The Virginia Society for the Preservation and Appreciation of High-Quality Posts

[Big Abraham]

It's a false dichotomy.

That's not how they saw it. 

Who is they? The scientists who developed the bombs? They were certainly not ok with it. The military? Not hugely - both Eisenhower, Nimitz and LeMay considered the Japanese effectively defeated already (and LeMay was not a man who was dovish in that regards). It's honestly shocking how many people - to this day - will naively repeat the Truman admin's justifications and their mysterious numbers as gospel.

The Japanese were a defeated power by 1945. Their military was dismembered, they had no raw resources and their cabinet was clearly trying to find ways to raise white flags without losing face. If I'm honest, a lot of the discourse relies on this weird racial trope that the Japanese are a naturally fanatical people (and if this notion that the Japanese would have all gone willingly to their deaths for the sake of Nippon is true, then why would the bombs even matter to begin with? It makes no sense).

The real reason the bombs were dropped had less to do with Japan, and more with what Truman (correctly) sensed would occur after WW2: a protracted showdown between the superpowers, and ensuring that the US could dictate terms of surrender. Why did the government explicitly rule out targeting a military base or giving a warning first (both actions which could have "demonstrated power" without leading to as many civilian deaths)? It was a show of strength - the US wanted to say that it had no qualms against using them in the future.

[Big Abraham]

I'm trying to word this in a way that doesn't make me come across as a problematic Gentile, but I think the Israeli Right is playing a dangerous game in that it constantly seems to attack the diaspora as lily-livered (or even self-hating) even though most of the diaspoara are Zionists with affinity for the idea of the Israeli state. Israel as a state isn't supposed to be just "a country with lots of Jews in it" but act as a sort of representative of all Jewish people. I feel like a lot of Jews - not just the likes of Gerald Kaufmans or even Jewdas-  are genuinely uncomfortable with Netanyahu becoming synonymous with their identity, especially as in certain countries the issue has become incredibly partisan.

What I am trying to say is that, for Israel to just not care about the diaspora would be an abdication of a lot of soft power. I would wager that most American Jews, if forced to chose between their affinity with the Democratic Party and a distant nation that implies they're a bunch of effette self-haters will probably go with the former tbh.

[Big Abraham]

Still other material is misleading. The project criticizes Abraham Lincoln’s views on racial equality but ignores his conviction that the Declaration of Independence proclaimed universal equality, for blacks as well as whites, a view he upheld repeatedly against powerful white supremacists who opposed him. The project also ignores Lincoln’s agreement with Frederick Douglass that the Constitution was, in Douglass’s words, “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” Instead, the project asserts that the United States was founded on racial slavery, an argument rejected by a majority of abolitionists and proclaimed by champions of slavery like John C. Calhoun.

This is why I call this a left-wing Lost Cause and people need to understand that the core problem at the root of the Lost Cause is the methods, the methods that lead to the distortion not the distortion itself. That is why people take umbrage when I make this comparison "how dare you compare us to those racists, we aren't white supremacists" and yet it is the methods that are dangerous and the methods that are the same.


We have a two front war on the founding, by right wing extremists seeking to drag the founders down with them in an attempt to gain legitimacy and by left-wing extremists seeking to knock them down from above in the name of false conceptualizations of political correctness and flawed historical narratives created on that basis.

Calhoun, Davis and Taney are wrong and they were wrong then and the contention by Lincoln and the Republicans was that they were wrong at the time. The view of the former group was the product of slavery's growth post cotton gin and the evolutionary effect this had the political dynamics as a result. A process I have long described in these discussions. This doesn't give them legitimacy to define the founding, it should illustrate that they are politicians contemporary to their time and corrupted by the politics and economic interests into warping and distorting the founding.