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[EnigmaticHat]

It gets more attention because its dramatic.  We brought out a huge weapon no one had ever seen before.

[Orange Wizard]

What I find funny is how the US is perfectly fine with bombing other people, but as soon as someone bombs (i.e. 11/9) them, it's all "this is the worst thing ever quickly we must invade various countries because terrorism".

[Lord Shonus]

What I find funny is how the US is perfectly fine with bombing other people, but as soon as someone bombs (i.e. 11/9) them, it's all "this is the worst thing ever quickly we must invade various countries because terrorism".

The US is "perfectly fine" with using military force against a real or percieved threat, but becomes extremely angry when someone murders a couple thousand US citizens for no real reason. The Afghanistan war was retaliatory (despite conspiracy theories, the US WAS attacked by a foreign entity, and the Taliban government of Afghanistan openly supported and harbored that power - about as  simple a casus belli as you can get), while the Iraq war was sold to the public on grounds that Iraq was a serious threat - as it became obvious that wasn't the case, support for the invasion plummeted. You don't see much support for bombing Tokyo because Japan is gaining too much cultural influence, or bombing Moscow because the Russian media tends to present "9/11 was an inside job" as proven fact.

[Morrigi]

What I find funny is how the US is perfectly fine with bombing other people, but as soon as someone bombs (i.e. 11/9) them, it's all "this is the worst thing ever quickly we must invade various countries because terrorism".

Well, we make at least a token attempt to attack military targets. The World Trade Center was not a military target.

Anyway, as stated above, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were indeed valid military targets.

Hiroshima had a military port, was home to the headquarters of Japan's Second Army Group which was responsible for the defense of all of southern Japan, and was also home to the headquarters of at least 3 other military formations including the 59th Army, a logistics base with a large stockpile of war materiel, and an assembly area with 40,000 troops stationed in the area. It was also undamaged by air raids, because it did not contain aircraft manufacturing infrastructure that was the primary target of conventional bombing raids.

Nagasaki contained one of the largest seaports in the region, as well as Mitsubishi Shipyards, Electrical Shipyards, Arms Plant, and Steel and Arms Works, employing nearly the entire population of the city. It was a gigantic industrial target, but also difficult to locate at night with RADAR due to the surrounding geography, making it untouched by firebombing.

While I do not approve of the bombing of civilians with any weapon, conventional or otherwise, it cannot be denied that the industrial and military infrastructure in these cities were valid targets of military action. It also cannot be denied that a conventional invasion would have cost far more lives, both Japanese and American.

I say this as an American with a Japanese-American grandmother and half-Japanese mother.

[Flying Dice]

What I find funny is how the US is perfectly fine with bombing other people, but as soon as someone bombs (i.e. 11/9) them, it's all "this is the worst thing ever quickly we must invade various countries because terrorism".

Well, we make at least a token attempt to attack military targets. The World Trade Center was not a military target.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA-oh wait you were serious.

Just about every major power on both sides of WWII went out of their way to attack civilian targets. It was, theoretically, supposed to shatter morale and end the war early. Turns out that bombing noncombatants in a total war has the general outcome of... killing lots of noncombatants. I mean, Jesu, look at what we and the Brits did to Dresden, and that was after the Germans had pretty much fucking collapsed. By the RoE that everyone was using then, the WTC was a perfectly valid target -- it's a major economic center and a symbol. Never mind the shit that the U.S. has pulled in so many of the "wars", police actions, backing of right-wing terrorist groups, &c. since then. There are two things that made it unacceptable: 1. It was committed outside of a state of war; i.e. it was a terrorist act and not a military action taken by a state, and 2. BLUH MURKA CAN'T BE ATTACKED.

Seriously, there's this fucking cultish mindset in the states about the sanctity of American territory. It's why people were so shocked and appalled by Pearl Harbor that Congress swung from partial isolationism to declaring war in such a short time. Apart from those two events, the last time there has been a notable foreign attack on American soil was when the British hit D.C. and burned the White House during the War of 1812.

Pre-emptive note because I know somebody will miss the point entirely. I'll use small words:
1. No. 9/11 was not good.
2. No. Attacking civilian targets is not good.
3. No. The general assholery of war is not good.

