"America is the only (important) country in the world!"

┻━┻ ︵ ヽ(`Д´）╯︵ ┻━┻

"*cough*RAPE OF NANKING AND KOREAN OCCUPATION*cough*"

I'm surprised you, as an American, care enough about those non-american victims to bring that up.

Forzare

I would hardly say that they deserved the bombs, but I do agree that it was the best option available at the time.

Gelzo

I just think it's silly to say that that post was a very worthwhile one considering how he's misrepresenting the facts. For instance, it's not like we dropped nukes just so we could send some payback for Pearl Harbor. It might not have been entirely justified, but vengeance/justice wasn't really the primary motivation behind it.

Chagen

"I'm surprised you, as an American, care enough about those non-american victims to bring that up."

I just did a whole English project on the Japanese Occupation of Korea.

And why does that matter?

We are all brothers and sisters under the nation of humanity.

An injustice against one of us is an injustsice against all of us.

Gelzo

That was so cheesy that I wish I disagreed with you.

IanExMachina

┻━┻ ︵ ヽ(`Д´）╯︵ ┻━┻

"We are all brothers and sisters under the nation of humanity."

That is the most chaotic and abusive family I have ever seen.

Hatter

Edmania, I'm not Jewish, a political dissident, an ethnic minority or gay, but I still feel awful for all the victims of the Holocaust. I may not be an intellectual, but I still sympathize with the victims of the Soviet purges. You don't have to be a member of a persecuted group to feel bad for them, and I object to the idea that, because Chagen and I are Americans, we somehow lack basic human emotions.

What the Japanese did during the second World War was horrific. Their military and scientists murdered millions of people simply because they believed that anyone who wasn't Japanese was subhuman. As many as thirty million Filipinos, Malaysians, Vietnamese, Burmese and others were systematically murdered, if they weren't experimented on or gang-raped. Their treatment of my countrymen during the war was similarly horrific; while there was a four percent mortality rate for prisoners of war under the National Socialist regime, 27.1% of non-Chinese prisoners of war in Japanese custody died from neglect, torture or experimentation.

That doesn't excuse the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the firebombings, or even the US' institutionalized racism at the time. But a relatively quick death from a nuclear firestorm is far better than being under the scalpel of Unit 731, or at the mercy of the Japanese military.

MoeDantes

In this case, no. In every other post Dantes has made, that would be true.

I whine? Really?

┻━┻ ︵ ヽ(`Д´）╯︵ ┻━┻

"I object to the idea that, because Chagen and I are Americans, we somehow lack basic human emotions."

Oh I didn't mean that, it's just that too many people mainly care about what happens to their own country so much over anyone else's, even if the damage to your own is far more minor.

Gelzo

I see no reason to care more about what happens to strangers in the U.S. any more than what happens to strangers in China unless it's indicative of some problem I have to deal with or am able to help solve.

MousaThe14

I whine? Really?

Yes, or generally annoying. Not in the worst way mind you, but really, some days I want to slap you.

glennmagusharvey

^ Mod voice: Watch it.

IanExMachina

Hollywood Crusade:

GLORIOUSLeader

Any video that starts out with sodomy is an automatic winner. 

IanExMachina

Ah yeah I forgot they did the BBC ident pisstake.

IN HONOUR OF ALL THE AMERICANS WHO DIED IN THE MIDDLE AGES

Marioguy128

"This is why I can't sympathize with Americans, or feel the least bit of
pity whenever an American has a bad turn. Frankly, Americans deserve
whatever shit they get."

Not all Americans are dipshits you know.

RedEyedAbyss

"Also, *cough*RAPE OF NANKING AND KOREAN OCCUPATION*cough*. Given the atrocities the Japanese comitted against other asians ( which was quite often worse than anything the nazi's did), they deserved those bombs.  "

*cough*Pinochet*cough*Batista*cough*Contras*cough*not even the tip of the iceburg.

Yeah, I know that wasn't your main argument, but the USA hardly has the moral high ground there.

