Wulfolme posted:

See, this poo poo. I see no way this can make sense. That it makes sense has to be taken as a given and then everything can build from there if it has to. No sir, I don't like it.

Joementum posted:

Your monthly reminder to come check out the 2016 primary thread to be kept abreast of all the hilarious primary stuff, like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efHGNzG3KJg

Quidam Viator posted:

It's really exciting, isn't it? I mean, just think what hell any one of the GOP candidates could wreak with a fully armed and operational House and Senate majority behind them. They could use the full power of the US constitution, backed by ~38 Republican governors and their State legislatures to just lay waste to everything, and it would be totally legal. Even if it weren't legal, they could make it legal. And if they play their cards right and win the first midterm, you're absolutely right, they can pack the Supreme Court for the next few decades, and make ABSOLUTELY loving SURE that everything they want is legal, everything they don't like is illegal, and make their brand of craziness the new normal.

Hollismason posted:

The only thing I actually like about Ron Paul and his son are that they seem to be at least pretty anti-war. So I think that's commendable at least.

I mean poo poo all on their other views but Ron Pauls pretty consistent from what I understand of not being pro war.

Radbot posted:

Did anyone get a chance to listen to Dan Carlin's latest Common Sense?

It was pretty adorable - he strongly adheres to a truth-is-in-the-middle ideology and having him try to paint the left as just as bad as the right on specifically the TPP and other trade deals was really strange. You know, those big leftist organizations that benefit from American corruption just as much as corporations do, like... um, you know...

KomradeX posted:

Hell that's part of the reason I gave up listening to his history podcast. I was listening to his world war one series last year and that truth in the middle crap just kept hitting me and after awhile I just turned it off cause he's a crap historian. I don't get why he's so popular, I'd rather listen to The Dollop at leat those guys are funny

40 OZ posted:

Mr. Ferguson is a bad guy but I'm sorry, is this a crime or something?

I'd borrow a passage from Satan himself if I thought it was illuminating.

Why aren't you upset about him citing Mein Kampf? Can you put down your democratic party membership badge for 5 seconds?

edit- fyi I am to the left of karl marx

Majorian posted:

I've always felt sorry for Schlieffen, because the plan that bears his name actually probably would have worked to take France out of the war, if Moltke the Younger hadn't hosed around with it and made it 100% unworkable.

Trin Tragula posted:

The insane "THERE IS NO SCHLIEFFEN PLAN THERE WAS NEVER A SCHLIEFFEN PLAN WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA" guy is Terence Zuber, who likes to pass the time by getting into ridiculous arguments on that theme, and he isn't particularly fussy whether he does it with academics in the pages of a scholarly journal, or with any old Tom, Dick & Harry in an internet forum.

On the other hand, the idea that pops up quite frequently of von Moltke reaching into a filing cabinet on about July 15th 1914, pulling out a well-thumbed file marked "The Schlieffen Plan" in big letters, and attempting to follow it precisely, railway timetables and all, except for that bit about "keep the right wing strong!" has taken a serious kicking over the course of the last twenty years or so. (It doesn't help that the documentation that would let historians know exactly what they were thinking disappeared when the archives got bombed thirty years later.)

(Writing more about this, watch this space, it'll be useful when I get done trying to make the July Crisis interesting and can start revising and expanding August and September, which needs doing.)

Trin Tragula posted:

OK, so if I were to start writing blog entries today about the "Schlieffen Plan" (and it would have to be in quotation marks), it'd probably look something like this. Warning - wall-o-text follows.

In 1906, Alfred von Schlieffen retired as German CIGS, leaving behind him a number of different documents (even the question of whether or not they should be called "plans", with all that that word implies, is a Matter of Some Debate - they're often described instead as think-pieces) which in some way contain some ideas about various scenarios for a European war. If you squint hard enough and tilt your head to the side, you can see at least a few similarities in all of them with what eventually happened in 1914. Until the last years of the 20th century, no historian had actually seen them and they were assumed lost; IIRC they were found by accident in a completely different set of files by someone who was looking for something entirely unrelated. Terence Zuber then picked up on them and concluded that there was no such thing as "the Schlieffen plan". He then proceeded to tell everyone. In a very loud voice.

