spauldo @ spauldo @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

It's a common idiom that indicates skeptical disagreement.

Instructional videos for things you only do occasionally. You can re-watch the video right before you perform whatever task you're trying to do.

"Don't bring me down... Bruce!" as heard by everyone ever.

(It's "gross," supposedly. Apparently Jeff Lynne sings "Bruce" sometimes in concert just to mess with his fans.)

From Wikipedia:

Springsteen has joked about confusion over the lyrics, claiming that it was not until Manfred Mann rewrote the song to be about a feminine hygiene product that it became popular.

Time to update Wikipedia's List of Sexually Active Popes.

If there was ever an article that deserved This list is incomplete, you can help by expanding it, it's this one.

A tankie saying a one party system is bad? The irony is strong with this one.

Ah yes, all that genocide the US supported in Japan. I must have missed that.

Yeah, I'm done here. You've moved on to a completely different subject and I'm tired of arguing with tankies for the evening.

Yeah, you'd think I'd know better by now.

You apparently do not understand the role of a government.

A government is responsible for itself and its people. It is not responsible for the well being of the world at large. It's not there to be nice. If it has principles (the US does), it is up to the citizens of that country to hold their government accountable to those principles.

US citizens generally approved of their government's actions after the war, so in that sense the government was acting properly.

I cannot emphasize this enough. The US government is not responsible for the rest of the world. How everyone else feels about what the US does only matters insofar as how it affects US interests. It was that way then, and it's that way now, and it's like that for every modern country on the planet.

The US does not need to (or want to) be subject to international law when it can act with near impunity. Law only works when it can be enforced. No other country is powerful enough to hold the US to account, so it would be against the US' interests to submit itself to it.

Don't like it? Tough. That's the way the real world is. One day the US will fall, but until that happens it will continue to consider its own interests above everyone else.

Call it imperialism, call it what you like - but it could be so, so much worse. Just ask Japan - the US could have annexed the entire country and enslaved everyone. Instead, they denazified it and helped them rebuild. Oh, what horrible villains!

(edit: autocorrect keeps "correcting" the possessive form of "it.")

So, pray tell, what would you have done in the US' position?

Did he say that because the answer to IF it worked was no?

"Stay together for the kids, we can make them as miserable as we are together!"

I wasn't a guard, but I know about it because a friend of mine was. IIRC the guard just stepped inside the shack and called in to report it. He was more confused than anything.

Or the one that closed in 1925 and is currently a coffee shop.

If you're in the US, replace it with a western red cedar post. It costs more but lasts much longer than standard SPF 4x4s. Let your kids replace the next one.

Or a 3" thick gauge steel pipe, if you're not concerned with looks. Your great grandkids can replace that.

You mean the attack the USA deliberately provoked by moving its naval assets to encircle and blockade Japan with the express goal of provoking an attack to create the necessary pretext to go to war? That Pearl Harbor?

Funny how almost all our battleships were in Hawaii, then. Not much of a blockade. Perhaps you mean that we stopped trading with them and they declared it an "act of war?"

In any event, the US didn't need an excuse to join the war. Germany was giving us plenty already.

How many other nations do you know of that were defeated in war that were prevented from having a standing military for nearly a century and instead was occupyied by the victor’s military forces and the Supreme Court of that country ruling in favor of the military interests of the dominator?

Germany wasn't allowed a standing military, either. They managed to convince the allies that they could contribute to NATO, and were allowed to do so again.

Japan is forbidden to have a military by their own constitution. Certain parties have tried to have it amended to allow a more active military (the SDF is almost purely self-defense), but so far the political will hasn't been there for it.

The "ruling in the interests of the dominator" bit is your words. I wonder if the Supreme Court of Japan would agree with your description of their decision. I somehow doubt it.

links I'm not going to read

Yeah, the trade balance with Japan was heavily skewed on Japan's side. The US and Japan worked out a rebalance of the system. What, exactly, is so evil about that?

