There's a difference between God's ordaining will and God's permissive will.
God does not ordain evil, but He DOES permit evil.
God does not ordain death come into the world, but He DOES permit it.
So, when we say "God wills X", that doesn't necessarily mean God wanted it to turn out that way. It's just that He permitted it to turn out that way because WE apparently wanted it.
Monday, May 30, 2016
Sunday, May 29, 2016
Quotes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
This Timeline to the end of WW II provides the context for the remarks given below:
Critics of the Bomb
Early critics of the bombings included Albert Einstein, Eugene Wigner and Leó Szilárd, who had together spurred the first bomb research in 1939 with a jointly written letter to President Roosevelt. Szilárd, who had gone on to play a major role in the Manhattan Project, argued:In June of 1945 the Franck Report was released. The Franck Report committee was appointed by Arthur Compton with James Franck as its head. Most of its contents was written by Eugene Rabinowitch, and signed by James Franck, Donald J. Hughes, J.J. Nickson, Eugene Rabinowitch, Glenn T. Seaborg, J.C. Steans, and Leo Szilard. This report outlined the possibilities and dangers of initiating or engaging in a nuclear arms race. In addition, the report also advocated for having a non-combat demonstration of the atomic bomb instead of first-use on a Japanese city.
On June 21, 1945 the report was presented to the interim committee appointed by President Harry Truman to advise him on the use of the bomb. The recommendation for a demonstration was rejected. Szilard followed by circulating another petition in July 1945 urging President Truman not to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The final version of this petition was signed by sixty-eight scientists assigned to the Met Lab. The petition was strongly opposed by General Leslie Groves. As a result, it never reached the president.
Leo Szilard, atom bomb physicist: "Using atomic bombs against Japan is one of the greatest blunders in history. Both from a practical point of view on a 10-year scale and from the point of view of our moral position. I went out of my way and very much so in order to prevent it but as today's papers show without success. It is very difficult to see what wise course of action is possible from here on." (The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes, p. 735)
On August 8, 1945, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Herbert Hoover wrote to Army and Navy Journal publisher Colonel John Callan O'Laughlin, "The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul."The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.
— Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, read into the Congressional Record, 19 September 2012
The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons ... The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.
— Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman, 1950
LeMay: The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb.
The Press: You mean that, sir? Without the Russians and the atomic bomb? . . .
LeMay: The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.
— Major General Curtis LeMay, XXI Bomber Command, September 1945
The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment ... It was a mistake to ever drop it ... [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it
— Fleet Admiral William Halsey, Jr. 1946
"...when we didn't need to do it, and we knew we didn't need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn't need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs."
- Brigadier General Carter Clarke, the military intelligence officer in charge of preparing intercepted Japanese cables - the MAGIC summaries - for Truman and his advisors, quoted in Gar Alperovitz, The Decision To Use the Atomic Bomb, pg. 359.
- Ralph Bard, Undersecretary of the Navy
Bard also asserted, "I think that the Japanese were ready for peace, and they already had approached the Russians and, I think, the Swiss. And that suggestion of [giving] a warning [of the atomic bomb] was a face-saving proposition for them, and one that they could have readily accepted." He continued, "In my opinion, the Japanese war was really won before we ever used the atom bomb. Thus, it wouldn't have been necessary for us to disclose our nuclear position and stimulate the Russians to develop the same thing much more rapidly than they would have if we had not dropped the bomb."
War Was Really Won Before We Used A-Bomb, U.S. News and World Report, 8/15/60, pg. 73-75.
- Ralph Bard, Undersecretary of the Navy
Lewis Strauss, Special Assistant to the Sec. of the Navy, recalled a recommendation he gave to Sec. of the Navy James Forrestal before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima:
"I proposed to Secretary Forrestal that the weapon should be demonstrated before it was used. Primarily it was because it was clear to a number of people, myself among them, that the war was very nearly over. The Japanese were nearly ready to capitulate... My proposal to the Secretary was that the weapon should be demonstrated over some area accessible to Japanese observers and where its effects would be dramatic. I remember suggesting that a satisfactory place for such a demonstration would be a large forest of cryptomeria trees not far from Tokyo. The cryptomeria tree is the Japanese version of our redwood... I anticipated that a bomb detonated at a suitable height above such a forest... would lay the trees out in windrows from the center of the explosion in all directions as though they were matchsticks, and, of course, set them afire in the center. It seemed to me that a demonstration of this sort would prove to the Japanese that we could destroy any of their cities at will... Secretary Forrestal agreed wholeheartedly with the recommendation..."
Strauss added, "It seemed to me that such a weapon was not necessary to bring the war to a successful conclusion, that once used it would find its way into the armaments of the world...".
- Lewis Strauss, Undersecretary of the Navy, quoted in Len Giovannitti and Fred Freed, The Decision To Drop the Bomb, pg. 145, 325.
"While I was working on the new plan of air attack... [I] concluded that even without the atomic bomb, Japan was likely to surrender in a matter of months. My own view was that Japan would capitulate by November 1945...."Even without the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it seemed highly unlikely, given what we found to have been the mood of the Japanese government, that a U.S. invasion of the islands [scheduled for November 1, 1945] would have been necessary."
-Paul Nitze, Vice Chairman, U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, From Hiroshima to Glasnost, pg. 36-37
In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives
- Dwight D Eisenhower
In a Newsweek interview, Eisenhower again recalled the meeting with Stimson: "...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
- Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63
A few months after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, General Dwight D. Eisenhower commented during a social occasion “how he had hoped that the war might have ended without our having to use the atomic bomb.”
~ Diary of Robert P. Meiklejohn, assistant to Ambassador W. Averell Harriman, first published 2015
~ Diary of Robert P. Meiklejohn, assistant to Ambassador W. Averell Harriman, first published 2015
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.
- 1 July 1946, United States Strategic Bombing Survey Summary Report
The President in giving his approval for these [atomic] attacks appeared to believe that many thousands of American troops would be killed in invading Japan, and in this he was entirely correct; but King felt, as he had pointed out many times, that the dilemma was an unnecessary one, for had we been willing to wait, the effective naval blockade would, in the course of time, have starved the Japanese into submission through lack of oil, rice, medicines, and other essential materials. (See p. 327, Chapter 26 of King's "third person" autobiography)
- Admiral Ernest J. King, commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet and chief of Naval Operations
Norman Cousins was a consultant to General Douglas MacArthur during the American occupation of Japan. Cousins writes of his conversations with MacArthur, "MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed." He continues, "When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."
The very day after the bomb was dropped, MacArthur's pilot recorded his opinion in his diary: "General MacArthur definitely is appalled and depressed by this Frankenstein monster [the bomb]. I had a long talk with him today, necessitated by the impending trip to Okinawa. . . ."
