528 karma · joined April 13, 2012
I would understand your feeling if it implied you being somehow less well off, or having less chances of being promoted in the future, etc. But you seem to dislike the idea of other people being better off, period. I don't see what you gain from the mail boy being poorer.
That is not true according to the article by Walter Trohan I quoted above[1]. From that article:
> 4. [Japanese] relinquishment of Manchuria, Korea and Formosa, as well as all territory seized during the war.
This peace proposal was virtually identical to the one Japan ended up accepting. The only difference was that it did not offer the surrender of the person of the emperor.
The veracity of this proposal has never been questioned or denied:
> The authenticity of the Trohan article was never challenged by the White House or the State Department, and for very good reason. After General MacArthur returned from Korea in 1951, his neighbor in the Waldorf Towers, former President Herbert Hoover, took the Trohan article to General MacArthur and the latter confirmed its accuracy in every detail and without qualification.
(Harry Elmer Barnes, "Hiroshima: Assault on a Beaten Foe", National Review, 10 May 1958)
So there is no reason to doubt it.
As for your belief that the US was concerned about another war in 20 years, I am aware that this commonplace ideological piece of rhetoric is very well documented. But let's take it a face value. Let's say we believe that the real reason the US chose to firebomb Tokyo and burn to death around 100,000 people, mostly children, elderly and caretakers was to save lives by preventing another war in the next 20 years. The very least you could say is that it didn't work very well: the US was fighting another war in Korea 5 years later, Cuba 16 years later and Vietnam 20 years later. And yet the rhetoric keeps coming back, as justification for every single one of these events. So if fighting wars doesn't actually seem to prevent any killings, but always warrants more wars, why not change tactics? Why not try a different approach, for example a game of rock-paper-scissors between world leaders? The answer is that wars do indeed work for the purpose they are fought for. But this purpose is not preventing other wars, as ideology would have you believe, but instead to establish the might of the state in the general competition of states for power and domination. And populations are simply the means by which states achieve this purpose: their own population as productive force for the war machine and canon fodder; and the enemy's population as evidence of the state's power, in the form of number of casualties. The more you kill, the better.
[1]: http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1945/08/19/page/1/article...
Maybe your confusion stems from something you said:
> Japan was not ready to accept any sort of unconditional surrender.
There is only one sort of unconditional surrender, that is why it's called unconditional. The Allies, the US in particular, were not interested in negotiating peace with Japan. They were not willing to settle for anything less than Japan's total submission to them, which is why they ignored Japan's overtures to negotiating peace in January 1945. Not, as you naively seem to be believe, because they were "concerned with not seeing another world war", but because the US realised it had the might to do so, and wanted to assert itself as a global military power. Negotiating with Japan would have implied that the US had doubts about their own capacity to wage war. You seem to be aware of this, as you point out in your other comment that was linked to earlier:
> Japan counted on the vast distance between San Fransisco and Tokyo to protect them from the horrors that they had unleashed on China, the Philippians and countless other peoples in the Southeastern Pacific. They were wrong.
They were indeed wrong, but the US had to prove it to them and to the rest of the world, which is what they did by firebombing Tokyo and nuking H. and N.
[1]: http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1945/08/19/page/1/article...
He had this to say in the introduction though:
> “I do not by any means depict the capitalist and the landlord in rosy colours. But individuals are dealt with here only insofar as they are the personifications of economic categories, the bearers of particular class-relations and interests. My standpoint, from which the development of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he remains, socially speaking, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.” (Marx, Capital Vol. I, 92)
Marx clearly opposes the personification of the conflict between classes. The aim of his Capital project was precisely to demonstrate how people's actions are determined by social relations, and not by greed or evilness. And what he wanted to replace were these social relations themselves, not the individuals affected by them.
Also, the no true Scotsmen fallacy refers to universal claims, like "Scottish people don't put sugar in their tea". Saying that Lenin had a different view of the world than Marx, and very different ideas on what needs to change and how, can be easily backed with facts. That is not a fallacy.
But the real nightmare only begins after you launch the shop. There's absolutely no way to test anything before putting it live. Want to add a feature, or fix a bug? Edit the code blindly, upload it and cross your fingers that it doesn't break everything.
I admire the developers who managed to develop these sites and maintain their sanity intact.
Both Wuala and SpiderOak do end-to-end encryption, so this statement doesn't apply to them. All their servers ever see is encrypted blobs.
Wuala seems to be the only encrypted file sync service that does team sharing though, which is a requirement for me. Does anyone know any alternatives?
https://github.com/kolber/stacey/wiki/Templating-Language#fi...
It was either that or tea.