>>340177also, though I haven't tied it together neatly, this should really hint at the way in which a country can act irrationally despite everyone within it acting somewhat rationally. It doesn't require "the Japanese" to be insane for perfectly sane Japanese people to advocate completely insane policies. (For example, if your high ranking position depends on pleasing an anti-surrender military, you might argue for the objectively insane policy of continuing the war - but you're doing it for sane-if-selfish reasons: to keep your status.)
a more organized thinker would've already neatly tied this in to the point about the atomic bombing debate being used to beat the US over the head with - just like the actual atomic bomb could be argued to have provide the pro-unconditional-surrender faction with something to beat the anti-unconditional-surrender faction over the head with in the form of a massive atrocity that might happen until there's no Japan left to speak of.
>>340183I'm not so much mounting a defense as trying to get people to think about the question in novel ways instead of retreating the same old ground. America's corpse pile is big enough that a hundred thousand Japanese this-way or that can be a rounding error.
That you see it as defending the US helps show one of the points I like to make - that we instinctively see most of these things as binary. Ingroup and outgroup, us and them, friend and enemy, etc, etc. It makes it hard to grasp the motivations of someone who, in one breath will explain why nuclear terrorism may be necessary to shift the factional dynamics of a government towards surrender, and then in the next explains that nuclear bombing is a special kind of nasty when compared to firebombing.
I'm denying my line is generally pro-US relative to the rest of the board, but it's not Pro-US for its own sake. Perversely, it's my confidence in my anti-US stance that makes it so easy to play their advocate here - I don't feel the need to convince myself or anyone else of my loathing for the US. I'm ending abruptly here because otherwise you'll get a 500 word spoiler about "in group signals" and nobody needs that on a Monday night.