Youtube comments of Bruce Tucker (@brucetucker4847).
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An excellent presentation! The one important thing I think is missing is the Anglo-German naval arms race and its vital role in causing the UK to seek an understanding, if not an alliance, with France to oppose German territorial expansion in western Europe. While the Belgian treaty may have been the cause that roused the common people to support war, the vital interest the cabinet was most concerned with was keeping the German battleship fleet bottled up in Kiel - a German navy mostly limited to operating in the Baltic was not an existential threat to the British Empire, but a German battleship fleet based in Belgium or northern France, with free access to the Channel and the North Sea, absolutely was.
This is something the German government apparently failed to appreciate in the slightest: they expressed surprise that the UK would go to war over a "scrap of paper" (the Belgian treaty) without realizing that the UK was NOT going to war over Belgium, Belgium was just an excuse the Germans had given the British government to enter a war that they already knew they had to fight over the German naval threat.
Many historians regard that naval race as a terrible strategic mistake on the part of Kaiser Wilhelm (who had read Alfred Thayer Mahan's book more than was good for his limited intellect) because it transformed Germany from a continental power that was not much of a threat to British world interests into a potential world power that was the greatest threat to those interests. In the late 19th century, when Germany had no oceangoing navy to speak of, the British had regarded Russia as its main potential enemy, fearing a Russian push from its Central Asian provinces towards India. The prospect of German battleships poised to descend on the Home Fleet at a moment's notice made the Russian threat seem insignificant in comparison. But because the Germans had to spend most of their resources on their land army, while the British did not, it was inevitable that the British would win the naval race and consequently that the German navy would be just powerful enough to force the British to fight a war to keep it out of the Atlantic, but not powerful enough to win the war at sea or to deter the British from going to war.
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@Ugly_German_Truths Not so. There had once been separate kingdoms but they had been united 200 years before the Norman Conquest by Alfred the Great. By 1066 Mercia and Northumbria were just regions or earldoms (Sussex, Essex, and Kent had lost their independence well before Alfred's time and passed back and forth between Wessex and Mercia) and the country as a whole was referred to as England (Engla-londe). Harold's title was not King of the Anglo-Saxons or King of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, it was Rex Anglorum, King of the English. But the concept of England as one land preceded the actual political unification, Bede used the term as early as the 7th century.
And the division between Angles, Saxons, and Jutes was probably always more mythological than real. There were certainly linguistic differences between the regions settled by the Anglo-Saxons, but they probably developed after they came to England and did not reflect different points of origin on the continent.
These aren't my personal opinions, I'm just telling you want I learned in university and in considerable reading since then.
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@BigHenFor Nonsense. There was absolutely an English language in 1066, and it is called that by many writers of the period, and universally referred to as such (Old English) today. And the country was referred to as England ("Engla-londe") as early as the 9th century. The English kings styled themselves as "King of the Angles," not the Anglo Saxons, from the early 10th century.
The Normans were descended from Vikings, but they had lost that tongue entirely by 1066 and spoke a local dialect of Old French.
And as you yourself point out was more than 300 years before the English kings became native speakers of English (which had by that time changed radically under the Norman influence).
Exactly how, when, and where the nobility transitioned to being native speakers of English is not clear, but it certainly took some time. For at least a century of the conquest they would have thought of themselves not as English lords, but as Norman lords with lands and titles in England. Of course nobles with holdings in different kingdoms was a very common thing in medieval Europe, and national identity was only just beginning to emerge: most of the nobles of France at the time probably wouldn't have thought of themselves as French nobles either, but rather as nobles who were the vassals of the King of the Franks (the term "King of France" wasn't even used until the late 12th century, although the term "King of England" was used
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You talk about the front line for Russia's invasion of Ukraine being longer than Germany's at the start of Barbarossa as if that's just some sort of bad hand that the Russians were dealt by nature, instead of what it is, which is the result of deliberate (and foolish) choices by the Russians to extend the front and deliberate (and wise) choices by the Germans to restrict theirs. If the Russians had wanted a much shorter front, it would have been very easy: all they had to do was not invade through Belarus and not attack out of Crimea - the bottleneck from Crimea to Ukraine is very narrow and could easily be defended by a very small Russian force while the main army attacked from the east, and Belarus would be neutral territory if Putin hadn't staged his invasion from there. But he did, and as a result the front is at least twice as wide as it had to be.
It's quite obvious that Putin wanted as broad a front as possible because he expected little resistance and wanted to gain as much territory as he possibly could before western sanctions kicked in. Like so much else in his war, that was a massive blunder that has resulted in the Russian offensive stalling almost everywhere, becoming stuck on a broad front rather than penetrating deeply on a narrower one as the Americans did in Iraq and the Germans did in the initial phase of Barbarossa.
As for Barbarossa eventually stalling, of course it did - despite all their propaganda, apart from the panzer divisions the German army was hardly mechanized at all in 1941and it took a while for its infantry, artillery, and supplies to catch up those 200 miles and more the panzers had penetrated. The Russian logistical problems in Ukraine are laughable in comparison: their forces have only advanced a few tens of miles at most rather than hundreds, their army is supposedly (like all modern armies) 100% mechanized, and yet after four weeks they are completely unable to keep their forces supplied a few miles into Ukraine at even a minimal level - Russian soldiers are having to loot food and fuel from civilians because their army is not getting it to them.
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The Jews had been there for thousands of years before becoming Jews. There is zero archaeological evidence for the Exodus from Egypt, the Jews were a cultural development within Canaanite society with what eventually became a monotheistic religion. That is why Hebrew is so closely related to Phoenician (Punic) and all the other Canaanite languages - they are all native to the area, Arabic is not. Archaeology has shown complete continuity between non-Jewish Canaanite culture and Israelite/Jewish culture in the early Iron Age - all that changed was the religion and the diet that went with it (non-Jewish Canaanite sites have pig bones and shellfish shells in their rubbish, Jewish sites do not.)
So the people who would one day become Jews lived there for thousands of years and continued living there until 135 AD when the Romans killed, enslaved, or expelled most of them. They went through periods of Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian domination but even in the Exile period most of the people remaining in the land were Jews - it was mostly the ruling class who were taken to Babylon. Syria Palaestina, as the Romans called it after exiling the Jews, became Christian gradually along with the rest of the Empire. But there were always some Jews still living there.
Islam only entered at sword point in the 7th century. The only claim Arab Muslims ever had on the land is right of conquest. But now it has been conquered by Jews again so any Arab claim by right of conquest has been extinguished. Right of conquest is good only as long as you can defend your conquest.
So the main error in your table above is counting the "non-Abrahamic" people different from Jews. They were the ancestors of the Jews, and they and their descendants have been living in Israel far longer than Muslims and Christians put together.
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It is probably true that few, if any of the men fighting at Hastings thought of themselves as fighting for or against England, as opposed to the individual claimants to the throne, but that was partly because William purported to be just the rightful heir to the English throne, and not (other than to the people he promised land and titles in return for fighting for him) someone who would entirely replace the native ruling class with a foreign one.
Had the English upper classes and free yeomen had any idea what was in store for them if William won, it might have been a very different story. However, it's worth noting that the English Witenagemot, the assembly of nobles, had chosen Harold over William as Edward the Confessor's successor, so most of the prominent men of the kingdom probably regarded William as an usurper - the ones who survived, anyway. And while we might argue about how oppressive the new ruling class really was, it is certainly true that with the imposition of French-style feudalism on England, the legal rights of people below the ruling class were certainly diminished.
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It's more complicated than that, but the fact remains that 1066 represents a radical political, cultural, and legal break in England. The native nobility was almost entirely replaced by William's leading mercenaries (who were, granted, from all over Europe, but chiefly from Normandy, Brittany, and France proper) and their descendants, the political system became much more like French feudalism than England had ever been before, architecture was transformed (castles as such were virtually unknown in England before the Normans), and most importantly, the language changed almost beyond recognition.
Try reading Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales in their original language and it is incredibly obvious that a massive social transformation took place between their writing, even greater in linguistic terms than that which took place in France from the end of the Roman Empire to the writing of La Chanson de Roland around the time of the Norman conquest.
And while it's true that the sharpness of the division 1-200 years later was greatly exaggerated by later writers, the division in this language remains apparent to this day, even if few English speakers are consciously aware of it. As WW2 scholars, you might recall it being pointed out that in the last sentence of Churchill's famous speech of June 4, 1940, the sentence beginning with "We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans..." the only word of certain Norman French derivation that the PM used was "surrender". You can be sure this was no accident.
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Agreed on the others but not on Gandalf. Gandalf is one of several Christ figures in the legendarium, the whole point of his character is that he's an immortal Maia with immense powers but he has voluntarily taken a human form with all that implies - pain, hunger fatigue, and to a degree vulnerability - so he can fully understand and empathize with the people he has been sent to help. of all the Maiar we encounter in all the stories, Gandalf is the most human, even if he is immortal and commands superhuman powers.
The orcs in LotR are also somewhat humanized; they think more or less like people, just sadistic and evil people. They are more subject to Sauron's will than humans are - but they hate and resent that. But like most foot soldiers in most wars, orcs like Shagrat and Gorbag mostly want the war to be over so they can just live their own lives. (Of course, being orcs, their own lives involve robbing, murdering, and torturing people, but for their own benefit, not for Sauron's.) But that's not to say they ARE human by any means.
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@CountArtha By the 15th century knighthood was a social class, a lesser, non-titled nobility, rather than a military caste, especially in England. Most knights would have been professional agrarian landlords, some of whom might have any interest in warfare, others not. And a most of the soldiers hired were neither knights nor men-at-arms, they were essentially mercenaries fighting for pay and for the opportunity to loot. The men-at-arms were mostly just more expensive mercenaries from a slightly higher social class; some were knights, many were not. But the biggest difference with the French feudal system was that in England there was no subinfeudation - every landholder from the highest noble to the lowest landowning farmer held his lands directly from the crown; the nobles had peasants and tenant farmers working their estates, but they had no landowning feudal vassals like knights or lower-ranked nobles. By contrast, in France the knights and lower nobles didn't owe feudal service to the king, they owed it to a higher noble who owed it to the king (possibly with another step or two in between), so the king didn't call up thousands of soldiers, he called up a few dozen nobles who called up their vassals who in turn called up their own vassals if they had any. That meant the king had almost zero flexibility in terms of the kind of army he could take to war. The English kings could spend their money on whatever sort of troops they wanted to employ, although of course limited by the number of potential recruits available on the market.
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Steven White None of that shows boats or ships that have actually gone over the horizon. It shows a boat that looks really tiny, then blows it up to be bigger. That is not the same thing at all.
Have you ever wondered why you never find one single naval or merchant marine sailor who thinks the earth is flat? Because, among other reasons, anyone who has spent much time at sea and actually had the job (as opposed to being a bored tourist passing the time) of looking for distant ships or landmarks at sea can tell you that they do indeed disappear over the horizon and the finest optics and/or electronics the US or any other Navy can provide cannot zoom them back into view. And unlike the boat in that video, when we're talking about a 1000+ foot long aircraft carrier, they never get too small to be seen by the naked eye at any distance this side of the horizon, at least not from deck or even bridge height on the ships I was on. (And you might be surprised at how good the resolution of the Mark I Human Eyeball can be in good visibility conditions, it can see things much too small to show on even very high quality electronics without optical zoom. It just takes training and experience to spot things when scanning without binoculars or electronics.)
But this is the problem with you flat earthers, you say "believe only what you see with your eyes" but then you also tell me to believe some silly YouTube video over what I have seen with my own eyes.
(Alas, I have no video evidence to show you because I'm an old fart and cell phones and consumer electronic cameras didn't exist when I was in the Navy, and even if they had I usually had more pressing things to do than taking pictures for my own entertainment.)
(Also, unless you're on a very small body of water you won't see anything but water if you put a camera 6 inches above the water because the waves are much higher than that.)
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@parlyramyar Again, false dilemma. Socialism involves collectivization, but not all collectivization is socialism. Socialism is opposed to capitalism, but not all that is opposed to capitalism is socialism. There are alternatives that are neither capitalist nor socialist. Feudalism (in the Marxist sense) is one such. Another I have pointed out in the past is the centralized Bronze Age palace system.
A key component of socialism is control of the means of production by workers . In state socialism control is exercised by the state on behalf of workers, and the state itself is, at least theoretically, representative of the workers. (Of course this was never true in the Soviet state, but that is a flaw in the Soviet system as it developed in practice.) Socialism is about economic class, specifically, the working class.
Nazism is not socialism (or capitalism) because nothing is controlled on behalf of or by workers OR capitalists and nothing is determined by economic class. Workers exist to serve the state, not the other way around. So do capitalists and their businesses. The state serves Hitler's mystic conception of the German volk , which is an ethnic class, not an economic one. In Hitler's flawed understanding of Nietszche, the volk effects its will to power through war, the state is the means of waging war, and the Party subordinates the state and everyone in it to this aim.
