You know. If they weren't trying to kill one another in a gruesome fashion I'm pretty sure all the heroic spirits would probably be okay with one another. Although they all have different ways to going about things they still generally believe what they are doing is right.
In a weird way its the Holy Grail that really compromises their decisions.
That is kind of how all warfare and conflict works out. On a personal level, most people can get along with each other, but we go to war because there is something contested that we all want or need for different reasons.
You go to war because you're mere puppets from the government. All they had to do was pretend they didn't know about 9/11 to raise hate and racism so you all could accept and be sent to combat without hesitation. It worked just fine with Pearl Harbor.
The government is selected by the people. The government is the puppet of the people (just look at how administration policies change with elections) unless you don't participate in politics.
The policy of our defensive response is simple. Attack us and we will attack you. If attacking someone who started the fight is "racist" so be it. Is it hateful? Yes, warfare is won by laying the hate on the enemy until they are no longer a threat. You don't win wars by bending over with presents and hoping retaliation doesn't happen.
Look at Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. They said giving North Korea US nuclear technology would be great, because if our enemies had nukes then they would be friends... and now look at today. NK is now a threat to the world. We were seeing the same failure with the Iranian nuclear deal under Obama. You don't win wars by playing on the enemy's terms. You win wars by forcing the opposition to submit completely, and then using their leaders as your puppet you break down their culture and establish your own.
Look at Japan. We controlled the Emperor and turned Japan into a first world country. Contrast that with the middle east where we kill the leaders and give the power to the "people". They are still savages who kill their own and bite the hand that feeds them. Their culture lacks any tolerance or unity to be able to maintain a free republic like ours. A total war must be fought or it should not be fought at all.
You know. If they weren't trying to kill one another in a gruesome fashion I'm pretty sure all the heroic spirits would probably be okay with one another. Although they all have different ways to going about things they still generally believe what they are doing is right.
In a weird way its the Holy Grail that really compromises their decisions.
Except that the list of "heroes" includes the likes of holy warriors who specifically fought wars of religion like Joan of Arc, along with tons of pagans like Gilgamesh or even outright pagan "monsters" or "witches" like Medea, people who personally loathed one another and spent much of their lives fighting one another like Edison and Tesla, as well as there being the likes of Genghis Khan whose idea of lovin' involved kidnapping thousands of women and forcing them into concubinage to the point where he had so many children 8% of Asians have his DNA, and oh yeah, quite a number of characters who are basically unthinking machines of destruction like Tiamat.
The government is selected by the people. The government is the puppet of the people (just look at how administration policies change with elections) unless you don't participate in politics.
The policy of our defensive response is simple. Attack us and we will attack you. If attacking someone who started the fight is "racist" so be it. Is it hateful? Yes, warfare is won by laying the hate on the enemy until they are no longer a threat. You don't win wars by bending over with presents and hoping retaliation doesn't happen.
Look at Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. They said giving North Korea US nuclear technology would be great, because if our enemies had nukes then they would be friends... and now look at today. NK is now a threat to the world. We were seeing the same failure with the Iranian nuclear deal under Obama. You don't win wars by playing on the enemy's terms. You win wars by forcing the opposition to submit completely, and then using their leaders as your puppet you break down their culture and establish your own.
Look at Japan. We controlled the Emperor and turned Japan into a first world country. Contrast that with the middle east where we kill the leaders and give the power to the "people". They are still savages who kill their own and bite the hand that feeds them. Their culture lacks any tolerance or unity to be able to maintain a free republic like ours. A total war must be fought or it should not be fought at all.
OK, taking this one thing at a time...
Government is only selected by the people in democracies, which is not at all universal, as your allusions to dictators in the Middle East already admits. Even then, there are "democracies" like, say, Iran or Russia where the ballots are openly stuffed. Even with a fair election, government is still only operating with the consent of a plurality of the people, and that's presuming no corruption... Oh, and we could also talk about disenfranchisement, such as, say, the fact that the American Electoral College was built specifically to allow for slave states to have more power, since slaves would count as 3/5ths of a person for population, but they couldn't be allowed to vote, so the system was built specifically to make slave owners have more votes than free Northerners, much less the slaves whose votes were being subsumed by their owners.
So... if someone mentions the 9/11 and the Iraq War, you say "attack us, and we will attack you"... You DO realize Iraq never attacked the United States, right? You know, most of the 9/11 hijackers were actually Saudis, but we're allies with them, and Iraq was blamed because Bush was planning the Iraq war before he even took office, etc. All those proven facts anyone who isn't stewing in the exact propaganda Rom Collector is talking about would already know, right?
As for Japan, what, you think Japan had all those battleships and carriers and such they fought World War 2 with out of bamboo while they were living in straw-roof huts? Japan made itself a first-world nation. Read the part on Import Replacement here, which covers some fair good deal on why Japan could make itself into a first-world nation because of its lack of natural resources. The easiest way to start explaining why nations with lots of oil, such as much of the Middle East, Venezuela, and Russia have crippled economies and brutal dictators is with the Oil Curse.
