Patting the wrists, rolling the eyes.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Sidd Finch
If you really think this of me, you are a complete idiot.

I know you don't, and was inviting you to draw a distinction.

[Say_hello_for_me]

Originally posted by Replaced_Texan
Reason 876 that I hate Republicans. (spree: Austin American Statesman)

Because the scourge of gay foster parents keeps us all up at night.

"It's a learned behavior, and I think a child . . . ought to have the opportunity to be presented to a traditional family as such," Talton said. "And if they choose to be homosexual or lesbian, then that's their choice when they turn 18."

Grrr.

I need to stop paying attention to what my state legislature does.

Dear RT, I'm not positive, but I thought you recently were posting "Reasons" that numbered in the thousands as to why you hate Republicans. It seemed that you were being consumed in hatred. As you can imagine, this wounded me deeply. So I was absolutely delighted to note that you are now down to only 876 reasons, and not more than a week or so after I first started to pray for you!

I have prayed for your soul, confessed your sins by proxy, and forgiven you for each one that might have caused harm to others. I am delighted and thrilled that your reasons for hatred have been so drastically reduced, and can only attribute your change of heart to the power of prayer and forgiveness.

May the good Lord bless you and keep you!

[Sexual Harassment Panda]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
Wasn't that the basic argument that kept Clinton from being impeached?

Obviously not very successful.

[sgtclub]

Anybody catch the latest? Arnold now blaming his faulty English on the "closing the border" comments he made.

[sgtclub]

• Former solicitor general Theodore Olson writes in the WALL STREET JOURNAL on Thursday: "A prominent member of the Senate leadership recently described a Supreme Court justice as 'a disgrace.' An equally prominent member of the leadership of the House of Representatives on the other side of the political aisle has characterized another justice's approach to adjudication as 'incredibly outrageous.'
  
  These excoriations follow other examples of personalized attacks on members of the judiciary by senior political figures. So it is time to take a deep breath, step back, and inject a little perspective into the recent heated rhetoric about judges and the courts. We might start by getting a firm grip on the reality that our independent judiciary is the most respected branch of our government, and the envy of the world. ... We expect dignity, wisdom, decency, civility, integrity and restraint from our judges. It is time to exercise those same characteristics in our dealings with, and commentary on, those same judges -- from their appointment and confirmation, to their decision-making once they take office."

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Sexual Harassment Panda
Obviously not very successful.

Dude, i went to one of the 40 top 20 schools. I know he was impeached, but it's shorthand.

[Hank Chinaski]

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,...559253,00.html

• France Backs China on Taiwan
  
  
  During a state visit to China, French Premier Raffarin threw support behind a law allowing China to attack Taiwan and continued to push for a lift of the EU arms embargo.
  
  "The anti-secession law is completely compatible with the position of France," he said in a joint press conference with his Chinese counterpart Wen Jiabao.
  

how can we be part of an organization where we promise to protect these weasals? They can make money from China- so they'll give up Taiwan? anyone have doubts about France's motives on Iraq?

I just can't believe this. Anyone who reads blogs have an explaination that makes this more than kissing up to China for $$$?

[Sidd Finch]

Originally posted by bilmore
In other news, judges are even saying that maybe Hank's interpretation of Delay was right:

"As a judge I have to be very careful about going outside the "four corners" of the record before me in deciding a case. Clearly, some internet research is appropriate--Lexis-Nexis. But, if I tried to resolve a factual dispute in the record by doing my own research I believe I would overstepped the bounds of my ethics. That is the parties jobs and they have burdens of proof to meet. The judge is the finder of fact and is not supposed to be the developer of fact.

Especially appellant judges, who are to review the record before them as developed at the lower level. These judges are not supposed to be supplementing or developing the facts. A judges role is similar to that of a jury--to review the facts presented. It is improper for a juror to do research on factual issues and it might also be for a judge. Thus, a blanket condemnation of Mr. Delay's comments is not necessarily appropriate."

(From The Corner.)

"A blanket condemnation ... is not necessarily appropriate." Wow, that's a resounding endorsement.

Seriously, that quote isn't from DeLay, and I haven't seen anything to suggest that DeLay was really attacking Kennedy for doing factual research outside the record. And I haven't seen Kennedy say that he did factual research on the Internet, rather than legal research. If you have a basis to say that was the issue on which DeLay was commenting (other than an after-the-fact explanation by DeLay), I'd like to hear it (seriously).

[Sidd Finch]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I know you don't, and was inviting you to draw a distinction.

Pretty simple. I see no evidence that torture would have caused the Japanese to surrender. In contrast, I see plenty of evidence that the mass killing of civilians would have caused, and in fact did cause, the Japanese to surrender (and, thus, avoid the far more massive killing of civilians that would have resulted from an invasion).

My objections to torture are only partly moral. I have seen plenty of evidence that it is not effective, that it leads to false confessions and unreliable information because prisoners will tell their torturers whatever they want to hear. I also believe that torture, even if theoretically aimed at getting information, more often becomes simple sadism. If torture were reliable and effective, I could accept its use as a last resort -- but the circumstances in which that would be so, even given effectiveness (which is far from given), would be extraordinarily rare -- as rare as the circumstances in which I believe bombing of civilian populations is justified.

You yourself acknowledged a distinction for atomic bombing. I think you were being sarcastic, but you should be careful -- if your point, ultimately, is that bombing civilian populations isn't effective unless you do it in a really massive way -- atomic bombs, fuel-air bombs, or the like -- I don' think you are on the moral high ground you seem so desparate to claim.