So, the first point to note is that of Schlieffen's various "plans", the ones that deal with a two-front war against Russia and France together (and possibly Britain as well) are fundamentally defensive. Which is interesting in itself; the traditional Schlieffen Plan narrative presents him as an inflexible single-minded cult-of-the-offensive berk. The German army deploys primarily to resist an offensive by one or other of France or Russia and evict them from Germany, then turns about and does the same thing on the other front, and then we go outwith the scope of the document.

Then there's the really interesting "plan", which is the one dealing with a one-front war against France. This one is offensive, and it assumes a larger army than Germany would have been likely to field (and is much larger than the one that was fielded in 1914). It's got the familiar curved arrows/revolving door concept. France mobilises on the border, the French Army kicks the door in and rushes into Alsace and Lorraine, they get stalled out by a combined German/A-H/Italian watch on the Rhine, and as soon as the French Army stops moving forward, the door keeps swinging round, having marched through the Low Countries, and kicks them firmly up the arse, cutting the French supply lines, besieging Paris, and eventually starting to squeeze the French army down into nothing on about the 40th day of mobilisation.

So von Schlieffen retires, von Moltke takes over, the years tick on, the Russians begin vastly expanding their army, and, under this reading, the General Staff starts to worry about their existing plans for a two-front war. They're both essentially defensive deployments that will probably be very good at not losing the war, but don't seem to offer too many opportunities to win it, at least not quickly.

The solution is to have their cake and eat it; the staff begins by bolting the revolving door from the France-only plan onto the two-front defend-against-France-first plan, looking for that quick western victory that will allow them to turn full force against Russia as soon as possible. What they come up with (we can infer from what actually happened) is naturally very different from Schlieffen's 1905 documents. With a two-front war, their allies will be busy dealing with Russia; that weakens the right wing because now you need more Germans defending on the Rhine. Then they get worried about letting the French so far into Alsace and Lorraine, strengthen the left again, and possibly start making plans to defend further forward. Somewhere in here the far right wheel through the Netherlands disappears entirely and only Belgian neutrality will be violated.

So now there's the question of the extent of the right wing's march into France. Until very recently it was absolutely unchallenged that the original intent was to encircle Paris (as in the 1905 one-front document), which was then changed on the fly to a march east of the city by von Moltke for reasons unknown but heavily speculated about, on about the last day of August. However, something that struck me when I was turning the end of the Great Retreat into blog posts is how absolutely knackered all the blokes on both sides were by the end of it, some of them literally with their boots wrecked and falling off their feet, and what this implies for the practicality of the 1914 plan. (By the route they took, the German First Army marched about 250-odd miles in 30 days and fought several actions.) A march around Paris would have left the Germans having to put even more miles on the legs of that strong right wing. It's recently been suggested that actually by 1914 the General Staff recognised that a march around Paris was beyond the endurance of their blokes or the reach of their supply lines, and never intended to do that at all; it's just been assumed that way because (among other things) from the French side it's easy to assume that if your enemy is marching in the general direction of your capital, he intends to attack it. It also allows people an easy explanation for why the war was in fact not won quickly, and Zuber argues that "The Schlieffen Plan" was invented almost out of whole cloth by apologists for the German staff to shift the blame from them. If only von Moltke had just followed von Schlieffen's magic stroke of genius without deviation, repetition, or hesitation!

So what we're left with from looking again at what the Germans actually did without preconceptions, is a heavily modified attack, which you might call the Moltke strategy or the Moltke-Schlieffen plan (or, indeed, whatever you like - I'm arriving at "the 1914 plan"). Calling it "the Schlieffen plan" is probably like calling the Race to the Sea by that name; but at the very least, the people who drew it up would have been familiar with Schlieffen's 1905 thinking, even if you think the 1914 plan didn't actually look much like any of it.

