|
Kemper Boyd posted:Mostly because there was really no reason for war, it was just the best and the strongest and the bigliest leaders of Europe all collectively stepping on their own dicks when playing at Great Powers, their brilliant foreign policy moves and alliances turning Europe into a charnelhouse.
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 18:26
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 9, 2024 11:01 |
|
|
Alchenar posted:Uh, I wouldn't recommend Glantz until you've gone through some more readable stuff - he's super dry and has a writing style of quoting wholesale from daily army orders and situation reports and unless you are already familiar with those or have a sense of the events he's talking about it's really quite difficult to penetrate. I'm a historian/librarian so I'll probably be fine but thanks for the warning. I'll add Forczyk's books to my list. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Jan 14, 2019 |
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 18:39
|
|
|
Edgar Allen Ho posted:I can see fascist environmentalists being all about preserving The Homeland and fueling it by plundering the poo poo out of other countries, laying waste to their environments. most of the vectors have their roots in alexander dugin's stuff, which also tries to contaminate Eastern Orthodoxy every now and then once you know what to look for you can spot it, but BOY do they yell when you call them out on it HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Jan 14, 2019 |
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 18:42
|
|
|
Honestly, what scares me more than some apocalyptic event like a Carrington is simple deterioration of our infrastructure until something important breaks. No one wants to fund it, so all our national infrastructure is in bad shape and getting worse all the time. Not out of malice, or a Giant Meteor event, but simple apathy and neglect.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 18:45
|
|
|
FrangibleCover posted:That's the narrative that attaches itself to WW1 but honestly how many wars would still have happened if nobody was trying to play at Great Powers? It's a question of how many degrees of separation and abstraction you can have while still qualifying as "because somebody was trying to play at great powers." Would WWII have happened without WWI? How about without the great depression? Does the definition of "great powers" in this question apply to the conditions of the Versailles Treaty, or just the way the entente divvied up the territorial administration duties after 1918? Does the assassination of Ferdinand count as a Great Power Problem or something different given the arrangement between Austria-Hungary, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina? Pigeonholing stuff like the world wars as the fault of great power hubris is about as bad as saying it's all Napoleon's fault because everyone started trying to overthrow their kings a few decades later.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 18:50
|
|
|
Edgar Allen Ho posted:I can see fascist environmentalists being all about preserving The Homeland and fueling it by plundering the poo poo out of other countries, laying waste to their environments. I find these types really love an imagined notion of their country, and place themselves are nice down to the earth types, connected to the country, etc. If there's any cognitive dissonance with their policies, well, global warming is just a chinese hoax.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 19:02
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:How did the Valentine and Crusader tanks measure up to their Panzer III contemporaries? The Panzer III was a very innovative design when it was introduced in the late '30s, and was one of the first tanks to introduce a 'three man turret' containing the tank's commander, gunner, and loader. Most previous and contemporary tanks at the time combined the role of the commander and gunner (And in the case of some French tanks, the loader as well), which vastly increased the workload on the commander—when one guy has to spot a target, aim at a target, fire on the target, confirm the target is dead, move to spot another target, keep an eye around the rest of the tank to make sure nobody's sneaking up behind you, and oh yeah also continually listening to the radio for new orders and if anyone's trying to warn you about things you can't see, it can reduce the overall effectiveness of an armored vehicle quite a bit. Separating the commander and gunner's roles to allow each to concentrate on their respective jobs was a major innovation, and almost every tank since then has followed that innovation. Of course, tank technology during World War II advanced pretty quickly, and the Panzer III was an aged and increasingly obsolescent tank by the time it started facing the newer Valentine and Crusader in the desert. Fortunately for the Germans, though, the British were straight-up bad at building tanks and had a fundamentally flawed tank doctrine. The Crusader in particular, while fast, wasn't that reliable, wasn't well armored, and was poorly armed with only a 40mm 2 pounder that didn't even have HE rounds for infantry support. The Valentine was a much better tank in many regards, with good armor protection and good reliability, but was relatively slow and had the same lackluster gun as the Crusader because goddammit Britain why would you give an 'infantry tank' a gun that doesn't fire HE why are you so bad at this In the end, the Crusader and the Valentine were both able to be upgraded to have newer, bigger 57mm guns that still lacked HE, while the Panzer III was already near the end of its effective service life. By 1942 the British and the newly arrived Americans were also bringing M3 Lee and M4 Sherman tanks that completely outclassed the Panzer III in every way, while the Panzer III was effectively replaced by upgraded versions of the Panzer IV.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 19:03
