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Cyrano4747 posted:edit: not even a fun wank. Like, bored and too lazy to turn on a computer game so you rub the third one of the day out before microwaving some of last night's taco bell. Hey man, I don't criticize your lifestyle.
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Mar 1, 2019 23:44
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If Ceasar didn’t instigate a Civil War then the Republic would have broke down in some other way, leading to Civil War.
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Mar 1, 2019 23:46
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zoux posted:We determined that he was a stick in the mud and then enjoyed several pages of counterfactual/hypothetical discussion. You mean that boring circle jerk that I spent days scrolling through looking for the interesting, fun thread I subbed to multiple iterations ago?
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Mar 1, 2019 23:46
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zoux posted:Here's a simple counterfactual with what should be a straightforward answer: Would Rome have been better or worse off had Caesar surrendered his legions in 49 BCE and gone into quiet retirement? Better for who within Rome? The answer is probably "the same thing, but 10 years later". The system had been broken for decades, the powers that be were utterly uninterested in finding a solution, and there were doubtless more Pompey's and Caesars working their way up the cursus. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Mar 1, 2019 |
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Mar 1, 2019 23:47
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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The people have spoken, optimas.
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Mar 1, 2019 23:48
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What if counterfactuals were useful and entertaining?
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Mar 1, 2019 23:50
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GotLag posted:What if counterfactuals were useful and entertaining? Vincent Van Goatse posted:Does this happen before or after I have a threesome with Jennifer Lawrence and Anna Kendrick? Is the moon made of barbecue spare ribs in this universe?
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Mar 1, 2019 23:52
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What if Hitler had an evil twin?
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Mar 1, 2019 23:52
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We're all going to be dead in a few years anyways so just let us partake in whatever the threads dumb flavor of the month is
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Mar 1, 2019 23:56
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Before, obviously. And yes.
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Mar 1, 2019 23:58
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Nenonen posted:What if Hitler had an evil twin? Then he would have a goatee, except for the part where Prime Hitler has a moustache, which would be bare on Mirror Hitler.
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Mar 2, 2019 00:01
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Counterfactual's are the philosophy equivalent of " am I truly awake or am I in an simulation?" it's dumb and inevitably spirals into circular arguments and more counter-factuals. I think there is a reason this thread came up with the "Gay Black Hitler" trope. Anyway - changing topic. The earlier discussion about the MIG15 had me reading up on the MIG15/Sabre dogfights over Korea, and got me thinking. Was Korea truly the last war that featured old-time line-of-sight aerial combat? I would image this got pretty rare once the next generation of fighters were deployed in the 1960s.
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Mar 2, 2019 00:01
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Having blown a year listening to something like 8 full days of audiobook worth of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, I will now act like I actually know enough about something to do more than make a dry comment in the thread about if Caesar had just given up. I suppose if he had decided to become a giant effigy for everybody--particularly the Roman Senate--on which to blame everybody's contradictory problems, then maybe it would have all turned out different. But that's an exceptional, saintly level of self-sacrifice. At 49BC we're talking about crossing the Rubicon. Crassus was dead. Julia was dead. There was a background of a destitute class of Romans who once had farms that they lost to rich elites due to having to neglect them for Roman forever wars--you have too many pissed off people. Insert a joke about Cato here if you'd like. If there wasn't a precedent with Sulla for having one rear end in a top hat just kill everybody, then maybe there could have been a precedent for some other recourse. Edit: I think it was the first incarnation of this thread where somebody answered that a good way to get into counterfactuals is to explain why things went the way they did and the kind of inertia that had gone into that, and those are usually illuminating.
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Mar 2, 2019 00:01
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This might be an embarrassingly simple question but one I recently realized I had no answer for: did the Soviet Union and the U.S. ever directly engage each other militarily during the Cold War? Obviously they had their share of proxy conflicts, but were there any direct engagements between their armed forces? It seems like the kind of thing that could immediately result in the kind of hot war they wanted to avoid, so I assumed they had never done so.
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Mar 2, 2019 00:04
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The answer is without Augustus to usher in the concept of the Principate, whoever came out on top might have gone full King from the start and this the entire history changes a ton.
