Patting the wrists, rolling the eyes.

[bilmore]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
When you think about what he was doing, you can understand why. When they firebombed Tokyo, there really wasn't a pretense that they were going after military or industrial targets.

That, though, had far more of a logical basis than some of the other carpetbomb plans. One of the main impediments to reining the Japanese in was their belief in the infallibility of the Emperor, and the corrollary belief that their homeland could never be touched/breached/damaged. In that case, there was a well-grounded thought that the Japanese morale needed to be hurt with a measure of damage thay they considered impossible, and the Tokyo bombings actually accomplished that to some degree.

Not to defend the carnage - just to make the abstract point.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
Is that true? Really? I knew there was inter-service rivalry but that is just plain stupid. So what they are saying is that lets go bomb strategic and tactical targets that may or may not help us win the war in the long run insteading of destroying tanks that are just about to kill our own soldiers.

Yes. Although a different way to put it is that they have a different view about what's effective.

The Army does the same sort of thing -- because it's allowed to have helicopters, but not fixed-wing ground-support aircraft, it has made a major, major investment in trying to build examples of the former to function as the latter. To mixed results, at best. There were good reasons for the Army to have cold feet about deploying the helicopters against a relatively advanced air-defense system in Albania, as illustrated by the problems they had when they tried that major helo operation in Iraq.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by bilmore
That, though, had far more of a logical basis than some of the other carpetbomb plans. One of the main impediments to reining the Japanese in was their belief in the infallibility of the Emperor, and the corrollary belief that their homeland could never be touched/breached/damaged. In that case, there was a well-grounded thought that the Japanese morale needed to be hurt with a measure of damage thay they considered impossible, and the Tokyo bombings actually accomplished that to some degree.

Not to defend the carnage - just to make the abstract point.

By the time Tokyo was firebombed, there had been an awful lot of damage in Japan. I'm not saying that it couldn't be rationalized at the time, but so can many war crimes. The idea that you can bomb another country into giving up is, as it turns out, pretty dubious, though we always like to pretend that it will happen. Spanky points to Serbia as an exception to my rule, which is fair, but doesn't take you very far.

[ltl/fb]

Originally posted by Spanky
I support welfare reform, but correlating a relationship between welfare reform and reduced abortions seems a stretch. I have never heard this argument before. Who did this study?

Uh, I think you mean, there may be a correlation, but correlation is not necessarily causation.

I say only because you don't normally fuck up the hard words with more than two or three syllables.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Mark Kleiman hits some of the things we were talking about here:

• Matt Yglesias is entirely right to prefer inheritance taxes to estate taxes. Conceptually, an inheritance tax puts the focus on the recipient of money he or she didn't earn, rather than on the decedent, who having faced one inevitability arguably shouldn't be faced with another. "Paris Hilton" or no, there's a strong, and perhaps politically potent, argument to be made that it's just plain wrong for people to be taxed on the money they earn but not on the money that's given to them. Practically, an inheritance tax has two big advantages: It encourages breaking up huge fortunes, thus reducing the problem of hereditary plutocracy, and it treats those who inherit as part of large families equitably compared to those who inherit equal amounts as part of small families. But Matt is wrong, it seems to me, to scoff at the small business/family farm issue. An economist may view ownership of an enterprise as merely a form of wealth like any other, but someone whose family has owned the local hardware store or newspaper for four generations may have an attachment to the business, and the people who work in it, that isn't at all the same thing as just being rich. That attachment may even have some social value. But Matt is even more wrong to argue about whether it's all right for the estate tax to orce the breakup of family businesses and farms, when in fact it does no such thing. As Stuart Levine explains, Section 6166 of the Internal Revenue Code allows estate taxes on closely-held businesses to be spread out over fourteen years at very generous rates of interest: currently under 3%, which is much lower than the rate on student loans, for example. So the "family business" question is a mere red herring, which a better-trained newshound than Matt would not have allowed to lead him away from the trail. The repeal of the estate tax, unless it's replaced by an inheritance tax, is a profoundly anti-democratic and anti-meritocratic move, taking us one step closer to reproducing the regime of inherited status against which the generation of 1776 fought and won a revolution. Being wealthy and important because of your ancestors is European; making it on your own is American...

(links in the original)

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
The fact that recruitment centers are still good targets show who is winning. Hint- if them, there would be so many people to kill lined up to sign up.

What does it mean when Iraqi generals are assassinated in their own homes? That must be another sign that we're winning, but I can't remember why just now.

More good news in that article: "Insurgents try to assassinate the leaders of Iraq's fledgling military and the police almost daily, and many officers have been killed."

[Sidd Finch]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
When you think about what he was doing, you can understand why. When they firebombed Tokyo, there really wasn't a pretense that they were going after military or industrial targets.

No, they were trying to break the will of the populace. Japan was an enemy unlike any previously seen by the western powers. On some of the island battles, there were literally no Japanese prisoners taken -- the population was apparently willing to fight to the death, despite overwhelming odds and certain death. We firebombed Tokyo, and then A-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because we were looking for options besides an invasion of the home islands -- which surely would have cost far more lives, American and Japanese, then all of the bombings put together.