|
|
|
Acebuckeye13 posted:The Valentine was a much better tank in many regards, with good armor protection and good reliability, but was relatively slow and had the same lackluster gun as the Crusader because goddammit Britain why would you give an 'infantry tank' a gun that doesn't fire HE why are you so bad at this We all know why: bad (armored) cav island
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 19:15
|
|
|
Acebuckeye13 posted:In the end, the Crusader and the Valentine were both able to be upgraded to have newer, bigger 57mm guns that still lacked HE, while the Panzer III was already near the end of its effective service life. By 1942 the British and the newly arrived Americans were also bringing M3 Lee and M4 Sherman tanks that completely outclassed the Panzer III in every way, while the Panzer III was effectively replaced by upgraded versions of the Panzer IV. There were 6pdr HE shells from 1943.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 19:38
|
|
|
Fangz posted:There were 6pdr HE shells from 1943. They existed, but IIRC they didn't make it into wide issue for some time. I could be wrong though!
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 19:54
|
|
|
Cessna posted:My dude, just wait 'til you get to Vietnam. "The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam" by James William Gibson should leave anyone with even a passing acquaintance on the subject frothing at the mouth, throwing furniture, and smashing lamps angry. I recommend it highly for an insight into just how hosed up and backwards American strategy in Vietnam was.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 20:20
|
|
|
HEY GUNS posted:even now there is a disturbing green/nazi overlap, seen it in germany myself I would **love** to hear more about this Is it the Nazis taking certain shared assumptions (pessimism about the effectiveness of rational government, an existential event so serious almost any action is justified etc) and then using them to lure people into the Nazi worldview? Or is it extreme greens drifting into the headspace where the ends justify any means? Following the Alt-right thread earlier this year it occurred to me one thing certain ideologies like are existential threats, because if you make the threat big enough you can justify anything. With the alt right, obviously, the "threats" are lies to justify acting a certain way, obviously, but I have been wondering the past few months why climate change isn't seeding the same behavior in the most extreme doomsayers. Phanatic posted:The scariest thing is the large HV power transformers. There are thousands of them, they're all essentially one-off designs, and the lead time to replace one of them is like 12-18 months, and they are no longer manufactured in the USA. Moreover, the rail cars required to even more them are rare and specialized items (there are 30 in the entire USA, fewer in Europe). Good (?) to know, thanks. I'm terrified by the 'one off design' aspect
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 20:25
|
|
|
Nebakenezzer posted:I would **love** to hear more about this Anyway take a New Urbanism guy, Slow Food guy, or environmentalist, of weak will and not too much education. then feed their mind with poo poo like this: "you know the things we hate about modern cities? those are due to black people." "you know how High Modernist architecture all looks the same? That's Jews trying to destroy all the cultural specificity of individual peoples." "Jews are also behind the part where modern cities are less walkable." "We're not racist, we just love cultural diversity. We love cultural diversity so much that you should make it harder to emigrate, to keep all the cultures diverse." There's an old pedigree for this: https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1084218478721187840 Basically it's like...taking decent points and twisting them very slightly. The same way it always happens--Georg Mosse called Nazism a "scavenger ideology," it clothes itself in remnants of other ideologies Seriously, look at wratth of gnon on twitter. It's 80% traditional catholicism, praise of the middle ages, traditional architecture...and then every now and then he says something about race. It's insidious. If you don't know what to pay attention to you can barely see it coming. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Jan 14, 2019 |
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 20:38
|
|
|
i would love to read about race theory / racism / racial interactions in the middle ages
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 20:41
|
|
|
bewbies posted:the hell? how? The “darker” green environmentalisms have sort of a mythic notion of pre-industrial society as better/purer than the fallen state of sinful modern man which meshes quite well with some of the Nazi ideas about the flowering of the fatherland and so forth?
