Things Trump Is Doing Right

[Eric the Green]

(05-11-2017, 07:14 AM)Odin Wrote:

(05-09-2017, 03:21 PM)Galen Wrote:

(05-09-2017, 06:35 AM)Odin Wrote:

(05-09-2017, 03:57 AM)Galen Wrote:

(05-08-2017, 06:47 AM)Odin Wrote: The Non-Aggression Principle can simply be dismissed as naive nonsense, it's basically throwing up ones hands and going "why can't we all be nice to each other and sing kumbaya and everyone will be happy???", it's the domestic equivalent of naive pacifists carrying cute signs like "what if they ordered a war and nobody came?".

The non-aggression principle does allow for self-defense since it is the initiation of force that is disallowed.  As usual you have failed to do even the most basic research.

Once again you missed the point since you think I was only talking about self-defense, I wasn't. There are a lot of situations where the initiation of force is necessary to stop a greater evil. Then again, IIRC you are one of those deranged Isolationists who think the US should have stayed out of WW2 and that Pearl Harbor was all FDR's fault, so I wouldn't expect you to understand that.

Considering the consequences of the embargo on Japan it is clear that Pearl Harbor was FDR's fault.  I learned about all of this in a class on World War II history in the eighties and The Rising Sun by John Toland touched on the subject.  His later book Infamy is devoted to just that subject.

I would have preferred that the US would have stayed out of the First World War which would most likely led to a more equitable peace and probably avoided World War II which was in many ways a continuation of World War I.  It is worth noting that without US entry into that war both sides would have had to sue for peace and neither could have impose anything like the terms of the Treaty of Versailles since they were simply running out of men to throw into the trenches.  It is also very likely that the German High Command would not felt compelled to send Lenin back to Russia and there might never have been a Soviet Union.

You might actually want to spend some time with actual history rather than the comic book version we all get from the public schools.

If Japan didn't want to be embargoed maybe it shouldn't have been engaging in an imperialistic war of conquest in China. So no, it is 100% not FDR's fault.

It's always fun to speculate about what might have been. We can't know for sure, by any means. I think Germany was on the way to winning World War I without US involvement. They had already defeated Russia, and had turned their might against France, hoping to wrap things up. They had broken through the trenches and the stalemate. Would it have been better if Germany had won? The German empire was retrograde in many ways, and it might have gotten even more oppressive. On the other hand, socialism was getting stronger then, and it might have taken over. And this would have been good, since German socialism was democratic; not the Leninist type that was strong over in Russia. If Germany somehow got more liberal, and reformed their junker-based empire, maybe WWII would have been avoided.

The problem was that this outdated, warlike eastern aristocracy was well-entrenched. If the German Empire had been allowed to triumph, it's possible that WWII might have happened anyway, not because of revenge and resentment over the German loss, but because of what happened with Hitler in the late 30s; allowing them to win might have whetted their appetite for more conquests. There is some value in a balance of power, in case the powers get greedy.

Now the USA has its own entrenched aristocracy: corporate libertarian oligarchy. It has installed an oligarch as president who is now engaged in increasing our military involvement, with the aim of winning so much that we get tired of winning.