We don’t need to only critique the USA for atrocities. It’s important to see the world for how it works. Japan’s occupation of Okinawa is still terrible and this action to put a US military base is a good example as to why. If Okinawa was fully assimilated into Japan, it wouldn’t be the dumping ground for USA military bases enforced by the Japanese Supreme Court. Likewise despite people thinking Hawaii is an assimilated part of the USA, it wouldn’t be the tragedy that it is.

Tell me you've never been to Okinawa without telling me you've never been to Okinawa. It's not some hick island full of yokels. It's a modern, fully-integrated Japanese prefecture. A bit more laid back than the mainland, but that's to be expected.

The bases there were built before the US decided to return Okinawa to Japan. The US has been slowly decommissioning bases and returning them to Japanese control ever since.

Did you even check what the supreme court was ruling? They're not building a new base. They're relocating MCAS Futenma, because it's smack dab in the middle of a city and can't do night operations without waking everyone up and filling the air with jet fuel fumes.

What is it with you tankies and Hawaii, anyway? Have you spent any real time there? I have. Saying it's not fully part of the United States is bizarre. It's a state. The only way it could become more a part of the United States is if you somehow towed the islands to California.

The largest minority group in Japan are the Ryukyuan people of Okinawa and Japan won’t even recognize them. Japan is a junior imperialist partner of the Western imperial block executing to advance the interests of the USA and, by proxy, the North Atlantic bourgeoisie.

They're Japanese citizens, with all the rights and responsibilities of every other Japanese citizen. You want to talk about disenfranchisement, talk about the Ainu. I'm sure you'll figure out some way to blame that on the US too.

"North Atlantic bourgeoisie" - that just cracks me up.

The idea that this should be above reproach because it’s not the worst thing the USA did is ridiculous. The idea that Japan deserved it is just bog standard liberal bloodthirst.

I never claimed anything was above reproach. I said it wasn't a good example of imperialism and that you should choose another example if you want to criticize the US.

Now tell me some unrelated nonsense (maybe bring up Hawaii again?) and that you're "not going to post anymore" because it's useless to talk to me (which it is - you're very clearly in the wrong on this one), so we can get this behind us.

They literally made them a protectorate after fighting a bloody four year war that Japan started. Then denied them the right to field a military so that they wouldn't start their shit up again.

What was the US supposed to do after Pearl Harbor? Shrug it off?

I find your claims of Japan being undermined by the US to be dubious at best. Japan has done very well since WWII. The US gave them their largest market (when many other Asian imports were blocked) and remains their second highest trading partner after China. They have the third largest economy in the world. That's not exactly a "vassal."

Looks, I get it, "US bad" no matter what. But out of all the examples of shitty things the US has done, picking Japan is just silly.

Pulseaudio was always buggy for me. I've only tried pipewire recently and so far I've had no issues.

The only downside is that (from having to do so much troubleshooting) I know more or less how to configure and tweak pulseaudio. If I ever decide to do weird sound things with pipewire, I'm starting from scratch.

A few points you missed.

Yes, the Rykuyu islands were a sovereign country... In the 16th century. It's been run by Japan - save for a brief period between 1945 and 1978 - ever since. There's a small and insignificant independence movement that pretty much everyone ignores. I remember them throwing bread rolls at our gate guards.

The US didn't nuke Okinawa. I don't think it was intentional, but your wording implied that it did.

Okinawans are split over the military issue. Some people want the US out. Others make tons of money off the Americans being there. It's not a clear cut situation as you seem to imply.

The US is responsible for Japan's defense ever since the end of WWII, just like it was for west Germany. Given that Japan didn't make many friends during their little adventure across east Asia, having the world's largest military protect them is a favorable arrangement for them.

It's been several generations since WWII. Japan is one of the US' closest allies. If they wanted to transform their self-defense force into a full-blown military and take over responsibility for their own defense, I'm sure they could do so. So far, no one has generated the political will to do that. Your buddy Kim isn't helping things by sending missiles over Japan.

And lastly, WWII wasn't a war of conquest for the US. Blame the US for interfering in Korea and Vietnam and the middle east all you like, but Japan was a different story. Calling the US' actions in Japan "Imperialism" destroys any credibility you may have otherwise had.

jwz addressed this, actually, by responding, "Who hurt you?"