- Weldon E. Rhoades. MacArthur's pilot
[General Douglas] MacArthur once spoke to me very eloquently about it, pacing the floor of his apartment in the Waldorf. He thought it a tragedy that the Bomb was ever exploded. MacArthur believed that the same restrictions ought to apply to atomic weapons as to conventional weapons, that the military objective should always be limited damage to noncombatants. . . . MacArthur, you see, was a soldier. He believed in using force only against military targets, and that is why the nuclear thing turned him off. . . .
- President Richard M. Nixon, recounting a meeting with General Douglas MacArthur
Obviously . . . the atomic bomb neither induced the Emperor's decision to surrender nor had any effect on the ultimate outcome of the war.
- Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, in charge of psychological warfare on MacArthur's wartime staff and subsequently MacArthur's military secretary in Tokyo
"General Marshall was right when he said you must not ask me to declare that a surprise nuclear attack on Japan is a military necessity. It is not a military problem...." "I have always felt that if, in our ultimatum to the Japanese government issued from Potsdam [in July 1945], we had referred to the retention of the emperor as a constitutional monarch and had made some reference to the reasonable accessibility of raw materials to the future Japanese government, it would have been accepted. Indeed, I believe that even in the form it was delivered, there was some disposition on the part of the Japanese to give it favorable consideration. When the war was over I arrived at this conclusion after talking with a number of Japanese officials who had been closely associated with the decision of the then Japanese government, to reject the ultimatum, as it was presented. I believe we missed the opportunity of effecting a Japanese surrender, completely satisfactory to us, without the necessity of dropping the bombs." ~John McCloy, Assistant Sec. of War:
The Japanese position was hopeless even before the first atomic bomb fell, because the Japanese had lost control of their own air....When the question comes up of whether we use the atomic bomb or not, my view is that the Air Force will not oppose the use of the bomb, and they will deliver it effectively if the Commander in Chief decides to use it. But it is not necessary to use it in order to conquer the Japanese without the necessity of a land invasion.
-Henry H. "Hap" Arnold. commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces
Arnold's view was that it [the dropping of the atomic bomb] was unnecessary. He said that he knew the Japanese wanted peace. There were political implications in the decision and Arnold did not feel it was the military's job to question it.
-Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker, General Arnold's secretary
Air Force General Claire Chennault, the founder of the American Volunteer Group (the famed "Flying Tigers")--and Army Air Forces commander in China--was even more blunt: A few days after Hiroshima was bombed The New York Times reported Chennault's view that: "Russia's entry into the Japanese war was the decisive factor in speeding its end and would have been so even if no atomic bombs had been dropped. . . ."
“Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, #2314)
CONCLUSION: FDR and Truman, both Democrats, committed crimes against humanity by deliberately targeting civilians. FDR was thereby compounding his crime of interning Japanese-Americans without benefit of trial, taking their land and years of their lives without just compensation.
"The dropping of the atomic bomb was done by a military man under military orders. We're supposed to carry out orders and not question them....If we were to go ahead with the plans for a conventional invasion with ground and naval forces, I believe the Japanese thought that they could inflict very heavy casualties on us and possibly as a result get better surrender terms. On the other hand if they knew or were told that no invasion would take place [and] that bombing would continue until the surrender, why I think the surrender would have taken place just about the same time." (Herbert Feis Papers, Box 103, N.B.C. Interviews, Carl Spaatz interview by Len Giovannitti, Library of Congress)."
- General Carter "Tooey" Spaatz, Commander of Strategic Air Forces in Europe
It is worth noting that General Spaatz' defense of his own actions is precisely identical to the Nazi defense at Nuremburg, "We were just following orders."
In a 1965 Air Force oral history interview Spaatz stressed: "That was purely a political decision, it wasn't a military decision. The military man carries out the order of his political bosses."
In 1945, eight Americans (four generals, four admirals) held five-star rank. Seven of the United States’ eight five-star Army and Navy officers in 1945 agreed with the National Museum of the US Navy’s vitriolic assessment. Generals Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas MacArthur and Henry “Hap” Arnold and Admirals William Leahy, Chester Nimitz, Ernest King, and William Halsey are on record stating that the atomic bombs were either militarily unnecessary, morally reprehensible, or both. The eighth, Admiral Nimitz, neither openly condemned nor supported the atomic bomb, but it is clear that he had certain misgivings about its use. His biographer E.B. Potter observed that the Admiral did in fact consider the atomic bomb somehow indecent. After his death, Nimitz’s wife Catherine also remembered her husband feeling badly about the dropping of the bomb “because he said we had Japan beaten already.”
That fact is all the more arresting when you consider that their professional code discouraged second-guessing the decisions of superiors, and that they were discussing an event that had already happened, and thus could not be reversed.
ADDENDUM:
Here's a link to a series of 1950's conservative sources, including William Buckley's National Review, which all opposed Truman's bomb drop.
Here's a link to a series of 1950's conservative sources, including William Buckley's National Review, which all opposed Truman's bomb drop.
Saturday, May 28, 2016
Truman: War Criminal
Two videos are making the rounds, purporting to make the case that President Truman had to drop the atom bomb. The first is Father Wilson Miscamble's video for Prager University. Father Miscamble is a history professor at Notre Dame and a Catholic priest, so he really should know better.
The second video Truman apologists like to throw out is Bill Whittle's notorious AfterBurner apology for war crimes.
Before we discuss the videos in question, we must first establish a single fact: the US military deliberately targeted civilians for death in Japan, and arguably either targeted civilians in Europe or stood idly by while the British deliberately and indiscriminately targeted civilians in Europe.
This fact is uncontested by historians.
It is uncontested that the Allies engaged in Total War, targeting civilian populations with "morale" (read "terror") bombing intended to force the civilians to get so fed up with the bombing that they would spontaneously rise up and overthrow their government. This was Douhet's theory of aerial bombing, developed during the interwar period and championed by men like Walther Wever, Billy Mitchell and Sir Hugh Trenchard. The British adopted it early, the Americans had fully adopted it by January, 1945.
Truman had no problem with total war against Asian populations because Truman was pure Democrat, which means he was an avowed racist. "In 1911, when he was twenty-seven, he wrote Bess Wallace: “I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman. Uncle Will says that the Lord made a white man from dust[,] a nigger from mud, then He threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is race prejudice I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion that negros [ sic ] ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia and white men in Europe and America.”
While what he says about casualties is undoubtedly true, it doesn't change the flaw in the moral analysis. Miscamble is essentially saying we have the right to choose the lesser evil. We don't.
The moral act consists of three parts: the object (what is done), the intention (why it is done) and the circumstances (the when, where, how it is done). All three must be substantially good, or at least neutral, in order for us to undertake the act.
While the intention to avoid greater casualties is good, the "what" of doing it is the problem here. We are not allowed to have soldiers deliberately target, maim and/or kill unarmed civilians. But that's precisely what strategic firebombing does. The atom bombs were really nothing but exceptionally large firebombs.
If the atom bombs had been targeted at military complexes, that would be, possibly, acceptable. But at Hiroshima at least, the bomb was not targeted at the military industrial complexes on the edge of the city, instead, they were targeted at the civilian center, at the hospitals. That is immoral.
