The Unoriginal Muse

In my limited internet travels I meet some fairly entertaining souls. This particular post was on a thread on a space simulator forum, originally about Puerto Rico’s status. I expect after this exchange it’ll get locked…

This joker popped up after a short discussion about puerto rican customs and people. I deal with people like this on a regular basis, unfortunately…

Update: The response I eventually got was “I can’t be bothered reading your essay.” Not worth dignifying something like that with a response.

Well, I don’t think independence day should be celebrated at all. I think it’s a rather sad day. The day thousands of people were doomed to die or live a hellish life.

This reminds me of a South park episode where the “founding fathers” were arguing weather to go to war with Britain or not. They finally decided that America will be a country which
will always go to war, yet act like it doesn’t want to.

Nagasaki/Hiroshima death toll combined = 340,000
Afghanistan/Iraq death toll combined = 799,896 not counting the other 1,529,439 seriously injured

Grand total of = 1,139,896 deaths

Right, Ok, I read the thread and I left, thinking I should just ignore that. But I can’t let it stand.

You look at those numbers for a moment and think about it. You say that over 1.5 million people have been injured in iraq and afghanistan? Where are they? Not in hospital. Neither country has a particularly good medical infrastructure; over 2 million additional deaths and serious injuries - on top of the usual humdrum of life - would have collapsed them by now.

I know where you gor your figures from. Your figures are based on very dodgy reports that used statistics normally applied to epidemiological studies to determine the likely number of deaths from a particular disease. Find a cluster and assume that it’s a typical representative, find out how many people died from a disease in that cluster and then extrapolate that outward. And of course they didn’t ask who caused the deaths; if you go to Basra or Faluja you’ll obviously find more deaths happening, though how many are caused by the allies and how many are caused by the so-called insurgents is a matter of debate. The mistake lies in first assuming that a cluster of deaths represents an average picture and then assuming that average picture can be applied to the whole of the country. That is a stupid, stupid assumption. Then the mistake is compunded by assuming that faluja, basra and the centre of baghdad are representative of the entire country, forgetting that there has been virtually no fighting in the kurdish north and very little fighting in the west of the country.

There is no evidence. There is speculation but no evidence. I’ve seen trials that were thrown out with far more evidence than those studies supplied. It is, if you’ll excuse my language, a crock of shit.

And that crack about hiroshima just doesn’t deserve answering.

The US fought for independence from us for a very good reason; our king was taxing them but refusing to allow them to be represented in parliament. The colonists had a genuine grievance, believing that they deserved to be allowed representation in parliament if they had to pay for its upkeep. They were right. Our king made a mistake, quite possibly one of the worst mistakes in history, because he lost the huge income that the colonies were bringing to the crown and he lost the potential manufacturing bases. The industrial revolution was just around the corner and the colonies were a huge potential resource, but George didn’t know that. His advisors told him that the colonists would give up eventually. They were wrong.

You may sneer and snipe at them but the US constitution is still one of the finest in the world. I can admire it because I can see the continuity from magna carta and the parliamentary bill of rights, and from the ancient rights we used to enjoy in this nation, inherited from the danes and the jutes. It preserves the essential nature of anglo-saxon individuality and self-determination, however far things may have sunk since then. but you condemn it out of hand, because you can’t see any further than your own petty grievances with a country and an ideal that was, and still is, a beacon of hope for many millions of people.

That south park episode you referred to was trying to express something that we don’t quite understand anymore. The US is a country that still has a very 19th century outlook on life. However individuals within that nation might thing, as a nation it lacks cynicism and and self-doubt. It sees the world in terms of ideals and universal truths (and this is obvious from all sides of the political spectrum). It see’s war as a necessary evil, but that doesn’t make it warlike because it values peace and freedom as things to be held above all. It [i]is[/i] reluctant to go to war, but once in war it will fight until it wins.

Hiroshima was not an act of callous murder but the desperate act of a nation prepared to do anything to bring an end to a war it wanted no part of. The second world war would have lumbered on for another two or three years and would have cost millions more lives; the japanese would not have surrendered. They were prepared to fight to the bitter end for the Emperor.

Iraq and Afghanistan are steps on a path to rid the world of a particular threat, one that sadly goes unnamed. You talk up the civilian deaths without understanding what causes them, and without considering the changes that have been wrought in both nations. In afghanistan women are free to choose their lives again. People can play music and watch films without being shot at for blasphemy. In Iraq there is danger, but it is less than people faced under saddam. People are finally finding out what happened to their loved ones who were tortured and executed under the old regime. They are able to determine their own future. These are simple things, but they are part of freedom.

But you don’t care about that. You’d rather see europe under the communist thumb. You’d rather see the middle east subsumed in to the greater Iraq, as was saddam’s plans when he invaded kuwait. You’d rather see the entire korean peninsula, and probably all of south-east asia under communist rule. You’d rather the japanese were allowed to ravage the pacific for their empire. You’d see Israel conquered, the last hope of the jewish people burned and destroyed. You see I’ve read history. We owe so much to the united states. They are by no means perfect; nobody ever claimed they are, but I find them preferable to the alternatives that history had outlined for us.