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 20:49
|
|
|
bewbies posted:the hell? how? There is a certain 'conservative Green' strain that is all about back to the soil, back to our peasant food growing roots, industrialisation is bad, tradition is good, etc. Given that ethnic minorities in western Europe are not traditional and tend to reside in cities this cross pollinates super well with the strain of Nazism (and conservatism before it) that is all about Blood and Soil (emphasis on both) and the heroic Aryan farmer. Chaps like this - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artaman_League No joke, the Nazis were by far the most 'Green' of governing parties in the 1930s.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 20:50
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:There is a certain 'conservative Green' strain that is all about back to the soil, back to our peasant food growing roots, industrialisation is bad, tradition is good, etc. Given that ethnic minorities in western Europe are not traditional and tend to reside in cities this cross pollinates super well with the strain of Nazism (and conservatism before it) that is all about Blood and Soil (emphasis on both) and the heroic Aryan farmer. Chaps like this -
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 20:51
|
|
|
To get things a bit more on topic: The earliest major ecologic impact of a military operation that I know off is the deforestation of Spain during the Armada buildup. Are there any earlier ones? And is the narrative there even true?Nebakenezzer posted:I would **love** to hear more about this 1: There are Nazis in every political group larger then a few people. The greens were a bit of an exception due to the greens = communists argument that was popular during the cold war. But that is fading, and it was always only a first world thing. Hey Guns said that a lot better. 2: There is a lot of the yellow terror narrative in the green nazis. Where all pollution is blamed on the Chinese and it is taken as proof of their inferiority. This also only became big after environmentalism became the consensus. 3: The most obvious actual overlap is in the primitivist ideas. Where you have greens saying : "If we lived as hunter gatherers, we and the planed would be happier" and nazis saying : "If we lived as hunter gatherers, all those decadent gays would die off".
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 20:54
|
|
|
tonberrytoby posted:3: The most obvious actual overlap is in the primitivist ideas. Where you have greens saying : "If we lived as hunter gatherers, we and the planed would be happier" and nazis saying : "If we lived as hunter gatherers, all those decadent gays would die off".
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 20:55
|
|
|
I think Germany also has a tradition of linking being opposed to industrial development and  and  since it happened later there?It’s also why the rightist bullshit about “National Socialism” being left-wing is probably only 99% wrong (prior to the long knives and the Strasserites getting killed off, at least?) E: Although I’d probably put that down more to a “child makes a right move in chess” effect more than to a deep understanding of third position “anti-capitalism” by the rightists? EE: and it’s not like my knowledge is much deeper than having read Marx’s Anti-Duhring (or at least parts of it) and Richard J Evan’s Third Reich Trilogy (pro tip: do *not* do this in audiobook form  ), and done some wikidiving?
