Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "TIKhistory"
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@joemoment-o1275 : Keepin' the troops in dry socks, alone, is a major undertaking! LOL! There is a "Patton" theory wherein the idea is to be so deep into the enemy that you can seize your supplies as needed, from an off-balance enemy, if you push forward, and will lose the initiative if you worry about supply lines. But the British were very Roman in how they devoted themselves to logistics and engineering. From fortifying Portugal, to paying gold for everything they took from a Spaniard in the peninsula, they beat Napoleon's "move fast and forage off the land" approach.
Montgomery's greatest successes were when he secured his supply and refused to proceed until he had overwhelming force. His biggest blunder was Nijmagen (sp?), where he tried to get super-aggressive. But some will still argue that it is better to take 80% casualties taking an objective with 1,000 men than it is to take 20% casualties with 500,000 men. And you look at the Japanese in Singapore, who followed that strategy and humiliated Percival.
I think "smash-and-grab" in the abstract is fine, but at some point, you have to move troops and materiel from point A to point B, and it becomes impossible, when every hand is against you in the countryside, as the Spaniards most definitely were against Napoleon. You can think of it as "supply lines," but if you turn to pillage to sustain your army, you're going to set the natives against you.
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@1158supersiri : Moscow was THE main railway hub for East-West and North-South transport. If the Germans won their way to and around Moscow, they'd have gained a pretty big advantage. The Soviets would have a LOT harder time re-supplying North and South, and the Germans would've been able to attack North and South, separately, in greater force. But wherEVER the Soviets had to let off their tanks, wherEVER the German-Soviet frontier was, there were T34s coming from the East in endless waves. And I believe the Soviets succeeded in moving their industrial production East of the Urals.
To me, it's not clear if it would've made any difference. Eventually, the German assault would run out of steam, and more and better armaments would come streaming in from the East, to drive them back.
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@etiennepilorget8777 The difference between a Christian and an atheist, in most cases, is that a Christian knows what he's taking on faith. An atheist makes innumerable assumptions of which they are unaware.
To me, at root, Abrahamic religion is basically two things: "I Am." This is the fundamental assertion of self-awareness, and the Name of God is "I Am."
"Life Is Good."
So, basically, "Life is good and I know it." And all of Judaism and Christianity boils down to that basic act of faith. After that, it's a matter of man-made doctrine and dogma, to me. IMO, Jesus was trying to teach us how to treat each other. The free ticket to Paradise is more of a hook that organized religion uses to recruit and keep people in line.
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@Sytall In ancap, those big companies get crushed by society, itself. In YOUR vision of utopia, they are shielded by the government, itself. They WRITE regulations that only they are big enough to comply with, which weeds out all competition. Before the FAA there were hundreds of airline companies competing. Now there are just a few, and they're all considered "too big to fail."
You see it in every arena the government regulates heavily. Agriculture, health care, auto making, you name it.
When government and big business speak with one voice, we're in big trouble. We live in a fascist dystopia that is cheered on by the very same people who claim to despise the big corporate interests and billionaire class, yet do their bidding, while congratulating themselves on their discernment and education.
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@Mrkontrol007 : In many ways, the Soviet Army was more of a meritocracy than their enemy. True merit (and good luck!) made for rapid promotion. If you sucked, you didn't last very long. People look back on the Great Patriotic War as "the good old bad days," when people were truly heroic, and everybody was pulling in the same direction in war-time.
But I keep coming back to the fact that Stalin had fresh armored divisions, just sitting there in Manchuria on June 22nd, 1941. It took them 'til December to arrive in and around Moscow, but at the end of a bitter road, the Germans, tired, decimated and demoralized had 2 fresh armored divisions from the Far East added to the equation.
I'm sure that lend-lease didn't hurt any. I haven't made a study of how decisive it was. But considering the fight the Soviets were in, and that they were the last man standing against Hitler in any meaningful way, Lend-Lease was the least we could do. Yes, the Battle of Britain was important. But the real war was won and lost on the Soviets' Western Front. A far bigger war than the one the Allies fought on the Germans' Western Front. Yes, the U.S. put a period on the hostilities with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Without the A-Bomb, the Soviets were planning the invasion of Hokkaido, and the U.S., sick of spending lives, was more than half-way OK with the idea, I suspect.
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@michelguevara151 Not everyone has time to watch the longer stuff. But if you didn't do the readings as a younger man, the longer videos are worth listening to. For me, doing the readings is much more efficient. I can't always concentrate the entire length of a video, but when I'm reading, I'm totally engaged until I put it down. You can run the video in the background while you go about your mundane daily activities, but it's easy to miss chunks.
Sometimes, I queue up a video before I go to bed. But I always fall asleep before it's over, so that method requires some work getting through the stuff you slept through.
