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Space Cadet Omoly posted:What? How? In what way? The Empire are comically evil. They blow up planets, directly murdered a bunch of children, and use clones as slaves. Yeah but they had really snappy uniforms.
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Mar 27, 2017 19:38
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Kopijeger posted:I'll assume you mean "Hero of the Soviet Union": Who knows what I mean? The sun rays behind the star look like the Order of the Patriotic War. Or it could be a cute little sheriff's star.
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Mar 27, 2017 19:43
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Maybe it's a medal Trump gave himself?
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Mar 27, 2017 19:42
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Regalingualius posted:Eh, even that can be picked up on in subtext if you actually pay attention to how many on-screen Imperial women and aliens there are in positions of power in the Empire compared to men in the original trilogy. To them, nothing but straight white dudes in power is just the natural way of things. Technowolf posted:Maybe it's a medal Trump gave himself? Money says he actually does that by the end of his term if allowed to serve a full 4. It becomes near certain if he somehow gets re-elected (or suspends the 2020 elections). Easy Salmon Recipe fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Mar 27, 2017 |
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Mar 27, 2017 19:50
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logger posted:Using the Nuclear Option on the filibuster would be MAD. I mean, poo poo, if you think about it logically, the most logical option for the Democrats is to press the attack. Worst case scenario, they both die; best case, they defeat the Republicans without the bomb going off. Either way, the Republicans are beaten.
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Mar 27, 2017 20:15
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Easy Salmon Recipe posted:Money says he actually does that by the end of his term if allowed to serve a full 4. It becomes near certain if he somehow gets re-elected (or suspends the 2020 elections). Like, the first 100 days should be proof the dude isn't clever enough to be the next Hitler. All of the hatred and narcissism, none of the brains.
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Mar 27, 2017 20:56
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Pants Donkey posted:Dude can't issue a travel ban without protests, and he's not well-liked enough by Republicans to make a Garland-tier load of BS justifying it. Basically, he'd be impeached and probably imprisoned immediately. How clever was Hitler anyway? Attacking Russia when he had enough on his plate with the rest of the Allies.
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Mar 27, 2017 20:59
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Considering the hard time republicans have winning the presidency the f-bomb is more likely to land on their head.
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Mar 27, 2017 21:14
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BarbarianElephant posted:How clever was Hitler anyway? Attacking Russia when he had enough on his plate with the rest of the Allies. Attacking Russia wasn't quite as bad an idea as it is frequently portrayed as, given their limited information. Germany didn't have access to enough oil to keep it running, so it imported a lot from Russia. Rather than be dependent on Russia never cutting them off, Hitler decided to invade somewhere with a lot of oil. It was a decision between the Middle East and Russia, but Hitler thought the Russians were planning to invade him if he didn't get them first. As I understand it, Hitler decided that if they attacked the Middle East and Russia betrayed them, they'd be hosed. So he went with attacking Russia, hoping that a sudden strike could secure the Russian oil fields. At the time, the Soviet military command was weakened by Stalin's purges, and the Germans believed (probably falsely as we now know) that the Soviets were planning an invasion of their own, so this was probably the best possible time to attack. Obviously we now know that it was a terrible idea, and that the Soviets likely wouldn't have betrayed the Germans during a Middle Eastern invasion, but it was a not-totally-stupid decision at the time. Of course, this isn't to say Hitler was actually all that clever. He was infamous for making a lot of blunders, frequently pulling away critical troops right before a decisive battle or while on the verge of victory, resulting in devastating defeat. That and his daft insistence on building BIGGER and MORE BADASS tanks when they were already low on fuel to supply the reasonable ones they already had.
