Managed to survive another Thunder Over Louisville yesterday! Most people I've been around in a very long time, they were expecting a crowd in the neighborhood of 800,000. My camera was on the fritz but I still managed to get a few shots I like. This first photo is an F-100 Super Sabre.
My autofocus decided to be temperamental, half the time it couldn't even focus on large stationary objects like bridges, much less jets. The heat could be to blame, we set a record high temperature for Thunder at 87F (30C). Didn't seem to bother these A-10s though.
Attempted to shoot on manual and also tried manually focusing before shooting with autofocus on but neither were particularly successful. With the latter method I could have a plane in focus or nearly so and trip the shutter, only to have the autofocus take it completely out of focus, after which it would sometimes even refuse to focus on the Ohio River bridge in the background. Anybody ever have this happen to them? I haven't used this lens in a while but didn't have these problems the last time I took it to Thunder. I wonder how the autofocus works in this AC-130 gunship?
To make things even more frustrating about halfway through the air show my camera decided to have a complete meltdown. Went to look at a photo and all it would display was an hourglass. Tried turning it off and back on but toggling the power switch repeatedly did exactly nothing. Had to pull the damn battery to get it to turn off. That straightened it out a bit, although the autofocus was still cranky. Speaking of cranky, how salty do you think the jet jockeys were when these A-1 Skyraiders showed them up at close air support?
Even with the camera conniptions we still had a blast. B-29 Superfortresses like this one were responsible for a different sort of blast, they're what dropped the nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wonder if we'd call that a war crime if the Russians did the same to Kharkiv and Odesa?
To beat the rush we dipped out as the sun was going down but we still managed to see the heliplane V-22 Osprey before we left. Pretty sure that is just the thing I need to be able to fulfill my childhood dream of becoming a treetop flyer...
😃loving it, thanks for steering me over to these!
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were definitely war crimes. So was the campaign of firebombing dozens of German and Japanese civilian population centers before that. The politicians are good at bombing non-combatants when they want to wage war.
That says it all. Much as I hate to admit politicians are good at anything.
The worse something is for us, the better they are at doing it.
Perspective is a bitch isn't it. The general American public seems pretty okay with the fate of Iraqis, Afghanis, Palestinians, and the like at the hands of the US government. But the second a competing superpower decides to do the exact same shit to a different people group then all of a sudden that's all you're hearing about. 🤷♂ P.S. Nice photos as usual despite an apparently uncooperative camera :)
Ain't it though? Apparently the Russians have the same 'we're the good guys, we wouldn't do something like that' mindset as Joe Schmo. Guess there's no monopoly on exceptionalism.
Thanks! Several of these were the only good photos I got of that particular aircraft.
Japan was the belligerent party.
Indeed. What's that got to do with the inconsistency in applying the term 'war crime' to the mass slaughter of civilians?
Hiroshima was the answer to a trolley problem: destroy a good part of an industrial city with tens of thousands of civilian deaths, demonstrating the power to obliterate Japan if their government did not surrender, or invade the mainland resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties and many US infantry casualties. Not to mention the horrors that partial Stalinist USSR occupation would have brought on the people of Japan, with the complex and deadly political splits that we saw play out in Germany and Korea.
The quick followup of using Fat Man on Nagasaki was arguably a war crime. With the benefit of hindsight, we should have given them more than three days to consider what it meant to continue war with a country that had nuclear weapons.
In the case of Russia invading Ukraine, Russia is the belligerent. The US did not start the war with Japan but it needed to finish it. Developing and using a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima in the effort to bring the war to a close with less casualties on both sides was probably the best course of action. It would have been much worse if the war had carried on with the status quo.
And speaking of Russia/USSR, dropping the bomb was also a measure of keeping peace by putting them in check. There was a justified concern that the Soviet Union wouldn't have waited long to keep expanding West into the rest of Europe after the war.
I got virtually the same apologia in public school. Problem is, it's more self serving than accurate, a nice example of the ends justifying the means. You're also missing the point I was making or at least arguing a different one.
When is it ethical to knowingly/deliberately kill civilians?
Bear in mind that civilians in countries with despotic/authoritarian regimes have even less say in the actions of their government than do the citizens of the 'enlightened' democracies that are usually doing the bombing. At the end of the day it's still killing everyday people like you or me who are just trying to survive and live their lives.
Tactical necessity and/or hastening the end of the war is the default defense for 'collateral damage'. Thing is, there's nothing you can't justify with that. Hence "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” and other absurdities.
Hell, Curtis LeMay himself said "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." All I'm saying is let's hold everybody to the same standards.
PS Ever read about the 'laws of war'? If you enjoy the absurd, they're good to read about, just what was and wasn't acceptable in warfare at various points in time and how that's changed over the centuries. At one point, if a city didn't immediately submit to an army it was perfectly acceptable for the army to rape, loot, pillage and slaughter the inhabitants.
LeMay was likely referring to all of the firebombing he conducted. It was Hiroshima that truly ended the war though. And of course Dresden was a horrible war crime committed against civilians too. Not that two wrongs make a right, but nothing the US or other Western allies did was comparable to atrocities committed by the Germans, Japanese, and Soviets.
Germany is still fucked
How so?
If you hadn't mentioned... we would have never known your camera was acting up... based on the results. Great shots!
Thank you! Yeah, the contradiction in that didn't occur to me until after I hit publish. Think I had a bad case of 'the ones you didn't get,' several are the only decent shot I got of the plane.
Thanks for dropping by!
I could definitely understand that. You are the only one that knows which ones you missed... and i bet that is frustrating. But, you did get some excellent shots. Hahaha Better luck next time. Hopefully, your equipment will behave.
right!