|
Comrade Gorbash posted:That's why Macron is talking about a "real European army" - he's trying to thread the needle of compensating for an unreliable US without creating the circumstances that will lead to an intra-European arms race. There’s a lot more political context to this statement. It’s part of his pro EU sentiment. Macron wants a unified European army, not a bunch of little national forces with duplicate functionally that add up to less than the sum of their parts. Of course it’s hard to imagine how this would work without greater political unity within the EU, if Germany supplies all the logistical support, will France need their approval before going on one of their little North African adventures? Logically foreign policy centralization goes hand in hand with military organizational consolidation. It's part of the wider argument for ever greater unity within the EU, presented in the technocratic language of enhanced efficiency in the realm of self-defense. Trump hates international organizations like the EU on principle as well as because it makes it harder for the US to strong-arm the world, so of course he thinks this is bad. Squalid fucked around with this message at 20:21 on Nov 13, 2018 |
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 20:08
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 7, 2024 11:30 |
|
|
Squalid posted:Trump hates international organizations like the EU on principle as well as because it makes it harder for the US to strong-arm the world, so of course he thinks this is bad. A big part of the issue with Trump on things like this and American soft power in general is that Trump truly does not believe in the win-win that makes everyone happy. He is, and always has been since he entered public awareness, been firmly of the view that either you're loving or getting hosed, you're the winner or the loser, and win-win is nothing but a con. This explains his view of military alliances and diplomacy as well as trade, what seems to anyone else to be a good working relationship or trade system where everyone profits is to Trump a simple impossibility and must by definition be malicious deceit that should be fought and dismantled.
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 20:20
|
|
|
It's also part of a broader trend where the US had such dominance over the entire world right after World War 2, and it has steadily been pissing and fumbling that dominance away over the last 70 years. The US lost most of its industrial advantage when the rest of the world built back up to capacity and US corporations refused to adapt to market demands. Internal politics like threatening to let the US default on its debt have been endangering the status of the Dollar as the world reserve currency, and US military superiority is one of the last pieces left. It's interesting how people's personal ambition for power compromises the overall power available to attain. I suppose they'd rather be dictator of a smaller nation than moderator of the whole world.
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 21:03
|
|
|
that sure is an extremely hot take
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 21:06
|
|
|
So remember that Norwegian frigate that got hit by a tanker the other week?  It is now a submarine.
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 21:11
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:It's also part of a broader trend where the US had such dominance over the entire world right after World War 2 You... have heard of the USSR right? There were two superpowers in the Cold War, not one.
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 21:16
|
|
|
if you want to go the "USA peaked and is declining" the point that you pick for the start of the decline is like, Somalia or something - so call it 1994
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 21:18
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:So remember that Norwegian frigate that got hit by a tanker the other week? Well at least its an inexpensive sub... relatively speaking...
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 21:20
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:A big part of the issue with Trump on things like this and American soft power in general is that Trump truly does not believe in the win-win that makes everyone happy. He is, and always has been since he entered public awareness, been firmly of the view that either you're loving or getting hosed, you're the winner or the loser, and win-win is nothing but a con. This explains his view of military alliances and diplomacy as well as trade, what seems to anyone else to be a good working relationship or trade system where everyone profits is to Trump a simple impossibility and must by definition be malicious deceit that should be fought and dismantled. This turned a light on in my head. I'd never thought of it in this way but it seems dead on to me.
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 21:32
|
|
|
Starts interesting. And then goes right into the pit of despair. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9JDqWC8gXc
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 21:32
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:You... have heard of the USSR right? There were two superpowers in the Cold War, not one. Yeah, but they were pretty beat up immediately after WWII - that whole "20+ million dead and a huge part of our infrastructure wrecked" thing required a lot of rebuilding. The USA, in contrast, was never seriously bombed or occupied.
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 21:40
|
|
|
With all this book chat should we repost the book recommendations spreadsheet? I'd  but I can't remember if whoever created it needs to manually give access or not.
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 21:45
|
|
|
oXDemosthenesXo posted:With all this book chat should we repost the book recommendations spreadsheet? Last page. OpenlyEvilJello posted:There's a thread booklist from a ways back here.