We cannot do evil that good may come from it. I cannot murder a civilian in order to prevent other civilians from being killed. Even less can I murder a civilian, a babe-in-arms, in order to prevent soldiers from being killed. But that's exactly what we did with the firebombing of Japan. We committed war crimes. Remember, Miscamble doesn't deny we targeted civilians. He says it was ok to do it because we saved more lives that way.
Now we could throw in other atrocities, like the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, etc. But the question isn't whether the Japanese were committing atrocities. We know they were. The question is, does their atrocities give us the right to commit atrocities?
No, it doesn't.
Then Bill spends a long time talking about casualties and how the atom bomb saved casualties from piling up. This is identical to Miscamble's false argument. Whittle insists that women and children were being trained as suicide bombers. The correct answer is, so what? Cardinal Ratzinger was trained as an anti-aircraft Hitler Youth soldier, but he never fired a weapon at the Allies, He deserted, along with thousands of others.
He claims Hirohito';s decision to surrender was opposed by his military commanders, to the point of attempting to kidnap the Emperor to prevent the surrender. Again, so what?
American soldiers have the right to shoot anyone who shoots at them. American soldiers have no right to deliberately target and kill civilians.
Whittle pulls out Sherman's March to the Sea (15:45) as an example of the US doing such things in the past. It's true, we did. We were wrong then too. Can you imagine General Washington ordering his soldiers to burn an entire town to the ground and have all the citizens executed? Washington never did such a thing. Truman commanded American troops to do exactly that.
If killing civilians in order to keep soldiers safe is an acceptable moral act, then we can have no quarrel with the Germans massacre at the town of Lidice in order to prevent further assassinations like Heydrich's. If that principle is acceptable, then we had no reason to go to war against Germany in World War I, for their rape of Belgium was actually not a rape, but a moral action, intended to protect the lives of their soldiers. Sure, the Germans executed ten civilians for every soldier that was sniped at from a town building, but that wasn't an atrocity. The WW I Germans were just implementing Truman's policies. Nothing to see here. Move along.
The Essence of the Argument
Essentially there are five arguments in favor of Truman's decision:
Prior to WW II, the US condemned the Italians, Japanese and Germans for indiscriminately bombing civilians. We said it was a war crime.
After we entered the war, we not only overlooked British indiscriminate bombing of civilians, we actually went further and TARGETED civilians.
Morality isn't subject to change.
America, by her own standards, standards enshrined in our customs from the founding of the country until the 1930s, committed war crimes. Lincoln originally opposed burning towns and stealing from civilians, but by the end of the Civil War, he was fully behind the policy. He won the war but lost his character.
Just as Lincoln's morality changed, and changed the country, during the Civil War, our morality changed when we entered World War II. Not only did indiscriminate British bombing suddenly become acceptable, our decision to actually deliberately target civilians suddenly stopped being a war crime. When they did it, it was evil. When we do it, it's ok.
Early critics of the bombings included Albert Einstein, Eugene Wigner and Leó Szilárd, who had together spurred the first bomb research in 1939 with a jointly written letter to President Roosevelt. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman, Fleet Admiral William Halsey, Jr., and even Major General Curtis LeMay, head of XXI Bomber Command, the man who oversaw every bomb dropped on Japanese soil, all said the same thing: the dropping of the atom bomb contributed nothing to the end of the war. In fact, Szilárd, Einstein's protoge, who had gone on to play a major role in the Manhattan Project, argued:
As Aishya told Mohammed, "it is a wonderful God you serve, who gives you everything you want."
The second video Truman apologists like to throw out is Bill Whittle's notorious AfterBurner apology for war crimes.
Before we discuss the videos in question, we must first establish a single fact: the US military deliberately targeted civilians for death in Japan, and arguably either targeted civilians in Europe or stood idly by while the British deliberately and indiscriminately targeted civilians in Europe.
This fact is uncontested by historians.
It is uncontested that the Allies engaged in Total War, targeting civilian populations with "morale" (read "terror") bombing intended to force the civilians to get so fed up with the bombing that they would spontaneously rise up and overthrow their government. This was Douhet's theory of aerial bombing, developed during the interwar period and championed by men like Walther Wever, Billy Mitchell and Sir Hugh Trenchard. The British adopted it early, the Americans had fully adopted it by January, 1945.
Truman had no problem with total war against Asian populations because Truman was pure Democrat, which means he was an avowed racist. "In 1911, when he was twenty-seven, he wrote Bess Wallace: “I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman. Uncle Will says that the Lord made a white man from dust[,] a nigger from mud, then He threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is race prejudice I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion that negros [ sic ] ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia and white men in Europe and America.”
More than a quarter of a century later, in a letter home to his daughter about dining at the White House when he was a U.S. senator, he described the waiters, who he thought were “evidently the top of the black social set in Washington,” as “an army of coons,” and in a letter to his wife in 1939, he referred to “nigger picnic day.”
Harry was a Democrat, through and through.
Miscamble's video
Miscamble doesn't deny the fact that civilians were targeted. Indeed, he acknowledges that we had already burned out entire cities, we had the islands under naval blockade, and the atom bombs were merely the next logical step in the chain. His entire argument revolves around the idea that Truman's use of the atomic bomb reduced American and Allied casualties, prevented much higher civilian casualties and was therefore acceptable. He said Truman chose "the least awful" (i.e., the least evil) of the alternatives.While what he says about casualties is undoubtedly true, it doesn't change the flaw in the moral analysis. Miscamble is essentially saying we have the right to choose the lesser evil. We don't.
The moral act consists of three parts: the object (what is done), the intention (why it is done) and the circumstances (the when, where, how it is done). All three must be substantially good, or at least neutral, in order for us to undertake the act.
While the intention to avoid greater casualties is good, the "what" of doing it is the problem here. We are not allowed to have soldiers deliberately target, maim and/or kill unarmed civilians. But that's precisely what strategic firebombing does. The atom bombs were really nothing but exceptionally large firebombs.
If the atom bombs had been targeted at military complexes, that would be, possibly, acceptable. But at Hiroshima at least, the bomb was not targeted at the military industrial complexes on the edge of the city, instead, they were targeted at the civilian center, at the hospitals. That is immoral.
We cannot do evil that good may come from it. I cannot murder a civilian in order to prevent other civilians from being killed. Even less can I murder a civilian, a babe-in-arms, in order to prevent soldiers from being killed. But that's exactly what we did with the firebombing of Japan. We committed war crimes. Remember, Miscamble doesn't deny we targeted civilians. He says it was ok to do it because we saved more lives that way.
Bill Whittle's video
Whittle pursues a similar course, but throws in irrelevant asides, such as "the people of Hiroshima got more warning than our sailors at Pearl Harbor... you sneak-attacked us" (3:20, 5:20). Yes, the Japanese surprise-attacked a military installation. We burned down entire Japanese cities. The two are not comparable. We acted in much more evil fashion than they did.Now we could throw in other atrocities, like the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, etc. But the question isn't whether the Japanese were committing atrocities. We know they were. The question is, does their atrocities give us the right to commit atrocities?