As Orwell pointed out, the Nazis had some economic policies that were capitalist and some that were socialist, but in no case was this because any economic philosophy drove policy, it was because those policies were whatever Hitler and his party decided would produce the maximum efficiency of production in service to the state and thus to the war machine.
TIK will never understand Hitler or the Nazis and their policies as long as he approaches them from the standpoint of rational economics and fails to understand what really underlay ALL of Hitler's philosophy and policy, which is the flawed interpretation of Nietszche and Darwin that held that the ultimate, and only valid, meaning of life was the struggle for superiority between ethnic groups.
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@Dave_Sisson This is where it gets tricky. The Harrowing of the North was certainly real and terrible, and there was probably an ethnic component to the natives' resistance to the new overlords, but in William's mind he was not carrying out ethnic cleansing against Anglo-Saxons, he was putting down a rebellion and getting rid of a troublesome segment of the populace, the exact same way Henry VIII did 450 years later. He certainly wasn't bringing in any new people to replace the ones he killed, or trying to change the ethnic composition of the region, which remained entirely English for everyone but the upper class.
I supposedly have one ancestor who fought in William's army, but like most such claims, it isn't documented until at least the 15th century and is extremely doubtful. By that time there was no meaningful ethnic distinction between the classes in England and "Norman" ancestry was mostly just something social climbers like my ancestor used to give their (largely invented) pedigree an extra cachet. Sort of like the "imputed arms" invented much later for periods well before heraldry in the late medieval sense really existed - no one in William's day had a formal coat-of-arms, and Edward the Confessor and Harold of Wessex most certainly didn't. And of course the other 99% of my ancestry is just English/Scottish/Irish mutt like everyone else who isn't named Spenser or Churchill or Howard, so I don't feel like I have a dog in that fight at all. (Now, Cavalier vs. Roundhead, that's another story, and there's a reason all my ancestors came to Virginia and not Massachusetts or Pennsylvania.)
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Racism in the modern sense was an invention of capitalism in the early modern era, and preceded the existence of the term or ideology "socialism" by at least two centuries. This is not a condemnation of capitalism, it is simply historical fact. Racism emerged because the new capitalist colonial powers needed cheap labor to work the cash crop plantations in their newly won American colonies, and racism provided a convenient justification for using captive people from Africa as slave labor while denying them the economic and political rights that indentured servants from Europe expected to earn through their labor, while at the same time claiming to adhere to Enlightenment values that were incompatible with concepts like chattel slavery.
Today racism can be found in, and used by, capitalism, socialism, or any other economic system. The two concepts exist on two different axes. It's sort of like arguing whether socialism or capitalism is more authoritarian, it's a meaningless discussion because there's no necessary relationship between any of them - there can be authoritarian capitalists and authoritarian socialists, and there can be liberal (in the traditional sense) capitalists and liberal socialists. Likewise socialism is neither more racist nor less racist than capitalism. The fact that people refuse to accept that is how you get flaming racists like Jeremy Corbin on the left who insist that they can't possibly be racists because they're left-wing, and useful idiots on the right who can't accept that people who literally march around wearing swastikas and chanting anti-Semitic slogans are Nazis because the original Nazis were socialists, not conservatives.
As for "socialism," I wouldn't quite say it's a term that is too broad and diverse to have useful meaning, but it's getting close, and if you're going to have a useful discussion of it you have to have a thorough understanding of its history and development. Yes, socialism historically had diverse branches, some of which were more left-wing and some, like National Socialism, more right-wing, but it's dangerous and generally mistaken to try to place Nazism on the spectrum of modern socialism because of developments both during and after its time. For one, while the DAP did include some left-socialists when Hitler joined it and accumulated more in the early days of its leadership, those people were purged when or shortly after Hitler took power as Führer und Reichskanzler and had virtually no impact on the policies of the NSDAP when in power - the Night of the Long Knives being the most dramatic episode in this purge.
Second, because National Socialism was so thoroughly discredited by the events of World War 2, it has virtually nothing to do with socialism as it has existed as a movement since that time. Modern socialism is almost entirely the product of either Marxism and its Bolshevik successors, or from the Democratic Socialism that developed as a response to the excessive authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks and their allies. And after the excesses of the USSR the extreme authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks was also largely discredited on the left in the West. To say today that one is a socialist, whether of the Marxist or Democratic variant, is to indicate adherence to beliefs and policies like trade unionism, internationalism, and the primacy of the material welfare of workers that were absolute anathema to Hitler and the Nazis. This is why TIK is 100% mistaken in saying that modern socialism has its roots in Nazism and is where the "real Nazis" are found today - modern socialism is the descendant of the people who were most diametrically opposed to Hitler from 1933 to 1945, people who ended up in concentration camps if they were unfortunate enough to find themselves under Nazi rule. (Or, for that matter, Soviet rule, since Stalin hated and persecuted non-Bolshevik socialists more than anyone else.)
(You did find a lot of former Nazis in government in Eastern Europe after 1945, though usually not in higher leadership positions - those were reserved for people who had been reliable Soviet stooges the whole time - but that has a lot more to do with Stalin's cynicism and Cold War practical necessity than with any ideological affinity between those people and Soviet Communism. Some former Nazis did very well in the West as well for the same reasons. Most of them were not Nazi true believers anyway, they were people who were happy to jump on Hitler's bandwagon when it helped their careers and just as happy to turn their coats when that became more advantageous.)
Likewise, the people who today claim or demonstrate an affinity for the Nazis generally have nothing to do with Hitler's economic policies and usually little or no knowledge of them; the parts of Nazi ideology that are reappearing today are mostly its racism, jingoism, militarism, and ideological elevation of violence as both a means and an end in itself.
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@valenrn8657 True, but that has nothing to do with race in the sense we use it today. The Thracians, Lydians, Gauls, Italians, and other neighbors of the Greeks were not very different from the Greeks in terms of physical appearance, it was purely by virtue of speaking something other than Greek as their native language that Aristotle classified them as barbarians. And they were no more or no less seen as barbarians than Ethiopians or Nubians.
The ancient world had little or no notion of all of humanity being divided into three (or any other number of) races. Even the classification of the descendants of Noah's sons in the Torah, which in the early modern era became closely associated with the idea of race, only covered the people in the general vicinity of the Israelites and didn't correspond to either ancient or modern actual relationships of people: Semitic Babylon and Nineveh were founded by a grandson of Ham, while non-Semitic Elam was founded by a son of Shem, and the Canaanites who were virtually identical to the early Hebrews except in not adopting monotheism were said to be descendants of Ham.
It's funny, people today get all wrapped up in arguing things like whether Hannibal or Cleopatra was black, but in the very numerous writings about those figures it's worth noting that the Romans and Greeks writing about them never uttered a single word about their race. To the ancient world Hannibal wasn't black and he wasn't white, because those concepts didn't exist: he was Carthaginian. No one particularly cared how dark his skin was or how curly his hair was or what shape his skull was because for the most part those things meant very little to the ancients except as interesting personal trivia.
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Those two developments were pretty much unrelated. The legions were still made up of Roman citizens and still functioned extremely well for 300 or more years after the Gracchi. The change that occurred in the late Republic was that the legionaries stopped being farmers for whom service in the military was a part-time occupation and instead became professionals who signed on for what was essentially a lifetime hitch. But they were still Roman citizens, not mercenaries, and still very loyal to the Roman culture and government, just not financially independent like the farmer-soldiers had been. The social-military problem that plagued the late Republic was partly the refusal of the Senate to accept the new conditions and treat the new class of soldiers properly, specifically, the refusal to provide for their eventual retirement. Generals like Marius, Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar filled in for this abdication of responsibility by providing for the soldiers' retirement out of the massive fortunes they made off of war by selling slaves and looting, which meant the common soldiers by necessity shifted their loyalty from the state to the generals who led them.
The change that crippled the Empire 300 years later wasn't that the soldiers started serving for pay rather than as a community militia - the latter system was so long gone that probably no one even remembered that it had been any other way, and indeed no large empire could ever have used the citizen-soldier model. What happened was that the economic issues discussed in the video meant that Rome could no longer afford to pay its legions full-time and instead had to resort to buying the services of soldiers on an ad hoc basis - it could afford, barely, to pay them one war at a time, but not to maintain them when they were not currently at war the way Roman legions had to be maintained. And those soldiers generally came from the barbarians because the demise of the legions meant there was no military caste of Romans available to be recruited and no professional NCOs to train and lead them if they could be recruited.
And when even that became impossible the Empire resorted to bribing entire national groups of barbarians with land grants within the Empire's borders. Of course the barbarians eventually realized that since the Romans no longer had an army capable of opposing them they could simply take whatever they wanted. At that point Rome's wars generally became wars between different barbarian groups, one of whom was nominally fighting for the Empire and the other against - Flavius Aetius' famous victory over the Huns at the Catalaunian Plains in 451 was actually a victory of a Gothic coalition put together by Aetius over a mostly Gothic opposing coalition (with a Hunnic core) fighting for Attila. So again, the crucial change in Late Antiquity wasn't from citizen soldiers to mercenaries, it was from a regular establishment of professional soldiers to ad hoc employment of the warrior caste of the barbarian tribes.
But the transition to monarchy did not erode the moral core or loyalty of the legions, in fact, it increased them because the monarchy was willing and able to do what the Senate hadn't and provide for the legionaries from the time they enlisted through their retirement. Since the monarch, who was theoretically the head general over all the legions, had become one with the state, there was no longer any divided loyalty between the general and the state. There was, of course, the problem of what happened when a popular general decided he could replace a weak or unpopular monarch, but in general civil wars were much rarer during the Empire than they had been in the late Republic - many generations often went by during the Empire without a civil war. The so-called Crisis of the Third Century did involve massive political instability at the top, but it should be noted that Rome survived that crisis but did not survive the economic crisis starting roughly a century later.
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WW1 tactics were a lot more sophisticated than Hollywood imagines, particularly WRT the use of artillery. The first day of the Somme offensive was the exception, mostly because the UK's new mass conscript army was extremely inexperienced and wasn't capable of performing any tactics more complex than "stand up and walk slowly towards the enemy in a line". Haig knew this and wanted to postpone the offensive until his army was better prepared, but he was forced to start the attack on prematurely because the French desperately needed pressure on the Germans elsewhere on the line to take a little steam out of the German's offensive at Verdun.
But by this point in the war the problem wasn't taking the enemy's first line of trenches, it was reinforcing, resupplying, and following up a successful attack when No Man's Land had been chewed into a moonscape and was bracketed by enemy artillery firing from well behind the lines. Communication was also a massive problem because radios were too bulky and fragile to use on the battlefield and telephone lines, even if they were buried, were inevitably cut by the constant artillery barrages. They tried everything from runners to signal flares to homing pigeons but nothing really worked until they developed practical radios in the interwar period. Commanders could neither receive real-time information on where the offensive was succeeding or failing nor issue updated orders to front-line units to deal with the changing situation on the battlefield.
In 1918 the Germans had considerable success with infiltration tactics, avoiding the sort of mass charges you see here, but both sides had learned the art of defense in depth, so the attacks could only go so far before they ran out of steam. Once they advanced past the range of friendly artillery the offensive had to stop until the heavy guns could be moved up to new firing positions, which, with the battlefield being so chewed up by artillery and without all-terrain mechanized towing vehicles or self-propelled guns like they had in WW2, could take days or even weeks.
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Shaun Thornhill Have you never heard of the Cavendish experiment? His intention was to measure the gravitational constant, not to prove gravity, because no one in his day doubted that gravity existed, but the experiment does serve as a handy proof of gravitational attraction between masses, and his has been repeated literally millions of times since he first performed it. Most university physics students repeat it as part of their freshman curriculum.
The observation is very simple: two heavy masses that are very carefully suspended in a plane perpendicular to the direction of the earth's gravity and isolated so that no outside force acts on them will accelerate towards each other at a constant and measurable rate. Cavendish and Newton couldn't explain why masses exert a gravitational attraction for each other but it is a universally verified fact and natural law that they do exert a constant and measurable attraction toward each other. The theory regards the why but the law is that they do .
The same goes for Kepler's laws of planetary motion - Kepler couldn't explain why orbital mechanics are what they are but that doesn't take away from the fact that his observations and predictions were 100% correct and reliable, with some very minor variations caused by objects like Neptune that had not been discovered in his day - but those variations prove the rule since when they were detected astronomers were able to calculate the orbit of Neptune using Kepler's laws and then observe it by looking where Kepler's laws predicted it would be. If Kepler's laws just so much nonsense, how were astronomers able to use them to find Neptune, which was too faint to be detected by thousands of generations of astronomers before?
"What about helium balloons?" In a vacuum they accelerate downwards at the exact same rate as lead ingots. This is another result that can be replicated with very commonly available equipment, all you need is a vacuum chamber. In the earth's atmosphere they rise because the earth's gravity pulls more heavily on the more massive nitrogen molecules in the atmosphere than it does on the helium atoms in the balloon, so the atmosphere pushes up on the balloon from underneath. Buoyancy only works with gravity and a fluid medium. In fact g, the earth's gravity at its surface, is part of the buoyancy equation for objects in our atmosphere near the surface.