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Mar 2, 2019 00:06
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Eumenides posted:This might be an embarrassingly simple question but one I recently realized I had no answer for: did the Soviet Union and the U.S. ever directly engage each other militarily during the Cold War? Obviously they had their share of proxy conflicts, but were there any direct engagements between their armed forces? It seems like the kind of thing that could immediately result in the kind of hot war they wanted to avoid, so I assumed they had never done so. The USSR shot down recon planes at various times, most famously Francis Gary Powers' U2, and that would technically count. If you mean ground combat, I don't think there was ever a direct battle.
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Mar 2, 2019 00:07
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Zorak of Michigan posted:The USSR shot down recon planes at various times, most famously Francis Gary Powers' U2, and that would technically count. If you mean ground combat, I don't think there was ever a direct battle. I thought Soviet pilots engaged Sabres over Korea? Obviously using fake call signs but we could hear them communicating in Russian. I don’t know of the same happened over Vietnam
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Mar 2, 2019 00:11
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I think the most popular method of spurring conversation here is asking about extremely obscure military history details for the purpose of using that information in a role playing game.
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Mar 2, 2019 00:12
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Solaris 2.0 posted:The earlier discussion about the MIG15 had me reading up on the MIG15/Sabre dogfights over Korea, and got me thinking. Was Korea truly the last war that featured old-time line-of-sight aerial combat? I would image this got pretty rare once the next generation of fighters were deployed in the 1960s. There were plenty of light of sight dog fights over Vietnam, though there were missiles in play. One notable instance: a supersonic guns kill on a Mig-19, after the F-4's missiles failed.
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Mar 2, 2019 00:13
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Cyrano4747 posted:Also counterfactuals are dumb. I think counter-factuals or alt-history can be split into two kinds of scenarios, narrow and broad. A narrow scenario is something tightly constrained in circumstances and can be useful to understand certain facets of historical events. They are over small specific changes and the immediate consequences. These can be useful because they help us understand how specific parts of past societies or technology worked. For example if we ask a question like "How would Philadelphia's city government handle a Yellow Fever epidemic in 1770, 1870, and 1970," we can use this question to explore the changing role of the government in administration of public health. We can ask a question like "If Czar Nicholas II died in 1902 without a direct male heir, who would inherit the Russian throne?" To understand the rules of Imperial succession in the late Romanov state. Broad scenarios are much less interesting. These are open ended questions, covering great sweeping events and encompassing chaotic and unpredictable processes. This would be a question like " What would 21st century Russia look like if Czar Nicholas II died before WWI?" It is a bad question because there is no possible telling what difference that would have made. Maybe it would have made no difference, or all the difference. I think the question about the time traveling sub, even if it was facially ridiculous, was a narrow alt-history scenario and a useful and interesting question. It forced people to think hard about the capabilities of the ships and fleets involved and to consider plausible responses and their immediate ramifications. The question about Caesar surrendering however is so open ended and vague that it becomes impossible to answer meaningfully. To give a trivial answer Rome would have been immediately better off for the next several years at least, as it would not be fighting a brutal fratricidal civil war. Beyond the immediate future though? Who could say? Maybe it would have just resulted in somebody else fighting their own civil war, or maybe given enough time the system could have been reformed. Maybe maybe maybe, it doesn't really lead anywhere.
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Mar 2, 2019 00:18
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Solaris 2.0 posted:The earlier discussion about the MIG15 had me reading up on the MIG15/Sabre dogfights over Korea, and got me thinking. Was Korea truly the last war that featured old-time line-of-sight aerial combat? I would image this got pretty rare once the next generation of fighters were deployed in the 1960s. Nearly all of the dogfights in Vietnam in gun range (I assume this is what you mean by line-of-sight...LOS actually has a slightly different meaning in military terms). Most of the VPAF fighters were only armed with cannons. Eumenides posted:This might be an embarrassingly simple question but one I recently realized I had no answer for: did the Soviet Union and the U.S. ever directly engage each other militarily during the Cold War? Obviously they had their share of proxy conflicts, but were there any direct engagements between their armed forces? It seems like the kind of thing that could immediately result in the kind of hot war they wanted to avoid, so I assumed they had never done so. VVS pilots flew pretty extensively in Korea and generally did extremely well, as would be expected. A handful flew in Vietnam, and the Russians sent a bunch of guys to operate Vietnamese SAM sites. This guy is almost certainly the top ground-based ace of all time aside from that one Kuwaiti colonel who shot down like half the Iraqi air force.