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 21:47
|
|
|
Vaginal Vagrant posted:What's the thread's take on the flashman series? They're absolutely brilliant, although obviously they're products both of their time and of the time they're supposed to be from. There are a couple of bits where they get into Whether Imperialism Was Good and I feel that the author's voice starts to show through, but mostly it's all enjoyable because it's Flashy saying it and he's an awful person in most categorisable ways.
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 21:56
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:Last page.  That does explain why there's so much recently added content
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 21:58
|
|
|
FrangibleCover posted:They're absolutely brilliant, although obviously they're products both of their time and of the time they're supposed to be from. There are a couple of bits where they get into Whether Imperialism Was Good and I feel that the author's voice starts to show through, but mostly it's all enjoyable because it's Flashy saying it and he's an awful person in most categorisable ways. I am a surprisingly big fan of flashy after the first book, largely because I initially read them as being quite anti-empire (before I realised that George MacDonald Fraser was very much of the “we brought trains to India!” School) in that flashman is held up as the epitome of the Mans Man of the British Empire - a cowardly bastard just trying to get laid which I think says a lot about the system he existed in that allowed him to thrive. Really felt for years they were an inditement of the imperial system; “to succeed here you must be a real poo poo”. No idea how I arrived at this reading but it stuck with me enough to be completely immovable in my mind even though reading them now I’m aware of how weirdly off kilter it is. Regardless, now I can’t not read them that way. It’s like a Boys Own adventure novel with loving and an anti-imperialist subtext. I really wish someone would fill in the gaps (Australia, American Civil War - I feel like the literal Shanghaing after Flash and the Dragon meant to send him to America), and have thought about it enough that I can now ape the style fairly well - someone do another In Her Majesty’s name game in Trad games!
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 22:51
|
|
|
lenoon posted:[I] have thought about it enough that I can now ape the style fairly well - someone do another In Her Majesty’s name game in Trad games!
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 23:09
|
|
|
Cessna posted:Yeah, but they were pretty beat up immediately after WWII - that whole "20+ million dead and a huge part of our infrastructure wrecked" thing required a lot of rebuilding. The USA, in contrast, was never seriously bombed or occupied. This reminds me of something. I've seen it argued that this was a double-edged sword for the US. The destruction of almost everybody else's industry gave the country a massive economic advantage for the first decade or so after the war, but this came at the cost of a massive economic disadvantage once the wrecked factories were rebuilt. Then, it was the US's increasingly outdated factories vs everybody else's ultramodern ones, and this is why the US loses economic dominance by the 1970s. Does this fit with reality at all?
|
|
#
?
Nov 13, 2018 23:52
|
|
|
lenoon posted:I am a surprisingly big fan of flashy after the first book, largely because I initially read them as being quite anti-empire (before I realised that George MacDonald Fraser was very much of the “we brought trains to India!” School) in that flashman is held up as the epitome of the Mans Man of the British Empire - a cowardly bastard just trying to get laid which I think says a lot about the system he existed in that allowed him to thrive. Really felt for years they were an inditement of the imperial system; “to succeed here you must be a real poo poo”. On the other hand I'm probably in a very small minority of people who read GMF's memoirs and only then figured out that he was a novelist, which casts the books in a slightly different light for me. quote:I really wish someone would fill in the gaps (Australia, American Civil War - I feel like the literal Shanghaing after Flash and the Dragon meant to send him to America), and have thought about it enough that I can now ape the style fairly well - someone do another In Her Majesty’s name game in Trad games! Gnoman posted:This reminds me of something. I've seen it argued that this was a double-edged sword for the US. The destruction of almost everybody else's industry gave the country a massive economic advantage for the first decade or so after the war, but this came at the cost of a massive economic disadvantage once the wrecked factories were rebuilt. Then, it was the US's increasingly outdated factories vs everybody else's ultramodern ones, and this is why the US loses economic dominance by the 1970s.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 00:01
|
|
|