"you cannot have gas pressure without containment" Correct. In the case of the atmosphere the containment is provided by gravity. In the laboratory ionized gases can be contained purely by a magnetic field. This is yet another effect that can be replicated in any lab, and it proves beyond any doubt that the assertion that gases can only be contained by a physical container is incorrect.
"If the ISS needs containment for its gasses they breath then why doesn’t the earth ?" Because the ISS is much, much, much, much smaller than the earth and its gravity is therefore far too insufficient to retain enough air to breathe. Do you honestly expect the gravitational attraction of an object massing a few hundred thousand kg to be equivalent to that of an object massing nearly 6 trillion trillion kg?
This is the problem with flat earthers: you're asking the right questions, but you're completely unwilling to listen to or put any serious thought into the answers. All of the questions you ask are easily answered, you're just unwilling to listen to them.
It's also one of the reasons I still keep up with FE, because listening to your questions and finding the answers to them through research and my own observations can be very entertaining. It's just frustrating that none of you will listen to the answers. You don't want to know the truth, you just want your own biases and ignorance to be affirmed.
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@jasperfilardo All modern cities are NOT on the coasts. Many are, many are not. Two of the five largest cities in the Americas are located hundreds of miles from the sea, and in the eastern hemisphere you have Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Moscow, Beijing, Delhi, Seoul, Cairo, Kinshasa, all located well inland. And this has always been true. The largest cities of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, and the Indus Valley Civilization were all inland.
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With the US neutral, it would have ended around 1943 as a bloody stalemate - the German Army beaten at Stalingrad and badly depleted, no longer able to take the strategic offensive, but the Red Army lacking the logistical capability to take back all the territory it had lost and the British far too weak to invade France on their own. With the US in the war but refusing to help Stalin, it gets more complicated. Even if Stalin made peace the Germans would still have to leave a massive army in the east or Stalin would just stab them in the back the moment they were fully engaged in the west, so the western Allies might still have been able to invade France, though with much more difficulty since the Germans would be able to transfer some of their forces to the west. But eventually American industry would just overwhelm the Germans, even if it took an extra year or two. At some point the Soviets would probably jump back in the war but would be unlikely to take Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, let alone Berlin.
Makes you wonder if helping the Soviets was a poor strategic choice for the US, but it certainly saved at least a million British and American lives to have the Soviets still in the war. And Hitler might have murdered millions more civilians if he'd held on to eastern Europe longer than he did.
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@spartacus-olsson On language, that is 100% wrong. By the 8th century there was a significant linguistic barrier between Danes and English caused by hundreds of years without much direct contact, however the various dialects of English had changed significantly over the succeeding 270 years and by 1066 most of the differences had been smoothed over to the point where English and Danes from the same regions were able to understand each other pretty well. This process of change in Old English is pretty well understood and unmistakable, there is no question that there had been significant differences. It's the main difference English became such an analytic (uninflected, i.e., words mostly keep the same form and their grammatical relationships are indicated by word order or helper words) language; Old English was highly inflected like Latin is, but the inflections were completely different from those of Norse (and sometimes the same inflection was used in both languages to mean completely different things, which understandably led to a lot of confusion), whereas the root vocabulary was almost the same, so speakers of both languages took to using just the uninflected roots to avoid confusion and as a result English syntax and grammar began to resemble more modern forms.
Whether we call Old English and Old Norse separate languages or Germanic dialects is something we could argue from now until Christmas, but the basic fact is that as of around 800 AD most people in England could understand people from other parts of England to some degree, but had a much harder time understanding Danes who came over from Scandinavia, and this difficulty largely lies behind the changes in Old English we see from the 8th to the 11th centuries.
But where you really go wrong is the Normans: they did not speak a Germanic language with some Latin/French loan words, quite the opposite: they spoke a local dialect of French with some Germanic loan words (in addition to the ones already present in Old French). While there were undoubtedly people in England who spoke medieval French, Old English and Norman French were radically different languages, as different as French is from English or German today, and they were in no way mutually intelligible. Norman French had some influence from the Normans' original Old Norse the same way Parisian French has some influence from Celtic and Germanic languages, but it is absolutely a Romance language and not a Germanic one.
(Trust me, I had to struggle with Law French, which is more or less an evolved form of Norman French that stayed on in English law long after even the royal court had stopped using Norman French for any other purpose, when studying legal history, and it's a Romance language.)
"Undoubtedly the conquering clans did not take all and exterminate all the previous landowners"
They did not exterminate all the landowners , but the did mostly exterminate, expel, or dispossess almost all of the nobles , and the remaining landowners were reduced to serfs or feudal vassals, which had, for the most part, not been the case in Anglo-Saxon England (although this is a complicated subject and manorial systems, though not on terms you could accurately call feudal, had made a good bit of headway in England before the conquest). At the same time slavery was abolished and the former slaves moved up in the social system to become serfs - but probably less than 10% of English people had been slaves before the conquest, while probably 40% of the population was subject to some form of serfdom by around 1200, and most of the rest of the rural laborers were subject to other feudal obligations and were less than entirely free.
Land ownership in Anglo-Saxon England is itself a complicated subject, but the long and short of it is that most land was freely held in the feudal sense (though not necessarily by an individual, farming was largely communal at the village level) and most farmers were free in the sense in which that word is used with respect to feudalism - they were not serfs and not legally bound to the land or to a lord. That changed rapidly after the Norman conquest, partly because the Normans had adopted French laws and customs, and partly because it proved convenient for William solidifying his rule and retaining the loyalty of the nobles and knights who had put him on the throne. As circumstances changed this changed as well and feudalism proper began disappearing faster in England than in areas on the continent where it had become entrenched.
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@Rubycule In Tolkien's case, because the portion of Middle-earth in which the stories take place was fairly small - more or less corresponding to western Europe - and had been relatively isolated due to millennia of war against Sauron. We know that the rest of Middle-earth is as diverse as our world, but very few if any people from that outside world came to the former Dunedain kingdoms except when Sauron mobilized them for his wars, because they hated and mistrusted each other. It's not an assumption , it's a logical result of the history described in the books.
Also, of course, Tolkien gave physical descriptions of many of the peoples he invented for his world, and the Elves and Dwarves were much, much smaller and more homogeneous populations than humans were. Even the Edain, the ancestors of the Dunedain, a very small subset of humans, were more physically diverse than all the Elves who are ever described. And Hobbits had in the distant past had more diverse phenotypes, but because the people of the Shire were a fairly small population living in complete isolation for well over a thousand years they had also become very homogenized. You could make them look like whatever you want, but whatever they look like they should all look more or less the same as each other. However, since the Shire is a mythical and idealized version of pre-industrial England, it would also be a bit odd if they looked and acted nothing like English people.
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The Soviet invasion of Manchuria was certainly a shock to the Japanese, who had been hoping the Soviets would mediate a peace, but the Soviets had no ability to invade Japan itself or to compel a Japanese surrender. The US, with some help from the UK, was the only nation that had the means to defeat the Japanese in their home islands, whether by invasion, naval blockade, or massive aerial bombardment (including the atomic bombs). In the event, Japan surrendered to the USSR along with all the other Allied nations, and the fact that the Soviets were not allowed to occupy any of the main Japanese islands was decided by the Allies (particularly the US), not the Japanese - nothing was said on that subject in the instrument of surrender.
sahil sing, watch the video. Some civilians wanted to surrender but the army, who had been running the government for over a decade, was adamantly opposed. The Japanese peace feelers were not for a surrender with retention of the emperor, they were for a negotiated settlement with no occupation of Japan and with Japan retaining its pre-1937 conquests including Korea and Manchuria, which was totally unacceptable to the Allies. When the Japanese government, after the bombs, the Soviet attack, and the intervention of the emperor, finally did offer surrender with the sole condition of the retention of the emperor, the Allies immediately accepted, with the proviso that the ultimate form of Japan's postwar government would be decided by its people through a democratic process.
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You're simplifying way too much. Cortes' war against the Aztecs looked absolutely nothing like King Philip's War over 100 years later, and neither of them looked anything like the battles of the Seven Years' War (known to many Americans as the French and Indian War) another century after that. You really can't make any generalization that covers those three events. It's like comparing industrialized trench warfare in WW1 to the American interventions in Mexico and Central America in the 1910s and 1920s and trying to draw a general conclusion about fighting methods of the great powers in the early 20th century.
And the British most definitely ship an army across the ocean to fight the Seven Years' War; several in fact, and also made extensive use of regular troops raised among the colonists in addition to the colonial militias. And while the main purpose of those armies was to fight the French, not the Natives, Native contingents played an extremely vital role on both sides, and the course of history for the Natives was massively affected by the events of that war. As for Natives and firearms, yes, they did use them, but this was almost as much a weakness as a strength because they couldn't produce their own firearms or ammunition and had become quite dependent on the supply of arms and powder by the Europeans for their own internal conflicts and for hunting - a fact that gave the Europeans a great advantage in their dealings with the Natives. Once the French government had been ejected from eastern North America the British and their colonists could (and did) use the threat of cutting off the supply or arms and powder as a powerful means of coercion in negotiations.
Another problem with your theory is that while, yes, epidemic diseases played a massive role in Europeans conquering so much of Central and South America and gaining a foothold in North America in the 16th and early 17th centuries, the impact of those diseases had attenuated quite a bit by the end of the 18th century, and only something like 10% of North America had been settled by Europeans at that time. So you need to look elsewhere for an explanation of how most of the remaining 90% of the continent was colonized by Europeans between 1775 and the development of industrialized warfare in the closing years of the 19th century.
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@fredbeard7710 No, the English army had no significant number of Normans in it and not all that many Norsemen, and none of William's army was Norse in any meaningful sense except by distant ancestry. Spartacus and Indy are dead wrong in saying they were all that similar or, for the most part, related. Tostig siding with Harald Hardrada was pure opportunism, they had nothing in common except both wanting to get rid of Harold Godwinson and scheming together to do it. There probably were some Englishmen in William's army as well because not everyone was happy with Harold's taking the crown (which is in itself a long story), but it was predominantly Norman, French, or Breton mercenaries supplemented by other mercenaries from all over Europe.
Most of the English army was the English fyrd - a militia of free landholders - but Harold had dismissed them for the harvest before Hastings (in part because William had waited until the very end of the campaining season to cross the channel) and was only able to muster a comparative few of them after William landed. The rest were his personal retainers or housecarls and those of the leading nobles. They were professional soldiers and some would have been foreign but most were native English or Danes who lived in England and had become culturally Anglicized to a large extent.
However, it is probably true that they would have considered themselves to be fighting for Harold rather than for England or the English people, but that's because most of them had little idea of the radical political and social transformations William intended to make - he purported to be nothing but the rightful heir to the English throne (again, long story) returning to claim his own.
The English (Anglo-Saxon, though no one used that term at the time) nobility were almost entirely killed, exiled, or dispossessed by William so he could redistribute their lands to his mercenaries as their payment for fighting for him, and native Englishmen almost universally regarded the new nobility as foreigners and usurpers for at least a generation. William and his immediate successors ruled entirely by fear and military force. As time went on the cultural distinction became more of a class one but it has never entirely disappeared.
The subject of nationalism is very complex. Certainly the modern conception of the nation-state did not exist in the 11th century, but the concept of England as a country and an English people who were distinct from Danes, Normans, or Celts absolutely did. Creating a nation of England out of the various former Anglo-Saxon kingdoms was one of Alfred the Great's major projects, and he is generally regarded as the first King of England, as opposed to an English King of Wessex, Mercia, etc. That was more true in England than most of Europe at that time, a person living in England would be much more likely to describe himself as an Englishman than a person in Scotland, France, or (the small Christian rump of) Spain would be to call themselves a Scot, Frenchman, or Spaniard.
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@RoryT1000 There is no legal definition of "apartheid state" so that depends on how you choose to define it. However, Arab (Christian or Muslim) citizens of Israel enjoy every right that Jewish citizens have, so it seems somewhat absurd to compare it to South Africa where that was not the case. If Israel permanently annexed Gaza and the West Bank without granting the residents of those areas citizenship and equal rights, the term would be more appropriate. However, that has not happened yet and is not likely to happen in the foreseeable future.
Would you consider Egypt, for example, to be an apartheid state based on the widespread violations of civil rights of non-Muslims there? Why do they get a pass? Or any other government in the Muslim world, which universally treats non-Muslims as second-class citizens?
Yes, the assault on Gaza is justified. No other nation on the planet would or should be expected to just tolerate what Hamas did on October 7.
The residents of Gaza should be allowed to govern themselves. However, that can't happen as long as any such government intends to use the country as a base for attacks on Israel. The Palestinians have to choose between peace and war. Thus far they have always chosen war. Now they've gotten themselves another one. If they don't like how it's unfolding, they should consider that before launching more terrorist attacks.