No, it doesn't.
Then Bill spends a long time talking about casualties and how the atom bomb saved casualties from piling up. This is identical to Miscamble's false argument. Whittle insists that women and children were being trained as suicide bombers. The correct answer is, so what? Cardinal Ratzinger was trained as an anti-aircraft Hitler Youth soldier, but he never fired a weapon at the Allies, He deserted, along with thousands of others.
He claims Hirohito';s decision to surrender was opposed by his military commanders, to the point of attempting to kidnap the Emperor to prevent the surrender. Again, so what?
American soldiers have the right to shoot anyone who shoots at them. American soldiers have no right to deliberately target and kill civilians.
Whittle pulls out Sherman's March to the Sea (15:45) as an example of the US doing such things in the past. It's true, we did. We were wrong then too. Can you imagine General Washington ordering his soldiers to burn an entire town to the ground and have all the citizens executed? Washington never did such a thing. Truman commanded American troops to do exactly that.
If killing civilians in order to keep soldiers safe is an acceptable moral act, then we can have no quarrel with the Germans massacre at the town of Lidice in order to prevent further assassinations like Heydrich's. If that principle is acceptable, then we had no reason to go to war against Germany in World War I, for their rape of Belgium was actually not a rape, but a moral action, intended to protect the lives of their soldiers. Sure, the Germans executed ten civilians for every soldier that was sniped at from a town building, but that wasn't an atrocity. The WW I Germans were just implementing Truman's policies. Nothing to see here. Move along.
The Essence of the Argument
Essentially there are five arguments in favor of Truman's decision:
- We saved American lives by killing civilians. The argument is that we may do evil that good comes from it. This is the only really substantial argument put forward by either Whittle or Miscamble. It is pure dreck. It is not Christian. To the extent that we accept such nonsense, we admit that Barack Obama is correct and America is not a Christian nation. For those who claim "one million American lives were saved", that claim is not substantiated by actual military estimates at the time. The American military expected 20,000 casualties from the invasion. The newspapers, for reasons not entirely clear, inflated this number to one million.
- They attacked us first/They bombed civilians first: Yes, they did. But their commission of unfair tactics or atrocities does not license us to imitate them. We cannot say, "If our enemy commits an atrocity, then we are cleared to commit the same kind of atrocities. Our morality is meant to be identical to that of whoever we are fighting. That's how we win, because our own moral code is too weak to survive on its own. We have to become the evil we fight." The very invocation of this principle hearkens back to kindergarten morals. Perhaps that is where we live now. If so, Barack Obama is correct and America is no longer adult enough to be a Christian nation.
- Firebombing was necessary because our technology was not good enough to target military installations This argument asserts that our morality is determined by our technology. If our technology is good, we can be held to a morally high standard, if it is low, we can only be held to a morally lower standard. People who propose this principle cannot, in principle, attack Osama bin Laden for knocking down the WTC on 9/11. He didn't have better tech, so he can't be held to a high moral standard. Is that really the argument we want to make?
- It was Total War. Yes, it was Total War. That's why it was evil. Just War is acceptable. Total war, in which soldiers can target any damned thing or one they please, is pure evil.
- It ended the war, didn't it? That's good enough for me. This argument is pure utilitarianism. Instead of judging action according to the three Christian criteria above, we judge action only and solely by whether or not it produces the effect we want. So, according to this moral code, We can take everyone's guns in order to keep the bad guys from having guns, A university can accuse all male students of being rapists, and - if those accusations result in lower rape rates or even just raises everyone's consciousness about rape - then the result affirms the method, and the accusation was moral. When liberals use this logic, we mock them. When Truman supporters use this logic, we nod at the brilliance. It is crap. Don't buy it.
The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, for instance, concluded that “Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” Admiral William Leahy, in his memoirs, called the bomb “barbarous” and said that it provided “no material assistance in our war against Japan,” since the Japanese were “already defeated and ready to surrender.”Even Curtis LeMay, the man who advocated and directed the firebombing of Japanese cities, said:
The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.While Admiral Halsey stated the case quite clearly:
The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment ... It was a mistake to ever drop it ... [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it ...
Counter-Argument
Truman could have dropped the Hiroshima bomb on the heavy military industrial complex on the outskirts of Hiroshima. Same explosion, same shock and awe, and a legitimate military target. instead, he chose to bomb the civilian center of town. As a result, Hiroshima's military industry was essentially undamaged. So was her water reservoir and her electrical power. Her industry would have been back online in 30 days. The same is true in Nagasaki - he could have chosen a legitimate military target. He didn't. Instead, the designated bombing target chosen was Urakami Cathedral.Prior to WW II, the US condemned the Italians, Japanese and Germans for indiscriminately bombing civilians. We said it was a war crime.
After we entered the war, we not only overlooked British indiscriminate bombing of civilians, we actually went further and TARGETED civilians.
Morality isn't subject to change.
America, by her own standards, standards enshrined in our customs from the founding of the country until the 1930s, committed war crimes. Lincoln originally opposed burning towns and stealing from civilians, but by the end of the Civil War, he was fully behind the policy. He won the war but lost his character.
Early critics of the bombings included Albert Einstein, Eugene Wigner and Leó Szilárd, who had together spurred the first bomb research in 1939 with a jointly written letter to President Roosevelt. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman, Fleet Admiral William Halsey, Jr., and even Major General Curtis LeMay, head of XXI Bomber Command, the man who oversaw every bomb dropped on Japanese soil, all said the same thing: the dropping of the atom bomb contributed nothing to the end of the war. In fact, Szilárd, Einstein's protoge, who had gone on to play a major role in the Manhattan Project, argued:
Let me say only this much to the moral issue involved: Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?
As Aishya told Mohammed, "it is a wonderful God you serve, who gives you everything you want."
FDR and Truman, Democrats both, were war criminals. America committed war crimes during WW II. We won the war, but at the price of losing our soul. Today's conservatives should be mourning Truman's actions, not celebrating them.
Friday, May 27, 2016
We Targeted Civilians
Did the A-Bomb force Japan to surrender?
Probably not. [1, 2]
As the table below shows, 67 Japanese cities had already been firebombed by the time the A-bombs were used. Neither of the A-bombs caused as much destruction as conventional American firebombing did, a technique they learned in Germany. From a strategic perspective, the A-bombs were neither new nor different. They were irrelevant. The Emperor of Japan's personal order of surrender didn't mention the atomic bombs. At all.
But how did we learn to firebomb? In Dresden and other German cities, Americans discovered that under the right conditions of temperature, humidity and wind, along with the right mixture of incendiary and explosives, entire city centers could be burned down.