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Mar 2, 2019 00:21
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Good counter-factual question: If you wrecked your car and fractured your elbow, what would be the immediate consequences? How would you get to work? Would your insurance cover the medical bills? Bad counter-factual: If your parents were millionaires and you lived on a yacht instead of in a house would you still like reading the Military history thread?
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Mar 2, 2019 00:28
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Solaris 2.0 posted:The earlier discussion about the MIG15 had me reading up on the MIG15/Sabre dogfights over Korea, and got me thinking. Was Korea truly the last war that featured old-time line-of-sight aerial combat? I would image this got pretty rare once the next generation of fighters were deployed in the 1960s. Rules of engagement and early BVR missiles being horrible/big have essentially ensured that every war since has involved some description of line of sight plane vs. plane and pilot vs. pilot air combat. For some of them, like the Falklands War, nobody even brought BVR missiles. The whole conflict in the air was guns and heaters. I don't have solid results for you on the latest Indo-Pakistani spat, but I'm willing to put money on at least some of the combat being within visual range.
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Mar 2, 2019 00:40
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counterfactuals are good because they allow you to tell a story. if you don't like stories, why the gently caress are you in the history thread?
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Mar 2, 2019 00:42
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bewbies posted:. aside from that one Kuwaiti colonel who shot down like half the Iraqi air force.  i gotta know more about this!
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Mar 2, 2019 00:49
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Mycroft Holmes posted:counterfactuals are good because they allow you to tell a story. if you don't like stories, why the gently caress are you in the history thread? Completely supported. Counterfactuals should never be seen as "the way it would go", more as "one way it could go". It's fun to play with history, it's fun to ask what if, it's fun to see how minor changes could theoretically lead to massive effects.
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Mar 2, 2019 00:49
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Squalid posted:Bad counter-factual: If your parents were millionaires and you lived on a yacht instead of in a house would you still like reading the Military history thread? Well, obviously this is a bad counter-factual since it's factual. But enough of this and back to harpooning dolphins!
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Mar 2, 2019 01:00
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FrangibleCover posted:Rules of engagement and early BVR missiles being horrible/big have essentially ensured that every war since has involved some description of line of sight plane vs. plane and pilot vs. pilot air combat. For some of them, like the Falklands War, nobody even brought BVR missiles. The whole conflict in the air was guns and heaters. I don't have solid results for you on the latest Indo-Pakistani spat, but I'm willing to put money on at least some of the combat being within visual range. https://twitter.com/SushantSin/status/1101313408727683075 How advanced is that missile and is it a good idea to sell it to quasi-allies Oh and what if Legio XIII had been armed with SLAMRAAMs zoux fucked around with this message at 01:05 on Mar 2, 2019 |
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Mar 2, 2019 01:02
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If it wasn't Caesar, it would have been someone else. One person never really has that much effect on the trajectory of history.
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Mar 2, 2019 01:17
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FrangibleCover posted:Have they got the communications facilities to do that? I doubt the Tico can talk to the Wildcats or the WW2 Carriers so they'll probably be reduced to flashing information to another ship to be broadcast for the fighters. True. However, the experience of the operators in the CIC counts for something. The Tico's CIC would definitely have been in put charge of the whole defense, and those operators have seen what communications failures can lead to in exercises. They'd either move an appropriate radio set to the Tico, or jury rig something that can talk on the appropriate frequencies. Given even a week to run exercises, they could make a start on imposing some radio discipline. One thing I'd want to do is to bring the CAP leadership on board and show them how complete a picture the CIC actually has.