We don't need to guess at the intentions of Hamas, they have made it abundantly clear that their intention is to murder Jews in Israel and everywhere else on the planet. Genocide is the entire raison d'etre of Hamas. That may not be the desire of everyone supporting the Palestinian cause, just as the Holocaust was not the desire of everyone fighting on Germany's side during WW2. However, you need to be careful whose side you're taking in such situations.
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@Scy You're just showing how little you understand about archaeology. Metal can last many thousands of years in the right conditions, and all of those things will leave traces of their existence under the right conditions. How do you think we know what dinosaur skeletons look like? Almost none of the actual bone has survived tens of millions of years, it was fossilized, meaning the bone decayed and was replaced by minerals that were different from the surrounding substance. The same would happen with plastic. Likewise all those perfect casts we have of human bodies in Pompeii - none of the flesh survived, but it left an impression in the volcanic ash that lasted 2,000 years and probably would last another million if they hadn't been excavated, slowly being filled by minerals that were again different from the original calcified ash.
But the big problem you face is that if no evidence could survive the intervening years, how do we have so MUCH evidence of all the less advanced hunter-gatherers who lived at the same time? If you're right, we should have no evidence of them either, but we have mountains of it.
Btw no one, literally no one works from an assumption of an Aryan invasion of India any more, that's a straw man Hindu nationalists love to trot out to cover for the complete lack of evidence for their pet (and equally racist) theories about all world civilizations coming from India.
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@crimony3054 It's not my socialism, and you can only argue that the Nazis were socialists if you use a much more expansive definition of socialism than anything current today and disregard a lot of key Nazi policies and characteristics. You might just as well argue - as many on the left do today - that Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were right-wing because they embodied much of what today we call fascism.
As for specifics, some characteristics of the Nazi Party that make it far-right rather than anything-left are its nationalism, nativism, militarism, social conservatism (everything from hatred of modern art to seeing a woman's place as in the home having and raising babies nonstop), disregard for the good of workers, disregard for the political will of workers, and encouragement of private enterprise and private profit. In terms of modern socialism, its hypernationalism and is rejection of class struggle make it completely incompatible with anything that has carried that label for the last 75 years. In terms of actual members of the Nazi Party, those who were genuine left-socialists were purged by Hitler culminating in the Night of the Long Knives
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@crimony3054 Another way to look at it is that the spectrum isn't a line, it's a horseshoe with the open end being extreme authoritarian territory. Still not accurate, but better than thinking of it as a line. The ends of the horseshoe are nearer to each other than to the middle, but they're still opposite ends of the spectrum. The reason for the gap between them is that pretty much anyone who attains absolute power is going to have political goals of some sort - even Stalin, who was as close to Orwell's Big Brother (lust for power completely divorced from ideology) as anyone I can think of, still had political goals, and they were generally left-wing ones even if his methods are deplored by leftists today. As far as I'm aware, as a policy (as opposed to pure personal selfishness) pure power divorced from all ideology has never existed in modern times.
Where Hitler fits on this is the extreme right end. His methods, including strong state compulsion and some degree of economic collectivism, had a lot in common with Stalin, but his ultimate goal - all social and economic rewards being subordinated to the needs of the nation-state for the purpose of waging a perpetual nationalist war, with social change, arts, private enterprise, etc. permitted only to the extent they furthered that end - was a conservative one. The ultimate beneficiary of his policies was not intended to be workers, the human race in general, or even the government itself, but a mystical concept of the German volk seen in rabidly nationalist - NOT statist - terms. For Hitler, state power, like everything else, was not an end in itself, it was purely a means to advance the interests of the German volk .
This is diametrically opposed to the politics of Stalin, for whom the ultimate beneficiary of his policies (beyond his own personal power) was theoretically meant to be the international proletariat.
Both of them identified their own personal interest with that of the people they claimed to serve far more than was rationally defensible, but the ultimate goal was not entirely a sham for either of them, they both genuinely believed that their policies were making the world a better place.
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@nick-beukan The way you talk about it - "Even the Vatican admitted it!" - makes it clear that you're just another nationalist fanboy like all the Serbs, Russians, Hindu nationalists, "Hebrew Israelites" and all the rest who are convinced that THEIR culture is the TRUE source of all language and civilization and that anything modern science says to the contrary is part of a nefarious plot to keep their people down. It's entirely rooted in a deep-seated need to validate their modern culture and has nothing to do with actual history or linguistics.
No, I haven't studied Dacian directly, but I know how to read and I have an education, and while linguists argue about the exact classification of Dacian (because it's too poorly attested to know for certain), I'm not aware of a single modern linguist who's not part of some sketchy nationalist cult who thinks that Gothic is more closely related to Dacian than to the other Germanic languages. If you have a source to the contrary, who is NOT part of a nationalist cult, I'd love to hear about it. And since you're the one claiming to have superior knowledge to every reputable linguist on the planet, I think the burden's on you to produce a source. Of course five minutes on Google will produce dozens of sources supporting my view - I invite you to look for yourself, Google will give you the same results it did me. (Alas, many of the full articles are behind paywalls.)
And sure, Romanian probably contains some pre-Latin substrate, just like every other Romance language does, but that doesn't change the fact that it is a descendant of Latin brought there by the Romans in historical times. A Dacian from 100 BC probably wouldn't recognize or understand one word in fifty of modern Romanian, while a Roman from 100 BC would probably understand 80% or more of it once he got the hang of the systematic changes in grammar and pronunciation.
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Wrong. The German objective was to inflict disproportionate losses on the Grand Fleet so that they could subsequently take on that fleet with close to even numbers and have a reasonable chance of winning a general engagement. They did not do that - after the battle, the balance of numbers was more in favor of the British than ever, and only got worse as time went on. So while it wasn't a resounding British victory, it was definitely a German loss.
In terms of losses, Invincible and Indefatigable were lightly armored and never had any excuse to be anywhere near a line of battle, or even slug it out with enemy battlecruisers (they were designed solely to take on cruisers) and Pommern likewise had no business being anywhere near a dreadnought clash, so each side lost precisely one actual capital ship plus a number of obsolete and scouting ships that had little bearing on the outcome of any future battles, but the German battle line had far more ships with extensive damage that would keep them out of action for many months. Loss of life was much higher on the British side because of the magazine explosions, but let's face it, loss of life for the entire naval side of WW1 was insignificant next to the colossal bloodletting in land battles - the British lost more than three times as many killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme than they did at Jutland, and more than twenty times as many by the end of that battle. Neither side in the naval war was going to run out of sailors before they ran out of ships.
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Where in eastern Germany were you born?
Here's the thing, history happens. The German/Polish border used to be in one place, then the Germans f***ed up and started a war they couldn't win, now it's in another place. In 1948 the Palestinians f***ed up and started a war they couldn't win, now Israel exists. But Palestine exists too, even if no one can agree on its borders. If we try setting the clock back no one will be happy because whatever magic date you choose that we're supposed to go back to, someone will be the loser and demand s different date. How about we just talk about the rights people have today, on the land they're occupying today, and forget about past grievances?
And if you'd asked me last Friday, I'd say the Palestinians have a right to a state on the land they've occupied since 1949, and so do the Israelis on the land they occupied before 1967. But Hamas f***ed up on an absolutely epic scale, and now they're paying an epic price. It turns out when you go around raping women to death and beheading infants and then posting videos online to brag about it while the folks back home dance in the streets and celebrate the rapes and decapitations, the relatives of those people get pretty riled up and come looking for payback. So while I still think the Palestinians must someday be granted their human rights, sadly, there's going to be bombing and invasion before that happens, and the Palestinians can only blame themselves and their own actions for that. They have sown the wind, and now they will reap the whirlwind.
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@spartacus-olsson Incredibly sparsely populated? Scandinavia, maybe, but not the British Isles or France. The kingdom of France, which excludes large parts of the modern country, is thought to have had around 7,000,000 inhabitants in the 11th century, and the population of England was probably somewhere between one third and one half of that, with another 1-1.5 million people living in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. That's much lower than modern urban populations, of course, but the rural areas of those countries were nearly as thickly inhabited, and in some areas more thickly inhabited, than they are today.
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@spartacus-olsson It was not true for Harold's forces, which were almost entirely native English. William's army was made up almost entirely of mercenaries, so it was polyglot, but the bulk of it was ethnically Norman, Breton, or French, and Norman French became the exclusive language of William's court (along with Latin for scholars and diplomats, of course). Harold's army was a mix of his housecarls, professional soldiers who were in personal service to Harold or to the Crown, and fyrdmen, who were the local militia. The housecarls would have been an ethnic mix but probably almost all born in England, with a mix of Englishmen and Danes plus a few foreign, mostly Danish, mercenaries, but the fyrdmen were all Englishmen from southern England. And Harald's army, like all Viking "armies," was also a mix of mercenaries from all over northern Europe including a number of Englishmen who, like Tostig, were unhappy with Harold's rule, but since it was defeated and repelled, indeed, almost entirely annihilated, it doesn't have much relevance when discussing English society after 1066.
Harold's army would have been even more ethnically English but for the particular circumstances of the battle. He had dismissed the fyrd because they needed to harvest their crops, and because William had delayed his invasion (mostly due to weather) until the very end of the season in which weather allowed an invasion at all. He then had to march his remaining army north to fight Harald at Stamford Bridge, only to receive word of William's landing. Because of the speed with which he marched south to meet William he left most of his army in Yorkshire, only binging the core of his housecarls to Hastings, to be joined by a much reduced portion of just the local fyrd who could be mustered in time. Had William landed in August, he would have been met by a mostly fyrd, and thus almost entirely native English, army at least twice the size of the one he met at Hastings.
Your point about the Normans being a class rather than a people is probably the best way to look at it, but there was definitely a perceived ethnic difference, particularly with respect to language. Most of the native English nobility were either killed, exiled, or dispossessed, and for at least a generation most Englishmen regarded the new Norman nobility as foreigners and usurpers. This was the cause of unceasing discord and rebellion for the rest of William's life. And it was several centuries before the language of the English royal court became the same as that of the common people, long after even the language of the people had changed dramatically under the influence of the French-speaking upper classes.
As to Marc Bloch, if you want to understand English society, I would recommend sticking to English historians. And "feudal society" itself, as Bloch describes it, was a concept mostly foreign to England until it was imported by the new Norman ruling class. If, for example, we look at it in military terms, the Anglo-Saxon fyrd was more like the citizen militia of the classical world or the early United States, organized and led by leading local men but directly responsible to the state, than it was like the private armies of great magnates of feudal Europe, held together by personal and contractual bonds of loyalty between lord and vassal. (It should be noted that William's and Harald's mercenary armies and Harold's housecarls were not feudal armies in any sense of the word, although once William took the throne he immediately began the process of transforming his army into a feudal one by granting English lands to which he had no lawful title.)
I have addressed your contention about population above, but I will say again that most estimates place the population of 11th century England at between two and three million souls, not a few hundred thousand. England was a fairly densely populated country in 1066 by the standards of the time, and its society, language, and political structure were extremely different from those of Normandy or France proper.
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@kaltaron1284 There is zero evidence that the US did anything to delay the declaration, or that it had any means to do so. Furthermore, the note delivered on December 7 was not only not a declaration of war, it was not a notice of any sort of hostilities or even an ultimatum. All it said was that the Japanese government had come to the conclusion that further talks on restoring normal trade relations were pointless. Of course anyone who was at all familiar with the lawless, hyper-aggressive, fascist Japanese government understood that this meant they were probably going to attack, but that is hardly the same thing as a lawful notice.
And you might note the language "or some other formal statement of the commencement of hostilities". The US has not engaged in hostilities without such a statement - for instance, in both Gulf Wars a deadline was given to the Iraqi government to conform its actions to international law (by withdrawing from its invasion of Kuwait in the first instance and allowing full inspection of suspected WMD sites in the second) or face military action. They same sort of notice was given to, for instance, Serbia to cease its murderous ethnic cleansing or face attack. And nothing in international law requires any nation to seek or receive permission from the UN before engaging in hostilities. So no, this rule of war has not changed and has always been honored by the US.
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@spartacus-olsson It's more complicated than that WRT the Germanic dialects, but the more important point is that few of William's followers, who became the new English nobility, spoke any Germanic dialect. Most of them weren't even ethnically Norman, they were Breton or French. Most of the Normans natively spoke the Norman dialect of French, which had most had a few dozen loan words from Norse. They had been in France for nearly 200 years by that point and had merged culturally with the much larger local populace just as their descendants had merged with the local English culture 200 years later.