For the bomb mix, we needed only to drop incendiaries that ignited on contact, along with high-explosives that had a 20 or 30 minute timer. The timer allowed time for local fire departments and ambulances to congregate around the burning buildings, where the high explosives would then detonate and destroy all the medical and fire personnel trying to administer humanitarian aid to survivors.
That's right.
We deliberately targeted doctors, nurses and firefighters.
We targeted civilians, non-combatants, old people, women, children, in World War II.
Both the RAF and US bomber commands knew they were simply not hitting military targets. Between 50% and 93% of the time, the bombs didn't even hit within 1 to 5 miles of their military targets.
Even the US Air Force admits Hiroshima suffered only minor military damage:
Probably not. [1, 2]
As the table below shows, 67 Japanese cities had already been firebombed by the time the A-bombs were used. Neither of the A-bombs caused as much destruction as conventional American firebombing did, a technique they learned in Germany. From a strategic perspective, the A-bombs were neither new nor different. They were irrelevant. The Emperor of Japan's personal order of surrender didn't mention the atomic bombs. At all.
But how did we learn to firebomb? In Dresden and other German cities, Americans discovered that under the right conditions of temperature, humidity and wind, along with the right mixture of incendiary and explosives, entire city centers could be burned down.
For the bomb mix, we needed only to drop incendiaries that ignited on contact, along with high-explosives that had a 20 or 30 minute timer. The timer allowed time for local fire departments and ambulances to congregate around the burning buildings, where the high explosives would then detonate and destroy all the medical and fire personnel trying to administer humanitarian aid to survivors.
That's right.
We deliberately targeted doctors, nurses and firefighters.
We targeted civilians, non-combatants, old people, women, children, in World War II.
Both the RAF and US bomber commands knew they were simply not hitting military targets. Between 50% and 93% of the time, the bombs didn't even hit within 1 to 5 miles of their military targets.
Bombing accuracy was so abominable that a 1941 British report stated that there was only a 22% chance of a bomber crew finding its way to within 5 miles of its target and for heavily defended targets in the Ruhr, the percentage dropped to 7%.[5] Even late in the war, when radar use became widespread the specially modified “pathfinder” aircraft were used to mark targets with incendiaries; bombing accuracy had increased to a 50% chance of a bomb falling within a mile of its target.... strategic bombing was a failure.... even at the height of the bomber offensive in 1944, [German] armaments production actually increased.Curtis LeMay, head of US Strategic Bomber Command, knew he was committing war crimes:
As far as casualties were concerned I think there were more casualties in the first attack on Tokyo with incendiaries than there were with the first use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The fact that it's done instantaneously, maybe that's more humane than incendiary attacks, if you can call any war act humane. I don't, particularly, so to me there wasn't much difference. A weapon is a weapon and it really doesn't make much difference how you kill a man. If you have to kill him, well, that's the evil to start with and how you do it becomes pretty secondary. I think your choice should be which weapon is the most efficient and most likely to get the whole mess over with as early as possible.
Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.... Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.
Even the US Air Force admits Hiroshima suffered only minor military damage:
"[Hiroshima suffered] slight industrial damage... Its shipping activities had virtually ceased by the time of the attack, however, because of sinkings and the mining of the Inland Sea....Though small workshops numbered several thousand, they represented only one-fourth of the total industrial production of Hiroshima, since many of them had only one or two workers. The bulk of the city's output came from large plants located on the outskirts of the city; one-half of the industrial production came from only five firms. Of these larger companies, only one suffered more than superficial damage. Of their working force, 94 percent were uninjured. Since electric power was available, and materials and working force were not destroyed, plants ordinarily responsible for nearly three-fourths of Hiroshima's industrial production could have resumed normal operation within 30 days of the attack had the war continued."
Meanwhile, in Nagasaki, the conventional bombing on August 1 did more damage than the atom bomb did:
In the pre-war years, the US condemned Japanese, Italian, and German aerial bombing of civilians. Despite this, the British deliberately bombed civilians in Germany. The Americans went one step further, and deliberately targeted civilians in Japan. "Shortage of raw materials had reduced operations at these four Mitsubishi plants to a fraction of their capacity. Had the raw material situation been normal and had the war continues, it is estimated that restoration of production would have been possible though slow. The dockyard, which was affected mainly by the 1 August attack rather than by the atomic bomb, (emphasis added) would have been able to produce at 80 percent of full capacity within 3 or 4 months. The steel works would have required a year to get into substantial production the electric works could have resumed production at a reduced rate within 2 months and been back at capacity within 6 months, and the arms plants would have required 15 months to reach two-thirds of their former capacity."
On 9 March 1945, 300 B-29s dropped half a million small incendiary bombs on the Japanese capital. The ensuing firestorm consumed 13 square miles of the city and killed an estimated 100,000 people. From this raid forward, American strategic bombing effort shifted from a Trenchard-Mitchell counter industry focus to a Douhet strategy based upon inflicting maximum damage on population centers (i.e. morale bombing).We called it "morale bombing" because "terror bombing" sounds kind of nasty. But, no matter what you call it, the effect was the same. In fact, due to LeMay's strategy of deliberately targeting the civilian population of Japan:
Between May and June 1945, Japan’s six largest cities fell to the torch of 20th Air Force B-29’s. By the end of the war in August, 58 of 62 Japanese cities with populations over 100,000 had been burned. In all, 178 square miles of urban area were razed amounting to 40 per cent of Japan’s total urban area. Twenty two million people, 30 per cent of the population, were rendered homeless. 2,200,000 civilian casualties were reported and over 900,000 fatalities were suffered, more than Japan’s combat casualties in the Pacific of 780,000.
Much has been written about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the devastation unleashed by atomic weapons. While revolutionary in nature, they added comparatively little damage in comparison to the amount of total damage inflicted on Japanese urban areas by the B-29 firebombing campaign.
