I wondered how long it would take, when I entered into arguments about Hiroshima, before the “It was a different time!” appeal to Patriotically Correct cultural relativism would come up. The answer is, less than 24 hours. http://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/1ju9fm/68_years_ago_today_815_am_local_time/cbj861z In other news, I have decided to stop protesting the repeated drone strikes on Yemeni civilians, because, hey, the most recent one happened before midnight U.S./Central Time, so it’s completely unfair to go around judging the Obama administration’s actions on Wednesday by the standards of today. http://radgeek.com/gt/2007/08/07/it_was/

Via Lester Spence. Caps added. “. . . While allowing claims against Mehserle to go to trial, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a ruling last week stressed the role of the lead officer at the scene, Anthony Pirone. Based on a plausible view of the evidence, the court said July 30, Pirone had NO LEGAL JUSTIFICATION for forcing Grant and a friend off of a train and onto the platform, where the fatal encounter occurred. . . . “. . . The events leading to Grant’s death began as Pirone responded to a report of a fight on the train just before it reached Oakland’s Fruitvale Station in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day. He approached a group of young black men on the platform and pulled his Taser on them. When three of the men started to walk away, he ordered them to sit down, the court said. “Two others in the group, Grant and his friend Michael Greer, re-entered the train, but Grant, who had been involved in the fight, got out when Pirone shined his Taser beam on him. The officer then pulled Greer from the train, yanking him by the hair and knocking him down when Greer spun to face him, the court said. Pirone later slugged Grant in the head, saying he had seen Grant place a hand on the officer’s partner, Marysol Domenici. At that point, Pirone ordered Mehserle to arrest Grant and another man. Mehserle then pulled Grant down, and Pirone and Mehserle pinned him to the platform, facedown. . . . “. . . ‘Pirone encountered a group of black men who were doing nothing but talking when he arrived at the Fruitvale Station, were not committing any crimes, and posed no apparent threat that would justify his pulling a weapon and holding them,’ Murguia said.”

“. . . [T]his particular failing is merely symptomatic of a larger problem in the libertarian movement generally. One might call the problem knee-jerk anti-leftism, or in other words, automatically responding negatively to certain issues (at least when those issues aren’t obvious applications of libertarian principle, like drug legalisation) merely because those issues have typically been the concern of the left. “The knee-jerk anti-leftist infection – libertarians’ costly inheritance from their long alliance with conservatives against the genuine menace of state socialism – takes different forms in different sectors of the libertarian movement: softness on corporatism here, softness on militarism there, softness on white-male-hetero chauvinism somewhere else (with each such sector quick to denounce the flavour of deviation embraced by some other sector, but far less swift to recognise its own). A crucial aim of left-libertarianism, as I see it, is to help libertarianism recover its pre-conservative roots. . . .” ~ Roderick Tracy Long, “Left Behind” http://praxeology.net/unblog12-05.htm#11

Suppose that you have, somehow, conclusively proven that there is no way to have a modern war without massacreing innocent people. (*) That gives you an incompatibility claim between moralism and militarism — if, say, you go around categorically condemning tactics (like the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, say, or the firebombing of Tokyo) for killing innocent people, then you’d end up having to condemn any modern war at all as immoral. Many people seem to use this argument as if it were an obvious reductio ad absurdum of moralism about military tactics. (“Oh, well, if it’s always immoral to bomb cities you can’t have any wars. That’s why it must not always be immoral to bomb cities.”) I honestly don’t know why so few people who give this argument ever even seem to have considered the possibility that their conversation partner might take it as an obvious reductio ad absurdum of militarism. (“Oh, well, if it’s always immoral to kill innocent people, you can’t bomb cities, and if you can’t bomb cities, you can’t have any wars. And that’s precisely why you shouldn’t have any wars.”) (* Actually, I think this has been more or less conclusively proven. And that’s precisely why you shouldn’t have any wars.)

Do you suppose that if I wrote about the Operation Meetinghouse raids or the March-August firebombing campaign against Japan, then A-bomb apologists would stop trotting these out every time I said something about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as if pointing to these other, equally horrible atrocities by the U.S. government somehow undermined what I had to say about the atomic bombings? Ha, ha, just kidding, I already wrote plenty of things about the March-August firebombing campaign (for example, here: http://radgeek.com/gt/2005/08/09/a_day/), and it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference, because most A-bomb apologists would rather recite the script of the argument they had with the clueless liberal they have in their head rather than address the issue on its own terms.

Contra-sequitur watch: replying to a post in which I factually described the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as “the deadliest act of terrorism in the history of the world,” a commenter at /r/history tells me [emphasis added]: “that’s some very heavy handed hyperbole they’re using there. THE BOMB WAS MEANT TO SHOCK, TO HORRIFY, to silence even the most gung-ho Japanese nationalists who were on a ‘death or glory’ mission, even though the country was manifestly beaten. It was emphatically not terrorism.” Seriously in what possible universe would the premise there actually lend support to the conclusion, instead of lending support to exactly the opposite claim? http://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/1ju9fm/68_years_ago_today_815_am_local_time/cbiooqa

Every year around this time I am reminded that the war-hawks among the Objectivists are perhaps literally the worst, most psychotic war-mongers in the entire world. In practice, the basic role of pro-war Objectivists within the American libertarian milieu is, at this point, nothing at all but a cult of maximal state power, imperial violence, and rampaging national collectivism. I’d call them the shame of the libertarian movement, if it were possible for anybody to confuse their psychotic national-greatness warmongering and routine invocations of collective guilt with anything that even came from the same universe as a principle of personal liberty or rational individualism.

APAB.

Sixty eight years ago today. http://radgeek.com/gt/2013/08/06/815am-4/ “It is worth remembering that the atomic bombing of the Hiroshima city center — the first ever use of atomic weapons against human targets — a bombing in which the United States government’s forces deliberately targeted a civilian center — a bombing that the United States government carried out with the explicit intention of obliterating an entire city in seconds, in order to “break enemy morale” — an attack in which that government’s forces turned weapons on civilians that destroyed 90% of an industrial metropolis, and killed over half of all the people living in it — remains the deadliest act of terrorism in the history of the world.”

Help out Auburn antiwar activist / CopBlocker / ALLy Daniel Patrick: “I’m still trying to reach my fundraising goal. Please consider helping me out. I could really use some right about now.”