[Sidd Finch]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
By the time Tokyo was firebombed, there had been an awful lot of damage in Japan. I'm not saying that it couldn't be rationalized at the time, but so can many war crimes. The idea that you can bomb another country into giving up is, as it turns out, pretty dubious, though we always like to pretend that it will happen. Spanky points to Serbia as an exception to my rule, which is fair, but doesn't take you very far.

Okay, so you're the armchair general, with the added benefit of fifty years of hindsight. What would you have done? How would you have avoided the kind of carnage we saw in the island battles? Can you imagine how bad that carnage would have been on the home islands?

[Sidd Finch]

Originally posted by ltl/fb
Uh, I think you mean, there may be a correlation, but correlation is not necessarily causation.

I say only because you don't normally fuck up the hard words with more than two or three syllables.

No, you mean there may be a coincidence, but a coincidence does not mean a correlation.

Turns out, however, that there isn't even a coincidence. As I've pointed out, abortion rates were falling for six years before the welfare reform act was passed, and may have been rising in more recent years -- the years in which the harsher aspects of welfare reform (i.e. the five-year limits) actually began to take effect.

[Sidd Finch]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
What does it mean when Iraqi generals are assassinated in their own homes? That must be another sign that we're winning, but I can't remember why just now.

More good news in that article: "Insurgents try to assassinate the leaders of Iraq's fledgling military and the police almost daily, and many officers have been killed."

See? If we weren't winning, they would be succeeding on a daily basis, not just trying.

[ltl/fb]

Originally posted by Sidd Finch
No, you mean there may be a coincidence, but a coincidence does not mean a correlation.

Turns out, however, that there isn't even a coincidence. As I've pointed out, abortion rates were falling for six years before the welfare reform act was passed, and may have been rising in more recent years -- the years in which the harsher aspects of welfare reform (i.e. the five-year limits) actually began to take effect.

No, I meant correlation is not causation. Truly. And I think you are using "coincidence" as the same thing as correlation. Where there's correlation between two or more things, there may or may not be a relationship. Coincidence implies (generally; I'm not sure if you are using it in the "coincidence? I think not" sense or the "the co-incidence [pronounced, I think, with the emphasis on the first, not the second syllable] between blah and blah" sense) that there is not a relationship. Causation means that there is definitely a relationship.

Anyway, I don't think one can "correlate a relationship" in any event.

Wow, is chatting with you fun. We should do this more often.

ETA check out definition of coincidence -- http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionar...va=coincidence

God I hate face time.

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by Replaced_Texan
Hyde will be gone, and I don't know anything about West Virginia politics, but I imagine the seat will be hard for the Ds to keep.

Was this a run-on sentence? In any event, Hyde is a GOP Congressman (House) from Illinois.

S_A_M

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Sidd Finch
No, they were trying to break the will of the populace.

So you have no problem with torture, I take it.

My original point about the effectiveness of strategic bombing -- and Dyson's -- is that notwithstanding the conviction of its proponents, strategic bombing does not "break the will of the populace." You are right that, as a subjective matter, that is what the USAF thought it was doing over Japan, just as the RAF and USAF thought they were breaking Germany's will, and the Luftwaffe thought it was breaking England's will during the Blitz. But they weren't.

Japan was an enemy unlike any previously seen by the western powers. On some of the island battles, there were literally no Japanese prisoners taken -- the population was apparently willing to fight to the death, despite overwhelming odds and certain death. We firebombed Tokyo, and then A-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because we were looking for options besides an invasion of the home islands -- which surely would have cost far more lives, American and Japanese, then all of the bombings put together.

As a historic matter, your characterization of the decision to use the atomic bomb is basically accurate, but your grouping of the firebombing of Tokyo is not so right. When we firebombed Tokyo, the invasion of the home islands was not imminent. The rationale was, in part, that light industry was dispersed in wood-frame buildings throughout Tokyo -- suggesting why Curtis LeMay was thinking about prosecution. Killing civilians for the sake of killing civilians sounds like a war crime.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Sidd Finch
Okay, so you're the armchair general, with the added benefit of fifty years of hindsight. What would you have done? How would you have avoided the kind of carnage we saw in the island battles? Can you imagine how bad that carnage would have been on the home islands?

I'm not talking about the use of atomic bomb, which is where you seem to be going. When the Japanese saw what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they surrendered, although some elements of the military wanted to keep fighting. I wager this would happen if you dropped nuclear weapons on just about any country.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by ltl/fb
Uh, I think you mean, there may be a correlation, but correlation is not necessarily causation.

I say only because you don't normally fuck up the hard words with more than two or three syllables.

I knew it sounded funney when I wrote it. I just looked up correlation in the American Heritage Dictionary, and of course, to cover their ass, they said that Corellation could be "causal, complementary, parallel or reciprocal relationship". So that was no help. Clearly there is a differencre between causal and correllary. So if there was no causation but a correlation what would that mean? Could they have a correlation but not be connected in any way?