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Fangz posted:Was the Hetzer actually as good as it was on paper? *adjusts glasses* Well, actually, I think you mean the Jagdpanzer 38(t). It was a small tank destroyer that carried a pretty big gun (for its size) on a very mature and reliable chassis. These factors made it pretty useful in battle, which can be seen from the fact that it continued to serve after WWII, not just in Czechoslovakia, but in Switzerland as well.
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May 6, 2017 23:30
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Fangz posted:Was the Hetzer actually as good as it was on paper? It was the most intimate AFV fighting experience of the war, very good for male bonding. It's small size and inconspicuous profile is well suited for clandestine masculine activities. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4JVBp2JOgE&t=251s  It's a pretty limited design, but for an ad-hoc desperation move it performed its role just fine. A military in less dire circumstances than Nazi Germany's would probably have designed something with better ergonomics.
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May 6, 2017 23:59
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For what it was, it definitely could have been a lot worse.
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May 7, 2017 00:08
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Elyv posted:It sounds like you're describing some overpriced hipster furniture or food or something 
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May 7, 2017 00:07
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Mycroft Holmes posted:John Brown did nothing wrong Should have picked on some actual slaveowners for full marks.
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May 7, 2017 00:21
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mllaneza posted:Should have picked on some actual slaveowners for full marks. Can't annihilate the slave empire without breaking a few eggs.
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May 7, 2017 00:21
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mllaneza posted:Should have picked on some actual slaveowners for full marks. I like my fanatical abolitionists to not die in a botched attempt to cause a slavery revolt / 
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May 7, 2017 00:37
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:It was the most intimate AFV fighting experience of the war, very good for male bonding. It's small size and inconspicuous profile is well suited for clandestine masculine activities. StuGs are fun to shoot in War Thunder because the crew sits all in a line, so one lucky shot can kill three guys like in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
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May 7, 2017 03:20
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If we could rank the dictators of the 20th and 21st century by order of how terrible they were, who would end up as the best dictators and who would be the worst? (Hitler Pol Pot and Stalin go at worst of course.)
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May 7, 2017 03:36
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Mussolini was pretty bad at being a dictator.
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May 7, 2017 03:57
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Kruschev proved that any idiot could run a country, Brezhnev proved that not any idiot could run a country.
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May 7, 2017 03:59
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that dude who changed his language's word for bread to his mom's name was pretty funny a surreal and terrifying nightmare for his people, but funny
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May 7, 2017 04:05
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Wasn't he the same dude who built the giant gold statue of himself that always rotated to face the sun?
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May 7, 2017 05:38
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Turkmenbashi. Yup
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May 7, 2017 05:47
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Mr Luxury Yacht posted:Wasn't he the same dude who built the giant gold statue of himself that always rotated to face the sun? That was actually real? Like, I thought that was the Onion making fun of his ego  Edit: The next Paradox game needs to let me go full crazy dictator, I need my giant gold statue of myself.
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May 7, 2017 06:19
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Grand Prize Winner posted:The whole peace activist discussion kind of brings out an interesting question: if you are an anti-war person (against some specific war or in general, just to make it harder to answer), then what can you do to prevent the nation in which you reside from doing wars? Do you judge anti-war acts by how effective they are? How do you even judge an act's efficacity? If you are in the army, you can march home. During the Kosovo War, following the repatriation of four dead reservists, a spontaneous protest broke out in the Serbian town of Krusevac, mostly of woman demanding the return of their men. When word got back to the front, about a thousand Serbian troops from the town mutinied and attempted to return home. The mutineers were ultimately stopped and arrested/returned to the front, but the incident demonstrated popular support for the Kosovo War was collapsing in Serbia, and helped convince Milosevic and other Serbian leaders they needed to negotiate an end to the war sooner rather than later.
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May 7, 2017 06:58
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Don Gato posted:That was actually real? Like, I thought that was the Onion making fun of his ego He was voted in by a 99.9% popular "vote".
