Donald Trump has been officially declared a loser.

[SteelCurtain]

Is that actually a statistical probability, or something you just made up?

[Anomalocaris]

If trump were to win the White House in 2016, it would be the end of the Goldwater Reagan Republican Party because many of its senators and representatives would have to leave the party to stand a chance in 2018 or 2020.

[bennyboy]

Japan had fucking nuclear bombs dropped on them. Are you really trying to argue that the war wasn't a tragedy for the Japanese as well?

For many Japanese people, yes. For the nation, no. If you stick your dick into a hornets' nest, and you get stung, it's not a tragedy. It's not like Japan was just building rock gardens and folding paper cranes, ya know.

[bennyboy]

FYI, I've been to a museum in Japan depicting their war history, especially conflicts with China, and they responded with the same cruelty in response to Japan, which today, Trump himself has suggested we respond to the same level of brutality as Saddam. Humans can be cruel on all sides. Evolution produces both cruelty and compassion which is why I am not going to devalue the lives lost in those bombs nor the survivors whom lead to my x's family. It happened and it sucked but it is nothing the world should ever repeat.

Japan lies.  Nanking isn't a lie, nor is the experimental torture of prisoners, or the systematic raping of young girls at the front lines by the Japanese military.  If you think there's ANY symmetry between what Japan did to all of Asia, and what little they might have been paid back for, you're a victim of revisionist bullshit history.  Which, of course, is what Japan does.

[bennyboy]

You should be concerned if Germany revised all her secondary school textbooks to say the holocaust never happened, Germany did not invade other countries during WWII but merely "entered" those other countries out of justifiable self defense,  and yes, Germany regrets innocent foreigners suffered, but Germany committed no culpable war crimes and is morally no worse than any other country involved in that war.

Furthermore, the chancellor and members of her cabinet took up making official annual pilgrimages to a shrine housing the remains of hermann goering, Wilhelm keitel, and Heinrich himmler,

and Germany just named a major warship Bismarck, after breaking with long practice of not reusing names of major warships from WWII.

The exact analogue all applies to Japan.

That's right. It's not just that Japan had a hard time losing the war they started, the STILL glamorize their leaders, including obvious and outrageous war criminals, by paying official respects at their tombs, and blatantly lie about the whole war. You don't see the German prime minister laying wreaths at Hitler's tomb, saying it was all Poland's fault. . . and the world would go apeshit if that were the case.

[Anomalocaris]

The other property of the postwar Japanese governance that concerns its East Asian neighbors is the fact that a high percentage of the behind the scene power brokers and leading politicians in the successive postwar Japanese government down to the present came from the same families as politicians who had advocated or supported pre-war Militarization in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as aggressive military posture in the late 1930s and 1940s.   Unlike in Germany, where the Nazi regime came from a different origin than the traditional ruling political, social and economic elite, so preservation of some elements of traditional social, political and economic elite in post war governance do not immediately call to mind the Nazi past; in Japan the militarism of 1920-1940s were largely sponsored by the ruling elite. This created and sustained the sense that pacificism and even the shift to democracy of postwar Japan is a superficial veneer.   The real behind the scene ruling elite in Japan has not changed substantially between 1930s and now, and by inference, if Japan were free to act, her ruling elite would cause her to act according to outlooks similar to those the had long held, since before WWII.

[bennyboy]

Yep, and here is the clincher-- Japan is now expanding its military presence into the seas around it, and contesting islands claimed by Korea and China. Oh yeah. . . and the whaling. This is not the behavior of a nation / people who are deeply respectful of anything or anyone so long as they can get away with it.

[Jehanne]

Is that actually a statistical probability, or something you just made up?

It's a subjective probability; the mathematics is the same for objective probabilities.

[Anomalocaris]

Yep, and here is the clincher-- Japan is now expanding its military presence into the seas around it, and contesting islands claimed by Korea and China.  Oh yeah. . . and the whaling.  

That is a different story.  To be respectful a nation need not yield whenever someone else claims territory it actually controls.   If it does this pretty soon its territory will dwindle down to nothing.

This is not the behavior of a nation / people who are deeply respectful of anything or anyone so long as they can get away with it.

One might just as validly make the same point with respect to China's contemptuous reaction to international court of arbitration's decision that China had no valid claim to waters that are far closer to Philippine and Vietnam than to China, and on which the only occupied Realestate consist of islands the Chinese were able to create out of dredged sand purely because China had a far larger and more powerful navy.

[Thumpalumpacus]

The exact analogue all applies to Japan.

So don't give me the crap about the second not being additional evidence for the legitimacy of the concerns raised by the first, or was not likely done specifically to reinforce the domestic political impact of the first.

The Japanese have been reusing the names of WWII-era ships since 1956, with the Yukikaze. Haruna and Hiei were DDHs commissioned in the 70s, Kongo-class DDs came in service in the 90s.

Given the 50-year policy of reusing these names, I'm highly skeptical that the change in their submarine-naming convention is evidence of anything other than, well, a change in their naming convention.