What is the worst thing the U.S. government has done?

[Billy Beer]

We have military bases in Britain. I think it's pretty clear who fucked up and who didn't.

And the British Armed forces train Americans, in America.

I meant to write empire.
I’ll see if I can draft a little list of medical advancements and technological discoveries, but it’s baffling that you think Britain is clearly superior on that point given what a very large number of inventions came out of the US.

Name the very large inventions because the industrial revolution, TV, Trains, and penicillin aren't exactly small.

The three biggest American inventions I can think of are Ford and the ICE/Mass production, can't knock that. The internet (Ruined by the same country who invented it) and Microsoft/OS's.

 

[FaramirG]

And the British Armed forces train Americans, in America.

Name the very large inventions because the industrial revolution, TV, Trains, and penicillin aren't exactly small.

The three biggest American inventions I can think of are Ford and the ICE/Mass production, can't knock that. The internet (Ruined by the same country who invented it) and Microsoft/OS's.

Britain is clearly the junior partner in its alliance with the US. If the British hadn't been so stubborn in the 1760s/70s they likely hang on to the American colonies and it's the other way around.

 

[DeadwastePrime]

the us government broke into my home and probed by butt and then tried to pin it on booty hungry aliens, but i know the aliens would never do that because theyre cool fam.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

And the British Armed forces train Americans, in America.

Name the very large inventions because the industrial revolution, TV, Trains, and penicillin aren't exactly small.

The three biggest American inventions I can think of are Ford and the ICE/Mass production, can't knock that. The internet (Ruined by the same country who invented it) and Microsoft/OS's.

I don’t disagree that the Industrial Revolution was a big deal.

Television, I have always heard, was invented by an American Philo Farnsworth. Telegram by Morse. Internet I’m actually hesitant to credit to America, likewise anything nuclear, due to the multinational nature of the researchers, but they were developed within the US. Electric DC I’m pretty sure, as well as some early theory of electricity, in the US. MASSIVE agricultural breakthroughs - steel plows, combine harvesters, lots of “Green Revolution” work on GMOs and fertilizers - done in the US. The phonograph. FIXED WING FLIGHT. Multiple inventors of automobile, but first became practical in the US.

British contributions seem, to me, heavily frontloaded in the 1700s and early 1800s. American ones backloaded in the late 1800s and the early 1900s.

 

[Akashic Retard]

WTF Happened In 1971?

"I don't believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can't take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can't stop." - F.A. Hayek 1984…

wtfhappenedin1971.com

 

[Shroom King]

Allowing Nintendo to remove Mike Tyson from Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!

 

[Idiotron]

Probably dropping 2 nukes on a civilian population and murdering millions of innocent people in an instant.
Sure, you can make the excuse that it was war time but still, that has to be the biggest war crime of all time.
Even the Japanese planes which attacked Pearl Harbor did not touch civilians.
There was even talk at the time that detonating an A-bomb would completely destroy out atmosphere so they were basically gambling with the fate of the world.

 

[Troonologist PhD]

Has the US government done anything that isn’t evil or stupid within the past century and a half?

 

[ToroidalBoat]

If the 1960s had played out differently I do honestly think we'd be living in the Jetsons style utopia they dreamed about back then today.

I doubt it. The world is still run by corrupt elite who want to lord it over the "little people". And quite a number of "little people" are jerks and/or blind followers, as this scamdemic has shown us.

So had Vietnam never happened, we'd likely still be living in a cyberpunk dystopia, one way or another.

 

[mr.moon1488]

Failing to provoke Germany to war, and then provoking Imperial Japan to war, and afterward pretending to not have been the aggressor.

 

[HumanHive]

Probably dropping 2 nukes on a civilian population and murdering millions of innocent people in an instant.
Sure, you can make the excuse that it was war time but still, that has to be the biggest war crime of all time.
Even the Japanese planes which attacked Pearl Harbor did not touch civilians.
There was even talk at the time that detonating an A-bomb would completely destroy out atmosphere so they were basically gambling with the fate of the world.

Confirmed retard. Any weapon that brings a conflict to a swifter end is justified. An invasion of the home islands would have been a bloodbath on both sides, and if it was done you’d be sitting here whining about how US GI’s raped and slaughtered their way through the Kanto plains.

 

[L50LasPak]

Operation Northwoods, though we never went through with it, is the basis of like all modern day conspiracy theories and the number one reason nobody will ever trust the CIA. The idea was to stage false flag attacks on US locations and bases and make it look like they were conducted by Cuba, which we would use as pretext for invading Cuba. Just the fact that this plan existed at all is the smoking gun in most people's minds that the CIA can and will fake anything in the name of furnishing a war.

Had Operation Northwoods gone through, it almost certainly would have escalated tensions with the USSR to a breaking point. I'm more or less convinced it would have been the prelude to WW3. JFK in a rare moment of sanity actually considered dismantling the CIA when he found out about it. Which in my opinion he certainly should have, since even on a good day the only thing the CIA actually collects is money.

There was even talk at the time that detonating an A-bomb would completely destroy out atmosphere so they were basically gambling with the fate of the world.

This is a long standing myth. One of the physicists, I believe it was Oppenheimer, did calculate that an atomic explosion could ignite the planet's atmosphere, that much is true. However, when his colleagues checked his work, they found that he had failed to account for heat dissapation. He ran the numbers again and confirmed that an atomic bomb would not ignite the atmosphere, and the first nuclear test was conducted with full understanding that such a thing couldn't happen. The US and USSR governments have done some really idiotic things with nukes, but that wasn't one of them.