And I don't think your moral ground is all that high. I've asked you to propose an alternative strategy that would have accomplished the defeat of Japan and you can't come up with one. The blood that would have been spilled in an invasoin far outweighs anything caused by bombing -- leaving aside the issue of whether the aggressor's blood is as important a consideratoin.

Originally posted by Sidd Finch
The blood that would have been spilled in an invasoin far outweighs anything caused by bombing -- leaving aside the issue of whether the aggressor's blood is as important a consideratoin.

I would speculate that the blood that would have been spilled in an invasion would have been largely the blood of active combatants on both sides, rather than the Japanese civilian population in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I think that is a point where one can draw a moral distinction.

As a matter of strategy there was no question that the bomb should have been dropped, because there was no question that our losses would have been horrendous.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Sidd Finch
Pretty simple. I see no evidence that torture would have caused the Japanese to surrender. In contrast, I see plenty of evidence that the mass killing of civilians would have caused, and in fact did cause, the Japanese to surrender (and, thus, avoid the far more massive killing of civilians that would have resulted from an invasion).

My objections to torture are only partly moral. I have seen plenty of evidence that it is not effective, that it leads to false confessions and unreliable information because prisoners will tell their torturers whatever they want to hear. I also believe that torture, even if theoretically aimed at getting information, more often becomes simple sadism. If torture were reliable and effective, I could accept its use as a last resort -- but the circumstances in which that would be so, even given effectiveness (which is far from given), would be extraordinarily rare -- as rare as the circumstances in which I believe bombing of civilian populations is justified.

You yourself acknowledged a distinction for atomic bombing. I think you were being sarcastic, but you should be careful -- if your point, ultimately, is that bombing civilian populations isn't effective unless you do it in a really massive way -- atomic bombs, fuel-air bombs, or the like -- I don' think you are on the moral high ground you seem so desparate to claim.

And I don't think your moral ground is all that high. I've asked you to propose an alternative strategy that would have accomplished the defeat of Japan and you can't come up with one. The blood that would have been spilled in an invasoin far outweighs anything caused by bombing -- leaving aside the issue of whether the aggressor's blood is as important a consideratoin.

No sarcasm. It's not clear at all that the strategic bombing of Germany and Japan -- setting aside, for the moment, the use of the atom bomb -- hastened the end of the war. That is exactly the point of the passage by Freeman Dyson that I posted the other day. For all the damage that strategic bombing does, the damage to key facilities was repaired quickly. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed. I can't tell whether you think Dyson was wrong, or whether you are simply grouping Hiroshima and Nagasaki with what came before.

Certainly, people involved in the bombing believed that they were hastening the end of the war. But that's the point. Their belief was wrong. You can attribute this to bureaucratic self-interest -- the USAF has always taken a rosier view of the effects of strategic bombing than have the other branches of the armed forces -- or you might think that it's just a human tendency to want to find some good in something unpleasant.

I think the use of the atom bomb is a hard question -- again, no sarcasm. One reason is that it was a new and different kind of weapon, and that the only way for the world to understand what we now had was to use it. The option of inviting observers to Alamagordo was considered and rejected, for reasons I haven't read enough about or don't recall. Another reason is that by August, 1945, we were on the brink of invading the main islands. We had taken Iwo Jima and Okinawa. So the a-bombs were used at a tipping point, perhaps.

edited for clarity

[bilmore]

Originally posted by Sidd Finch
If you have a basis to say that was the issue on which DeLay was commenting (other than an after-the-fact explanation by DeLay), I'd like to hear it (seriously).

I don't. His comment struck me immediately as being incredibly stupid - my only point is, as is usually the case when I look at something and think "wow, that's incredibly stupid", there's usually something I'm not being shown, or some context missing. Maybe that's the case here. Or, maybe Delay just said something incredibly stupid. With what I've been shown so far, I don't have the info to decide which is right.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by ironweed
I would speculate that the blood that would have been spilled in an invasion would have been largely the blood of active combatants on both sides, rather than the Japanese civilian population in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I think that is a point where one can draw a moral distinction.

As a matter of strategy there was no question that the bomb should have been dropped, because there was no question that our losses would have been horrendous.

Just a clarification point, your use of "our" in the last sentence is probably a poor choice. "Our" generally implies a commonality. The troop ships that were steaming young men to the Japanese coast carried very few anti-American, Sniveling coward, "look to France for justification of what god's favorite country should do" thinking bents. Said another way, they weren't playing pick up soccer matches on deck, okay? maybe go edit?

[bilmore]

Originally posted by Sidd Finch
Pretty simple. I see no evidence that torture would have caused the Japanese to surrender.

What if torture would have revealed the location of the small red button the pressing of which would instantly cause the Japanese to quit the war?

Or (more realistically) revealed the location of the leader of the entire Japanese war effort, whose capture would lead to a quick surrender by the Japanese?

I would allow torture for that. I think that is a more correct analogy here.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by bilmore
What if torture would have revealed the location of the small red button the pressing of which would instantly cause the Japanese to quit the war?

Or (more realistically) revealed the location of the leader of the entire Japanese war effort, whose capture would lead to a quick surrender by the Japanese?

I would allow torture for that. I think that is a more correct analogy here.

That is never the correct analogy, because ex ante you're never going to have that kind of certainty about what torture will get you.