[Lord Shonus]

"Terror bombing" wasn't really a thing - the goal of strategic bombing was to reduce war production - the USAAF tried to precision (as much as that word meant anything with 1940s aiming methods) bomb factories while the RAF (who didn't want to keep ramming themselves into hardened defenses) used incendiaries to drive away the workforce. Meanwhile, in Japan the USAAF switched to the incendiary method because direct strikes on factories didn't work - Japanese production was too decentralized for taking out the factories to matter (most of the production was spread throughout the civilian population, with one or two parts made in any given house and assembled elsewhere), and the buildings weren't sturdy enough to set off the bombs - they tended to bury themselves harmlessly. Axis forces did some "terror bombing", but the main thrust of air attacks was still against production targets.

Dresden's a perfect example - the city was an essential transport nexus for the Eastern front, and destroying it was expected to paralyze German defenses against Soviet troops and dramatically shorten the war. Casualties were also far lower than commonly accepted - the city administrators reported 25,000 casualties, but Hitler inflated the figure tenfold for propaganda purposes, and post war critics doubled that in an attempt to demonize the Allies.

[Flying Dice]

...also not what I was saying.

Every side in that war with an airforce worth mentioning targeted civilians, and the two most commonly cited reasons were: to turn home-front opinion against the war (which failed), and to shatter industrial capacity and infrastructure, which for obvious reasons works better if you target both the factories, rail hubs, &c. and the workers that operate them rather than just the former. Unless you're trying to pretend that cities were being firebombed with no intention of doing harm to civilians.

tl;dr, apparently: Civilian targets -- including people, economic centers, infrastructure, industry, &c. are typically targeted alongside what might be traditionally thought of as military targets. Pretty much the only time this didn't hold universally was that brief period between the military habit of "sack the cities, rape and loot as you please" and industrial-era total war, when people pretended to be civilized by sending their lower-class boys and bravado-laden noble sons out to die away from other people. Targeting civilians isn't "terrorism" when it's a military action, but it's also sure as hell not all fine and dandy from any perspective other than victory-oriented pragmatism.

[Putnam]

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=food+with+most+calories

i get the feeling that their measurement for this is off

5 kg of fat in a 105 gram burrito???

[TempAcc]

Its a quantum burrito that draws its fat values from another universe :v

[Lord Shonus]

most commonly cited reasons were: to turn home-front opinion against the war (which failed),

The only statement from an Allied commander that comes anywhere close to stating this as an objective was an RAF general -commenting on Dresden- that the raid "was also probably pretty damaging to the remaining German morale", after he listed the three hundred military targets in the city. Germany conducted a few "terror raids" late in the Blitz to "prove" to the British that the RAF was beaten, but most of that air campaign was aimed at fighter factories and such.

Yes, civilians were targeted alongside traditional "military targets", because the nature of the war made a factory worker just as much -if not more- a military target as a rifleman. Notably, this stopped being doctrine as things changed after the war - declassified US and Soviet nuclear war plans have civilian centers dead last on the priority list.

[AlleeCat]

So, I'm doing my thing. Reading stuff. Seeing things. And then I run across this

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I think this person needs to ask their parents where babies come from.

Fun fact, my friend made her mom get a DNA test because she really could not believe she was her biological child.

[Avis-Mergulus]

the Russian media tends to present "9/11 was an inside job" as proven fact.

I don't wanna get into this discussion, but...really? The only thing where I saw that was a talk show somewhere, and I only became familiar with this conspiracy theory after I started frequenting English-speaking sites. I don't watch news a lot, but I thought it was sort of a fringe opinion here as well.

[ggamer]

the wtf thread just went from zero to debauchery real quick

real quick

real fuckin' quick

[Lord Shonus]

the Russian media tends to present "9/11 was an inside job" as proven fact.

I don't wanna get into this discussion, but...really? The only thing where I saw that was a talk show somewhere, and I only became familiar with this conspiracy theory after I started frequenting English-speaking sites. I don't watch news a lot, but I thought it was sort of a fringe opinion here as well.

I've seen a lot of books (back when I was working in a used book warehouse) that, while in Rusian, had pictures that quite clearly were the same sort of "proof" used by conspiracy theorists. At least three were textbooks with school stamps.

[TempAcc]

So, I'm doing my thing. Reading stuff. Seeing things. And then I run across this

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I think this person needs to ask their parents where babies come from.

Fun fact, my friend made her mom get a DNA test because she really could not believe she was her biological child.

Fun fact 2: its actualy possible that one's biological mother may have different DNA then her child due to chimerism. It is a rather rare phenomena though.