Cessna posted:Yeah, but they were pretty beat up immediately after WWII - that whole "20+ million dead and a huge part of our infrastructure wrecked" thing required a lot of rebuilding. The USA, in contrast, was never seriously bombed or occupied. Sure. But 'such dominance over the entire world'? The US couldn't even conquer North Korea, come on now. If it were even remotely true there would never have been an Iron Curtain.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 00:45
|
|
|
Comrade Gorbash posted:So the idea is that NATO can help keep that kind of thing from happening. Geography and history mean that US military strength is not the inherent danger to the security of any given European state that the military strength of another European state is. Thus the inclusion of the US in NATO and the commitment of each state to defend each other means European countries can get by with much smaller militaries, which reduces the risk for all of them. I guess that makes some sense. But I feel you could equally argue that many member countries might have cut military spending a lot further without pressure from Nato, particularly in the 90s.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 00:48
|
|
|
Mr Enderby posted:I guess that makes some sense. But I feel you could equally argue that many member countries might have cut military spending a lot further without pressure from Nato, particularly in the 90s. The larger point is that bitching endlessly about how unfair it is that the US is on the hook for European member nations and that they should shift for themselves, then bitching when they propose to do that on the grounds that large European armies are inherently destabilizing kind of exposes that there's a different agenda behind all of it. There certainly is a middle ground where you can argue that Europe has cut too close to the bone and needs to spend a little more without fully re-militarizing. But... yeah.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 01:10
|
|
|
Careful with the Flashman spoilers now, I finished the first one a while back (that poor bloody Lancer) and I intend to eventually read the rest at some point.
|
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 01:34
|
|
|
I just found out there is a podcast discussing all the Popes: https://pontifacts.podbean.com/e/22-fabian/ Also, I guess I should get back to it, we haven't even gotten to the chapter on booze yet:              
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 02:31
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:Sure. But 'such dominance over the entire world'? The US couldn't even conquer North Korea, come on now. Oh, they could have, but decided not to because that would've kicked offf WW3. There might a a reason we pulled out of Korea and Vietnam without taking it all the way, as opposed to Iraq and Afghanistan which weren't under Soviet protection. Hail SS-18 Satan, &c.. And the main reason we haven't had another go at North Korea is because NK isstill kinda friendly with China, and the US can't go to war with China because if we did, dollar stores and the British equivalent Poundland would have to up their prices by an order of magnitude or two. (Before anybody yells at me, that's the simplified version. It could also cause thermonuclear Armageddon, but either way the economic fallout might end up being worse.) Something something most of the well-known wars/conflicts the US was involved in between 1946 and 1990 were proxies for the US and Soviet Union to have a dustup while keeping the Cold War reasonably cool, and the US mostly bowed out first in the game of thermonuclear chicken. I think we technically won Afghanistan (the '80's one, when the Soviets tried to invade), if only by giving a bunch of goodies to the side that turned out to be the bad guys and eventually turned against us*, causing basically the third iteration of our experience in Vietnam -- the OG, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the American invasion of Afghanistan ... Yeah, it may have been for the best that we quit while we were ahead in Korea and Vietnam. *The Dropkick Murphys sum it up pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPIezg-YyxI "Now I've trained an army for my kids to fight one day We'll teach them all of our secrets, and then we'll walk away We're knee-deep in guerillas, yeah the party never stops United States of America, undercover cop" Yeah, the US Government kinda does that on the regular, and not just with the spies. We sent Army SF to Afghanistan in the '80s to teach them ho to use all the cool weapons we were giving them. Oops. Edit: Also there was that US-sponsored coup in Iran that was eventually overthrown by a rebellion, and anyway they hate us now and are somehow still flying at least some F-14s, which, to be fair, is pretty impressive, given the type's reputation for needing rather a lot of maintenance hours per flight hour, and the US doing their damnedest to prevent them getting spare parts. On a lighter note, the rebellion happened just before the last F-14 for the Iranian order rolled off the production line. The US Navy just kinda straight-up stole it for themselves, because we couldn't give it to our now-enemies for obvious reasons, even though they'd already paid for it.. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 05:15 on Nov 14, 2018 |
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 04:59
|
|
Bad Angus! Bad!