The inarguable truth is that there was a massive new influence of French on the English language in the century or two following the conquest, with just about zero influence of English on French (as spoken outside of England) at the same time. The only rational conclusion is that this was caused by the well-documented replacement of almost the entire English upper class with William's French-speaking followers. If the international upper classes were as polyglot and interrelated as you claim (without any evidence, and no, the foreign languages spoken by English monarchs 500 years later in the Renaissance are not evidence for anything in 1066), how do you explain the radical and well-documented influence of the French language on the English language that suddenly appeared in the decades following 1066 and the complete absence of any evidence of similar changes before that date? (English did undergo major and well-documented changes before the conquest, of course, but the influences we see are entirely from Old Norse, "Danish" as it was called in England at that time, and not from French.)
Have you ever looked at Beowulf in its original language, and any of the Norse sagas, and anything in Old French like the Chanson de Roland or 12th century legal documents? I can't believe you have, because I have, and if you had you wouldn't be making such outlandish claims. Old English and Old Norse were absolutely, positively, distinctly different languages, though much more similar to each other than either is to French, and the language imported and used by the new Norman nobility was absolutely, positively a medieval dialect of French with no more influence from Germanic languages than modern French has, easily recognizable as an ancestor of modern French. I'm sure the new nobles fairly quickly learned to speak enough English to make themselves understood by their servants, but the language they used in their daily lives and their courts was the Norman dialect of Old French, and was no more intelligible to their English subjects than Greek or Russian or Latin would have been, whereas the language used in daily life and court by their immediate predecessors was the exact same English those subjects spoke.
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@bludfyre "I would argue that "fascism" is socialism for a narrowly-defined ethnic or national group"
I agree completely. That is why fascism is not socialism. Socialism is aimed at the betterment of the working class, fascism (and nazism, to the extent it is a different thing from fascism) is aimed at the betterment of an ethnic group. Socialism is entirely about economic class conflict, fascism is about a different breakdown of classes of people based on race or ethnicity, not economics.
TIK fallaciously argues that socialism is not about bettering conditions for workers because its policies actually make things worse for workers. He is correct in that premise -socialism does not, in fact, work - but wrong in his conclusion. The fact that socialism makes things worse for workers is an inherent error in socialism, not a thing that makes socialism not socialism, or a thing that defines socialism. You can't say, as he does, that because socialism makes things worse for workers, any system that makes things worse for workers is socialist. That is the commutative fallacy.
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@FireOvRenewal Race is not a reality, it is purely a construct. Genetic and morphological differences between populations of humans are a fact, but race is a fantasy we have constructed around those differences.
The main problem with the concept of race as it is generally understood are threefold: One, there are very few if any sharp lines where everyone on one side shares a completely different set of traits from those on the other, there's almost always a continuum where the traits change gradually with distance. Serbs are darker than Swedes, Greeks are darker than Serbs, Syrians are darker than Greeks, Egyptians are darker than Syrians, Ethiopians are darker than Egyptians, Kikuyu are darker than Ethiopians. Where do you draw a line where everyone on one side is "white" and everyone on the other is "black"? How an you draw it between, for example, Syrians and Egyptians when those populations look much more like each other than Syrians look like Swedes or Egyptians look like Kikuyu? What traits can you point to where you CAN draw a sharp line?
Two, different traits are usually distributed on different geographical lines - for example, the variations in skin color break down on completely different lines from variations in skull shape, or height and/or stockiness of build, or other variations of musculature: some dark-skinned people are much more likely to be excellent marathon runners than others, and some very-light-skinned populations have genes that predispose them to be much better marathon runners than some dark-skinned populations. Some populations have adapted very well to living at high altitudes, but you find populations in Tibet who have that adaptation as well as populations in South America who have it, but their neighbors of the same "race" who live in lowlands do not share it. And you have very dark-skinned people who have adapted to living in equatorial Africa, and other very dark-skinned people who have adapted to living in the hot Australian Outback, but beyond sharing a skin color those populations have literally nothing in common genetically.
And three, with a few exceptions, there are no unique sets of common ancestors at the scale of purported racial groups - there may be, for example, a unique set of common ancestors for all Inuit people, but there is no group of common ancestors for everyone living in the pre-Colombian Americas that excludes everyone living in pre-Colombian Eurasia, and there is no set of common ancestors for everyone living in prehistoric Europe that excludes everyone living in prehistoric Africa. This is in contrast to different species or subspecies which do have entirely unique ancestors. Races are not clades.
In other words, there are thousands of distinguishable populations of humans predating modern transportation, but with a few very limited exceptions, there are no lines you can draw where everyone on one side shares every trait and everyone on the other shares a different set of traits - wherever you try to draw the lines, there will be populations on one side who share traits with populations on the other side, but do not share that trait with some populations on their side of the line. What you have are populations who have adapted to local conditions, and who share traits with others living in similar conditions, but not with people right next to them, with whom they have far more in common genetically, who live in different conditions.
Out of these local variations we have constructed a fantasy that there are much larger groupings who all share all the same traits, but there is no basis in fact for such larger groupings.
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@Paul-fritz. Point 4 is really not correct. You're confusing de facto acceptance with international law. Stalin got to take Kaliningrad because no one wanted to fight WW3 to stop him, not because he or the USSR had any legal claim to it. Stalin also carried out massive and illegal ethnic cleansing throughout Eastern Europe, but few people complained because no one else was feeling much sympathy for Germans in 1945. But again, that's not international law. Most of the other losses that were sanctioned (like Japan losing Korea, Manchuria, and Taiwan) were accepted because the historical claim of Japan to control any of those territories was dubious to say the least. But the US couldn't have said, for instance, it was just going to annex Hokkaido or Kyushu and that would be legal because Japan started the war.
But the real issue isn't this, it's people, not land. Even assuming Israel had a right to annex Gaza and the West Bank, what becomes of the people living there? They are still human beings, they have human rights, and that right includes being citizens of whatever country rules them with the right to participate fully in politics. Is Israel going to make the people living there citizens? Germany annexed Alsace-Lorraine from France in 1871, but it didn't expel or murder all the people living there, they became German citizens with the right to vote and all other rights that other German citizens had. And while, as I said, ethnic cleansing has sometimes been tolerated because of realpolitik concerns, it is still illegal, and Israel isn't the USSR, it doesn't have the power to defy the rest of the world and get away with it. Murdering or expelling all the Arab residents of Gaza and the West Bank simply isn't an option, no matter how much Netanyahu might wish it were.
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@spartacus-olsson "No one spoke English until the 16th century… Old English is about as much English as Welsh is."
Sorry, that is absolute rubbish. Yes, English has changed quite a bit over the last 1200 years, but to say Old English is as close to modern English as Welsh is nonsense. Modern [High] German wouldn't be understandable to anyone from Clovis' or Alaric's day either, but it is still German and not Spanish or Hindi, and the differences between ancient and modern English, just as the differences between ancient and modern German or Latin and modern French, are regular, systematic, and predictable once you understand the rules that govern them. A modern English speaker can learn to understand Old English very quickly, much more quickly than speakers of any other language except Dutch, and MUCH more quickly than he can learn Welsh (although familiarity with a highly inflected language like Latin was also useful in my experience).
If Professor Tolkien were here today he would give you a good knock on the head with Grond, the Hammer of the Underworld for saying Welsh is as much like modern English as Old English is. (Or at the very least tell you not to be so hasty and then set about writing a 6,000-word essay on why you're wrong which would have to be reassembled from six different scribbled, typewritten, and heavily corrected partial manuscripts.)
And there are COPIOUS records about the Plantagenet monarchs; the reason most people today aren't too familiar with them has little to do with language OR destruction of records, IMO it's because the society they lived in was so different from ours that it's much harder for modern students to connect their lives and policies to anything in their own personal experiences than it is for rulers from the early modern era onward. it's the same reason that students of ancient history, as I have observed, have a much easier time (and more interest in) understanding, say, Roman society than that of ancient Egypt or Babylon.
The highly polyglot English monarchs you're talking about were from a completely different era as well. Certainly there was trade, diplomacy, and travel in the 11th century but not nearly as much of it as there was in the 16th, and the idea of a court full of official foreign ambassadors was completely unknown in northern Europe. You are conflating events from a lot of different periods with different influences. George III was certainly not the first English monarch who spoke mostly English on a regular basis; his father and grandfather didn't because they were Germans brought in because they were Protestant. We don't know what languages Harold Godwinson spoke; he probably did understand and speak Danish very well and very well may have had some French, but I'd bet the family farm against a donut he didn't understand a word of Portuguese (Or Galician, back then, I guess? - Portugal was still part of al-Andalus at that time) or Greek or probably even Latin.
French only became the lingua franca of diplomacy in the 18th century, before that it was Italian or, for much longer, Latin. The term "lingua franca" comes from a completely different context, a Mediterranean pidgin and trade language based primarily on Italian, with some influence from Occitan and Spanish and a little less from Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Berber, French and other Mediterranean languages, that few if any western European monarchs ever spoke, which was called "the language of the Franks" not because it had much to do with French but because "Franks" was the term used in the Byzantine Empire and many Muslim countries for any western (i.e., not Slavic or Greek-speaking) European since the days of the Crusades. If you're going to read "Frank" as "French" in this context you're going to have a great deal of difficulty understanding period sources.
If you're going to lecture people on a subject outside your specialty you really ought to know this stuff.
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@spartacus-olsson Genetics is a completely different subject IMHO. I am absolutely not talking about any sort of racial difference in the modern sense, it's a cultural one. I couldn't even guess what the genetic background of most of William's or Harald's armies might have been, and frankly I don't think it matters very much in this context: most humans are a big genetic mix anyway, and I don't think genetic ancestry has much to do with people's identity compared to cultural heritage.
And I think you are looking at it through too modern a lens if you're looking at it from the point of modern (i.e., Victorian and later) identity politics. Yes, a lot of nonsense had been written about Saxons and Normans and what it means to be English or British in the last 200 years, and quite a lot in the last 20 years - my understanding is that medievalism as an academic discipline has become more polluted by that sort of nonsense than it was in my student days, which, if true, makes me sad. And myths have been at the core of nationalism for centuries. But the fact that a myth leads to false conclusions doesn't mean it doesn't have a kernel of fact at its core, and disproving the myth is not disproving the facts cited in support of it. I think you are looking at the modern myths and working back to discredit them, which is fine as far as it goes, but gives you more of an understanding of the present than it does of the distant past.
I see this when you say, for example, that William didn't conduct an ethnic cleansing. No, he didn't, and that certainly wasn't his purpose - he was merely paying off his followers and installing nobles who were loyal to him personally, I don't think he gave a fig about the ethnicity or cultural identity of the people he was dispossessing or the people he was replacing them with, most of the latter weren't even actually Normans. But the result of his policy was an ethnic - in the sense of culture, not genetics - change, and the fact that it doesn't fit the modern idea of ethnic cleansing doesn't change that. The old nobles spoke the same language as the common people and shared a set of cultural experiences and expectations with them, and the new nobles spoke a radically different language and shared fewer cultural experiences and expectations with the commoners.
Nationalism is a very tricky subject, especially if you go back to the Middle Ages. I would agree that the modern concept of nationalism would have been largely alien to anyone in the 11th century, but that doesn't mean that there was never a sense of shared cultural identity that often fell along lines we today would call national. As I mentioned elsewhere, as early as the 7th century Bede could write about an English language and an English people, and his readers would understand what he meant, and that he was talking about a real and commonly recognized distinction between the English and the Welsh peoples, or between the English languages (as diverse a collection of dialects as it was) and Germanic languages spoken on the continent. That can't be a Victorian invention if Bede wrote about it 1200 years before the Victorians. If the Victorians drew some false conclusions about that, that doesn't change what Bede thought or wrote.
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@crimony3054 The mistake you're making is in thinking political ideology is a one-dimensional (linear) structure. Hitler and Stalin did a lot of things the same way because they were both extreme authoritarians, but authoritarianism is neither left nor right, it is its own axis. Likewise democratic socialists have a lot of the same methods as liberal (in the old sense) free-market capitalists, but their economic policies and aims are different. Modern socialists are no more like Stalin in terms of authoritarianism than modern conservatives are like Hitler in the same terms, and it's very mistaken to try to use the examples of Hitler or Stalin to link authoritarianism with either the left or right on social and economic issues.
Politics is better described as a three- or even four-dimensional structure. Authoritarianism is one axis, economics is another, and social policies (things like religion, the status of women, and reproductive rights) a third, and people can fall anywhere in the cube formed by those three axes. And you could even add a fourth axis for nationalism vs. internationalism.The Nazis were extremely authoritarian, as extremely nationalist as it is possible to be, generally socially conservative, and in the middle on economics - they exercised a large degree of control over the economy but profits still went to private owners and workers reaped few of the benefits of their labor. Mussolini's Fascists were very authoritarian, extremely nationalist, in the middle but tending toward conservative on social policy, and mixed on economic policy. Franco's Falange (including his Carlist supporters) started very authoritarian but became less so as time went on, was extremely nationalist, extremely socially conservative (particularly with respect to the status of the Catholic Church), and generally right-wing (pro-market) on economic policy.