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Mar 2, 2019 01:26
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FrangibleCover posted:Completely supported. Counterfactuals should never be seen as "the way it would go", more as "one way it could go". It's fun to play with history, it's fun to ask what if, it's fun to see how minor changes could theoretically lead to massive effects. That's not history though, that's fantasy flavored like a past time period. It's like discussing Tom Clancy books in D&D. I'm not saying fantasy and fiction are bad. They're great. I enjoy all kinds of them, including ones with a historical flavor. But you might as well walk over to the spaceflight thread and start arguing about how The Expanse would be different if the Belter kids got some 20th C. over the counter multi-vitamins.
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Mar 2, 2019 01:31
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mllaneza posted:True. However, the experience of the operators in the CIC counts for something. The Tico's CIC would definitely have been in put charge of the whole defense, and those operators have seen what communications failures can lead to in exercises. They'd either move an appropriate radio set to the Tico, or jury rig something that can talk on the appropriate frequencies. Given even a week to run exercises, they could make a start on imposing some radio discipline. One thing I'd want to do is to bring the CAP leadership on board and show them how complete a picture the CIC actually has. This is a great example. 1) How do we know Tico's CIC would have been put in charge of everything? Who makes this decision and who agrees? 2) how do we know the operators would have that experience? 3) how do we know they would be clever enough or able enough to jury rig something to talk to 1942 USN fighters? 4) how do we know 1942 USN pilots would be amenable to these random assholes totally changing their radio protocol? There is no answer to any of these. Any answer is going to be based on conjecture to which anyone can answer with more conjecture. It's the historical version of arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. At the end of the day we haven't learned anything new, just traded half-formed opinions based on the most tenuous of trivia that might or might not have anything to do with the reality of the situation. History is fundamentally ill equipped to answer the "how would ____" questions. It's far more able to answer "why/how did _____ " questions. It's not a predictive discipline. This holds as true for how Gay Black Hitler changes 1950s Rhodesia as it does for how having a Fletcher Class Destroyer at Trafalgar changes things.
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Mar 2, 2019 01:35
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Cyrano4747 posted:This is a great example. 
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Mar 2, 2019 01:57
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Personally i love the idea that history has no predictive power, and thus is unable to give any guidance to inform our current decision making.
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Mar 2, 2019 02:16
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Mycroft Holmes posted:counterfactuals are good because they allow you to tell a story. if you don't like stories, why the gently caress are you in the history thread? you may as well be asking "you like game of thrones, why won't you read my lovingly detailed fanfiction?" you realize Anyway on an actual MilHist note, I'm over at my grandparent's and going through some of my great-grandfather's old paperwork. He was a lifer in the Navy, and was serving as a ship's clerk on board the destroyer tender USS Whitney during the Pearl Harbor attack. He later transfered to the light cruiser USS Wilkes-Barre when it commissioned, saw the end of the war in Tokyo Bay from her deck, and in peacetime entered the reserves, got picked back up during Korea, then served as chief ship's clerk on a few other ships including the Ticonderoga until he retired for good in the late '50s (So, if anyone here had a relative on one of those ships who had their paperwork hosed up, sorry  )I'd post some examples, but it's all transfer orders and medical examinations so it's exceedingly uninteresting to anyone who isn't directly related to him. It's a pretty neat history in bulk, though, and makes me really wish I'd been around to talk to him (He died 20 years before I was born). I'll definitely have to try and find more of his official records sometime.
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Mar 2, 2019 02:19
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Tunicate posted:Personally i love the idea that history has no predictive power, and thus is unable to give any guidance to inform our current decision making. That's absolutely not what Cyrano was saying and it's extremely dickish to put those words in his mouth.