And, what, you think the Iraq war wasn't lesson enough of what happens when you think war is about nothing but making sure your tanks get to the enemy command center like some sort of RTS? Winning a war is far easier than winning the peace that comes after it, and that mentality you're showing is exactly the thinking that created the problems that caused Iraq to become the quagmire it ultimately became. For as much as the Iraq War was not a war that needed to be fought, the insurgency that came afterwards was not inevitable, and was brought about specifically because of the lack of foresight into winning the peace, and a total disinterest in understanding the nuances of the powers that be in the region... exactly the same line of thought you're arguing.
If you want to overthrow the dictators and destroy the culture of the Middle East, all you need to do is invest in solar power. The instant renewable energy becomes cheaper than gasoline is the instant the house of cards falls. Especially for someone who comments on and reads about Kantai Collection, you should realize that economics, industrial capacity, and the capacity to mobilize it determine the outcome of wars far more than mere war machines.
"Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics." - Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC (Commandant of the Marine Corps) noted in 1980
That's the thing. Everything is US even for wars you weren't yet born, then everything is THEM for all the things you don't want to be associated with or you feel the loses. If you are going to cover that lack of self confidence by siding always to the winning team (after it won), at least be concise and accept everything. YOU are Obama, YOU are Clinton, YOU are Vietnam, YOU are the one who gave nuclear missiles to Korea. Don't be a coward and man up. But maybe I'm asking too much for a Japanese descendant who feels white and asks for your nationality first to condition any good doing. It's not different to a president descendant from Germany who's daughter sells merchandise factored in China. Yes I know, this one is another "fake news" even if you could take the same source of information to talk against Obama or Hilary.
It doesn't matter who you elect, they won't ask for your permission to press the big red button. But that doesn't worry you because as long as you can pretend to side with the winning team, then you will always say US like a bot without own will and independence.
The electoral college was not designed for slave states, but to prevent large states from overpowering the opinion of smaller states. This overwhelmingly is the agreed purpose of the electrical college by historians. Additionally, the electoral college would actually favor non-slave western states which were far lower in population than many of the slave states and eastern states in general. One thing to keep in mind is that the protection against disenfranchisement is an amendment, not what the founders indented. Voting was not considered a right because voting was considered something you earned by being invested in the country in some way such as owning land. If everyone could vote such as those who were poor, then these voters would be voting based on their own benefit not for the good of the country. We can see the results of this today where politicians buy votes by promising free things. This has turned the election into a spending contest where victory depended on who can buy out the most strategic lobby, until Trump came along. Anyways, my point being is that participating in politics and promoting the representative we like is how we choose our government. We do so by a republic, where the mobs opinion does not immediately override the opinion of a minority which may be separate but collectively as important as the rest of the country. As an example, a city that is prone to similar thinking cannot override and dictate the government for the few farmers in the countryside. Sure, we may feel like the outcome of elections are out of our hands, but we have to realize that there are many people in this country and the total power is split among us. Ultimately though our vote does have an impact in deciding the government that is established from the outcome.
Bush said that there were things going on in the world that could not be released due to national security and he would not release it just for political gain. There is a much bigger picture that only those who were there fully understand. Right now the mainstream media says there was no relation of Iraq against the US, but they also said that there were no WMDs there either. Today we do have reports that there were nerve agent casualties in Iraq that Bush did not release, even though that would have lessened a lot of the scrutiny he received during his time as president. The thing people don't realize is that there really aren't intelligence "experts". We all are trained in how information is gathered and how it is disseminated into intel but one analysis cannot simply be given redacted reports and "know" the context. This kind of secrecy is present even in mundane stuff like law enforcement. Everything is on a need to know basis, and one of our jobs as the ones on the front with the adversary is that what we see and hear is not the same as what the higher ups know. Any information we gather is immediately disseminated by an analyst and depending on the context of our presence, it is stripped and pieced together with other information with only what is necessary to help the leaders make a decision. It is done this way to protect the guys in the field, and to prevent guys on the other side from anticipating what we intended by gathering the information. The guys who show up on TV or interviews are not the same as the guys who know the big picture, they only have the conclusions made after the fact, not the details that lead up to that conclusion. The western world is a scapegoat for many of the Arabs, it would not surprise me that we went into Iraq for more than oil (after all, we were not hurting for oil and actually let countries like China mine in our seas, and we would not pay for the oil, we would just seize it).