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May 7, 2017 07:03
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Hey, at least it's not a 140% vote. Have any dictators actually been benevolent? Coming from Gray Hunter's AGEOD thread: so Austria sucked in WWI because their army was a horrible multilingual hodgepodge where officers didn't understand the troops. But was there more to this than that? Did their soldiers not know how to point a rifle? Actually formed up in Napoleonic lines? Had single shot breech loaded rifles? Was their artillery cast bronze and none of the artillery men knew math or time tables? Conversely, the Great War documentary constantly calls the Prussian military most well trained army in the world while Kitchener's army is constantly described as untrained. Considering what insignificant worm a WWI soldier is in the grand scheme of this, what is this crucial training that we're talking about? Is all about "dying standing" instead of running away?
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May 7, 2017 07:31
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They were actually still using bronze artillery during WWI.
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May 7, 2017 07:39
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Aw, man, Saparmurat "Turkmenbashi" Niyazov was something else. Dude forbid dentistry and replaced it with chewing bones and wrote his own lovely bible you had to memorize by rote in order to get a job 
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May 7, 2017 07:41
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Tias posted:wrote his own lovely bible you had to memorize by rote in order to get a job Don't knock the Ruhnama, it's a guaranteed ticket to Paradise.  Wikipedia posted:In March 2006, Niyazov was recorded as saying that he had interceded with God to ensure that any student who read the book three times would automatically get into heaven. Oh, and good news if you're a martian or something. Wikipedia posted:In August 2005, the first part of the Ruhnama was launched into orbit so that it could "conquer space" as well. It is supposed to orbit Earth for the next 150 years.
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May 7, 2017 08:15
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Yo fam, this mix tape is so fire, it set the bush that God talked from ablaze. Like it three times to get into Heaven. Brb, sending it into space to blast Martian brains. E: is there an English version of it? I want to pitch it to IDEOTV podcast.
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May 7, 2017 08:26
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Franco probably wasn't the best dictator, but he was probably one of the most successful since he avoided getting involved in WWII, died in power, and his successor was competent and successfully transitioned Spain to democracy.JcDent posted:Have any dictators actually been benevolent? I think Lee Kaun Yew is probably the only one who would really count as such. JcDent posted:Yo fam, this mix tape is so fire, it set the bush that God talked from ablaze. Like it three times to get into Heaven. The official site seems to have fallen prey to Japanese domain squatters, but archive.org has it: http://web.archive.org/web/20120229185922/http://www.ruhnama.info/ruhnama-en/index.htm This site has two PDF versions: https://inteltrends.wordpress.com/ruhnama/ Amazon also has several used copies of the hardcover for around $40.
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May 7, 2017 08:39
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C.M. Kruger posted:Franco probably wasn't the best dictator, but he was probably one of the most successful since he avoided getting involved in WWII, died in power, and his successor was competent and successfully transitioned Spain to democracy. The inteltrends guy is pretty proud of his Turkmenbashy blog, Jesus.
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May 7, 2017 08:56
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JcDent posted:
Flt. Lt. Jerry Rawlings in Ghana did pretty good. He set the country on a path to modernization, and managed to peacefully transition the country to democracy when he retired. He's still kicking around, getting the occasional humanitarian award. Not bad for someone who had around 300 people disappeared.
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May 7, 2017 09:15
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mllaneza posted:Flt. Lt. Jerry Rawlings in Ghana did pretty good. He set the country on a path to modernization, and managed to peacefully transition the country to democracy when he retired. He's still kicking around, getting the occasional humanitarian award. Not bad for someone who had around 300 people disappeared. Was that the guy who held an insane 100+ day press meeting huffing his own farts about his plans for the future?
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May 7, 2017 09:17
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C.M. Kruger posted:Franco probably wasn't the best dictator, but he was probably one of the most successful since he avoided getting involved in WWII, died in power, and his successor was competent and successfully transitioned Spain to democracy. I suspect Franco would have thought of that bit as a failure, before we sing the murderous old bastard's praises too much.
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May 7, 2017 09:52
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What about Porfirio Diaz or Getulio Vargas?