| Name of firebombed Japanese city | City % destroyed | Equivalent in size to the following American City |
| Toyama | 99 | Chattanooga |
| Fukui | 86 | Evansville |
| Tokushima | 85.2 | Ft. Wayne |
| Fukuyama | 80.9 | Macon |
| Kofu | 78.6 | South Bend |
| Kuwana | 75 | Tucson |
| Hitachi | 72 | Little Rock |
| Nara | 69.3 | Boston |
| Tsu | 69.3 | Topeka |
| Okayama | 68.9 | Long Beach |
| Mito | 68.9 | Pontiac |
| Takamatsu | 67.5 | Knoxville |
| *Hiroshima* | 67 | |
| Shizuoka | 66.1 | Oklahoma City |
| Tsuruga | 65.1 | Middleton |
| Hachioji | 65 | Galveston |
| Nagaoka | 64.9 | Madison |
| Maebashi | 64.2 | Wheeling |
| Matsuyama | 64 | Duluth |
| Imabari | 63.9 | Stockton |
| Gifu | 63.6 | Des Moines |
| Kagoshima | 63.4 | Richmond |
| Toyohashi | 61.9 | Tulsa |
| Hamamatsu | 60.3 | Hartford |
| Yokohama | 58 | Cleveland |
| Isezaki | 56.7 | Sioux Falls |
| Ichinomiya | 56.3 | Sprinfield |
| Kobe | 55.7 | Baltimore |
| Kochi | 55.2 | Sacramento |
| Kumagaya | 55.1 | Kenosha |
| Tokyo | 51 | New York |
| Akashi | 50.2 | Lexington |
| Wakayama | 50 | Salt Lake City |
| Himeji | 49.4 | Peoria |
| Hiratsuka | 48.4 | Battle Creek |
| Tokuyama | 48.3 | Butte |
| Sakai | 48.2 | Forth Worth |
| Saga | 44.2 | Waterloo |
| Chosi | 44.2 | Wheeling |
| Utsunomiya | 43.7 | Sioux City |
| Numazu | 42.3 | Waco |
| Shimizu | 42 | San Jose |
| Kure | 41.9 | Toledo |
| Sasebo | 41.4 | Nashville |
| Uhyamada | 41.3 | Columbus |
| Chiba | 41 | Savannah |
| Nagoya | 40 | Los Angeles |
| Ogaki | 39.5 | Corpus Christi |
| *Nagasaki* | 39.2 | |
| Siumonoseki | 37.6 | San Diego |
| Kawasaki | 36.2 | Portland |
| Omuta | 35.8 | Miami |
| Osaka | 35.1 | Chicago |
| Yokkichi | 33.6 | Charlotte |
| Omura | 33.1 | Sante Fe |
| Okazaki | 32.2 | Lincoln |
| Kumamoto | 31.2 | Grand Rapids |
| Aomori | 30 | Montgomery |
| Oita | 28.2 | Saint Joseph |
| Miyakonoio | 26.5 | Greensboro |
| Miyazaki | 26.1 | Davenport |
| Nobeoka | 25.2 | Augusta |
| Fukuoka | 24.1 | Rochester |
| Moh | 23.3 | Spokane |
| Sendai | 21.9 | Omaha |
| Yawata | 21.2 | San Antonio |
| Hbe | 20.7 | Utica |
| Amagasaki | 18.9 | Jacksonville |
| Nishinomiya | 11.9 | Cambridge |
Thursday, May 26, 2016
Democrats vs. Republicans
The difference between Republicans and Democrats:
Republicans say
1) Dead people in Chicago can't vote in elections, but
2) Dead people from 1779 should determine how we interpret the Constitution.
Democrats say the reverse.
Thus endeth the lesson.
Saturday, May 14, 2016
Transgenders for Contraception!
National Review holds a strange opinion. It asserts Barack Obama's latest insistence that public schools accept transgenders will be the death of the public schools. "Homeschooling will triumph!" shout the conservatives.
No, it won't. Homeschooling won't make a difference unless parents stop living the life of Bruce Jenner. The idea that my biology must yield to my fantasy identity began with contraception. As long as parents contracept, they are acting out Bruce Jenner's life in front of their children.
Both vasectomy and tubal ligation are individual attempts to assume a voluntary gender identity that does not match the reality: the unwanted reality is "fertile", the desired identity is "sterile". Like the woman who pours drain cleaner in her eyes because she wants to be blind, the vasectomy or tubal ligation patient victimizes himself/herself.
In that sense, the use of contraception (e.g., the pill, condoms, the IUD, etc.) is very similar to the drag queen, Bruce Jenner. Users don't actually cut off body parts to force reality to yield to voluntary gender identity, rather, they play the part for awhile to see if they like it.
But how many Americans will reject these facts, because it offends their self-image? How many contracepting Americans are willing to accept that they are essentially being Bruce Jenner? And how does a contracepting parent showcase to their children anything other than Bruce's own confusion?
No, it won't. Homeschooling won't make a difference unless parents stop living the life of Bruce Jenner. The idea that my biology must yield to my fantasy identity began with contraception. As long as parents contracept, they are acting out Bruce Jenner's life in front of their children.
Both vasectomy and tubal ligation are individual attempts to assume a voluntary gender identity that does not match the reality: the unwanted reality is "fertile", the desired identity is "sterile". Like the woman who pours drain cleaner in her eyes because she wants to be blind, the vasectomy or tubal ligation patient victimizes himself/herself.
In that sense, the use of contraception (e.g., the pill, condoms, the IUD, etc.) is very similar to the drag queen, Bruce Jenner. Users don't actually cut off body parts to force reality to yield to voluntary gender identity, rather, they play the part for awhile to see if they like it.
But how many Americans will reject these facts, because it offends their self-image? How many contracepting Americans are willing to accept that they are essentially being Bruce Jenner? And how does a contracepting parent showcase to their children anything other than Bruce's own confusion?
Homosexuality: An Addictive Disorder
The Clean Slate Addiction Site tells us that addiction is a choice, not a brain disease:
However, according to the National Council on Alcohol Addiction and Drug Dependency (NCADD) gene predisposition accounts for about 50% of addictive disorders.
if the promise of a ticket to the movies is enough to double the success rate of conventional addiction counseling, then it’s hard to say that substance users can’t control themselves...to clarify the point, if you offered a cancer patient movie tickets as a reward for ceasing to have a tumor – it would make no difference, it would not change his probability of recovery.According to the New York Times, it may be a learning disorder:
The studies show that addiction alters the interactions between midbrain regions like the ventral tegmentum and the nucleus accumbens, which are involved with motivation and pleasure, and parts of the prefrontal cortex that mediate decisions and help set priorities. Acting in concert, these networks determine what we value in order to ensure that we attain critical biological goals: namely, survival and reproduction.
In essence, addiction occurs when these brain systems are focused on the wrong objects: a drug or self-destructive behavior like excessive gambling.... Once that happens, it can cause serious trouble.The learning disorder that is addiction may be the result of trauma or it may originate in a lack of social bonding. It may also be the result of a dopamine imbalance in the brain.
Whether a person decides to use alcohol or drugs is a personal choice, influenced by multiple biological, familial, psychological and sociocultural factors. But, once a person uses alcohol or drugs, the risk of developing alcoholism or drug dependence is greatly influenced by genetics. Research shows that genes are responsible for about half the risk for alcoholism and addiction, and while genetics are not the sole determinant, their presence or absence may increase the likelihood that a person will become alcohol or drug dependent.
What does all of this have to do with homosexuality? As Psychology Today points out, even if addiction is not really genetic, it is certainly the case that addiction travels in clusters. What does it mean to say addiction travels in clusters? It means that if you suffer from one addiction, you are more likely to have a second or third as well. For instance, the NIH tells us smokers are more likely to drink, Someone who both smokes and drinks is more likely to use drugs. Smokers are more likely to suffer from eating disorders. The combinations are endless.
Medical News tells us men are about twice as likely to suffer from some form of addiction as women are. By purest happenstance, most studies show there are about twice as many homosexual men as homosexual women. Now, you may think this doesn't prove much. If that was all that could be brought forward, you would be right. Unfortunately, that isn't all there is to it. So, with all of the foregoing in mind (choice, genetics, learning disorder, lack of social bonding, clustering), let's see where homosexuality falls in the addiction spectrum.