There are still plenty of grounds for critique and disagreement with what actually happened that don't revolve around "a bloo bloo Moltke changed the magic plan" or "a bloo bloo Moltke sent some men to the East too early" (which seems like a smelly red herring to me). For instance, the left wing was probably far too aggressive and defended too far forward considering what the right wing was doing, which made it much easier for the French army to meet the blow behind the Marne as the revolving door swung round towards their rear. (Whether this was designed by von Moltke or happened because the army commanders took a Russian approach to their orders in search of personal glory is an open question, owing to lack of documentation.)

Also, even if we assume that a march east of Paris was always the plan, I think it still probably asked far too much of the men of First Army to complete an encirclement while being completely shagged out and moving ever further from their supply lines; the French Army would likely have been able to retire south and avoid the big squeeze, although it's not too difficult to imagine a situation where they have to give up the Reims-Verdun-Nancy-Belfort line and leave the Germans in possession of much more of north-eastern France than they eventually ended up with. Given that, it may have been a better idea to march through much less of Belgium, and compensate by moving the German left back, which might not have provoked Belgium, which might have denied the British cabinet its easy casus belli... (You can keep going like this for a long time, and indeed, people have.)

So there seems now to be general agreement among specialists that the old idea of "The Schlieffen Plan" as a Teutonically inflexible and impractical plan, drawn up in arse-numbing detail by Schlieffen in 1905, and slavishly followed by unoriginal thinkers and duffers who were in love with their railway-timetables, is inaccurate. (Unfortunately, their ideas don't appear to have made it very far out of academic circles yet - finding the details of some of these arguments without access to academic journals and arse-clenchingly expensive books is very challenging.) There's plenty of room for disagreement still, but it's now revolving around answering the question of exactly what was happening, if it wasn't "The Schlieffen Plan" as popular culture knows it. Zuber and his supporters think that the actions of 1914 are so far removed from the documents of 1905 that Schlieffen's influence on the 1914 plan was minimal or non-existent. Opponents like Terence Holmes (yes, it's very annoying when the two figureheads are both called Terence) and Holger Herwig think that Zuber goes far too far with this theme and that there's considerable direct Schlieffen influence in the 1914 plan.

If you're not bored yet, there's that forum link to Zuber yelling like a cranky old grandfather at some Internet randoms (I got bored somewhere around page 20 of 36). He's also archived his side of his long-running bunfight with Holmes in the pages of War on History on his website.

My Imaginary GF posted:

When the consequences of missing one terrorist training camp are a modern pearl harbour and 8 trillion in response spending over 20 years, you tend to err on the side of individual responsibility. Namely, since you cannot reasonably expect adequate reparations and compensation for stateless actions, individuals have the responsibility to unambiguously organize against local terrorist training camps in a manner which is politically expedient to both the Democratic and Republican Congressional delegations before we have to enact policies which will take adequate action on individual's behalf.

Anime Curator posted:

I just really dont buy into this argument that things will get worse with republicans and we should vote for hillary. why are people so afraid to do the work our communities need? like organizing locally? organizing with the poor? listening and learning from peoples stories? doing more community empowerment? how are these things more difficult than dealing with the repercussions of being further recognized and included into a liberal state

Quidam Viator posted:

And stick to your guns: don't buy into that argument that things will get worse with Republicans. That's just fearmongering. You're better than that, so work on the community level and make this country a better place!

quote:

Aren't you making a good argument against accelerationism? We get a conservative Executive and Legislative branch, and then the Executive makes sure the Judiciary conservative too, and then poo poo gets real bad, and then people realize "holy poo poo, poo poo is real bad" ... and then they can't do anything about it by that point because any court challenges will be shot down, or it'll be enshrined by law, or it'll be upheld via Executive Order, and then people will accept it as the way things have always been, and then no change happens because you just handed the keys to the nutters and they've locked the steering wheel in place.

Quidam Viator posted:

You consider this a nominal outcome, a victory. You literally have no other plan; you have no coherent strategy for wresting political power out of the hands of the Tea Party and the Kochs, taking back state and local legislatures, or even beginning to address the global issues that we're getting our asses kicked on.