┻━┻ ︵ ヽ(`Д´）╯︵ ┻━┻

Moral high ground is bullshit anyway.

glennmagusharvey

Things I've learned about the moral high ground:

No one has it.

Chagen

I never stated that America had the high ground. I simply stated that Japan had done some fucking up shit.

"That was so cheesy that I wish I disagreed with you."

It's just my opinion.

As I said on another forum:

I don't really think Nationalism leads to Xenophobia when done right.

I have a very odd view on Nations. A Nation is actually any group of people who share a characteristic. To me, people belong to many nations, and they should respect and be unified with one another. All those in one nation are equal. For example, people are the White Nation, the Black Nation, The Slavic Nation, the Asian Nation, and so forth, due to their race. This is one of many nations.

But, you might say, this can lead to those saying that their nation is better than others! Then we have Xenophobia and Discrimination!

However, this is not true. Because we all are in one nation--the nation of Humanity. We all are under this Nation. As such, we all are equal. As long as people share one nation, they are equal. Since we all share the Nation of Humanity, we all are equal. 

But this is simply my view. 

That explains my views rather well.

Gelzo

Yeah, it's kind of funny when an American says that Americans suck as if they weren't an American.

MoeDantes

Not seeing what about Mousa's post warrants a mod voice (I tried to post this a lot earlier, but things kept happening).

But anyway, to continue on:

You don't have to be a member of a persecuted group to feel bad for them, and I object to the idea that, because Chagen and I are Americans, we somehow lack basic human emotions.

But the thing is, you kinda do.

You can "feel bad for them," but you can never really understand what a sufferer is going through until you've gone through something very much like it. The mind has this way of working: anything it doesn't have an analogous experience to, it reduces and trivializes, turns into a bullet list. To anyone who has never been a victim of radiation poisoning, it's just a checkmark of symptoms with some emulated emotions attached.

It's like, think of a city-swiping nuclear blast. How many of you can actually fully grasp that? You can understand on some level that yeah, it sucks. But until you've seen a destroyed building or watched a person die in front of you, you can't really grasp it in any meaningful way because you have no similar experience to measure it against. You can't explain outer space to a fish, in other words.

Yeah, it's kind of funny when an American says that Americans suck as if they weren't an American.

Because being a member of a nation means you can't ever criticize it?

┻━┻ ︵ ヽ(`Д´）╯︵ ┻━┻

"you can never really understand what a sufferer is going through until you've gone through something very much like it."

I don't think this was covered under basic human emotions anyway.

MoeDantes

I assumed that part was a typo, because I never said Americans didn't have emotions.

What I did say, was that their view of reality is disproportionate due to how easily Americans have it compared to just about everyone else. There's an old joke that reflects this: its about a reporter going to Nigeria. A Nigerian man suffering from malnutrition tells her "I'd love to live in America." She asks why, and the man says "because in America, even the poor people watch television and worry about obesity."

BonSequitur

That's not really an American thing anymore, though. Eating heathily outpaces just plain eating in cost in any advanced economy; hell, it's the case around here that if I want to eat like a human being, I have to spend more, and it's only cultural inertia that keeps the urban poor from ballooning into giant proportions.

Chagen

Dantes: My dad said the Russians had a similar joke during the USSR days:

A commercial airs with propaganda prasing communism. To discredit Capitalism, the commercials shows the slums and run-down areas of the US, with poverty everywhere.

The russians watching it, however, say, "Look! They have TV, cars, food, and carpet! If I'm poor, I want to be poor in America!"

It was something like that.

Tnu1138

As far as America being the hero of WWII I have one thing to say. Internment Camps

Chagen

My dad argued that it wasn't the best idea, but that was a lot of Japanese spies and that sometimes bad shit happens in war. Which is disturbingly apologetic to me.

He said the real crime was not the internment, but the fact that the Japanese didn't get their property back at the end of the war.

Forzare

I don't think there were nearly enough Japanese spies I'n the country to justify the internment.