Philosopher of the Apocalypse | Hacker News Reader

Philosopher of the Apocalypse

aeon.co

37 pointsThevet12 comments

Fear of the Apocalypse belongs into the past era, today we are much more afraid that the Apocalypse won't happen, and things just go on as they are going ... Anders has some good insights into the relationship between the engineer and his creation, but his commitments to Heideggerian authenticity limits those insights severely. There was no mythical time when the creator and the created were not separated and we could control technology, one can control what happens after the invention of nukes to the same degree that one can control what happens after the invention of the plough.

>committing arguably one of the most barbaric acts of the Second World War with complete indifference

ok but also committing arguably a totally justified act that saved more lives than it cost.

That is impossible to surmise.

it is impossible to surmise?

I mean there are two main arguments that people make, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes, and that they were completely justified.

Either one is arguable, the justifiable one has pretty solid data as to how many people were being killed in American bombing raids and how many people would have died in a land invasion of Japan. https://www.history.navy.mil/about-us/leadership/director/di...

I mean it is pretty much the opposite of impossible to surmise! Given that there are lots of well known arguments on how the use of the atomic bombs were justified because of lives saved I find it a bit much to claim it was arguably one of the most barbaric acts of the war without even a nod towards hey, maybe it wasn't though, since the phrasing implies that hey everyone everywhere agrees it was pretty darn barbaric.

I read not too long ago about things I didn't learn in school:

- Most cities in Japan had already been extensively fire-bombed - The Japanese High Command were not shocked that atomic bombs could exist or that yet another city was obliterated - The Japanese - Soviet war was also not going well for Japan. They would much rather surrender to the Americans than the Russians.

You are framing it as if a land invasion was inevitably the only other option. That's also impossible to surmise.

The Americans were basing their decisions on a land invasion, and they were intending, evidently, to continue lots of firebombing prior to doing a full scale invasion. That is known.

Something that is evidently not known here is the meaning of surmise, which my dictionary tells me is

"suppose that something is true without having evidence to confirm it."

so, I think what people are trying to say is it's impossible to know for certain. And yes, it is impossible to know for certain if a land invasion would have happened, but it does seem like a pretty good chance of it given the planning for one.

Saving more American servicemen lives at the expense of Japanese children and other non-combatants.

supposedly an invasion would have killed 5-10 million Japanese https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-atomic-bomb-saved-millionsi... although I suppose that would mainly have been combatants.

I mean, you’re the one calling incinerating kindergarteners ‘totally justified’.

"Totally justified" given the costs and consequences of the alternative.

It's a comically naive view on the dropped atomic bombs that this was in any way based on 'costs and consequences of the alternative'. The opposite is true, as is well documented in countless books and statements by the people involved at the time:

The key reasons they were dropped was (1) the cost of developing the atomic bomb at 2 billion dollars, and (2) to demonstrate this capability to the future enemies, the Russians.

But you're not alone in your assessment. Notably, recently dozens of cops watched kids being massacred for an hour, because the alternative would have been that officers could have been hurt, which is clearly unacceptable https://twitter.com/VAKruta/status/1529977770931113987?ref_s...

Let's not kid ourselves: had any party on the losing side of the war pulled that off, the people involved would have been hung as war criminals.

that's the official propaganda. There is no truth in war.

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