Name a large country that doesn’t have mass civilian casualties in it’s past.

Is the argument supposed to be that everyone else is also bad so it doesn’t matter? Because I don’t agree with that reasoning, you can still find something objectionable even if other bad stuff also happens.

The guys who conducted experiments for Japan on living Chinese victims are also bad. The guys who armed and equipped the Taliban are also bad. The people that trained and armed the Contras, very bad. The guys who build weapons for Israel are also bad. It’s not a contradiction, there are plenty of other people who also have earned some sort of just retribution for the things they enabled.

I didn’t draw the US out of my hat, they came up because of the article in the link.

If you really want to put the US in a bad light you should mention that the US did a hell of a lot more damage to Japanese cities with conventional bombs than nukes.

Of course. I’m not the one who was saying only everyone else’s nuclear weapons matter, though, you’re the one who needs to prove that somebody else has a worse record on this. You can’t do that though so you’re pivoting to… I guess yeah they also killed a lot of civilians with conventional weapons? I’m not disputing that though, I think most of the people the US kills are killed with conventional weapons. My original point was that the US goes around hurting humanity because it is an unquestionable nuclear power. The nukes are deterrence to keep everyone else in line.

You might also want to consider that the question of whether Japan actually had non-combatants is debatable.

Or that I guess, can’t kill civilians if all the children in Hiroshima were combatants? Yeah that’s a sane approach, definitely makes the US position seem really reasonable.

That kind of logic can justify unlimited violence. It’s not debatable that civilians lived in Japan.

Look, I know you’re defensive of your country or whatever. But this is really some wild justification you’re attempting here, at the point where the defense is “everyone committed mass murder but also it’s possible that every single person in two cities deserved to be vaporized by a nuclear bomb” we need to take a step back and reconsider how we got here.

Or I’m just edgy and misinformed or whatever. But I think you’re relying on a lot of canned lines and not thinking about what happened in a neutral light. If anyone else (say, Israel? Saudi Arabia?) claimed they could kill everyone in an area because there weren’t any civilians we would all recognize that for what it is.

You are not misinformed because you don’t have access to the correct information, you are misinformed because you choose to be myopic because you think that makes you edgy or clever.

I think we just disagree about what the US is justified in doing to the rest of the world. I’m trying to meet you partway here but my guess is this is the actual divide and there’s not really anything I could argue that would affect that belief you have.