The National Eating Disorders Association tells us homosexuals have a higher rate of eating disorders than the general population:
Medical News tells us men are about twice as likely to suffer from some form of addiction as women are. By purest happenstance, most studies show there are about twice as many homosexual men as homosexual women. Now, you may think this doesn't prove much. If that was all that could be brought forward, you would be right. Unfortunately, that isn't all there is to it. So, with all of the foregoing in mind (choice, genetics, learning disorder, lack of social bonding, clustering), let's see where homosexuality falls in the addiction spectrum.
The National Eating Disorders Association tells us homosexuals have a higher rate of eating disorders than the general population:
- In one study, gay and bisexual boys reported being significantly more likely to have fasted, vomited or taken laxatives or diet pills to control their weight in the last 30 days. Gay males were 7 times more likely to report binging and 12 times more likely to report purging than heterosexual males.
- Females identified as lesbian, bisexual or mostly heterosexual were about twice as likely to report binge-eating at least once per month in the last year.
- Elevated rates of binge-eating and purging by vomiting or laxative abuse was found for both males and females who identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual or “mostly heterosexual” in comparison to their heterosexual peers.
- Compared to other populations, gay men are disproportionately found to have body image disturbances and eating disorder behavior (STATS). Gay men are thought to only represent 5% of the total male population but among men who have eating disorders, 42% identify as gay.
"Although few studies have examined the link between sexual orientation and smoking, it is clear that LGBT individuals have a higher smoking rate than the general population. Only six states have published reports on tobacco use by sexual orientation: Arizona, California, Massachusetts, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington. All six of these states found significantly elevated smoking rates in the LGBT community. A 2009 review of 42 separate studies measuring tobacco use among lesbians, gays, and bisexuals reported consistently higher prevalence of smoking among sexual minorities.2 Other studies have reported smoking prevalence among gay and bisexual men is 27% to 71% higher and for lesbians and bisexual women, 70% to 350% higher than prevalence observed for comparable gender groups in the general population.3"The Pride Institute tells us homosexuals have higher rates of alcohol abuse:
In the LGBT community, research suggests that alcohol abuse and dependence occurs at even higher rates than in the mainstream population. Independent studies collectively support the estimate that alcohol abuse occurs in the LGBT community as rates up to three times that in the mainstream population. Said another way, alcohol abuse is estimated to occur in up to 45% of those in the LGBT community.The Lesbian and Gay Foundation, in union with the University of Lancashire, tell us homosexuals have higher rates of illegal drug use and abuse:
... new figures suggest that gay people are seven times more likely to take illegal drugs than the general population, with one in five of those surveyed showing signs of dependency on drugs or alcohol.
More than a third of gay, lesbian and bisexual people took at least one illegal drug in the last month, according to the largest study of its kind.The National Asian Pacific American Families Against Substance Abuse group informs us of a Yale University study that reports homosexuals are over-represented in gambling addiction self-help organizations:
One of the few existing studies on problem gambling in the LGBT community was conducted by two prominent researchers in the field of problem gambling studies, Jon Grant of the University of Minnesota Medical School and Marc Potenza of Yale University Medical School (Grant and Potenza, 2006). The study was conducted in 2006 with a sample of 105 treatment‐seeking men who had sought treatment for pathological gambling. The researchers found a substantial overrepresentation of gay and bisexual men among this sample of pathological gamblers (21% of the sample self‐reported as gay or bisexual) (Grant and Potenza, 2006). The researchers also reported greater impairment and a higher incidence of impulse control and substance use disorder among these gay and bisexual men.Atlantic Magazine informs us that homosexuals beat each other up. A LOT:
In 2013, the CDC released the results of a 2010 study on victimization by sexual orientation, and admitted that “little is known about the national prevalence of intimate partner violence, sexual violence, and stalking among lesbian, gay, and bisexual women and men in the United States.” The report found that bisexual women had an overwhelming prevalence of violent partners in their lives: 75 percent had been with a violent partner, as opposed to 46 percent of lesbian women and 43 percent of straight women. For bisexual men, that number was 47 percent. For gay men, it was 40 percent, and 21 percent for straight men.
Update: Rutgers re-confirmed the findings on interpersonal violence in LGBTQ+ relationships.
American Addiction Centers tell us homosexuals use drugs all out of proportion to the normal population:
- The rate of alcohol abuse in gay and transgender individuals may be as high as 25 percent compared to 5–10 percent in the general population.
- The use of tobacco products is significantly higher in gay individuals than in heterosexuals; some studies suggest 200 percent higher.
- Gay men are far more likely to use amphetamines than heterosexual man (as much as 12 times more likely).
- Gay men are nearly 10 times more likely to use heroin than heterosexual men.
The arsonists also had poor military performance and records with only two of seven completing a term in the military with an honorable discharge. One-half had tattoos and one-fourth had some type of disfigurement. The sexual preference of the serial arsonists reflected 25 percent who identified their preference as homosexual or bi-sexual. ...[The thrill seeking arsonist] is most likely to be heterosexual but nearly one-third are bisexual or homosexual.An additional study, funded by National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) and the Department of Justice, found 29% of arsonists were homosexuals. Even Wikipedia, in it's article on firefighter arson, recognizes the link. Similarly, the National Volunteer Fire Council (NVFC) found that homosexuality was linked to arson (p. 17). Homosexual arsonists even have their own Tumblr E-Zine.
Reuters and the Guardian tell us homosexuals actually act out sexually with both sexes. Remarkably, homosexuals are more likely to be involved in an unintended pregnancy than are heterosexuals.
Overall, about 13 percent of heterosexual females and about 14 percent of females who only had male sexual partners had been pregnant, compared to about 23 percent of lesbian or bisexual females and about 20 percent of girls who had male and female sexual partners.
About 10 percent of heterosexual males and those who only had female sexual partners experienced a pregnancy, compared to about 29 percent of gay or bisexual males and about 38 percent of males with female and male sexual partners.Correlation or Causation?
For those who would argue that all of the above is merely correlation and not causation, this poses a serious problem. If homosexuality is not simply a sexual addiction, that is, if homosexuals were really homosexual, they wouldn't be involved in unintended pregnancy at all, much less would they generate more unintended pregnancies than heterosexuals. That fact alone tells us what the problem actually is: homosexuals are addicted to sex.
As even Slate admits, both male and female homosexuals have higher numbers of partners than the normal population.