Schadenboner fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Jan 14, 2019 |
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 20:57
|
|
|
HEY GUNS posted:the hunter gatherers are also gay But I am fairly certain that most nazies don't know that or repress that knowledge. At least until it is time to accuse some subhuman of being homophobic, then they are totally gay.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 20:59
|
|
|
tonberrytoby posted:To get things a bit more on topic: The earliest major ecologic impact of a military operation that I know off is the deforestation of Spain during the Armada buildup. Are there any earlier ones? And is the narrative there even true? https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/greenland-ice-cores-track-roman-lead-pollution-in-year-by-year-detail/
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 20:59
|
|
|
god if the Nazis weren't so horrible it would be almost funny. i just got in a rabbithole on the breitspurbahn. Railways, but bigger! KYOON GRIFFEY JR fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Jan 14, 2019 |
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 20:59
|
|
|
KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:god if the Nazis weren't so horrible it would be almost funny. i just got in a rabbithole on the breitspurpahn.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 21:01
|
|
|
KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:i would love to read about race theory / racism / racial interactions in the middle ages For the first two I'd say it didn't really exist, at least not as we think of it. You had national/regional/religious prejudice and such, and a thinking that different peoples (race was used in the past in English and other languages as interchangeable with people) but it wasn't as "scientific" as the bullshit people got into in the 19th century nor as concerned with ideas of purity. One thing I find interesting is that in Gesta Francorum (I belive) or one account from the First Crusade, the author is pretty impressed with the fighting qualities of the Turks they fought at Dorylaeum and throughout Anatolia, and considers that if you could have Franks and Turks breed you might just create a race of perfect warriors (or something along those lines). Islamic societies seem to have been a bit more concerned with "color race", and even in medieval times will sometimes talk about black and white people, though it seems to most often come up with the subject of slavery where slaves will often be divided into categories of white (typically, Slavs and Turkic people go into this one, though you'll also see others like Armenians and such) and black (often just called "Sudanese" no matter where they come from), and there seems to exist certain tasks that certain slaves are preferred for, based again on a conception of racial characteristics (also within the colors, Turkic slaves being almost exclusively warriors and Slavs being manual laborers, servants and concubine for an example). It also for some instance comes up with slave eunuchs, in the Ottoman Empire for instance, white eunuchs typically only had their balls cut off, but black eunuchs were almost always "true eunuchs" having everything cut away, and were preferred as harem guards.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 21:02
|
|
|
HEY GUNS posted:the romans mined and processed so much metal that they left pollution levels that would not be equaled until the industrial revolution you can also look at Roman mining sites which were highly destructive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_M%C3%A9dulas that is a good one
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 21:03
|
|
|
Cessna posted:Yeah, right? I mean in general maybe be a bit suspicious of the rigour of a dude writing his first publication whose sole academic qualifications are a 3rd in BA history (the worst possible honours degree class, can yanks translate to GPA?). It's not like people can't write good history outside of academia but it's worth the old squinty eye when that happens.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 21:08
|
|
|
Didn't the ancient greeks deforest their landscape heavily (in part) to build their navies and make their seas safe for mass olive oil exporting/Persian-free? (Also olive groves are apparently lovely at holding soil so hope u like bare blindingly white hills, future Greece)!
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 21:08
|
|
|
There used to be an herb that was an astonishingly effective natural contraceptive. The Romans so abused and over-harvested it that the plant is now extinct.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 21:11
|
|
|
Schadenboner posted:I think Germany also has a tradition of linking being opposed to industrial development and Stuff like Kraft durch Freude and the Volkswagen would absolutely be socialist if it weren't for the 'you must be THIS Aryan to ride' stuff, yes. But then there's all the other stuff.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 21:14
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:Stuff like Kraft durch Freude and the Volkswagen would absolutely be socialist if it weren't for the 'you must be THIS Aryan to ride' stuff, yes. But then there's all the other stuff.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 21:22
