It’s a feature not a bug. Which as you point out is insane.
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War is hell and at the time any bombing will always result in extensive civilian casualties. There was no humane way to conduct this war.
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It is an absolute no brainer to find someone whose parent or child died of COVID and have them read Trumps words from the Woodward tapes to him at the debate.
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Biden will say something like “Mr. President, you tried your best with Covid-12 but your best isn’t good enough!!!” Twitter will orgasm at how brave it was and we will all go to bed miserable.
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lmao don’t read this. stephanopolous is so shitty
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STEPHANOPOULOS: You were saying it was going to disappear.
TRUMP: What?
STEPHANOPOULOS: You were saying it was going to disappear.
TRUMP: It is going to disappear. It’s going to disappear, I still say it.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But not if we don’t take action, correct?
TRUMP: No, I still say it. It’s going to disappear, George. We’re going to get back – we’re not going to have studios like this, where you have all of this empty space in between.
I want to see people, and you want to see people. I want to see football games. I’m pushing very hard for Big Ten, I want to see Big Ten open – let the football games – let them play sports.
But no, it’s going to disappear, George, and I say this –
STEPHANOPOULOS: But Dr. Fauci said we have to be prepared for – we have to hunker down. We have to be prepared for a possible second wave.
I understand that you don’t want to panic people, you said you want people to be calm. You’ve often talked about Winston Churchill and FDR, and they did reassure people, they were strong. They did keep people calm.
But they also were straight. They said this war is going to be tough, it’s going to be a real fight, we have to persevere.
TRUMP: When Churchill was on the top of a building, and he said everything’s going to be good, everything’s going to be – be calm. And you have the Nazis dropping bombs all over London, he was very brave because he was at the top of a building. It was very well known that he was standing on buildings, and they were bombing. And he says everyone’s going to be safe.
I don’t think that’s being necessarily honest, and yet I think it’s being a great leader. But he said, you’re going to be safe. Be calm, don’t panic. And you had bombers dropping bombs all over London.
So I guess you could say that’s not so honest, but it’s still a great leader.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So do you think it’s OK to be dishonest?
TRUMP: I’m not looking to be dishonest. I don’t want people to panic. And we are going to be OK. We’re going to be OK, and it is going away. And it’s probably going to go away now a lot faster because of the vaccines.
It would go away without the vaccine, George, but it’s going to go away a lot faster with it.
STEPHANOPOULOS: It would go away without the vaccine?
TRUMP: Sure, over a period of time. Sure, with time it goes away.
STEPHANOPOULOS: And many deaths.
TRUMP: And you’ll develop – you’ll develop herd – like a herd mentality. It’s going to be – it’s going to be herd-developed, and that’s going to happen. That will all happen.
But with a vaccine, I think it will go away very quickly.
STEPHANOPOULOS: We’ve got to take a quick break.
he actually said “turd mentality” but the fake news fixed it to make him look less stupid
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The Uterus Collector? How is that likely real?
There were more humane ways. Once it was understood that firestorms were hard to start not to mention unlikely to meet their goals, the allies could have at least stopped wasting the lives of their own aircrews. The value of war materials destroyed by the bombing was half that of the cost of the airplanes. Again, this is according to Dyson, but for 60 some years after that war, the US paid him and his colleagues to make just those kinds of assessments.
Those youtube clips are short. And if not short enough, here are the transcripts:
Summary
TRANSCRIPT: The place was a collection of Army huts hidden away in a forest on a hill outside High Wycombe, and that’s where the Bomber Command Headquarters was. Sir Arthur Harris was our chief. We saw him driving by every morning in a big limousine while we struggled up the hill on our bicycles, so we were very lowly worms in the organisation. I was then 19 years old when I arrived there, and during the week when I arrived there we bombed Hamburg, and that was the first really successful bombing operation Bomber Command did.
[SS] Successful in the sense that…?
We really destroyed a lot of Hamburg and there was a firestorm and about 40,000 people were killed. So it was the first real success in the sense of - I mean Bomber Harris, who was our chief, whom we always called Bert - Bert had this idea that we would just put the fear of God into the Germans by burning down their cities. That was the idea of the whole campaign. He was just very single-minded that you wouldn’t try to go for military objectives but just burn the place down, and it worked in Hamburg. For the first time, we actually created a firestorm, which meant that it was a fire of really apocalyptic dimensions, quite different from a normal fire. It meant there were winds of a hundred miles an hour and tremendously strong circulation of the flames going hundreds of feet up into the air. For the people who survived it, it was a really terrifying experience, and so it burnt people to death, even in shelters, or asphyxiated them, which otherwise would never happen. So if you had a fire storm you killed tens of thousands of people; if you didn’t have a fire storm, with the same tonnage of bombs you’d only kill a few hundred. So it was an absolutely qualitative difference. So it was Harris’ intention to make fire storms all over Germany. In point of fact we only did it twice: there was just this one time in Hamburg in '43 and then Dresden in 1945 when the war was almost over, and in between we had hundreds of bombing attacks, none of them produced fire storms. But at the time when I arrived, of course the Command was in great joy because finally things worked and we never really found out why it worked in Hamburg and nowhere else. It seems to have been a sort of meteorological accident that you had to have an unstable atmosphere to start with and the bombing was a trigger which set in motion some sort of a big instability which was there already before. I don’t know - I mean, I don’t think anybody understands it to this day. But the failure of the campaign was that we never could do this in Berlin, for example, which was obviously the prime objective.