Quidam Viator posted:

Try to go out to your local Wal-Mart, or church, or gun store, and do that good work of convincing your fellow Americans that we should organize with the poor and listen to each other. It's not difficult at all, it's just that too few people have the courage that you have to "do the work our communities need". It's not that people could ever be opposed to unifying communities, they just need you to point the way for them.

Quidam Viator posted:

I've answered your question: the purpose of accelerationism is to make the inevitable collapse of this political system happen more quickly by pushing the Republicans to show us exactly what happens when you don't fail conservatism. The hope is that if the terribleness becomes bad enough fast enough, that it will be a sufficient shock for us to do something shocking and the GOP will defeat themselves through their own success. Of course it's not a sure shot; it's just a desperate, last-gasp attempt to unmake the Tea Party so we can refocus our energy on preventing human extinction before it's too late. I believe you are underestimating your political opponents by believing that they are rational actors, concerned with the national welfare, and I am trying to get you to quit that terrible habit.

So, I get to ask YOU questions now: How do you uproot and remove completely the current right-wing ideology that is holding half of the nation right now? I'm talking about the 40-50% of the nation that voted twice for George W. Bush, then for McCain, then for Romney? How do you take away the political power that the Kochs have made for themselves by throwing money at everything from local school board races to the Supreme Court? How will you take back any of the gerrymandering and cancellation of protections from the Voting Rights Act that ensure Republican victories in counties and states all over the country? But most importantly, how will you attack the root of the cancer itself: the fear and greed of white, racist, classist, evangelical Americans who will do anything, say anything, kill anyone just to make sure that nobody else rises to their level of privilege?

You see, all those terrible outcomes you talked about as evidence against accelerationism are already happening, and you have no strategy to stop it. I've said multiple times that I'll toxx myself the minute one of you comes up with a real answer to this question instead of dodging it by saying "grassroots conversations" will convert the whole Fox News demographic to sanity. While you putter around, the Kochs and corporations are in turbo mode, exploiting and extracting as fast as they can before everything runs out. What makes you think you have any time at all to convince people who have abandoned all reason to be reasonable and think of everyone's welfare?

Quidam Viator posted:

Well, at least now you have understood me. Yes, I believe that it will take apolitical action to create change at this point. I believe that liberal success from within our current system has been deliberately made impossible. I believe we are at a place where, if we were honest with ourselves, we would acknowledge that we've been playing a game for 200-something years, and that except for a Civil War, the rules have basically worked, but that the GOP and their donors have figured out a way to cheat the game from within the system.

Quidam Viator posted:

Or are you still really rolling out this idea that the 40% of America that has voted GOP this past few decades are just reasonable people like us who engage in responsible discussion, and only watch Fox News because it's the only thing on?

MaxxBot posted:

Is there anyone here that doesn't think we're headed for some sort of civilizational collapse within the next century? I'm starting to feel like an outlier here.

SedanChair posted:

Catastrophic climate change? Resource scarcity? Welcome to the history of the human race

Trabisnikof posted:

But remember this is in the context of the proposed "solution" being accelerating this process.

zoux posted:

JT Jag posted:

People with bad opinions aren't a protected class, sorry.

MaxxBot posted:

What?

Joementum posted:

Quote of the morning, "Listen, we elected Warren G. Harding." ~ Roger Ailes, on Ted Cruz's chances of becoming President.

Maarek posted:

Carter's approval ratings were in the garbage largely because of something he couldn't control (Iran), but his presidency was not a shining advertisement for the Democratic party, either.

Fellatio del Toro posted:

I'm generally in favor of reducing the overall number of guns floating around society but it's not an issue I feel terribly strongly about so I like to make snide gun control comments and just see how loving long this guy will rant about how The Only Reason The Japanese Didn't Invade The United States Was The Second Ammendment or some poo poo.

Rexicon1 posted:

Why would Obama nuke New York?

reagan posted:

gradenko_2000 posted:

Isn't that a picture from World in Conflict?