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:I mean in general maybe be a bit suspicious of the rigour of a dude writing his first publication whose sole academic qualifications are a 3rd in BA history (the worst possible honours degree class, can yanks translate to GPA?). It's not like people can't write good history outside of academia but it's worth the old squinty eye when that happens. what is the difference between honours and non-honours? because i thought a 3rd was like a...C?...but when you say "honours" that makes me think it's higher than that
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 21:23
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:Stuff like Kraft durch Freude and the Volkswagen would absolutely be socialist if it weren't for the 'you must be THIS Aryan to ride' stuff, yes. But then there's all the other stuff. But even that has to be seen in the context of being the cheaper solution for Hitler’s factory owner-backers, cheaper than the actual unions if the Social Democrats were in power and certainly cheaper than if the Communists took over. Also a lot of Nazi unionism had very very weak worker protections and grievance procedures? TLDR: The rightists claims are bullshit: the Nazis were a right-wing party supported by anti-Semitic right-wing industrialists which pursued right-wing domestic objectives, but there were aspects of social welfare legislation (with Herrenvolk means-testing) which leads to Anglo-American rightists going “YOU SEE!?! ZOMG, LIBURUL FASCISMS!” and there probably is an interesting intellectual tradition to tease out here, but it’s completely divorced from the shallow and ideological claims of modern rightists about “Left-Wing Nazis”. See also: 1984 being a right-wing parable rather than being about National Socialism (INGSOC: English Socialism). They aren’t arguing in good faith so even if they happen to be correct (for certain extremely narrow and technical interpretations of “correct”) they’re still wrong. Schadenboner fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Jan 14, 2019 |
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 21:25
|
|
|
Epicurius posted:How much of that was due to a lack of German access to the cotton market? Off the top of my head, most cotton is/was grown in the US, Egypt, China, India and Egypt, and the only one of those countries not at war with Germany was China (which was having their own problems) Also, you know, the Royal Navy existed.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 21:25
|
|
|
Schadenboner posted:there probably is an interesting intellectual tradition to tease out here, but it’s completely divorced from the shallow and ideological claims of modern rightists about “Left-Wing Nazis”.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 21:29
|
|
|
HEY GUNS posted:what is the difference between honours and non-honours? because i thought a 3rd was like a...C?...but when you say "honours" that makes me think it's higher than that So it goes First, 2:1, 2:2 (me!), 3rd, all with honours, then a bare pass without honours.Traditionally it's like maybe 10%:40%:40%:10%:barely anyone (recent grade inflation scandals exist) by distribution. 'Honours' translates to 'didnt drool on the exam paper'.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 21:29
|
|
|
HEY GUNS posted:Seriously, look at wratth of gnon on twitter. It's 80% traditional catholicism, praise of the middle ages, traditional architecture...and then every now and then he says something about race. It's insidious. If you don't know what to pay attention to you can barely see it coming. I was on Wikimedia reading through Eugene Viollet le Duc's writing on medieval French architecture (mostly to look at the pictures) and running the text through Google Translate, and it's amazing how quickly he'll transition from talking about window asymmetry in medieval houses to talking about racial purity and the barbarous influence of Italians on virtuous Indo-Germanic timber architecture.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 21:29
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:So it goes First, 2:1, 2:2 (me!), 3rd, all with honours, then a bare pass without honours.Traditionally it's like maybe 10%:40%:40%:10%:barely anyone (recent grade inflation scandals exist) by distribution. 'Honours' translates to 'didnt drool on the exam paper'. OK that maps pretty well onto First = A+, maybe A 2:1= A, A-, or high B 2:2 = the rest of the Bs, here is where most of the bell curve sits 3 = C anything lower: we are not actually allowed to fail you without an investigative process so if i give you a D you REALLY hosed up HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Jan 14, 2019 |
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 21:32
|
|
|
Ghost of Babyhead posted:I was on Wikimedia reading through Eugene Viollet le Duc's writing on medieval French architecture (mostly to look at the pictures) and running the text through Google Translate, and it's amazing how quickly he'll transition from talking about window asymmetry in medieval houses to talking about racial purity and the barbarous influence of Italians on virtuous Indo-Germanic timber architecture.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 21:33
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 9, 2024 11:01 |
|
|
feedmegin posted:Stuff like Kraft durch Freude and the Volkswagen would absolutely be socialist if it weren't for the 'you must be THIS Aryan to ride' stuff, yes. But then there's all the other stuff. yeah one of the key points of Naziism is that it does have social programs they're just explicitly only for the in-group rather than nominally for everyone
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2019 21:37
|
|