TRANSCRIPT: What the Command needed, of course, was somebody to tell them that their basic strategy was wrong and that they should stop and start doing something else. That nobody ever did. That’s what Blackett would have done.
[SS] And this was part of the… during World War II, the notion of strategic bombing and winning the war through aerial warfare?
Yes. And of course it worked in Japan and it didn’t work in Germany, and there are many reasons for that, but primarily the reason it worked in Japan was that it was very, very sudden. In Japan the strategic bombing started in March 1945 with overwhelming strength. The B29 force was already very big.
[SS] Would be thousands.
Not thousands, it was only a few hundred - but still the B29 of course carried many more bombs than a Lancaster, and… and so Japan was saturated with bombs within three months. I mean essentially all the Japanese cities were not completely destroyed but very severely damaged in three months. And that really worked. It meant the society was really disorganised and demoralised to a great degree, and then the coup de grace of course, was Hiroshima, but in Germany it was much more gradual. The bombing started seriously in '41 and built up over four years, and the Germans just made very good use of opportunities to build defences which were very good, and the German defences, both passive and active, were just too strong. We never could do what we needed to do. Of course originally we intended to bomb Germany in daylight, but the defences were so strong that we just got shot to pieces, and so then the Command turned to night bombing and the night bombing could never be accurate enough to be particularly harmful. I mean the total damage we did to the Germans was roughly half of what it cost us to build the airplanes, and so it was clearly a waste of resources as far as we were concerned. Apart from 40,000 young men got killed in the planes; and 400,000 got killed on the ground. So it was a total tragedy.
[SS] And you were fully aware of it?
So by the end we were fully aware. I mean, it was Hamburg was… gave us a false impression at first, for a few months after Hamburg I still believed that something like this could work, but it became clear in the winter of '43 we had the Battle of Berlin which was the equivalent of the Battle of Britain. We had repeated heavy maximum effort attacks on Berlin, about twelve attacks, over and over again, with maximum force, and the losses just went up and up and up; each time we’d lose more, and the bombing was more and more scattered on the ground as the defences got better. So by the winter of January, February of ‘44 it was clear that we had failed and if we couldn’t make a fire storm in Berlin then what was the point of the whole thing? And we certainly weren’t hitting the factories and the German weapons’ production was going up constantly all through those times. And so we became, I think, completely aware of this by about March 1944, and from then on it was simply, you did what was the sort of - my job was to save the lives of the bomber crews and that was all I could do. I wasn’t really contributing to the war.
[SS] And you were frustrated in that too…
Right. I mean that was in addition: frustrated by the bureaucracy. One of the reasons we were killing so many of the air crew was that the escape hatches in the bombers were too small, and it was extremely hard for them to crawl out of the escape hatches after they’d been shot, after they had been seriously damaged. So bailing out was in fact very rare. The fraction who successfully bailed out of the planes that were shot down was something like 12%; whereas the Americans, who bombed in daylight, and had larger escape hatches, were saving about 50%; something like 50% of the crews could bail out. So we were losing something like 40% of the crews just because their escape hatches were too small. So a friend of mine, Michael Lochlan, whom I shared the office with, discovered this and he fought a hopeless battle to try to get the escape hatches enlarged and never succeeded before the end of the war.
And the North destroyed a lot of civilian shit in the Civil War. Morality is a tricky proposition in “justified” war. I guess some can argue there is no such thing as a just war but when attacked what is the appropriate response? What about when allies are attacked?
What was the acceptable response to Germany and Japan? To claim anything during that time in terms of tactics is clearly black and white with moral certainty is disingenuous.
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Some people collect uteruses, some people have them. There are winners and losers in every policy choice, it’s complicated.
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“herd mentality” not a lot less stupid
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He was just signaling to all the sheep.
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Gee I wonder what the ONGOING DISCUSSIONS are about
Our president on Churchill. I’m dying. What a history lesson.
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