Let's be perfectly clear: The US was destroying large Japanese cities and their occupants at the same scale as Hiroshima and Nagasaki for some time, just with less efficiency, and much of the Japanese populace was prepared to fight to the death with shovels and sticks.
I'm not saying that the atomic bombs were a good thing; I'm just pointing out that they weren't particularly worse than what the US was already doing, and prepared to continue doing. And that in the moment, a display of such offensive power could be argued to be a quicker way to end the war, and prevent having to do a ground invasion of the home islands. With today's hindsight, we can definitely see clearly the other local and global repercussions of nuclear weapons, which makes the US having used them carry many different connotations.
But that's likely not even the whole reason nuclear bombs were used in 1945. The USSR were only grudingly allied with the US, because they needed help early on in the European theater. Well before the bombs were dropped, the Soviets had ramped up their military strength and were running roughshod over eastern Europe. Germany had already surrendered, and USSR looked towards the east, taking over Manchuria and Korea, with the Korean peninsula split at the 38th parallel at Potsdam, before the Korean War.
The US wanted to use the bomb as a deterrent to the Soviets, and using atomic bombs in Japan in 1945 accomplished that goal, as well as reducing the expense and risk to US military forces already at war, without increasing the effects on the ground very much. Japan's surrender had plenty to do with making the decision on who to surrender to, with the preference being the US and not the USSR. But Japan did not want to surrender unconditionally, they wanted to ensure that the Imperial government could do so while saving face, and probably while not also being imprisoned or killed. It's likely that Japan would have surrendered with or without any atomic bombs, certainly without the second one.
But the US needed to demonstrate to the world, particularly to Stalin, that they could build as many atomic bombs as they wanted, and that came from dropping a second one in quick succession after the first.
I’m torn on this, on one hand it completely makes sense and will definitely help those from a lower income. On the other hand, California has a huge problem with petty theft and this doesn’t apply to all forms of assault which means more criminals will just be released. The bail system is B.S. but California should be doing more than just this. Maybe someone with more background knowledge on California can help educate me as to why this will be a net positive.
If we believe in the death penalty, then we believe that the state has a right to end someone's life because they unjustly took someone else's.
So if a person was executed and was found posthumously to actually have been innocent, then would we be justified in executing, say, the DA who prosecuted the crime?
Yeah we totally would, and if the original murderer was found to not be innocent we would have to kill the person who killed the person who killed the murderer…
And perhaps at that point, enough people might realize that giving the state the right to execute people is extremely fraught and finally decide it's not worth it.
But it seems like maybe the bloodlust is too strong.
Do we ever give the death penalty to someone who kills someone by accident or in an unfortunate situation?
You analogy might be relevant if the DA knew the person was innocent and intentionally framed them and/or continued to prosecute. But it’s not remotely the same to have done so and been mistaken.
Do we ever give the death penalty to someone who kills someone by accident or in an unfortunate situation?
No, but we sometimes give the death penalty to... people who didn't do anything wrong? And maybe, just maybe, it's too easy, too consequence-free, for the state to take someone's life, if it just happens by accident sometimes.
The difference is that we don’t give the death penalty to somebody who accidentally does something wrong. And we especially don’t do that in such a deliberate drawn out process.
Yes, and I would argue that it's crueler to put an innocent person through that drawn out process than it is someone whose mistake or carelessness actually caused an innocent life to be lost.
It is a mistake worth dying over? Maybe not, but as long as there is no consequence to getting it wrong, there is literally zero incentive for public officials to get it right, especially those wanting to prove themselves "tough on crime"
I’m not sure why you act as if all innocent people are completely innocent. It could be that they made mistakes and we’re careless and that was a part of what led them to being falsely convicted.
Literally zero incentive is an extremely high bar and certainly incorrect.
I understand wanting to ensure there’s a better incentive than currently exists, but giving them the death penalty for false death penalties is just a roundabout way of stopping the death penalty. So you may as well just do that directly.
What I mean is that take a situation where someone was convicted of murder, but the reality is that was a false conviction and they were only guilty of manslaughter.
I shouldn’t have used the “innocent person” phrasing because that’s too low resolution for this discussion. You can’t always neatly put a person into innocent/guilty categories.
G’morning, Your title might not match the title of the article you linked! Could you please double check, and edit your post title if it indeed does not match? article title: “Constipation linked with cognitive decline, research finds” (Similairity: ~68%).
BLEEPERDY BLOOP this action was performed semi-automatically by a bot (:
I know this is a bot, but I did take the auto-suggested post title, and have confirmed that the post title matches the title display in the page content.
Not really. They don’t fear the bullshit that spews out of their mouths that they believe to be the truth. They genuinely believe what they think and do is right and true. They don’t fear the “truth”, they think they are the truth.
I would argue that the VAST majority of the people pushing these ideologies do not believe the things they profess to believe and that they are pushing their followers to subscribe to. It is rank tribalism with the only goal being money & power for themselves at the expense of anyone that they deem to be a threat. It really is a zero sum game.
There are the useful idiots that I would classify as the true believers, but their beliefs have often times been coopted either due to poor education or coercive indoctrination of assorted varieties (like religion for example).