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Mar 27, 2017 21:20
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BarbarianElephant posted:How clever was Hitler anyway? Attacking Russia when he had enough on his plate with the rest of the Allies. Extremely clever politically, not great militarily, although perhaps you could make the case that recognizing you have unique technological advantages and capitalizing on them takes a certain sort of military mind. Regardless, he seems to have rushed into the great majority of his actions in World War II (including the initial invasion of Poland) owing to a belief that his illnesses were catching up with him and he would die before realizing his goals. It didn't help that he never really trusted doctors and was, shock of shocks, incredibly paranoid. e: VVV Also a pretty good point to keep in mind. SomeMathGuy fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Mar 27, 2017 |
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Mar 27, 2017 21:20
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Kaza42 posted:Attacking Russia wasn't quite as bad an idea as it is frequently portrayed as, given their limited information. Germany didn't have access to enough oil to keep it running, so it imported a lot from Russia. Rather than be dependent on Russia never cutting them off, Hitler decided to invade somewhere with a lot of oil. It was a decision between the Middle East and Russia, but Hitler thought the Russians were planning to invade him if he didn't get them first. As I understand it, Hitler decided that if they attacked the Middle East and Russia betrayed them, they'd be hosed. So he went with attacking Russia, hoping that a sudden strike could secure the Russian oil fields. At the time, the Soviet military command was weakened by Stalin's purges, and the Germans believed (probably falsely as we now know) that the Soviets were planning an invasion of their own, so this was probably the best possible time to attack. Obviously we now know that it was a terrible idea, and that the Soviets likely wouldn't have betrayed the Germans during a Middle Eastern invasion, but it was a not-totally-stupid decision at the time. Hitler's motivation in attacking the USSR was first and foremost ideological, with securing resources being at most a nice bonus to his grand vision of carving out an Aryan homeland in the East. His own generals argued that it was a bad idea as even with the disorganized state of the Red Army, they knew the Wehrmacht wasn't yet up to the task and needed considerably more mechanization and logistical development before it could carry out any sort of sustained campaigning in the vast spaces of the Soviet Union, but Hitler had the idea that the USSR was tottering on the edge of collapse as the only thing he thought had sustained Imperial Russia, an elite bureaucracy manned largely by ethnic Germans, had been purged by the Bolsheviks and their sinister-yet-feckless Jewish masters. Even had this not been the case, practical considerations never rated all that highly for Hitler anyway, as he had the idea that will was more important than anything else, and if his armies were sufficiently motivated by National Socialist zeal then the subhuman Soviet hordes would necessarily fall before them regardless of minor nonsense like "having enough fuel" or "being vastly outnumbered" or "goddammit we're bogged down outside of Moscow in the rasputitsa who's dumb idea was this anyway?" Captain_Maclaine fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Mar 27, 2017 |
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Mar 27, 2017 21:27
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Mar 27, 2017 22:01
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The main lesson I've taken away from what I've read of Hitler and the other facists was that you don't need to be clever, skilled or smart to do tremendous amounts of damage once you have control over the complete, unified resources of the state.
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Mar 27, 2017 22:03
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Regalingualius posted:Eh, even that can be picked up on in subtext if you actually pay attention to how many on-screen Imperial women and aliens there are in positions of power in the Empire compared to men in the original trilogy. There's only one woman in a position of authority in the rebels. She inherited it, and ended up getting stuffed in a gold bikini by a giant slug. The original trilogy as a whole is pretty drat sexist. SomeMathGuy posted:Yeah the left is definitely thinking "Trump is doing great." We're definitely not organizing at the local level. Protesting is definitely the only way to show and practice dissent. Well, Tall will also accept lovely cartoons praising him as the smartest man alive as a valid show of resistance.
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Mar 27, 2017 22:18
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Fulchrum posted:There's only one woman in a position of authority in the rebels. She inherited it, and ended up getting stuffed in a gold bikini by a giant slug. The original trilogy as a whole is pretty drat sexist. mon motha
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Mar 27, 2017 22:21
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Pants Donkey posted:Dude can't issue a travel ban without protests, and he's not well-liked enough by Republicans to make a Garland-tier load of BS justifying it. Basically, he'd be impeached and probably imprisoned immediately. People really need to stop this myth that Hitler was smart. Dude was a loving idiot who couldn't read or write above a comparative 5th grade level. Didn't stop him being a monster. He was obsessed with kids books, and managed to fail to get into art school. The level of intelligence for that kind of person was not higher in the 30s than that same person now. Fulchrum fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Mar 27, 2017 |
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Mar 27, 2017 22:22
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Fulchrum posted:There's only one woman in a position of authority in the rebels. look at this scrub forgetting Mon Mothma, smh 
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Mar 27, 2017 22:23
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loquacius posted:look at this scrub forgetting Mon Mothma, smh Yeah but she still only made 70% of what Garm Bel Iblis made for the same work though.
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Mar 27, 2017 22:30
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Fulchrum posted:People really need to stop this myth that Hitler was smart. Dude was a loving idiot who couldn't read or write above a comparative 5th grade level. Didn't stop him being a monster. Despite failing to get into the Vienna Academy, he was astonishingly sophisticated in matters of culture and art, with a voluminous knowledge of different schools and movements (particularly in opera and stage), which combined with his screwed up personality meant he could be relied on to drone on pedantically for hours about this or that artist, composer, or actor. I mean yeah the guy was hugely uninformed in many areas and believed himself far more capable in realms he was largely unequipped to handle, but neither was he a knuckle-dragging cretin like, say, Mussolini.
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Mar 27, 2017 22:44
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Guys, stop giving me "Hitler wasn't that smart" Ted Rall parody blue balls.