Modern socialists are more liberal than authoritarian, socially very liberal, strongly internationalist, and of course very far left on economics (but not as far as classical Marxists, some degree of private property is still protected.) Modern conservatives are in the middle on authoritarianism (although there is also a libertarian wing), very nationalistic, socially conservative, and very pro-free markets.
As far as historical Nazism, it should be noted that Hitler was violently opposed by the socialists in his time, while conservatives generally preferred to work with him thinking they could control him. The Nazis never had anything close to a majority, Hitler took power with the cooperation and support of conservatives, most notably the military. This is one reason he's considered to be on the right end of the political spectrum by people looking to classify people according to that one-dimensional spectrum.
I also included Franco in the above comparisons because the Spanish Civil War was very much a political fault line in its day. Nazis, fascists, and conservatives, including the Catholic Church, all lined up on Franco's side while liberals, socialists, anarchists, and communists, including Stalin, lined up on the Republican side. One important reason for Franco's eventual victory was that his coalition held together much better than the Republicans' did, especially once Stalin realized the Republican government would never be his puppet and withdrew his support. But if Hitler had been an actual socialist in anything but name his interests would have aligned with the Republicans, not Franco's Insurgents who were conservative in every respect.
Stalin's personal paranoia and megalomania could almost be considered a fifth political axis whenever he was involved because they made him a terrible ally even for people who agreed with his politics in every respect. Those personal characteristics and the excesses they led to, and not any political differences, were why Stalin was so thoroughly repudiated by Khrushchev in the 1950s.
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@rowdkyl5365 First of all, Judah existed before 750 BC, as did the northern kingdom of Israel. We don't know when the monarchy was founded, but the people had been living there for hundreds of years, and references to them from other cultures go back to the Merneptah Stele in 1208 BC. Second, you're ignoring the Hasmonean dynasty. Third and most important, you're confusing who had ultimate sovereignty with who lived there. It was a Jewish country from its founding until 135 AD, the Babylonians only took a fairly small number of people from the ruling elite and the Persians, Greeks, and Romans not even that. There was never a population replacement. Would you say India stopped being Indian when the British ruled it, or Vietnam stopped being Vietnamese when the French ruled it?
So we're talking about a minimum of 1343 years, but I would argue much longer than that because the people who lived there in 750 BC were essentially the same people who lived there in 2,000 BC, they had just developed a new religion.
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This video is completely mistaken. It falls for the old Barbara Tuchman line of a Europe that had tensions but no real reason for war blundering its way into a war because of a mishandled crisis. Nothing could be further from the truth. There was not just tension between France and Germany, each was not only just prepared for war with the other, they were both determined to fight such a war and were only waiting for the time to seem right. And the German general staff deemed that when the 1914 crisis happened, the time was right. They were looking at demographic trends in France and Germany and even more so at the recovery of Russia from its 1905 aborted revolution and at its rapid industrialization and modernization, and they figured that conditions would only get less favorable for Germany to win the inevitable war as time went on.
This is why this crisis turned into a war when all previous ones had been resolved through diplomacy. The German general staff, and to a lesser extent its civilian government, did everything it could to ensure that diplomacy would fail. They not only gave the Austro-Hungarians the famous "blank check" promising support in the event of war, they pushed them very hard to be as harsh as possible in their response to Serbia and to send an ultimatum that Serbia couldn't possibly accept, thus ensuring a war between Austria and Serbia. They worked to sabotage every effort by third parties to mediate the crisis between Austria and Serbia. They then pushed Austria-Hungary to mobilize its army against both Russia and Serbia instead of just mobilizing against Serbia as the Austrians wanted, saying this would deter the Russians from declaring war while knowing that it would inevitably do the opposite. When Russia responded by mobilizing its own army (which was tantamount to a mutual declaration of war) the Kaiser wanted to mobilize against Russia only and try to keep France from joining the war through diplomacy, but the generals convinced him that this was impossible and that Germany had no choice but to invade France as well.
And this is where this false narrative really goes off the rails. It's always claimed that when Germany went to war with Russia, France joined in to honor its treaty obligation. Now, France very well may have done that if given the choice, but in actual fact it never came to that because Germany effectively initiated a war with France. It did that by sending an ultimatum to France demanding that France disarm its frontier and allow the German army to occupy fortifications on the French side of the border, which was an absolutely insane demand that no one imagined France could ever possibly accept - it would have been national suicide. The alternative was that Germany would attack. It was in response to this ultimatum and its open threat of invasion that France mobilized its army. In any case the Germans were going to invade France whether France mobilized its army or declared war or not - the only question was whether France would resist the invasion. This was because the German mobilization plan, which the generals absolutely insisted on following to the letter, required German troops to cross into France, Belgium, and Luxembourg as a specific point in the process.
This is not to say that Germany bears sole responsibility for the war - the other powers were all spoiling for a fight as well (Austria to crush the Serbs, Russia to check Austrian ambitions in the Balkans, France to avenge its loss in 1870 and recover the provinces lost in that war, and Britain to eliminate the German naval threat and check German economic expansion into the Middle East). And the German generals were probably correct that France was eventually going to attack Germany if Germany didn't attack France first. But the reason the war broke out when it did and the way it did was that the German general staff saw 1914 as the best chance for them to win a war against Russia and France and therefore did everything they could to ensure that the diplomatic crisis caused by the Archduke's assassination turned into a general European war.
Also, the main reason the British cabinet went to war (as opposed to the reason they told the public) which less a principled outrage over the violation of Belgian neutrality than a realization that Germany invading Belgium meant they would gain control of the Channel ports of both Belgium and France, and that controlling those ports would raise the German naval threat from unsettling to absolutely intolerable. This is why the BEF was initially deployed into Belgium when everyone still expected the main thrust of the German advance to come through Alsace-Lorraine - initially the BEF wasn't there to win the land war against Germany (that was the French Army's job), it was there to protect vital British interests on the Channel coast. As it turned out the German plans were something very different and the BEF happened to find itself in the right place to play a decisive role in keeping the Germans from taking Paris by a very, very narrow margin.
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I got a similar same vibe from the East Village. Mostly junkies and dead enders, then by the 90s St. Mark's was just a tourist trap for middle-class subculture kids looking to go slumming. It wasn't all corrupt, though, and a lot of the people who created both scenes weren't in it to exploit anyone, they were trying to create something real. I think Marty Balin and Jerry Garcia mostly wanted to create beautiful music, and a scene where it could flourish and be appreciated, and they did, for a while. Sure they made money, but musicians have to eat. Same with the later NY scene - Warhol was a genuine artist, and Hilly Kristal never got rich, he just wanted to have a club where interesting musicians could have a venue. It's not their fault that the suits eventually figured out how to package and monetize the scenes they created.
Also, I think the Doors were mostly from middle-class families. Morrison's father was a Rear Admiral in the US Navy, which is a comfortable living but hardly what I'd call wealthy - these days it's very low six figures, less than what most of my law school classmates are making. Krieger's father was an engineer, Densmore went to public high school, Manzarek enlisted in the Army, again, all comfortably middle class, but none of those sound like wealthy backgrounds.
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@austinmackell9286 In the late 4th and 5th centuries they were not loyal to the Roman system because they were not Romans, they were barbarians. They were 100% loyal to the Roman system in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd centuries because they were still Romans. This remained true after Roman citizenship was expanded far outside of Italy, because the new citizens had by then started to think of themselves as Roman regardless of whether they or their ancestors spoke Latin or Greek, Aramaic, Gaulish, etc. The reason the soldiers eventually stopped being Romans wasn't because they stopped being a citizen militia, it was because Rome stopped being able to afford a permanent military establishment and without that establishment there was no longer a military caste of Romans to call on when war broke out, so the only place to look for soldiers with military traditions and training was among the barbarians. This was less true in the Eastern Empire because the economy remained healthier there.
The father of modern military history, Hans Delbrück, tracks the demise of the Roman legions with two key metrics: the transition of the legionaries from full-time professionals with no families and no other occupation to reservists living on land they farmed with their families, and the disappearance from the records of all reference to the centurions, the professional NCOs who maintained the military skills and traditions and passed them on to new recruits. The reservists eventually became the limitanei, who were of little military value partly because they weren't full-time soldiers but mostly because, unlike Marcus Aurelius' legions, they were only available for service near their home and thus couldn't be moved en masse to deal with a crisis elsewhere in the Empire.
The entire military history of the early Middle Ages was essentially an attempt to address this problem. The solution they hit on was an elite military caste, knights, who were supported by settlements of land granted in return for an obligation of service in time of war rather than being economically supported full-time by the state. They themselves were not farmers, they had farmers - serfs - dedicated to providing for their economic support. But this system never worked very well in practice so as soon as states started having significant monetary revenue again they went from using feudal levies to mercenaries and then to a regular, full-time professional military establishment.
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@Agrestic All of that is just the movies. Almost none of it happened that way in the book, least of all Aragorn shirking any responsibility. He knew Gondor would never accept him as king unless he proved victorious in the war against Sauron - they had already rejected one of his ancestors many centuries earlier, and that was when the northern Dunedain still had a kingdom to rule (though a much reduced one by then). He had spent his entire life fighting against Sauron and preparing himself to be king, and he also had an understanding with Elrond that he would never wed Arwen, which was what he wanted more than anything else in life, until he was king of the reunited realms of Gondor and Arnor. Also, in the book, his original plan was to leave the Fellowship at the Falls of Rauros and let Gandalf take Frodo to Mordor while he went to Minas Tirith with Boromir to fight in the war; his plans only changed because Gandalf died in Moria and then again because Frodo left without him and Merry and Pippin needed rescuing.
You have to remember that in the book Isildur had lived and died 3,000 years before their present day, and it had been 1,000 years since Aragorn's ancestors had ruled anything but a ragtag band of rangers - their kingdom had been destroyed by the Witch-king a thousand years earlier and centuries before Sauron had returned. And Isildur and his descendants had never ruled any part of Gondor; they ruled Arnor in the north while the descendants of Isildur's younger brother Anarion ruled Gondor. It would be about like a long-lost descendant of Harold Godwinson whose ancestors had been living in rural Norway since that time showing up today and claiming to be the King of Scotland.
Aragorn's (IMO questionable) self-doubting character arc in the movies is entirely PJ's creation.
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The first fatal flaw in your analysis is separating the Vietnam War into separate and barely related conflicts. From Hanoi's point of view it was one continuous struggle for national liberation that started in 1945 and ended in 1975, separated into phases named by the principal opponent in each stage. For them the Paris Accords of 1973 were not the end of anything but American involvement. A vital clue in this interpretation was their rock-solid insistence that any "peace" treaty left their forces in place in South Vietnam ready to renew their offensive any any time they chose. The South Vietnamese government understood this as well and that is why it was vehemently opposed to the treaty, but they had no power to compel the US to stay in the war or support the South after the treaty was signed. Yes, Hanoi really needed a truce in 1973to stave off the collapse of their offensive capability to US bombing, but they understood that Nixon needed an end to US involvement in the war even more, and that they held the upper hand in the truce negotiations and could hold out for their bottom line which was the maintenance of that offensive capability not only against, but in South Vietnam.
The Napoleonic Wars are a good comparison, and I think most historians, while giving individual names to the various phases of those wars, would indeed regard them, or certainly all of the phases after the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens in 1803, as one continuous conflict that Napoleon ended up losing, separated into phases defined by who was actively fighting Napoleon at any given time. Every one of those wars was fought for the same reason, Napoleon's desire to make France the hegemon of Europe with his own Imperial dynasty at its head and the refusal of the other European powers to accept that result, and ultimately they achieved their goal and Napoleon failed utterly in his. Any temporary successes he achieved along the way, however impressive, didn't affect that ultimate result.
As you stated, the American goals in the war were the preservation of South Vietnam as an independent, non-communist country, and the containment of communism in Southeast Asia. Regardless of the temporary lull in the fighting in 1973 - a lull that every major player on the planet other than Richard Nixon, and probably even he, understood could not possibly be anything but temporary and brief - the fact remains that within two years of the American withdrawal South Vietnam was absorbed by the communist Hanoi government and Laos and Cambodia were controlled by communist governments as well.
Watergate and Nixon's fall certainly made South Vietnam's position more difficult by cutting off any possibility of continued US support, but I believe the ultimate result, the complete conquest of South Vietnam by the communist North, was inevitable from the day the Paris Peace Accords were signed. Public support for any continued US involvement in Vietnam was about zero even before the Watergate scandal broke, and the Saigon government simply wasn't capable of resisting the North's attack without massive US support, if not active intervention, and the leaders of both North and South Vietnam understood that. The lack of US enthusiasm for keeping its promise to Saigon was not a surprise to Hanoi, they had been counting on it - they could watch CBS Nightly News even if their subjects couldn't.