|
I'll also point out that they most assuredly DID conquer North Korea: It was China getting involved and, as mentioned, the unwillingness to risk nuclear war in response, that forced them out.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 05:40
|
|
|
Cessna posted:I'll also point out that they most assuredly DID conquer North Korea: My father was an "advisor" in the late days of Vietnam, and sums it up with "we won all the battles, but lost the war." And, I mean, he's not wrong about that. Who was it, MacArthur who advocated for turning North Korea into a glass parking lot? And then the guy they put in charge of SAC (Gen. Thomas S. Power, which is an appropriate name for a man in his position), made MacArthur look positively reasonable by comparison. This is your more-or-less yearly reminder that a) the line from whichever recent Batman movie "Some men just want to watch the world burn," is actually true, and 2) has been true for some of the guys in control of nukes. Thread favorite book Command and Control is scary enough, but then you realize Dr. Strangelove was so close to being a documentary, and frankly it's amazing we still exist as a species. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 06:34 on Nov 14, 2018 |
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 06:08
|
|
|
lenoon posted:I am a surprisingly big fan of flashy after the first book, largely because I initially read them as being quite anti-empire (before I realised that George MacDonald Fraser was very much of the “we brought trains to India!” School) in that flashman is held up as the epitome of the Mans Man of the British Empire - a cowardly bastard just trying to get laid which I think says a lot about the system he existed in that allowed him to thrive. Really felt for years they were an inditement of the imperial system; “to succeed here you must be a real poo poo”. No idea how I arrived at this reading but it stuck with me enough to be completely immovable in my mind even though reading them now I’m aware of how weirdly off kilter it is. They weren’t totally meant that way but they also weren’t completely blind to it. George McDonald Fraser was a patriotic ex-army Brit and I don’t think he ever lost his reflexive love of the idea of Empire, but at the same time he wrote Flashman as a complete arsehole.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 07:13
|
|
|
Just wanted to stop and say thanks to everyone this last couple days. The Japanese book, Polyakov's Iran-Iraq series, and Ponifacts have been some great additions the last two days. edit: oh and the book list too, although I'm probably not going to be reading much until after New Year's.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 08:26
|
|
|
There is this dramatic recording going around of a whole bunch of gunfire at 10:59 on November 11, 1918, which then dramatically and instantly stops at 11:11. The audio itself is a piss-poor reproduction (I'm pretty sure I heard one of those stock explosion sounds in Red Alert 1), but it is supposedly based on a real "sound-graph" which shows a great deal of gunfire suddenly stopping at 11:11. Is there any way whatsoever that this is real? I know there was some fighting between the signing of the armistice and it taking effect, but this seems a little too dramatic for me. Did some prick order a artillery bombardment at 10:55, or is someone just janking people's emotional chains?
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 12:14
|
|
|
Cessna posted:I'll also point out that they most assuredly DID conquer North Korea: That's my point. You do not 'dominate the world' if another power can join the war you're fighting and instantly kick your conventional forces halfway back down the country. Nor if you are unwilling to do something about it because it'll get you nuked.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 12:17
|
|
|
Book rec: The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, by Paul N. Edwards. It's not exactly a book about war or battles, but it's extremely good. Came out in 1996 and talks about history, but has some downright eerie parallels to current tech trends.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 12:25
|
|
|
Geisladisk posted:There is this dramatic recording going around of a whole bunch of gunfire at 10:59 on November 11, 1918, which then dramatically and instantly stops at 11:11. The audio itself is a piss-poor reproduction (I'm pretty sure I heard one of those stock explosion sounds in Red Alert 1), but it is supposedly based on a real "sound-graph" which shows a great deal of gunfire suddenly stopping at 11:11. If you believe the Imperial War Museum the sound-graph is real. https://twitter.com/I_W_M/status/1059759737884078081
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 12:29
|
|
|