 

[Iron Jaguar]

It's a toss up between Emancipation and Suffrage.

 

[Idiotron]

Any weapon that brings a conflict to a swifter end is justified.

Any weapon?
So, for example, if I have a beef with someone and we keep bickering and sometimes getting into fist fights, it's justified for me to burn down his house with him and his family inside it?
It will end this conflict swiftly, I can tell you that.
You're literally justifying genocide of the innocent.

An invasion of the home islands would have been a bloodbath on both sides

And still, a lot less people would die and those who would die would not be civilians for the most part.

 

[ClownBrew]

listened to that fat bipolar alcoholic faggot Churchill

 

[HumanHive]

Any weapon?
So, for example, if I have a beef with someone and we keep bickering and sometimes getting into fist fights, it's justified for me to burn down his house with him and his family inside it?
It will end this conflict swiftly, I can tell you that.
You're literally justifying genocide of the innocent.

More retardation. You are escalating. Houses were already being burned in WW2, America just used one bomb instead of hundreds.

And still, a lot less people would die and those who would die would not be civilians for the most part.

Wrong.
US casualties were estimated at 500,000 during the first few months.
Japanese casualties would have been at genocide levels based on civilian suicides during previous island invasions. The Japanese were training civilians to resist an invasion, with bamboo spears if necessary. It would have been slaughter.

The Atomic Bombings were 100% justified in that circumstance. You are an idiot who sees the word “nuclear” and pisses himself.

 

[George Floyd Sneed]

The 1965 Hart-Celler Act. Nothing else comes close.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Your mom.

 

[Drain Todger]

Without a doubt, the Phoenix Program. The CIA went around torturing and assassinating suspected VCs in Vietnam. And when I say torture, I mean, y'know. Basically having South Vietnamese assets rape people, and stuff.

Phoenix Program - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electric shock ('the Bell Telephone Hour') rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; the 'water treatment'; the 'airplane' in which the prisoner's arms were tied behind the back, and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair, after which he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; the use of police dogs to maul prisoners.

>tfw you will never be MACV SOG, roaming through the jungle with face paint on and no body armor, fellow hardened SF guys at your side
>tfw you will never deliver a screaming Vietnamese woman to a black site and watch interrogators stuff a live eel up her cooter while attaching a rotary phone magneto to her nipples and cranking real hard

The worst part? Most of the people they raped, tortured, and murdered were completely innocent, according to the CIA’s own files.

https://www.mcall.com/opinion/mc-phoenix-program-vietnam-denton-borhaug-yv-0923-20160922-story.html

According to the CIA's own unique database of this program, at least 38 innocent people were victimized for every Viet Cong agent, and 4.7 innocent people were killed for every Viet Cong agent. In all, over 73,697 Vietnamese were targeted, and at least 15,438 people were killed. (Rejali emphasizes that these figures may be much higher.)

Only 1 out of 38 people detained and 1 in 5 killed was VC. I'm sure that tales of indiscriminate rape and murder didn't make anyone bitter at the US and increase their VC sympathies.

 

[L50LasPak]

Any weapon?
So, for example, if I have a beef with someone and we keep bickering and sometimes getting into fist fights, it's justified for me to burn down his house with him and his family inside it?
It will end this conflict swiftly, I can tell you that.
You're literally justifying genocide of the innocent.

Under the doctrine of Total War, all assets of the enemy are considered a valid target, especially civillians. Japan certainly didn't disagree with this doctrine at all, considering what they did to China and the Philipines.

Japan also had their own weapons of mass destruction.

Spoiler: Japan had their own weapons of mass destruction

The purpose of Unit 731 was to breed bioweapons, specifically new strains of smallpox and the bubonic plague, as a weapon that could be carried to the United States (and presumably China, eventually). Unit 731 was also the first bioweapons laboratory to cultivate anthrax for use as a weapon, and when it was captured by the Soviets it became the basis for their bioweapons program. Two Japanese weapons, the balloon bomb and the tremendous I-400 supersubmarine, the largest submarine ever constructed by any nation at the time, were both directly built to be delivery mechanisms for biological weapons.

The balloon bombs were a simple method of attaching explosives to weather balloons and letting wind currents carry them over the United States. The American government actually censored the existence of the balloon bombs including the fact that they touched off a forest fire and burnt some farmer's house down, specifically to give the Japanese the impression that they were a failure, because we knew about that bioweapons program and that the balloon bombs could very easily be modified to carry plague. It worked, and the Japanese switched to the I-400 submarine.

The I-400 submarine was so large that it had a hangar capable of both launching and recovering up to three seaplanes. All three seaplanes could carry small payloads. The range of the I-400 and its aircraft was such that the submarine could easily slip past US defenses in the Pacific (we weren't even aware the first one was operational yet) and bomb cities on the western coast of the United States. Japan was prepared and fully willing to use their bioweapons on US soil as a last ditch attempt to get them to abandon the war. The atomic bombs were dropped only a few months later. Once they were, there was a direct communication to Japan that any use of their biological weapons would result in swift and total retaliation.

Those plagues could have killed and debilitated millions. Its safe to assume Japan would have also unleashed them on China as well had they started with the United States. Had this occurred, there would have been no X-Day. The airforce would have simply dropped atomic bomb after atomic bomb on the islands until there was no Japan left to surrender. I call the two atomic bombings we did get a bargain.