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Mar 27, 2017 22:54
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Captain_Maclaine posted:Hitler's motivation in attacking the USSR was first and foremost ideological, with securing resources being at most a nice bonus to his grand vision of carving out an Aryan homeland in the East. His own generals argued that it was a bad idea as even with the disorganized state of the Red Army, they knew the Wehrmacht wasn't yet up to the task and needed considerably more mechanization and logistical development before it could carry out any sort of sustained campaigning in the vast spaces of the Soviet Union, but Hitler had the idea that the USSR was tottering on the edge of collapse as the only thing he thought had sustained Imperial Russia, an elite bureaucracy manned largely by ethnic Germans, had been purged by the Bolsheviks and their sinister-yet-feckless Jewish masters. Keep in mind that Hitler had in living memory seen Germany soundly defeat Russia, forcing a political collapse on an enemy. It's easy to look back now and get all smug about the vast spaces of the USSR but Hitler believed the Soviet Army, just like the Russian Army of the czar, Kerensky, and Trotsky would eventually have a moral collapse after being inflicted an enormous number of military defeats.
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Mar 27, 2017 22:59
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After The War posted:Guys, stop giving me "Hitler wasn't that smart" Ted Rall parody blue balls. "Hitler wasn't that smart. I once spent hours with him discussing Lebensraum. He disagreed when I said invading the USSR was futile, that Stalin would repel an attack. But he couldn't articulate why I was wrong. He kept pointing to the persistent Jewish conspiracy to undermine the German race, which I didn't dispute."
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Mar 27, 2017 23:01
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Guys, smart doesn't mean "all-encompassing brilliance." Hitler had a narrow set of skills that took him to the top. Trump doesn't even have that, as he failed to even convince a majority of Americans to vote for him, and he can't even unify the party to pass his lovely healthcare bill. The dude is certainly dangerous, and must be resisted throughout the next four years, but he's not going to suspend elections. Okay, he might try, but as of right now he doesn't have the mass appeal to pull it off.
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Mar 27, 2017 23:05
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Captain_Maclaine posted:Despite failing to get into the Vienna Academy, he was astonishingly sophisticated in matters of culture and art, with a voluminous knowledge of different schools and movements (particularly in opera and stage), which combined with his screwed up personality meant he could be relied on to drone on pedantically for hours about this or that artist, composer, or actor. He tried to hold up Karl May as a military genius and forced his generals to study Winnetou. College Humor once had a sketch where they pretended that Kim Jong Un was that level of infantile and stupid.
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Mar 27, 2017 23:10
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Pants Donkey posted:Guys, smart doesn't mean "all-encompassing brilliance." Hitler had a narrow set of skills that took him to the top. Trump doesn't even have that, as he failed to even convince a majority of Americans to vote for him, and he can't even unify the party to pass his lovely healthcare bill. Hitler got elected on 42% of the vote. Trump got 46.1%. The Nazis also could barely work within government and turned everything into a clusterfuck, wracked with huge intergovernmental conflicts and pissing matches. No-one is disputing that Trump is a loving idiot. Just that Hitler and the Nazis were also loving idiots, and that wasn't as big of an obstacle as we would like to think.
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Mar 27, 2017 23:19
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Panzeh posted:the Russian Army of the czar, Kerensky, and Trotsky would eventually have a moral collapse after being inflicted an enormous number of military defeats. That's the same army as far as you're concerned? Trotsky's army was notoriously thoroughly defeated and collapsed, in your interpretation?
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Mar 27, 2017 23:20
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SomeMathGuy posted:"Hitler wasn't that smart. I once spent hours with him discussing Lebensraum. He disagreed when I said invading the USSR was futile, that Stalin would repel an attack. But he couldn't articulate why I was wrong. He kept pointing to the persistent Jewish conspiracy to undermine the German race, which I didn't dispute." Oh yeeah, that's the stufff... 
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Mar 27, 2017 23:22
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Xander77 posted:Um. When Trotsky tried to resist the Germans at the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, he got absolutely nowhere. The fact that that force managed to turn around and win the civil war is impressive.
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Mar 27, 2017 23:25
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SomeMathGuy posted:"Hitler wasn't that smart. I once spent hours with him discussing Lebensraum. He disagreed when I said invading the USSR was futile, that Stalin would repel an attack. But he couldn't articulate why I was wrong. He kept pointing to the persistent Jewish conspiracy to undermine the German race, which I didn't dispute." 
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Mar 27, 2017 23:40
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Quality Hitler derail
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Mar 27, 2017 23:52
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Panzeh posted:When Trotsky tried to resist the Germans at the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, he got absolutely nowhere.
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Mar 28, 2017 00:13
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Sandpuppy posted:
Okay, but there have been protests since then? And also people doing things on a local level like going to town hall meetings and calling their representatives? People have been very vocal about their Trump hate and the need to resist him.