Promiscuity among lesbians is less extreme, but it is still higher than among heterosexual women. Overall, women tend to have fewer sex partners than men. But there is a surprising finding about lesbian promiscuity in the literature. Australian investigators reported that lesbian women were 4.5 times more likely to have had more than 50 lifetime male partners than heterosexual women (9 percent of lesbians versus 2 percent of heterosexual women); and 93 percent of women who identified themselves as lesbian reported a history of sex with men.17 Other studies similarly show that 75-90 percent of women who have sex with women have also had sex with men.Again, this merely confirms the earlier point: there is no way to make sense of the these numbers unless we recognize that homosexuality is simply one more addiction in a spectrum of addictive behaviors displayed by addictive personalities. In fact, the differences between homosexual addiction and normal activity is so enormous that it creates basic disconnects for both the homosexuals under study and the heterosexuals studying them:
[G]ay reporter Gabriel Rotello provides [data] for the United States, citing the book Homosexualities. It indicates that in the late 1970s, 75% of gay men had had more than 100 sexual partners in their lives... Further, 43% of gay men reported more than 500 partners and 33% more than 1,000.
One well-known gay man boasted that by age 26 he'd had about 3,000 male partners, though he could see how people who had not been in the "fast lane" like him could barely envisage such sexual statistics. The differences with Rotello's heterosexual friends were so great that, when citing these figures, neither the gay nor straight people could believe them. Some found 100 or more partners a year inconceivable, while the gays could not comprehend people having so few encounters in life!The NAADC, the National Association of Addiction Professionals, recognizes the links between homosexuality and addiction. It even produced a Powerpoint series outlining the various addictions that homosexuals habitually engage in.
For someone who has a genetic predisposition to become addicted, homosexuality is one way for that addictive predisposition to express itself. Instead of, or in addition to, being addicted to alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, gambling, eating disorders or a host of other harmful behaviors, the homosexual is (also) addicted to maladaptive sexual expression. This maladaptive activity is, according to the NIH, just as physically unhealthy as alcoholism, drug abuse or any eating disorder. The homosexual should be viewed as an addict who is committing slow suicide. The maladaptation which causes alcoholism and other addictions, like homosexuality, may be treatable. It is possible that either serotonin or dopamine treatment can slash addictive behavior by up to 90%..
Speaking of suicide, some would argue, despite the evidence presented here, that homosexuality is not a choice. They would argue that attempting conversion therapy on homosexuals is deadly. After all, it is alleged that people who go through such conversion therapy have a high suicide rate:
People who have gone through conversion therapy face 8.9 times the rates of suicide ideation, face depression at 5.9 times the rate of their peers and are three times more likely to use illegal drugs and be at high risk for sexually transmitted infections.Of course, the article that makes this statement then links to a PDF that you would think substantiates the assertion. But here is where it gets very odd indeed. The PDF that is the "source" for the statement says exactly the opposite. The referenced 2009 APA study ("Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation") actually says:
Early and recent research studies provide no clear indication of the prevalence of harmful outcomes among people who have undergone efforts to change their sexual orientation or the frequency of occurrence of harm because no study to date of adequate scientific rigor has been explicitly designed to do so. Thus, we cannot conclude how likely it is that harm will occur from SOCE (sexual orientation change efforts).So, as of 2009, even the APA could find no evidence of a higher suicide rate among those who go through conversion therapy. So, what is the suicide rate of homosexuals, bisexuals and transgenders? Well, it is much, much higher than that of the general population. In fact, the suicide rate for those who have not undergone conversion therapy is even higher than it is for those who have undergone conversion therapy:
According to surveys, 4.6 percent of the overall U.S. population has self-reported a suicide attempt, with that number climbing to between 10 and 20 percent for lesbian, gay or bisexual respondents. By comparison, 41 percent of trans or gender non-conforming people surveyed have attempted suicideSo, those who argue against conversion therapy quote studies that actually show conversion therapy results in a lower suicide rate for homosexuals. It's almost as if they specifically misrepresented the results. They appear to have deliberately lied about the fact that conversion therapy lowers the risk of suicide. How odd.
In fact, homosexuality is just one more disorder in a whole spectrum of addictive disorders. It should be viewed as such and treated as such. As long as the professional psychological community is in denial, the high rate of injury and death among homosexuals will continue.
UPDATE:
Here's a shocker. Everything I've documented above is now confirmed in this meta-study
The belief that sexual orientation is an innate, biologically fixed human property—that people are ‘born that way’—is not supported by scientific evidence....
Non-heterosexual and transgender people have higher rates of mental health problems (anxiety, depression, suicide), as well as behavioral and social problems (substance abuse, intimate partner violence), than the general population. Discrimination alone does not account for the entire disparity.Jason Hill, a homosexual man writing in the Federalist, agrees that the homosexual lifestyle revolves around addiction.
Promiscuous sex and drug use are not exceptional or marginalized currents in gay culture. They are an omnipresent force in every register, crook, and cranny of the gay world. The new and disturbing “Poz Me” trend merging in gay culture needs to be nationally discussed. This culture consists in underground online sites where gay men who are HIV negative hook up with men who are not and beg to be “breeded” by HIV-positive men.
And this Townhall article provides even more information and links.
Considering the above non-biased, replicated, empirical and irrefutable scientific facts, its little wonder that an earlier study in the International Journal of Epidemiology (IJE), determined the “life expectancy at age 20 years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 20 years less than for all men.”
UPDATE:
Homosexual "marriage" doesn't improve health outcomes. Which is no surprise, given that homosexuality is itself an addictive disorder.
UPDATE:
Cambridge study affirming disproportionately poor impulse control, mental disorders and eating disorders.
Cambridge study affirming disproportionately poor impulse control, mental disorders and eating disorders.
Conversion therapy REDUCES suicide (by up to 80%), just as I indicated above.
UPDATE:
Here is a BMJ letter confirming that homosexuality is an obsessive-compulsive disorder
Here is PubMed study that reached the same conclusion: "Conclusion: Same-sex sexuality is associated with impulsive/compulsive behavior and addiction."
Here is another study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, reaching the same conclusion
American Addiction Centers reach the same conclusion.
Healthy Life Recovery, same conclusion.
List of Links
List of Links
https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/eating-disorders-lgbt-populations
http://www.lung.org/assets/documents/tobacco/lgbt-issue-brief-update.pdf
http://pride-institute.com/programs/lgbt-treatment/lgbt-alcohol-addiction/
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/drug-use-seven-times-higher-among-gays-8165971.html
http://www.napafasa.org/resources/PGP.Problem%20Gambling%20and%20the%20Lesbian,%20Gay,%20Bisexual%20and%20Transgender%20Community%20Rev.11.0322.pdf
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/a-same-sex-domestic-violence-epidemic-is-silent/281131/
https://americanaddictioncenters.org/lgbtqiapk-addiction/gay
https://americanaddictioncenters.org/lgbtqiapk-addiction/crystal-meth-addiction-gay-community
http://www.wiarsonhotline.org/pdfs/2012%2006%20WAIC%20Newsletter.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefighter_arson
https://www.tumblr.com/flamingzine/106742594029/flaming-a-queer-arson-zine-is-finally-here-did
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/oct/24/3
http://dailysignal.com/2016/08/22/almost-everything-the-media-tells-you-about-sexual-orientation-and-gender-identity-is-wrong/
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