The second fatal flaw in your analysis is confusing battlefield success with strategic success. Body counts and battles won do not determine the winner of a war, achievement of the political goals of the warring powers do. If we go by body counts and number of battles won, the British won the American Revolution and the Confederates won the American Civil War, but obviously no one would claim that. Britain lost its American colonies (aside from Canada) and the South was forced to remain in the Union, so they lost those wars. South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were taken over by communist governments, so the US lost its struggle to prevent those outcomes by military force.
As to America gaining by, for instance, lessons learned, the British Empire's naval superiority and general geopolitical position against its greatest rival, France, were better in 1784 than they had been in 1775, but again, few if any historians would argue that that means the British won the American Revolution.
Don't get me wrong, I am an American patriot and I think the US military achieved remarkable things in the Vietnam War and were forced to leave the conflict by purely political, not military, factors, but like Napoleon's astounding victories in battles like Austerlitz, military successes mean nothing if they fail to achieve the political goals they are intended to achieve. The simple fact is that the US did not possess the political will to win the Vietnam War, and so it lost the Vietnam War. North Vietnam's military position in 1968 was not good, the Viet Cong had virtually ceased to function as a fighting force, the Soviets lacked the stomach for a direct showdown with the US over Vietnam, and Hanoi's relations with China had broken down to the point that China was no longer a sanctuary or sufficient supply route for the North Vietnamese, so if the US had had the political will to mount an invasion of North Vietnam comparable to MacArthur's invasion of North Korea in 1950, the result very well may have been a collapse of the Hanoi regime and a complete US victory - but the US did not have that political will, and all of the leaders involved knew it, so there was no such invasion and no US victory. (And of course, there was also the possibility that such a radical change in US policy might have resulted in an equally radical change in Chinese and/or Soviet policy and a much more destructive direct war between superpowers, and that possibility is a large part of the reason for the American unwillingness to support such an invasion.)
The real crying shame is that the Johnson administration, and especially SecDef MacNamara had concluded by 1965 that the war was unwinnable for political reasons, but they lacked the moral courage to try to explain this to a then-hawkish public and accept the political cost of having the war lost on their watch. I'm pretty sure Nixon and Kissinger understood this as well, and they had no more moral courage than LBJ did, but they were much better politicians and managed to spin the inevitable loss into a US victory under Nixon's administration followed by a "loss of the peace" under his successors. He just got booted out of office more quickly than anyone anticipated and his successor lacked both the political support and the motivation to stave off the debacle in South Vietnam until a Democrat was in the Oval Office. IMO it is a testament to the consummate and devious political skills of Nixon and Kissinger that they sold their BS so cleverly that intelligent and informed people like you are still buying it today.
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William's army was not Scandinavian in any meaningful sense, nor, by 1066, were the Anglo-Saxons. Linguists may speak of proto-Germanic language, but even by Caesar's time there was no culturally or linguistically united German people, if indeed there ever had been. Gothic, Old English, Old Norse, Old High German, none of these were mutually intelligible even to the extent Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian are today. Old English had changed under the influence of 270 years of Danish incursions, and lost some of the features that made it less intelligible to Norsemen, but it was still a distinct language. And the Normans had completely lost their original language by 1066 and spoke a local dialect of Old French. Most of William's army wasn't even Norman, he recruited large numbers of mercenaries from Brittany and the rest of France, and others from all over Europe, who fought purely for personal gain in the form of lands and titles redistributed from English nobles who were killed or dispossessed during the conquest.
There wasn't that much intermarriage, either, outside the royal houses and a few of the very great houses. Very few if any of the men in William's army had a drop of English blood in them. Of course that changed rapidly after the conquest, but the linguistic difference lingered for generations.
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@TheLordpeanuts The separation between classical and vulgar Latin wasn't a class difference, it was a functional difference. Vulgar Latin was what everyone used for everyday conversation, and Classical Latin was what people used in literature. In the 1st century AD there wouldn't have been much difference, the spoken language would mostly have just been a stripped down, simpler version of the written language. As the centuries passed the two diverged, classical Latin staying the same because you could still read books from 200 years before, while the spoken language changed because there was no fixed record or standard of how people write. An example of the types of changes is words that started as slang becoming the standard word for something and the original literal word falling out of use - so people started calling a person's head ("caput") their pot ("testa"), the slang caught on universally, and eventually people just stopped using or remembering "caput" and "testa" became the standard word for head (which is where French gets "tête"). By the 5th century they had become distinct dialects. When people today say "Vulgar Latin" they usually mean that phase, in the late Roman Empire, before Vulgar Latin began diverging along regional lines and turning into proto-French, proto-Spanish, etc.
Jerome translated the Bible into Vulgar Latin because he wanted ordinary people (i.e., not just those with an education in classical literature) to be able to understand it. A few hundred years later the Church forbade translating the Bible into vernaculars because it didn't want common people to understand it - they were supposed to believe whatever the priest told them, not read the Bible and form their own interpretations. Sermons were delivered in the vernacular, but rituals - prayers, masses, etc. were conducted in Latin (in the west, in the east they were in Greek) because rituals are fixed in form, that's what makes them rituals, and Vulgar Latin was what people were speaking when the Church began becoming an institution and the rituals became formalized. Anyway God would understand the prayers even if the people mumbling them didn't.
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@guillaumedeschamps1087 "Course, most of their armies were by definition part of the warrior elite."
Not Harold's, most his army were fyrd , a citizen militia of freeholding farmers. However, he had dismissed most of the fyrd so they could harvest their crops and his much smaller remaining force was mostly his warrior elite, the housecarls, supplemented by the few local fyrdmen he could recall on such short notice. The housecarls were less like feudal knights than personal retainers/household troops like you saw in the late Roman Empire and early Middle Ages, or after the real feudal period in the Wars of the Roses, and most of them were either English, or Danes who were born in England and Anglicized to a greater or lesser degree. They were not a polyglot, international mix like William's mercenary army, nor were they feudal vassals like the armies of France or the HRE at this time.
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@MarkErikEE You are correct that socialism is all about the workers. You are wrong in thinking Nazism was about workers. Hitler and the Nazis had to appeal to workers to get elected, but it was always about the German people as an ethnic group, not any particular class. Capitalists, managers, and professionals were part of the German volk every bit as much as workers were. It wasn't socialism with a side of nationalism, it was nationalism with a side of socialism, and in some other ways, a side of capitalism. Everything Hitler wrote and said in his adult life supports this view - class was nothing, race and nationality (which were inseparable for Hitler) were everything.
The Bolsheviks were not national socialists, they were international socialists. The dispute between Stalin and Trotsky wasn't about nationalism, it was about whether communism should consolidate its gains in the nation it already controlled before trying to spread to others, or whether it should always try to spread to other nations from the moment it gained power in one. Stalin took the former view, Trotsky the latter. Of course for Stalin it was always really about his own personal power, as Orwell described, but that doesn't really speak to Stalin's ideology so much as his lack of a genuine one. (Which also distinguishes Stalin from Hitler, for whom his nationalist and racist ideology was the only point to having power.)
You can't hope to understand Hitler without starting with what he took from Nietszche and Darwin (mistakenly in both cases, but those were his core beliefs).
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There was time... but there is no evidence. Not just of an advanced civilization, but of the existence of anything remotely like what it would take to develop technology, or even the distant ancestor of anything remotely like what it would take to develop technology. It took 50 million years for small rodent-like mammals to evolve into primates and then into us, and while there are pretty big gaps in our fossil record, still, we can identify primates from 20 million, 10 million, 5 million years ago, and 2 million years ago that have increasingly large brains, prehensile thumbs, upright gaits, and other characteristics like ours. There's no way Stegosaurus evolved into technology-using Silurians in a just a million years, or without leaving a single trace in the fossil record of any of hundreds of transitional forms, or any of their thousands of related species that didn't develop into intelligent technology-users.
We have a fossil record based on tens of thousands of pieces of evidence, and it tells a story, and that story makes sense. if you're going to upend all of that you need more than a hypothetical possibility or one or two small anomalies around the outer edges of the story, you need real evidence.
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The mistake you're making is ignoring the even more massive elephant in the room, the fact that the DAF was a means for the state to control workers, not a means for workers to control the state or the workplace. The fact that DAF was often adversarial to management does not mean it was controlled by the workers. This is the difference between the DAF and a real labor union. The quote you put up at 12:03 shows this - corporate management was taking directives from government officials, not workers' representatives. A labor union isn't just an organization of workers, it is an organization run by workers or by representatives elected by workers.
In general you always seem to fall into the trap of reasoning that Hitler had to either be a capitalist or a socialist, and therefore that you can show he wasn't a capitalist, he must have been a socialist. This is a classic false dilemma fallacy. The Nazis were neither capitalist nor socialist, they were a third system in which neither the interests of capitalists nor those of workers controlled policy, they were both subordinated to the militarist state. Everything done by the DAF was intended to benefit the state and its war machine - if it advocated for better conditions for workers, that was solely because it had determined that better conditions would make workers more productive in support of the war effort. George Orwell, as good an authority on communism, socialism, fascism, and Nazism as I think there has ever been, put it best: the Nazis borrowed from both capitalism and socialism whatever policies they thought would make the economy more efficient in serving the state.
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Anarchy is your sixth grade gym class, forever.
Anarcho-capitalism is much like socialism: it's a great idea that cannot possibly work because it requires human beings to be Vulcans, elves, or something other than human beings. It's also a religion. Libertoons irrationally worship the market in the exact same way Marxists worship the inexorable march of history. Your blind faith that the market, which is incapable of ever being wrong, will take care of everything is no less irrational than the blind faith of socialists that the government or the Party, which is incapable of ever being wrong, will take care of everything.
And anyone over the age of twelve who think taxation is robbery is profoundly ignorant of the foundations of liberal (in the classical sense) economics and politics. Again, it's exactly as ignorant and naive as "property is theft". It's something a teenager who knows nothing about the real world says.
I would highly, highly recommend you study of on Edmund Burke and the American Federalist Papers and proceed from there. Or better yet, study economics and political science at a university. And study some history that doesn't involve tanks.
And the belief system you're describing utterly and completely fails to take into account that some things (not restaurants) are inherently communal. Clean air and water, for example. Sure, the market can provide drinking water for a price. But I don't just want my own personal drinking water to be clean, I want the creek behind my house not to be toxic and stinking and kill all the wildlife, and also not kill me if I happen to fall into it. How can a market possibly provide that? How do I buy my own individual creek and not have the same creek that flows past everyone else's house? And what if my upstream neighbor values pouring the waste from his lead mine and smelter into the creek more than he values the water downstream from him being clean? How can market possibly address that? And do we really want to pay individually for clean air to be pumped into our own little airtight bubbles so we can breathe it? The reality is that everyone breathes the same air, regardless of how much we pay or how much we pollute as individuals. You're too young to remember the days when we had "market-provided" clean air and water and the government kept its nose out of it, which meant we had rivers catching on fire and life expectancy cut by ten years or more by breathing smog all day. In practice, the way the market provided clean air and water was that rich people all lived upwind and upstream from the pollution and poor people lived with the smog and toxic rivers. But that only worked so well, and the wealthiest men in London still breathed toxic fumes when they went into the City.
And the idea of a "market for security" is quite simply idiotic. Yes, there can be market solutions to providing those services - but the market cannot possibly determine how much funding should be put into security, or provide the funding, because security (beyond the level of private bodyguards, who are pretty much zero use when another country invades or lobs nukes) is also inherently communal. If I think I need $100 per capita worth of security, and the other 99 people in the area to be secured decide they want to pay zero for security, my $100 will buy $1 per capita of security for me and also for all of my 99 neighbors, who will pay nothing but get the exact same security that I get. Thanks, I'll take the state military-industrial complex over that any day of the week.
And then we can get into a market for justice. Then again, let's not. I can only take so much brain hurt from the stupid in one day.
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@alecblunden8615 The Bismarck was never going to force Britain out of the war. Commerce raiding with battleships against an enemy with overwhelming naval superiority was a novel concept that turned out to have little success. And I don't think it's supportable to say that the sinking of the Bismarck changed the course of the war: the Royal Navy had complete control of the surface of the Atlantic before that sinking, and it still had complete control afterwards. The ships that really made the biggest difference in the Battle of the Atlantic were the hundreds of corvettes and escort carriers that got very little public recognition.
In any case, while the contributions of the Allied navies were indispensable in the European war, in the public mind that war was mostly a ground and air war and the battles and campaigns that got the most recognition and fame were ground and air ones: The Battle of Britain, El Alamein, the siege of Leningrad, Stalingrad, Kursk, D-Day in Normandy, and the Battle of the Bulge. The war in the Pacific was decided at sea and the Enterprise did literally change the course of the war at Midway and in the Solomons - the Japanese were winning decisively at sea and in the air before those campaigns, and losing decisively after them.
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@TimeGhost Very little of that is true. German languages were not all mutually intelligible after, and possibly not even during, the Migration Period. Pan-Germanism is just as much a Victorian myth as Ivanhoe and Robin Hood. An 11th century Londoner and an 11th century inhabitant of Cologne or Nuremberg wouldn't have been able to understand each other much better than their modern equivalents could.
