I was engaging with a collective in the US, and they seemed to be wishing for a global revolution; so excommunication would not be an option like the Kulaks unless the idea is to remove them from Earth.
I guess I can't judge all collectives when I only engaged with one (go figure, right). I appreciate you taking the time to share information with me. It was enlightening.
This is a fair point, but a general premise to Marxism is a bloody revolution where the working class takes the assets from capitalist bosses. Perhaps some Marxist are interested in alternative methods, but the group of communist members with which I was able to discuss this topic with were not concerned with that.
They demonized and dehumanized capitalist and talked about them as if they were not worth saving, and it was this kind of rhetoric that turned me off from their cause.
Though, it was also their rhetoric which presumed racism and sexism would be solved if we all just view eachother as workers. This seemed to underplay the effects these caste systems have on people.
Is it possible that there is a better a solution to the issues of Capitalism which doesn't involve the liquidation of entire groups of people?
Being a person who have visited communist meetings, this is my biggest gripe with the ideology. Yes, capitalism today has become corrupted, perhaps even beyond repair. But, I refuse to believe that the only solution is to round up and kill the capitalist bosses in order to bring back power to the working class. At this point, we would be dehumanizing an entire group of people which wouldn't make us much better than what the far-right does.
The Japanese were attempting to negotiate surrender with the "neutral" USSR prior to the nuclear bombs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan The US wanted an unconditional surrender which included the destruction of the Japanese emperor, who at the time, was the head of the Japanese religion. To put this into perspective, consider the United States request similar to requesting the destruction of the Pope within the Vatican. Because of this, the Japanese were seeking better terms of surrender which did not involved the removal of their religious leader. What the Japanese did not know at the time was the USSR was not a neutral party, and they were secretly mobilizing their forces on mainland Asia due to an agreement Stalin made with FDR prior to the US entering the war in Europe.
The reality is, once Japan learned that the USSR was not neutral and they were going to be fighting the US and the USSR in a two front war, this is when the emperor forced Japan to surrender.
To put things into perspective, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were sadly, just another two cities leveled by the US. The US were performing night carpet bombing on Japanese cities as soon as 1944. Many of these raids leveled several square km of urban areas. https://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=217. This is why people argue that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were probably not the catalyst to Japan's surrender because the US have been leveling Japanese cities, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens, long before the two nuclear bombs were dropped. None of these raids caused Japan to surrender before.
That's pretty cool that you did archery at a national level.
Respectfully, I still think that I am correctly interpretting the information on the Wikipedia links sourced above. I'm basing my conclusion off two pieces of evidence. The longbow wiki page linked above mentions that longbows existed in "many cultures", and there is a separate Wikipedia page for the English Longbow. This pushes me to conclude that there is a symantical difference between the two terms, "longbow" and "English Longbow" though many people assume the latter when the former is mentioned.
Very interesting indeed. Thanks for sharing. I'm just pointing out that people are assuming "English Longbow" when saying "longbow". Which, to be fair to these folks, the English Longbow is likely the most famous longbow in history. Nevertheless, even the Wikipedia page sourced above mentions that longbows existed in "many cultures" and there is a separate Wikipedia page for the English Longbow. This pushes me to conclude that there is a symantical difference between the two terms, "longbow" and "English Longbow" though many people assume the latter when the former is mentioned.
Reading your links, the correction you made seems semantically insignificant. Yumi is the word for "bow" in Japanese and longbows describe bows that are long. Longbows are not unique to the English, and there are a lot of bows that can be described as longbows. So my point is, if samurais used yumis that are long (which some did) then saying they used longbows is not incorrect. Nevertheless, thank you for letting us know what the Japanese called their bows, it was educational.
The big bang (if it is still a valid theory) would have been unlike any explosion you have ever witnessed. The big bang was not an explosion of only matter, since time and space were both created during this event as well.
The smartphone is a different beast. Hardware and software companies spent millions of dollars of R&D to create the most psychologically addicting and attention demanding device as possible.