instant classics.

Lord of War is one, IMHO. however not very popular.

but she loves the walking dead! when gore/violence is too close to reality, or historical reality, it is on a different level. i get it.

are you sure you aren't my GF? lol. It took a lot of convincing to get her to watch django or inglorious bastards for the same reason. having grandparents in the holocaust will do that to you.

It was and is an extension of the samurai traditions. But, ironically, the kamakazi were simply crappy pilots...

Well, Schindler's list was a great movie that told an amazing story. Rabe's story is very similar yet not a single hollywood movie has been made about any of the events in Nanking '38 - '45.

1 in 3 pow's were killed under japanese rule. 1 in 25 under nazi rule. good point. good book too, i highly recommend it.

Look up John Rabe. Freakin' Nazi protecting chinese citizens because the Japanese were so brutal. He even took film and diaries back to Germany during the war and sent them to Hitler, hoping he could coerce the Japanese into stopping.

no offense taken. I just finished the book, coincidentally, so this entire debate is very fresh in my head. To put into perspective, the death toll of the Rape of Nanking exceeds that of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki death tolls combined.

War is disgusting and produces disgusting human behavior (think abu grabass, atomic bombs etc etc). However rarely in war has systematic abuse and disgusting human behavior been so widespread and sanctioned from above as it was for Germany and Japan during WWII. The only difference is that the Japanese got away with it, and are to this day covering it up.

A small part of the reasoning/ability for this cover up initially was that the US needed a strong and stable japan as a barrier to the commie Russians and Chinese. That isn't the case anymore.

Gang raping pregnant women and then slicing open their stomachs to throw the babies onto bayonets is more emblematic of the situation than 200,000 forced comfort women...

Dropping two atomic bombs on a people was the result of the way they waged war.

Read The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang. You will find it very easy to disagree with the Mayor.

Imagine if Germany systematically covered up their nation's role in WWII.

"Newly minted Finance Minister Yair Lapid, hugely popular for opposing the long-standing preferential treatment enjoyed by the religious minority, is moving swiftly to slash state handouts to large families, compel lifelong seminary students to work and join the army, and remove funding for schools that don't teach math, science and English."

It's changing, politically, albeit slowly. But at least it's happening.

It's because many people make choices not based on reason, but instead through indoctrination.

We have many of these types in the US, but they are impotent for the most part because there are far more people that utilize reason. Think WBC. Or even US muslims. The number one reason we haven't suffered many small scale attacks, such as the boston bombings, is for the most part due to the reasonable muslim population that lives here and doesn't stand for that crap.

One can't reason the reasons for people without reason choosing to do what they choose. It's like explaining to Danni that everything bad/good doesn't follow party lines. Futile.

This is the type of indoctrinated, uneducated idiot that I referred to:

'If they are going to kill him, I don't care,' she told CNN of Dzhokhar.
'My oldest one is killed, so I don't care. I don't care is my youngest one is going to be killed today. I want the world to hear this. And I don't care if I am going to get killed too. And I will say Allahu akbar!'
While Dzhokhar was reportedly injured from a self-inflicted gun shot wound as he sought to hide from police in a boat parked in a backyard, his mother said she does not believe this account.
'You know what I think? I think now they will try to make my Dzhokhar guilty because they took away his voice, his ability to talk to the world... They did not want the truth to come out.'

Until we adopt sharia law in this country and stop having any international presence/influence, there will always be SOME example used to indoctrinate uneducated idiots into doing the bidding of their masters. F'em.

And did Danni just write that we should have prolonged vietnam?? you're an odd one.

And our gov has turned to BS due to a lazy population, IMHO. It's hard to keep the populace at attention because it gets lonely and boring at the top.

"responded like lightning" must be code for "suffered incredibly inflated casualties simply due to very shoddy construction, mostly schools".

Possibly another side effect of having over 1.6B people and only embracing capitalism recently, granted.

By friend from BJ likes the boat analogy, you have to give the gov props for keeping such a heavy load afloat, all the while soaring economically. But it's only a matter of time before many more ai weiwei like people come on the scene. Hopefully a slow and peaceful transition, socially.

It's ironic if you have a negative viewpoint of all pittbulls and at the same time think that you view mainstream media objectively.

103: no.
104: The productive ones. And it's not my cult. Read more carefully. It's not 'revolting', it's the truth.
105: The strategy is stability, when was the last major war in this world? who do we have to thank for that? Pay closer attention. Your third question is more inference-type thinking. The fourth: yes.

110: They are all touchable.

or replace it with 'our military strategy'. Applicable in each semantic.

That's inference-type thinking. Replace 'human race' with 'modern world'. Is that better?

Israel is more valuable to the human race. .

"Israel boasts the highest number of scientists, technicians, and engineers per capita in the world with 140 scientists, technicians, and engineers per 10,000 employees. In comparison, the same is 85 per 10,000 in the United States and 83 per 10,000 in Japan.[3][4][5]
Israeli scientists have contributed to the advancement of agriculture, computer sciences, electronics, genetics, medicine, optics, solar energy and various fields of engineering. Israel is home to major players in the high-tech industry and has one of the world's most technologically-literate populations.[6]"

Hard to counter that one.

And I'm going to my first Passover dinner with an Israeli family Monday. Likely a tad biased. Also the iron dome / bad ass yamakas for cities is pretty cool.

The key word here is oppression. Oppressive cultures are inherently trapped in time. It stifles development and progress, and currently it's the most prevalent in muslim countries. To a lesser degree china, but we all know that's going to change soon, hopefully slowly.

As Yusuf pointed out, it's not muslim culture in general, it's muslim culture within specific oppressive counties. And the oppression, unfortunately, is facilitated through religion. It taints Islam in a major way, and maybe 'westernized' muslims need to take a bigger stance and tackle the issue.

*it is because of their culture.

... regarding japanese bounce back, being non apologetical.. if that's a word.

I don't think it's backpedaling because I pointed out that Khaled is in Cairo and he clearly hasn't had enough influence within his own country when you look at the recent malevolent transition that Egypt has just been through. One could argue that we (the west/US) shares some responsibility for that lack of development due to our support of Mubarak.. that's called an apologist stance.

If Japan was a crap hole right now would the same apologists blame the US? of course. But it isn't because of their culture. Maybe that is the pinpoint, the apologist stance.

In which cultures is the mentality 'my current crappy situation is mostly due to outside forces' the strongest? Muslim culture, american blacks. The Japanese sure as heck didn't and don't think that way, look at where they are now. And they really did get F'd. Jews don't think that way, and now they're taking over the world. Americans sure as heck didn't think that way regarding the british.

Shouldn't the list of outspoken muslim leaders and people championing the death of innocent civilians be shorter than the reciprocal?