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Mar 2, 2019 02:20
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Cyrano4747 posted:History is fundamentally ill equipped to answer the "how would ____" questions. It's far more able to answer "why/how did _____ " questions. It's not a predictive discipline. This holds as true for how Gay Black Hitler changes 1950s Rhodesia as it does for how having a Fletcher Class Destroyer at Trafalgar changes things. You're not wrong per se, but the examplar setting is quite extreme. Hypotheticals tend to sway that way but that doesn't mean that asking silly questions is a complete waste of time and energy. Used properly they can be telling. What if Gay Black Hitler is not a useful counterfactual if we think of a setting where the Führer all of a sudden displays those two qualities. But that doesn't mean that we can't learn anything from considering what the future of a black baby born in Austria in 1889 and who doesn't fit in the heterosexual norm would be like. Or from considering what the likelihood of that would have been - what do we know of the black minority in Austria at the time, or how do we estimate how many people are born with features that we consider homosexuality.
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Mar 2, 2019 02:20
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mllaneza posted:The Ticonderoga at Midway discussion is overly focused on the kinematics. The real advantage it brings is a CiC full of trained operators. They'll set up good intercepts on all the incoming strike groups and the Wildcats will take care of breaking up the strikes. It was overly focused on that because it started with Frangible saying it could solo the entire Air element of Midway and I screwed around with the math on the actual weapons a Tico would/could have for the anti-air role. I think people got too caught up on the counterfactual poo poo when for me it it was just a breakdown of how it could do a thing if it somehow got there as a neat little numbers experiment since we know the numbers, or at least most of them. As mentioned in the convo the SPY-1 could’ve been a significant factor itself as could the Tico shooting harpoons or SM-6s at the carriers if it so wanted, but that wasn’t my point. It never really at any point was a “this is how it would work to alter the course of the battle”, it was more of “how could/would the Tico shoot down 400 planes.” And it turns out carrying a gently caress load of ESSMs and/or using the 5/54s well allows it to do an awful lot of airplane killing when they are props at a couple hundred knots, and it could in fact shoot down most of the Kido Butai itself just on the available weapons/sensor load a single Tico has, at least at a glance. If you wanted to make it less WW2 counterfactual you could sub it out for subsonic anti-ship missiles that fly a lot like Kates and Vals (Or Avengers/Dauntless) and it wouldn’t change anything. Anyways I apologize for making the counterfactual thing last longer than necessary since I do know that never goes over well in the thread, I just like spergin' out about poo poo like this. Mazz fucked around with this message at 03:05 on Mar 2, 2019 |
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Mar 2, 2019 02:24
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What would happen if there was no such thing as a counter-factual?
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Mar 2, 2019 03:37
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Nenonen posted:You're not wrong per se, but the examplar setting is quite extreme. Hypotheticals tend to sway that way but that doesn't mean that asking silly questions is a complete waste of time and energy. Used properly they can be telling. None of the examples you're giving are counterfactuals. If you want to have a conversation about ethnic and sexual minorities in the late 19th century Hapsburg empire that's totally a thing we can do using the historical method. We can gather evidence from contemporary sources and draw conclusions about these things. We aren't discussing unknowable hypotheticals about things that didn't happen, we're examining the lived experiences of real people and drawing generalizations from those. We can generalize based on their age cohort and, yes, their ethnic and sexual background. I don't know much about Austrian history at this time, but I'm pretty sure I could bash together a decent outline of what a gay non-white person born in Berlin two decades before WW1 would experience in his lifetime. Of course these would be the broadest of generalities, but you can then back that up by case studies of actual, known individuals. Tunicate posted:Personally i love the idea that history has no predictive power, and thus is unable to give any guidance to inform our current decision making. While this is an extreme statement I don't disagree with the core principle. I would disagree with the part about "unable to give any guidance" but the people who insist that history is predictive are flat out wrong. Studying 1930s Germany certainly gives some insight into right wing political radicalism, but you can't look at the 1933 and say it's the same as 2016. There's no direct line between Hitler and whatever contemporary political clusterfuck you want to name any more than there is a direct correlation between how the 1946 Red Sox did and how the Cubs will work out next year. Knowing about past events can inform your understanding of contemporary events, but they can't tell you what will happen. Worse, if you think you know how to approach the present because of what you think you know about the past you can gently caress it up BAD. Some fundamental misunderstandings of denazification and how the occupation of Germany worked from 1945-49 directly contributed to people loving up the occupation of Iraq after 2003.
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Mar 2, 2019 03:53
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