@Moon he's very rude, likes to talk over everyone else and seems to think he's the smartest guy in the room at all times, which might even mostly be true. It's fun if you agree with him but grating if you don't.
@ThatWouldBeTelling@lain an important part of Making The Tough Calls is not getting bogged down in petty trifles such as "where is all the food we need to survive going to come from".
also fuel is the evil that creates greenhouse gases that choke the life from Mother Gaia so she'll bravely sacrifice that right up until the moment her A/C cuts out.
@pcachu@lain Very plausible Harris would push that button, and very much on the table thanks to PRC compromised Congressman Eric Swalwell.
But there’s a practical problem: the US Deep State is dependent on the things “Middle America” produces like food and fuel. But living in a deep Red state part of flyover country I’ve been thinking it might be used once or so in a program of terror.
@Fishbed the Japanese were already willing do capitulate under the one condition that the tenno could stay. Then they bombed them to make them surrender unconditionally and... Let the tenno stay.
@lain The bombs, to me, seemed like more like giving Hirohito an excuse. The Japanese people had it drilled into their heads for generations to defend the home islands to the last man and if Hirohito just gave up after the US started winning, he'd be overthrown by warhawks. It took something capable of wiping out an entire nation to get Japanese leadership to step back and take a critical look.
Hell, even with the bombs, a small group of military officers tried to overthrow him anyway.
@lain They really weren't. The six-man war council that had the power over that was still half-for-war, and they couldn't make peace without unanimity.
The Japanese government was far from a single united front (ask the IJA and IJN), and the pro-war faction was the biggest until the bombings shook it up. Even then, it had enough influence for the Kyūjō incident to happen.
Taking the Iraq example further, it's like if the Iraqi ambassador proposed peace while Saddam was dead-set on holding out.