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May 7, 2017 09:55
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Arquinsiel posted:A lot of complicated inter-related factors. The improved weapons and communications technology made it very easy for the IRA to conduct effective attacks that didn't cause them any losses and for news of that to spread. It didn't hurt that the 1916 executions were widely publicised and that managed to overnight turn the average person from against the rising to regarding the British government as overly harsh and thus more likely to support the war. The Rising also showed that there were a lot of people willing to die stupidly if it made the other side look worse, especially if the other side was willing to resort to unsavoury tactics. The British government obliged with the Black and Tan formations which in retrospect probably get a raw deal what with likely being heavily composed of Western Front PTSD suffering lads. A lot of the leaders were also trade unionists so they managed to rally "the working man" alongside those who were appealing to an imaginary lost united Irish nostalgia state. It didn't hurt that the 1914 Home Rule bill had basically agreed to give Ireland some degree of independence anyway. So in the end it wasn't just some guys down in Wexford marching pike blocks at muskets, it was constant attrition of British power across the entire island for a protracted period with the ever-present threat of another Easter Rising being possible and with the British government having a way to spin it as talking people into accepting what they had already been offered. Ireland then just kind of gently wandered away from the commonwealth and eventually in the post-WWII anti-colonial atmosphere told the King thanks for his time, but we're gonna do our own thing now and fully formalised what was already an effective total independence. Of course it was Churchill who sent the Black and Tans to Ireland.
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May 7, 2017 09:59
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, but being immediately post WWI the British public weren't super enthusiastic about the whole idea of having another war right next door. There was very little support for sending lads off to pacify a province when everyone knew someone who didn't come back from the last adventure.
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Arquinsiel posted:with the British government having a way to spin it as talking people into accepting what they had already been offered. Ireland then just kind of gently wandered away from the commonwealth and eventually in the post-WWII anti-colonial atmosphere told the King thanks for his time, but we're gonna do our own thing now and fully formalised what was already an effective total independence. This in particular, I think. Home Rule had actually been passed immediately before World War 1, but suspended because of the hostilities; going from that to Ireland being a Dominion (still, theoretically, part of the Empire and owing allegiance to the King) isn't that huge a leap, and yeah, Britain was in any case in no mood to have to fight another war straight after WW1. Then the 20s and 30s happened and then the postwar period happened and the whole Empire thing kinda stopped being a thing.
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May 7, 2017 10:01
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Don Gato posted:That was actually real? Like, I thought that was the Onion making fun of his ego You can build that in Tropico. Tias posted:Aw, man, Saparmurat "Turkmenbashi" Niyazov was something else. Dude forbid dentistry and replaced it with chewing bones and wrote his own lovely bible you had to memorize by rote in order to get a job JcDent posted:Yo fam, this mix tape is so fire, it set the bush that God talked from ablaze. Like it three times to get into Heaven. Foreign companies got better deals if they translated that book. So it's translated to 41 different languages.
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May 7, 2017 10:02
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JcDent posted:Coming from Gray Hunter's AGEOD thread: so Austria sucked in WWI because their army was a horrible multilingual hodgepodge where officers didn't understand the troops. But was there more to this than that? Did their soldiers not know how to point a rifle? Actually formed up in Napoleonic lines? Had single shot breech loaded rifles? Was their artillery cast bronze and none of the artillery men knew math or time tables? Austria-Hungary's problems in WWI were many and varied to say the least. The biggest problem overall was that the political system of the country was a complete basket case, with the Hungarian parliament wielding a disproportionate amount of power, and using said power to block things like military budgets and reform bills in order to extract concessions that benefited Hungary. The economy also poo poo itself during the war due to AH's relatively unsophisticated economy being dislocated by troops going off to war and a lack of a big lender to loan them money (like the entente did in Britain and then America) so the situation got worse relative to everyone else throughout the course of the war, not better. As a result of all these shenanigans come WWI Austria-Hungary was spending the least of any combatant on its military and so lacked money for things like training and equipment, leading to comedy situations like the cast-bronze cannon that's been mentioned before. In addition the political situation of the all the various ethnicities in the AH empire in a time of rising ethnic nationalism meant that morale wasn't exactly great either.
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May 7, 2017 10:12
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Grouchio posted:Porfirio Diaz? I As the Futurama quote goes "Oh, you're serious. Let me laugh even harder" He wasn't terrible but that doesn't make him good for the country. Of course, like anything relating to Mexican history, people have all kinds of opinions regarding him, but I personally blame his not stepping down from power as one of the chief causes of the Mexican revolution during the 1910's and 20's. This probably says more about my personal politics than anything else.
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May 7, 2017 10:53
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:A military in less dire circumstances than Nazi Germany's would probably have designed something with better ergonomics. And yet.
