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.”

Progressive President (cont’d).

Via Anthony Gregory and Keith Taylor Of course the NSA’s spying has been used to prosecute U.S.-American drug cases. Every single fascist National Security monitoring program, surveillance policy, financial regulation and executive power that has been created over the last 20 years in the name of “counter-terrorism,” including large sections of Clinton’s AEDPA and Bush Jr.’s PATRIOT Act, has repeatedly been utilized by the DEA to gather evidence and coerce testimony in drug cases. Every single National Security state program, regardless of its alleged purpose, has been used to double down on the federal government’s insane and destructive prosecution of a “War on Drugs.” This one is no different. Even if there were such a thing as a limited National Security state– a way to create a counter-terrorism-only police state, which would focus on a single threat without creating a general, all-powerful police state in the process– it would still mean shredding civil liberties, targeting people and activities which ought to be presumed innocent, and it would still be destructive and wrong. But, in any case, there is no such thing. There is no way to focus a police state on only one group of people or one part of life; there are no partial or limited police states. There is only a police state– one which will come for you sooner, or later.

t/w Eldritch horror, ultradimensional realm of nameless terror

Lease, ended. All worldly possessions, moved across town.