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Mar 28, 2017 00:19
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:Okay, but there have been protests since then? And also people doing things on a local level like going to town hall meetings and calling their representatives? People have been very vocal about their Trump hate and the need to resist him. Rall isn't good at paying attention to things that aren't him.
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Mar 28, 2017 00:22
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:Okay, but there have been protests since then? And also people doing things on a local level like going to town hall meetings and calling their representatives? People have been very vocal about their Trump hate and the need to resist him. there was literally an organized protest in the last week (about the healthcare bill) but ted rall likes to ignore anything that gets in the way of being a holier then thou prick
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Mar 28, 2017 00:26
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Panzeh posted:When Trotsky tried to resist the Germans at the Brest-Litovsk negotiations, he got absolutely nowhere. What, if anything, does Trotsky's ineffective negotiation strategy at Brest-Litovsk have to do with his later command of the Red Army during the civil war? He wasn't facing the Germans down across a battlefield and he didn't have any real military forces at his command (or indeed in the area) at the time. Panzeh posted:Keep in mind that Hitler had in living memory seen Germany soundly defeat Russia, forcing a political collapse on an enemy. It's easy to look back now and get all smug about the vast spaces of the USSR but Hitler believed the Soviet Army, just like the Russian Army of the czar, Kerensky, and Trotsky would eventually have a moral collapse after being inflicted an enormous number of military defeats. My point was his decision to invade was ideologically motivated, and with the resource consideration Kaza42 cited being at best a secondary consideration.
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Mar 28, 2017 00:37
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SomeMathGuy posted:"Hitler wasn't that smart. I once spent hours with him discussing Lebensraum. He disagreed when I said invading the USSR was futile, that Stalin would repel an attack. But he couldn't articulate why I was wrong. He kept pointing to the persistent Jewish conspiracy to undermine the German race, which I didn't dispute." Okay, this is fantastic, but it actually raises an interesting point yet to be touched on in the Hitler-derail. While many of the nazi unforced errors and inefficiencies might be attributed to arrogance or incompetence, it's important to also consider the nazi ideology's aims. What appear to us as strategic errors can often just as easily be attributed to the movement's very particular, altogether inhuman set of priorities. Sure, they were lovely at fighting a world war, supposing you judge them on ho-hum criteria like holding territory and extorting concessions from rival powers; however, if you consider that Hitler's aim was less about "winning" in any conventional sense and more about murdering as many untermenschen as quickly as possible, many of his decisions start to take on a horrific clarity. Time and time again, Germany's pursuit of conventional war aims was stymied by the ideological directive that demanded time and resources be directed towards maximum murder. And so, you get the Whermacht left without logistical support because all the trains that could be used for retreat or resupply are busy shipping people to the killing centers instead. You get Alfred Rosenberg drafting up plans to organize the peoples of conquered western Russia into a net of buffer states between the Reich and what's left of the USSR, oblivious to the fact that his proposed buffers have already been slated for extermination along with the Jews. You get Hans Frank sulking in his office in Poland, grousing to anyone who will listen that, although he's perfectly fine with the eventual elimination of inferior peoples, he can't understand why Hitler insists on liquidating so many perfectly good slave laborers while there's still a war on. As byzantine and disheveled as nazi operations were, it was as much down to ideology as incompetence. So yeah, if Nazi Todd Rall tried to hit Hitler with some truth re: the futility of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler probably would just go on about the Jewish conspiracy, not understanding why practical concerns were even part of the conversation. (Read The Origins of Totalitarianism you guys, it's really good. Hella' dense, but good.)
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Mar 28, 2017 01:12
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Space Cadet Omoly posted:Okay, but there have been protests since then? And also people doing things on a local level like going to town hall meetings and calling their representatives? People have been very vocal about their Trump hate and the need to resist him. Ted "I'm so lazy, I can't draw a straight line" Rall wants blood in the streets unrest and riots. He doesn't like civil disobedience, protests almost every week, harassing representatives in town halls every day they can and the occasional punching or brawl with nazis. Its not noticeable and loud enough for him to then criticize about being too much instead of right now where he's crying about how it isn't enough. What I'm getting at is either way Ted Rall is a lazy little bitch.
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Mar 28, 2017 01:56
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Political Cartoons: Stalingrad was a time of contrasts
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Mar 28, 2017 02:23
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mandatory lesbian posted:well if you look at the EU Before Legends became non-canon, everything Palpatine did was for the sake of saving the galaxy from the Yuzhan Vong, IIRC.
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Mar 28, 2017 03:19
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Silver2195 posted:Before Legends became non-canon, everything Palpatine did was for the sake of saving the galaxy from the Yuzhan Vong, IIRC. trap sprung, but also yes thats right i dont even actually care about star wars eu and somehow i know that, sigh
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Mar 28, 2017 03:21
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