The half-hour pieces are more distilled. I already knew a lot about the delusion of command economics, and that the Nazis were totalitarian. TIK brings the facts, in detail. But it's always the same thing. The political class knows what it wants and can get a lot of it by force. But things always fray at the ends. The sand slips through their fingers. Without real price-based valuation and allocation of resources, everything crumbles.
This is why war is wasteful, and wasteful people need war.
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I didn't ask you a question, but you destroyed one of my comments about Moscow being a rail hub and how its capture (I speculated) might swing the balance for the Germans. I don't think I ever seriously believed that it would be decisive, because - as you say - behind every defeated Soviet Army is another Soviet Army, bigger and stronger than the one before it. The Germans couldn't even get TO the Urals, let alone take on the whoop-ass already there, and growing.
I was brought up on Guderian, basically believing that the crucial mistake was wasting time investing Minsk, when they should've bypassed it. But I don't think bypassing Minsk changes the fundamental equation. They still grind to a halt by or before Moscow, and from then on, it's just a matter of how fast they can bring their Guard units West over the Urals. The war ends sooner, if they're quicker. It takes a little longer if they're slower.
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@TheImperatorKnight A PhD dissertation is basically a scholar's first foray into and proof they are capable of self-directed, active scholarship. It's "making your bones" so you can join the big boys.
But there are a lot of hoops to jump through for the formal degree. A lot of course work in areas of study in which you have no interest, passion, or money coming in. Heh.
My advice to you would be to not let your obligations to an employee ruin YOUR life. Yes, you want to do right by her. If you're killing yourself to do that, then the contract to which you hold yourself is a bad contract for YOU, and she should understand. You didn't come into this world to make sure everybody else has a job at any cost to yourself.
If BattleStorms are all you WANT to do, that's one thing. Otherwise, maybe you could branch out and find something else useful and engaging for your partner/assistant/editor to do.
I'm probably not understanding your situation, fully. I'm just in a similar relationship with a nephew, trying to maximize the mutual benefit from his working for me.
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I'll go out on a limb, which is easier for a lightweight who wafts gently to the ground from any height, than for this crowd, and suggest maybe extra resources in air superiority was the right idea. Maybe they would've been better served by fuel-efficient, high-clearance, rugged, easy-to-repair lorries to move their men around. Dig in with infantry and heavy guns on defense. But in good flying weather? Go where you want and destroy all comers if you have air superiority. Use those lorries or something beefier to pull the artillery pieces around.
Save all the money you put into tanks and put it into 4- and 6-wheel drive vehicles. The whole tank warfare thing makes it a constant battle to keep infantry with tanks. And you don't want your tanks to be caught out against infantry without infantry support for the tanks. But what if you're just really good at moving men and heavy guns, and focus on that. You can dig in and make little fortresses for your guns in captured territory.
Properly coordinated with the air forces, with air superiority over the enemy, you can advance your men and guns rapidly in good weather, and then force the enemy to attack YOU when you're on pause and digging in deeper every minute you're at the new location. Again, if you're properly coordinated, your air can clear the immediate vicinity forward of any tank forces that aren't hunkered down. You'd be on the defense by night and in poor visibility conditions. Those conditions that work against your air also work against their ground. Less than ideal attacking conditions.
Anyway, it just seems to me that it might've been more efficient to forego use of tanks, entirely. You can stick a pretty big gun on a lorry, especially if you're building the lorry for military use. Standard gun mounts built into the decks of every one of them. And as screening forces/scouts, you could have a fleet of highly efficient motorcycle units. A good dirt bike is very practical in all kinds of terrain and only burns a thimbleful of gas, compared to tanks, halftracks and big trucks.
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In answer to the original question in the opener, it IS capitalistic, in a sense, for the leaders of a socialist country to exercise functional ownership of all or most of the economy. It's like their own private piggybank. But if you're going to say it may as well be ownership, then you have to understand that it must therefore be a criminal enterprise, because you are taking those things by force from others. So it's not really private enterprise on a grander scale, even though you can make an argument for it being exactly that, on functional grounds.
I've gone down a similar rabbit-hole in my own thought experiments, because a socialist system STILL invests capital in various enterprises in order to obtain some sort of return. So in that sense, ALL systems are capitalist, and the distinctions between different systems are in who controls the capital. That's why I kind of shy away from "capitalism" as a term, entirely, and stick to "free enterprise and property rights." You either have property rights or you don't. Maybe that's a better term. Systems WITH property rights and systems without, and all gradations in between. But all systems are capitalist.
I don't think the Nazis ever nationalized Krupp Steel. Krupp just did what they wanted and they did what Krupp wanted, but last I checked, Krupp was still in operation. Some say that's the difference between fascism and socialism. You still OWN that company under fascism, but you do whatever the government tells you. Fascism, then, when viewed in economic terms, is functionally identical to socialism in that everything is how the government says, any time the government takes an interest and decides it wants something from you. That's why many in the West feel that we BECAME fascists in our war AGAINST the fascists, when you look at the regulatory web and the proliferation of government agencies regulating everything under the Sun. If you control the property, that's functionally the same as actually owning it.
