good money after bad? Go bankrupt!

Tightening credit conditions and foreclosures signal to this silly socialist one and one thing only: the lending industry is not yet egalitarian enough; it has not yet been forced to lend to all equally. The insurance industry already gets sued to bits when it refuses to pay out to the barely insured for homes that were swept away by Katrina, but were never insured against floods. This woman is so dim. Like so many women, Hillary just doesn’t understand money or free markets. Here I include the war harpies. They cheer on the spending in Iraq, which contributes to our economic straits—to the promiscuous money printing and the devaluation of the dollar. As I once said on a libertarian discussion list, I’d give up my vote if that would guarantee that all women were denied the vote.

The worst part of all this is how Hillary audaciously framers her Fabian plank as quintessential Americanism: “We need to secure the marketplace and put reforms in place right now… [do] what America has always done in times of difficulty…,” IT announced.

Practically every initiative Hillary touts as part of her platform is grounded in spending money not hers. Hey toots, you haven’t even been elected yet! Enough already! I’m being unfair. Instead of a slap on the face to calm the cow down, Barak Hussein Obama is matching Hillary word-for-word. He has also promised to curb “abusive practices,” by which he presumably means the mortgage company’s practice of charging a higher interest rate for loans to less credit-worthy borrowers.

This is sick. It’s socialism.

Updated (March 29, 2008): Yesterday Hillary reiterated her intent to level another industry: health insurance. This time her mandate came from the … Constitution. We were all prohibited under the Constitution, said she, from discriminating on the basis of age, sex, race, etc. So why should the insurance industry be exempt? Why should it be permitted to discriminate between people based on health status (largely under the individual’s control)? Hillary wanted to know. Aware as I am that Hillary is such a strict constructionist (sarcasm alert), please enlighten me as to the clause in the Constitution upon which Hillary bases her latest Fabian impetus. It’s obvious that the woman could never fathom what it is that the actuary does.