As far as Carter and Clinton, I am aware of the what was negotiated. That does not conflict with what I said. You don't get your enemy to comply by bearing gifts, but by intimidating or forcing them into submission. What did NK do with that money? Fund arms research among other things. You don't give a country that wants to reach WMDs money which allows them to do so, especially a poor country like NK which would be severely hampered by a lack of funding. Even if you take it at face value, the negotiation failed anyways as NK broke off from the negotiations and is currently researching their ICBM technology. Iran is smart, they did the negotiations with Obama in a carbon copy of what Korea did. Give us money for "energy" development and we "promise" we won't develop CBRN weapons.
Japan became a first world nation because of outside influence. Certainly the Japanese are innovative but they were severely hampered by civil issues. Commodore Perry was a big start in Japan's "modernization" (of course other countries established trade first, but Perry's military might show had a big effect in waking the Japanese people up from isolationism. From here on through WWI until the start of WWII, our intercultural exchange had a huge impact on raising Japans industry. We didn't help just Japan either. Russia's industry post revolution has roots from our aid in teaching them conventional mass production techniques. We helped a lot of countries out due to FDR's idea that the US should be the leader of the world (something I disagree with, the US should only intervene in my opinion if it pertains to US interests only). Post war General Douglas MacArthur and his staff raised Japan from the more totalitarian empire into more like our republic.
Winning the peace certainly isn't done by giving the power back to the people who you fought. That is the mentality that caused Iraq to have problems. One of the start was Bush's claim that Islam was a peaceful religion and we are suffering from that statement even now where people are conflicted as to who the "terrorists" and our enemy is. Winning peace is done by having the people live under the previous leaders direction but under our dictatorship in order to quell any revolutions, and then slowly giving back power over years when they demonstrate compliance. Again, Japan is the example of how it is done right. Don't kill the leaders, use them. The goal is not to overthrow or punish the dictators, but to incorporate them into your own goal. Killing the leaders as we have been doing gives rise to splinter cells that make it harder to unite into a country. Vietnam became such a screw up largely because Kennedy imitated the coup of the Diem government that was in our pocket. With no domestic establishment to rally behind, the pro-western Vietnamese were left helpless against the Vietcong. A fictional example is Code Geass. Remember when the Princess Cordila or whoever was serving as the inbetween of the US of Japan and Britannia? If you can control a factions leader you can wipe away a great deal of current and future resistance as most people by default are with the establishment no matter what form it may be.
Renewable energy is non-existent. All energy is finite. There is plenty of petroleum in the world and far more than the very conservative estimates that we were give in the 90s. But regardless, even if nuclear power was more widespread it would not end the Arab conflicts as this is not a war of resources, but one of ideology. We have a faction of people (whose spread is debated) that wants to kill us and anyone associated with us. So long as that drive exists, our drive to fight back against them will continue.
Economics and warfare are tied together, one is not more important than the other. Without the infrastructure of course a military cannot operate. However, Without a military, our country's wealth can be stolen.
First, in the quote he said tactics not strategy. Tactics are like how you organize men and shoot a gun etc. Strategy is what we are talking about. Logistics is certainly important, but he did not mean everything else is useless. You have to know the fundamentals before you can run as a professional. It is the horse's nail. We have the best logistical setup where we can airlift men, supplies or gather information nearly anywhere in the world in less than 24 hour notice, but without the a sound strategy with which to use those supply lines, you are beating a dead horse. It is just like the intelligence field. You can have the roughest and strongest men with the most powerful of equipment, but if you don't have clear actionable intelligence to give them a solid objective and contingency, the fighters are essentially inert.
rom_collector said:
Funny how for someone like you who supposedly abhors racism, you manage bring my race to try and validate your argument. White people are not the only people who have patriotism in this country or in any other country. My ethnicity has no impact on which flag I defend. If I did not like this country I would have left and worked for another. I choose this country because I believe it has the best governmental system available and I like the values and people this country promotes.
The people of a country have the responsibility to back their country, or change their country or move to another country. Every country must stand for their own interests and no citizen has the right to declare immunity from the conflict that erupts. We are all invested in the country we reside.
If I were as blind with nationalism as you say I would be 100% behind every leader of the US and every single thing we did. However, I clearly have opposition to how Obama and Clinton negotiated those deals. I did not vote for either one and I was not the one who did what they did. However, my vote is not supreme and I am not king (I'm sure you would not like that, right?). The country voted for Obama and Clinton, and yes, even Trump. However, we are free to disagree with policy (as a semi-related note, people are not free to riot and use terrorism to force feared compliance to your opinion as rioters today are doing, that is not freedom of speech, that is suppressing another's speech). I voted for Trump because I think he has the best plan for this country. This time I happened to win. Next time I may not. However, the only consequence I am responsible for is for my own actions, not the actions of another person of which I have no authority over, and certainly not for someone I didn't vote for. That said, as I said in the reply to NWsiacB, votes DO matter and do change policy and even rule of law.
One year later and this video finally explains the reason behind this fan art.
I thought it was obvious from the artist comment. Then again, why most of Syatey's works have no artist comment when most of the FGO thing are very context heavy?