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Trying to do for Stalingrad what you did for Crusader was EXTREMELY ambitious, and the 100,000 who loved it are possibly the only 100,000 people in the world who care deeply enough to do it justice.
With 250k subscribers and 100k views, you are hopefully making enough money to hire an able assistant or two. I never learned how to do that until injuries forced me to direct others, rather than just handle everything, myself. Especially the editing stuff, which you probably think only you can do. I'm that way with my math videos. But your strength is your research and analysis. If I were you, I'd take a step back and try to strategize what things to delegate and how to go about it.
I'm a great one to talk, because I make shit up as I go along, and delegate mundane tasks on an ad hoc basis. But I get better at it as I go along. The toughest thing for me is the helper not reading my mind, i.e., when they f*** up, it's because I didn't make myself clear enough and/or anticipate the bits that they need explained. The beauty of it is when you find somebody who's actually competent and self-disciplined enough, they don't need everything spelled-out, and just do things on their own initiative.
I bet you could find one or five people out there who'd love to do the heavy lifting for you for free or nominal compensation, just to work with you and get a mention.
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Yes and no. Keynesians love slurping up every erg of surplus energy available in the system, give it to government, and then say "$ee? Big government is why the economy is so big!"
On the other hand, the fable of $tone $oup teaches a vital truth of which Keynesians avail themselves and that is that the value of paper currency has more to do with the faith put in it than the actual value. Inflation always lags behind inflationary actions, and that lag does create wealth on paper.
Also, infrastructure projects: roads, bridges and dams, do appear to make everyone wealthier in the medium term, but maybe the spread of human civilization across the entire planet needs no artificial accelerants, and the great success of federal infrastructure projects only led to a more wasteful and destructive way of life than if infrastructure were left to entrepreneurs and local communities. Boy that federally-funded highway/railroad was great for trade, but maybe America would've turned out OK if the expansion were mutually agreed to, and negotiated, rather than imposed by force by larger populations on smaller populations that were living quite sustainably on those lands, already, and the unsustainable city folks have to steal to survive. They love "our democracy." "You have to move. We voted on it."
If your way is truly better, folks will adopt your way, over time, in the natural course of things.
Anyway, I've always doubted the "grow or die" philosophy. Growth mandated by political entities isn't organic growth, and it never worries about sustainability of its authoritarian arrogance. It only sees the problems it creates as being insoluble by anything other than more authoritarian solutions.
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Seriously, good work! BUT I'm still not sure that they wouldn't've been MORE ready in a year or two, and maybe Chamberlain at Munich convinced them the time was right, even though it was not. If things had continued as they were, without hostilities, Germany had a big lead in planes, tanks and subs and probably would've extended that lead, because it was such a high priority for them. And if they'd extended the peace, they could've traded for and squirreled away a war stockpile. They were pretty good at keeping their buildup below the level of Allied perception. The whistle-blowers in the West would've been dismissed as war mongers.
Newt Gingrich, who was a historian before he was a politician, who made a VERY similar case for Japan. Japan was the last Asian man standing in Asia, after the Europeans colonized and put all the trade and trade routes on lock-down. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere wasn't entirely without merit, although the Japanese practiced the concept in very brutal ways. Gingrich says that the attack on Pearl Harbor was a long-shot the Japanese were taking, because if they didn't do SOMEthing, the Americans were going to lock out the Japanese everywhere the Europeans already hadn't. So even though it was probably doomed to failure, the Japanese were looking extinction in the eye, and at least going to war had a CHANCE of turning out well for them. If they did NOTHING, the expansion of the USA into Asia looked to them like the death of Japan, for SURE.
We look back on Ghengis Khan as this great evil conqueror, but he rose to power because drought compelled steppe tribes to expand to new lands or perish. So one tribe gobbled up the next, and Ghengis, who was actually very enlightened and equal-opportunity for his time, ran his tribe as a meritocracy, rewarding performance and bravery with promotion, without regard to what tribe or nation you came from. Some of his top people were Chinese, promoted from the engineering ranks! So the biggest bad guy of all time, possibly, ran things in a more enlightened way than the position-by-birth that everybody else followed. That's why his tribe grew to be the biggest tribe of all.
Of course, having succeeded in becoming Kha Khan (Khan of Khans), he was still the leader of a tribe with too many mouths and too little grass! And it turned out that horse archers were the perfect instrument. And anything they didn't bring to the field, he didn't hesitate to adopt foreigners who DID bring it. Chinese engineers, Russian chargers... What he didn't have, he appropriated, on the basis of individual merit. Very rare for those days. Very enlightened. But also vicious, cruel and vindictive.
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