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May 7, 2017 11:52
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Don Gato posted:As the Futurama quote goes "Oh, you're serious. Let me laugh even harder" How is Maximilian viewed in Mexico? From US-centric pop-history (and not much of that really talks about him, or Mexico in general, which is a drat shame) he seems like a well-meaning but not too competent European aristocrat in a time and place where being a European aristocrat is a somewhat poor idea.
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May 7, 2017 12:12
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JcDent posted:Hey, at least it's not a 140% vote. I suspect this strongly depends on what you mean by "benevolent" (and to an extent "dictator"), since by definition dictators don't respect the wishes of the people they rule. If we're considering any unelected person with nominal supreme power over the country a dictator, Queen Elizabeth's not the worst monarch ever
spectralent fucked around with this message at 12:50 on May 7, 2017 |
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May 7, 2017 12:46
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JcDent posted:Hey, at least it's not a 140% vote. I'll answer your bit about the British army in WWI. It's complicated. Immediately pre-war, you have a colonial policing force scattered around the globe in penny packets, composed of local colonial troops with a small smattering of regular battalion-sized formations. You also have about 200,000 men of the Regular Army available on a minute's notice, and then about another ~300,000 in the Territorial Army, which is basically the National Guard designed for home service so that the Regular Army can gently caress off to Tajikistan or whatever. The army is fuckin tiny compared to colonial powers, which led of course to the very amusing Bismarck quote that if the British Army landed in North Germany he would call the police and have them arrested. The Regular Army divisions were very well trained with long service and were certainly equivalent to whatever the best the Central powers had to offer. They were deficient in heavy weapons but as the backbone of a global empire, the emphasis was on small unit leadership, man-on-the-spot decision making, riflery (an outgrowth of the Boer war), and night operations. It's a bit ridiculous to describe these guys as undertrained. Similarly, the TA that got called up was probably equivalent to German A formations of reservists, or at least fairly close. The problem was that the British could mobilize the regulars and get a good portion of the TA to volunteer for overseas service, but that's only about a half million men, and these guys died like flies in the early days of mobile warfare. Then, once the majority of your trained, veteran forces have died or been wounded, there's no core of B and C reservists because the British don't have conscription and thus do not have the massive amounts of at least partially trained men that the French and Germans could draw on. Sure, if you're 35 and you're pulled away from your desk as a clerk, you will require a lot of refersher training and training on modern warfare, but you at least can summon the basics of small unit tactics, discipline and marksmanship from fifteen or twenty years ago, which gives you a huge leg up. Hence all of the British volunteer formations immediately post war were a lot worse than a Prussian Landwehr division or a Bavarian C division. Long story short: The Regular Army was not more poorly trained than the Prussian army on balance, it was just smaller. Once everyone died at the beginning, there was not a pool of reservists to draw on because of the lack of conscription, and thus when it came to the secondary formations that everyone relied on after 1914, the British were at a huge disadvantage. A-H had access to some of the best weapons in the world through Skoda and other industry in Bohemia and Moravia. Procurement was a hilarious set of gently caress ups. You had KuK formations, which were Imperial and Royal (for the two kingdoms). Then you had the Honved, the Hungarian Royal Army, and the Landwehr, the Austrian army. All three had different procurement and different leadership and did not coordinate. The bronze cannon thing is fairly legit, but they were late bronze cannons so they weren't that bad, mostly the issue was they did not have recoil devices. The troops were trained and conscripted, but languages for command were German or Hungarian, which isn't useful if you're Czech or Galician or Slovak or Croat or Bosniak. It also leads to a lack of cooperation between the three types of army units. A-H was hosed on a very macro level, kind of like the late Ottoman empire. There are a lot of similar problems but at least the Ottomans were more centralized.
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May 7, 2017 13:07
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My questions itt keep getting dumber and dumber but what's the difference between a monarch and a dictator?
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May 7, 2017 13:13
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aphid_licker posted:My questions itt keep getting dumber and dumber but what's the difference between a monarch and a dictator? Nothing :jacobin101: But in seriousness, not all monarchies are absolutist, even historically, and modern monarchs, where they exist, are figureheads who can't really be said to be exercising unrestricted personal power. A hell of a lot of historical monarchs were basically dictators, though, for sure.
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May 7, 2017 13:26
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Was there any point at all where the leadership of the A-H realized how badly they screwed everything up or did they spend literally all their time ratfucking each other to the very end?
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May 7, 2017 13:57
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