Chillbro Baggins posted:I think we technically won Afghanistan (the '80's one, when the Soviets tried to invade), if only by giving a bunch of goodies to the side that turned out to be the bad guys and eventually turned against us*, causing basically the third iteration of our experience in Vietnam -- the OG, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the American invasion of Afghanistan ... Yeah, it may have been for the best that we quit while we were ahead in Korea and Vietnam. Afghanistan wasn't quite so simple as that, there were a myriad of different groups that the US, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia supported, all of whom had their "favorites" among who was to get the weapons and training, though Pakistan's part was mostly acting as a counduit for Saudi and US support, which allowed some degree of deniability and also gave Pakistan alot of influence over who got what. Iran also supported a number of Mujahideen groups, but this was not in cooperation with the US and Saudi Arabia, they were also a bit preoccupied with the war against Iraq. Alot of the guys the US supported are still around and part of the government-aligned warlord groups of the northern alliance, most of the Pashtun groups either allied themselves with or were defeated and absorbed by the Talian when they emerged out of the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan in the mid 90s and began fighting everyone. It's important to note that the Taliban did not exist during the Soviet-Afghan war, they are specifically a result of the society ravaged by the war, specifically the generation of Pashtun kids who grew up in refugee camps in Pakistan, where living was pretty hard and many had been orphaned or injured by mines and bombs, also in many of them schooling was handled by Saudi organizations (you can imagine what that entails). Anyway I'd kind of hesitate to call people who fought against a Soviet strategy of dealing with insurgency that bordered on genocidal the "bad guys". What became of Afghanistan since is largely the result of the almost complete destruction of its society and infrastructure during that war, the depopulation of much of the country, more than half the population becoming refugees and somewhere around 1 to 2 million killed overall. It's that and the US and the rest of the world largely losing complete interest in the country the moment the Soviets left, which did not at all improve the post-war prospects of the country and its inhabitants.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 12:31
|
|
|
The 'some prick' that ordered an artillery barrage on the 11th November was General Pershing, btw.quote:As news of the armistice spread across the western front the level of fighting generally decreased. This was not the case in those areas where the United States Forces were active. General Pershing of US Forces appeared to have been sceptical of the armistice and questioned whether the Germans would honour the ceasefire. As a result United States Forces were involved in heavy fighting on 11 November. Two major operations – crossing the River Meuse and taking the town of Stenay from German control (the last town to fall in World War One) – led to casualties of 1,300 for the Americans. Those who died in US uniform on 11 November included three Mayo-born men Michael Garvin, Patrick Murray and Michael Walsh. Another man to die, originally from Kilfenora, County Clare, was Austin O’Hare. He was 30 years old when he was killed, and had emigrated to Massachusetts in his early 20s where he worked as a labourer. He is buried in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery and Memorial.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 12:34
|
|
|
Sorry if this was posted, but lol gamers suck: https://www.polygon.com/2018/11/11/18085202/battlefield-1-armistice-day-moment-of-silence-video
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 12:42
|
|
|
Tias posted:Sorry if this was posted, but lol gamers suck: I mean, you can look at it that way, or you can consider that most of them voluntarily observed a moment of silence.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 12:54
|
|
|
Tias posted:Sorry if this was posted, but lol gamers suck: Something something stab in the back myth
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 12:54
|
|
|
I'm just joshing, it's a pretty neat gesture, but I think it was bound to play out the way it did 
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 12:55
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 7, 2024 11:30 |
|
|
FrangibleCover posted:You know, I never got that vibe from them at all. Every other Englishman in the books is portrayed as an upstanding type of fellow, noble and heroic, apart from the ones like Elphinstone who were too far gone for a sympathetic angle. I think that's actually Flashy's view though, he's such a poltroon that he automatically assumes he's cheating his way through the system without bothering to check that everyone else is doing what they claim to be. I know, right? I think teenage communist me just somehow missed a lot of the hagiography of the imperial heroes. Weirdly I read Mr American before any of the flashman books and initially thought his cameo in that was his sole appearance. Got to love extremely old 1914 flashy though. He would have been very old at Khartoum but I agree, almost certainly there, no doubt sneaking out by posing as an Arab merchant after Gordon’s death. I did at one point plan out the ACW flashman with him starting it all accidentally at fort sumter, time with quantrills raiders (under orders from Lincoln) and then in the hell of Gettysburg with the union, eventually with Sherman on the march to the sea. Got to meet (and get the better of) his inferior American copy Jackson Speed.
|
|
#
?
Nov 14, 2018 13:04
|
|