This is the actual Republican platform. It’s absolutely about getting control, not about any particular ideology. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s why Republicans try their culture war junk, because WE care about ideologies, and it divides us. In the pursuit of the ‘right’ people telling the ‘wrong’ people what to do, and in the pursuit of keeping the ‘wrong’ people from telling the ‘right’ people what to do, anything goes. Hypocrisy, lies, crime, election fraud, subverting courts, coups, false patriotism, false piety, terrorism, even outright murder… anything goes.
Know the enemy, spread the word to your friends and family (and maybe further).
They fear not being in control. Whether it’s control over others bodies or control over religion and government, or the fear of being a minority racial group, the one thing in common is they have to be the ones allowed to tell everyone else how to live.
Did you read this? You comment makes me think you have. No one seems to be mentioning this despite how eminently reasonable it seems to be. Have you been sharing this link? I have been. I wish more people could read this.
My understanding of it (based on discussions with my mom) is that they don’t fear the truth, they fear being wrong, because if they are wrong they then don’t have an answer anymore and it is deeply uncomfortable.
The issue with this is that if you never acknowledge that you may be wrong, you can never learn.
They’ve been wrong for a very long time. They are still waiting for trickle down economic (reaganomics) to work. Its been decades and nothing close to trickle down has ever come to fruition.
Non-americans: trickle down is the idea that when we boost the profit of CEOs that money will “trickle down” to everyone else at the company. A laughable idea that has and will never work.
As the party of tax cuts for rich people, with 3 of the last 4 GOP presidents proudly cutting taxes for rich people, it has been interesting to watch the evolution of Trickle-down as the framing for these tax cuts.
Even when it was clear the money would only trickle down to yachts, the W tax cuts (biggest ever) were seen as helping main street by increasing investment. This is trickle down, without saying it.
By Trump’s tax cuts, he was just saying I cut taxes. He didn’t dance around phrases, he just said tax cuts for everyone and of course they weren’t, but with about 18 other lies that day, people can’t keep up.
The next GOP president will cut taxes for rich people. It is the only thing you can count on.
And by rich, we are talking yuge amounts of money, considering the GOP calls a family making $400k/year “middle class”. Middle class isn’t rich, we are talking about people who make a lot more than $400k/year.
The only people who benefit from voting red are the super rich who use their money to influence poor dumb dumbs into thinking that they too will be rich one day, despite only making under $100k/year.
This is the actual Republican platform. The only thing they want, is to have authority over everyone, and for no one to have authority over them. We are the ones who fear being wrong. Republicans, on the other hand, won’t lose a wink of sleep if lying gets them in power. In the pursuit of the ‘right’ people telling the ‘wrong’ people what to do, and in the pursuit of keeping the ‘wrong’ people from telling the ‘right’ people what to do, anything goes. Hypocrisy, lies, crime, election fraud, subverting courts, coups, false patriotism, false piety, terrorism, even outright murder… anything goes.
Know the enemy, spread the word to your friends and family (and maybe further).
something i recently learned is: you can change your opinion, this literally changed my life. if you feel your opinion is wrong, don’t stick to it. stick to facts and science.
Yes, that is the whole point of the scientific method: you can only prove that something is wrong. It’s can be uncomfortable to realise that all our foundations could be destroyed at any time, but it is the only logical position one can hold.
What boggles my mind more than that is that the homicide rate for St. Louis is 87.83 per 100.000 inhabitants… For comparison, the homicide rate for Osaka (highest im Japan) is 0.8…
Japan doesn’t have guns freely available for purchase from gun shops every couple miles do they? I live in St. Louis and drive past half a dozen gun stores and ranges on my way to work daily, I can stop in every single one of those every day and buy a gun and ammo if I so desired. 20 minutes and a couple hundred could see me easily capable of wiping groups of people off the earth, and the couple hundred dollars is easy to get because the gun stores are always conveniently placed near payday loan shops and pawn shops
I’ve read that Japan police often rule things a suicide if they don’t immediately think they know they can convict someone in order to keep their solve rate above 99%
Saying religion is cancer is not quite as provocative as burning a religions holy text on the statehouse…. But me saying religion is cancer is just me expressing my religious belief.
A satanist just existing is provocative to some Christian’s. But if we are going to have freedom of religion, I have to be free to say that your sky daddy is a toxic stain on humanity.
luckily no one is infringing on anyones right to be r/atheist’s bravest little warrior against christmas while complaining about doing something purely to provoke specific groups of people
I feel like the problem with bail is that you have to actually come up with the money. Can’t they get the same effect with just the promise of a fine?
So like you say… “Ok… You’re released pending trial, but if you skip out and run, you’re going to have a fine added that’s equal to $10,000 or 50% of your net wealth, whichever is cheaper”…
That’s all bail is really doing. Bail just forces people to come up with the money in advance and this creates an inequity. If it’s just a fine for if you don’t show up at trial or something, you no longer have that problem.
If they skip town, you can make the fine as big as you want, you’re still not going to be able to collect it. They’re already gone. That’s why bail is money up front.
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