I was tired and planning to go to bed, and then I came upon this essay while reading Scott's blog. The essay, by another Scott, was good, but some of the commenters got on my nth nerve. The same old arguments again are served up as if they were brilliant insights no one had ever thought of before, instead of tedious repetitive queries along the lines of a toddler's unanswerable "why?" Apparently we have no right to ever call anyone else an enemy or fight to defend ourselves because: "America isn't innocent" (no one ever claimed it was); "America was bad in the past and killed a bunch of Indians" (no one has ever denied that either, and what the hell does that have to do with Islamofascist terrorists? They don't give two shits for dead Indians); our use of atomic bombs on Japan was not only inhumane, it was unnecessary overkill (that point is debatable, with good supporting evidence* that any alternatives would have been even worse); we have a "hard on" for Saddam (can we dispense with the disgusting high school gutter talk for once?); we aren't being "told everything" (Well no duh, why don't we just email all our plans to Hussein while we are at it?); "What on earth does Iraq have to do with 9-11?" -- why, nothing at all, 9-11 happened outside time, in a universe of its own, totally apart from the mass of psychic goo that binds the whole rest of the gaiaverse together so that we don't dare move lest we start a hurricane that will smash all the butterfly wings in the world! As I wrote in Scott Chaffin's comments (not the other Scott's, I have no intention of getting into it with yet another set of oblivious fools): I am so sick of these people, they make me want to bang my skull on a stone wall until my head breaks open and my brains spill out. Good thing I have nothing but plaster and drywall around me now.
*Look it up, I am not your goddamn research assistant.
Posted by Andrea Harris at February 15, 2003 02:04 AMDon't be banging no heads and spilling no brains -- we're gonna need you when all the shooting's over.
It does make it hard to read things, though, doesn't it?
(like your new buttons.)
Posted by: Scott Chaffin at February 15, 2003 at 07:43 AMthey make me want to bang my skull on a stone wall until my head breaks open and my brains spill out.
What, you want to become one of them? :)
Posted by: Gary Utter at February 15, 2003 at 02:54 PM"our use of atomic bombs on Japan was not only inhumane, it was unnecessary overkill"
That one (and the "the Japanese were about to surrender") always pisses me off, because it is so obviously and OBJECTIVELY false. It is easily provable that the Japanese were not ready to surrender: it took TWO bombs.
Posted by: Ken Summers at February 15, 2003 at 03:11 PMMoreover, Ken, even the most conservative estimates were that Operation Olympic (the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands) would have cost half a million American casualties. Undoubtedly even more Japanese, both military and civilians, would have perished as well. Moreover, once we had set foot on the sacred soil of Japan itself, there could have been no thought of surrender on the part of the Japanese, and thus the US would then essentially be forced to engage in genocide. It was only because that had not yet happened that Hirohito could personally call for an end to the war and still save face--both his own and that of the nation.
Posted by: David Jaroslav at February 15, 2003 at 10:31 PM