English was a distinct language in the 11th century just as much as it is today, and the fact that it changed during the Middle Ages makes that no less true than it is of German (that is, High German), which also underwent dramatic changes in the Middle Ages.
Old English was not mutually intelligible with Old Norse at first, but the basic vocabulary was mostly the same, and Old English changed over the 200 years or so before the Norman conquest to be less different from Norse, mostly by simplifying and dropping most of its inflections. This is a major component of the change from Old to Middle English.
France and England were not one linguistic melting pot; there was almost no Romance influence on English before the Norman conquest and there was almost zero influence of English on France at any time (although the early French language was influenced by the Germanic language of the early Frankish rulers of France). The melting pot was almost exclusively due to the introduction of French to England after the Norman conquest when the upper classes of Anglo-Saxon England were almost entirely replaced by William's followers, most of whom were not even ethnically Norman but almost all of whom did speak some form of French.
Old English is absolutely recognizable as English once you learn what to look for, the changes from one to the other were regular and systematic and it is much easier for a modern English speaker to learn Old English than it is for a modern native speaker of French or [High] German or Irish.
Middle English is much closer to modern English than to any modern German language other than Dutch or Frisian; educated modern English speakers can usually read Chaucer more or less accurately, if slowly. It may sound more like German in some ways, but that has little to do with the underlying structure or vocabulary and a German-speaker cannot understand it - nor read it as easily as a modern English speaker. Sindarin sounds a lot like Welsh, but try speaking Sindarin to a Welsh speaker and see how much you manage to get across.
And French was NOT the lingua franca of European courts until around the time of Louis XIV, before that it was Latin and then Italian. The term "lingua franca" doesn't even refer to French, it originally referred to a Mediterranean pidgin and trade language that was mostly based on Italian with a bit of every other language spoken around the Med thrown in; it meant "language of the Franks," not of the French, and "Frank" in that context was the word people in the Eastern Med (mostly the Byzantines and Arabs) used to refer to anyone from western Europe, i.e., any European who wasn't a Slav or Greek.
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@dhowe5180 It's a very bad argument. Nothing that happened in China brought about the end of the war or ever would have, the war was ended by the US advancing across the Pacific until it was close enough to bomb Japan and blockade its home islands so vital resources couldn't get through. And if every one of the Japanese troops in China had been available to be used elsewhere it wouldn't have made a bit of difference because Japan lacked the logistical capacity to move them to remote islands in the Pacific or to feed and supply them if they got there. That's the key point you're missing about battles like Guadalcanal: the scale of the fighting on land was relatively small because the logistical task of getting them there and supplying them was so enormous. And the scale of fighting at sea was far from small, by every possible measure it was the most massive naval war in the history of humanity - and the Soviets did nothing whatsoever (and the British very little) to help with that. The contributions of Australia and New Zealand, OTOH, should never be forgotten.
In terms of scale you're also conveniently ignoring the Philippines campaign, which involved more than one million American troops and was larger in scale than any individual operation in the Sino-Japanese War.
As for Europe, the Soviets would have gotten nowhere without the massive influx of Lend-Lease aid from the US and UK, and as early as 1942 fully half of the Luftwaffe's fighters and AA guns were deployed in western Europe defending against Allied air attacks, rising to 75% by 1944, so while it's fair to say that the Eastern Front was the decisive theater of operations in Europe, it would be a mistake to downplay the impact the Western Allies had on the outcome.
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@alisilcox6036 Generally no, but like everything in history, it's complicated. Edward the Confessor, the Anglo-Saxon king between Cnut's dynasty and Harold Godwinson, had been brought up in exile in the Norman court (because his line had been usurped by Cnut, who systematically exterminated the other survivors of the Royal House of Wessex while at the same time marrying Edward's mother to give his heirs some legitimacy on the English throne, which he taken purely by conquest) and was probably a native speaker of Norman French, and when he finally became King of England after Cnut's son died without issue, he brought some of his courtiers and officials from Normandy to England, where they were highly influential at court. I wouldn't go so far as to say Norman French became the main language of Edward's court, but it was certainly spoken there, and there was significant resentment by native Englishmen of the power and influence of those foreigners, which eventually had a part to play in the choice of Edward's successor, Harold.
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Herbal Shaman You didn't bother actually reading much of those articles before trying to cite them in support of your racist bullshit, did you?
"Oculocutaneous albinism (OCA) is an autosomal recessive disorder characterized by hypomelanosis of the skin, hair, and eyes, associated with reduced visual acuity, nystagmus, and photophobia (Tomita and Suzuki, 2004). Its worldwide prevalence is approximately 1:17,000 (Witkop, 1979)."
A worldwide prevalence of 1:17,000. In 2019 that's roughly 453,000 individuals. And you somehow imagine this includes everyone in the world who is of primarily European descent - a category that includes well over a billion individuals.
So why don't you take your ignorant, bigoted "white people are genetically deficient albinos" Louis Farrakhan bullshit and shove it up your ignorant, bigoted 75 IQ ass. Ignorant fuckwits like you are the reason racism still exists in this world today.
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@adolphdresler3753 Social control of the means of production, which means either by (in most cases) or on behalf of the workers.
In a broader sense, any system in which the distribution of wealth is a political process and is intended to benefit the working class almost exclusively. The existence of some amount of corruption doesn't necessarily take the system out of the realm of socialism (it makes it flawed socialism), but at some point you have to say the scheme is no longer intended even theoretically to benefit the working class and what you have is a kleptocracy.
The Nazis did not come anywhere near either of those models, so they were not socialist. To the extent they controlled the means of production, that control was not exercised by or on behalf of the workers, or to their benefit, it was directed to the benefit of the military machine. To the extent the Nazis granted any concessions or benefits for workers, it was only because they calculated that this would make the workers more productive and efficient servants of the military machine. For the same reason, the Nazis generally did not interfere with the extraction of large profits by the industrial capitalists, not because the Nazis were devoted to capitalism, but because they deemed that this was the best way to maximize production in support of the war effort.
Unlike TIK, I'm not just making up my own definitions because they suit my purposes. This is how actual socialists define socialism.
George Orwell called all of this 75 years ago.
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@LongVu-vy9ie Do you have any idea how much you sound like a lot of fascist Japanese and German leaders in the 1930s? I hope you don't repeat their mistake and find out the hard way how wrong you are. No, we didn't fight World War Two by ourselves - no one did, on any side, and having allies is a strength, not a sign of weakness - but it was 100% American courage and 100% American skill at arms that planted the American flag on Iwo Jima against some of the most skilled, brave, and fanatical soldiers in the world. And stopped the Japanese fascists from making China a large province in their empire in the process.
(This is not in any way to denigrate the courage, skill, and sacrifice of all the Russians and other Soviets, Chinese, Brits, French, Canadians, Aussies, Kiwis, Poles, and all the others who stood up to fight fascism in the 1930s and 40s.)
Germany and Japan both learned that it is much, much better to be peaceful and cooperate with other nations rather than trying to conquer them, and since then they have been the best of friends and allies with the US. I sincerely hope China will take the same lesson to heart without having to suffer so much and cause so many others to suffer in order to learn it. Americans have NO desire for a war with China, we would much rather be friends and peaceful trade partners. But attack one of our allies and you will find out how cowardly Americans are.
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@suddenuprising None of that is true. All the government does is restrict who they can sell weapons to if they choose to make weapons, and decide what weapons it wants to buy. But Northrop Grumman could decide tomorrow that it won't produce a single additional piece of military equipment and will instead make commercial aircraft and fishing boats, and the US government can't do a thing to stop them. No one would go to jail and no part of the company and its assets, aside from classified material it possesses, would be confiscated. Of course that's not going to happen because Northrop Grumman makes a fortune selling weapons to the US government and our allies. That's capitalism. But there is nothing in US law that would allow the government to nationalize, confiscate, or liquidate a Pentagon contractor that decided to stop producing armaments.
The situation in Nazi Germany was very different. When Hugo Junkers decided he no longer wanted to make military aircraft for the German government, the Nazis seized the company, installed their own managers, and prosecuted Hugo for treason. He died soon after, while they were still in the process of seizing his assets and before they had a chance to send him to a concentration camp.
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One main reason most women didn't, and weren't expected to, fight much on the battlefield (as opposed to in defense of the home) in most ancient and medieval societies is that before the advent of modern medicine and birth control most women spent much or even most of their fertile years (the years when anyone is suited for military service) pregnant or nursing just to produce enough surviving children for the population to be self-sustaining. One can perform hard manual labor , or hold and use political power, or even command troops on a campaign while pregnant, but fighting in hand-to-hand combat would not be practical or advisable. Not to mention society already lost many women in childbirth, as well as many people of both sexes to disease and famine; losing that many more women in battle would again severely impact the ability to maintain the population. And of course many societies practiced polygamy, whether in the form of plural marriage or concubinage, particularly among the upper classes, so the loss of the excess male population in war was actually a social boon in that regard while every woman lost was that many more children who would never be born.
There were, of course, always exceptions, but society, and any given class in society, couldn't afford but so many of those exceptions and still maintain the population, which is why social institutions developed to encourage men to fight on the battlefield and women not. And ultimately it was those social institutions much more than practical ability to fight that determined who went off to war and who didn't.
(Many women did accompany the armies, of course, as mistresses, servants, prostitutes, etc., but in normal circumstances they wouldn't expect to fight except in self-defense, and even then not very often.)
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That plan was for the most part not entrusted to radio communications, though. There were updates on things like diplomatic moves and expected local weather sent by radio to Kidō Butai once it was underway, and of course the famous and completely ambiguous go code "Climb Mt. Niitaka," but the preparation and planning for the mission was generally restricted to more secure methods, which was possible because all of the units involved in the attack remained in home waters until the attack force sailed. AFAIK there's no record that any mention of the task force's objective was ever transmitted by radio, let alone that such a transmission was even detected, let alone decoded, by anyone in the US or UK. And the Japanese were so determined to maintain comms security on the mission that they left the radio operators from the task force's ships in Japan to fake normal radio traffic as if those ships were still in port (which fooled everyone in the USN, including Joe Rochefort, into thinking they were) and physically disabled every last transmitter in the fleet, including those on the planes, until the attack was ready to be launched.
I think people today have been given an unrealistic view by Hollywood of how signals intelligence actually worked in WW2. Even with the Midway operation six months later, for which detailed plans had to be transmitted by radio to units scattered across millions of square mile by ocean, the Allied picture of Japanese intentions was extremely unclear and argued about vehemently by various commands. "Code breaking" in this context usually didn't mean reading the other side's messages word for word, it meant trying to assemble a picture from thousand of isolated message fragments and data points out of tens of thousands more that couldn't be decoded. And I find the idea that anyone among the Allies was reading JN-25 word for word at any time in 1941 not just implausible but ludicrous, given the absolute clown show of British response to much more widely expected Japanese moves against their own empire. In fact, Allied estimates of Japanese intentions were harmed in this regard by how much they did pick up on Japanese intentions in Southeast Asia, coupled with the erroneous assumption that Japan had neither the resources nor the inclination to conduct more than one major operation at a time. This assumption was shared by the British as well as American analysts and leaders.
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@Watchmyplaylistthentalk 1. Yes. But I also believe that revealed knowledge about God is separate from scientific knowledge derived from reason and the study of evidence. I am a Christian, but I am not a fundamentalist or Biblical literalist. I also accept the idea that there are different paths to knowing and understanding God.
2. No. The Vedas were composed by human beings, and even if they were divinely inspired, nothing human can be older than the world.
3. No, the evidence is overwhelming that it is not. It's pretty clear that Afro-Asiatic languages are older than any Indo-European language including Sanskrit. (And I have no bias in this, obviously I am a speaker of an Indo-European language.) And there are probably even older languages that are lost.
4. Probably. I don't know a lot about the very early history of Buddhism, but from what I understand it seems that Hindu doctrines were already known by Siddartha Gautama before he is said to have attained enlightenment.
5. That's very complicated, but I would say no. Obviously each has influenced the other greatly. I would also distinguish Hinduism as it exists today from the religious practices related in the Vedas. "Hinduism" is an extremely broad term that includes an enormous number of doctrines and practices. Some of those doctrines and practices existed 3,000 years ago and some did not. Some probably came from different original sources. All religions change and almost all are syncretic.
6. I have heard the names, but I don't know much about them.
7. I'm not sure exactly what you're asking. Obviously there has been both continuity and change in Indian culture. Hindu nationalists may deny it, but Islam is also a part of Indian culture, just like it is a part of European culture even though it was introduced there relatively late in the history of both places and many European nationalists want to deny that it is a legitimate part of European culture.
8. No. I can only read in translation. OTOH I also don't understand Hebrew or Greek but that doesn't mean I have no opinion on the Bible. In both cases I have studied what people who DO understand the languages have to say about them.
9. Yes, but I think you are probably overstating it, just like extreme European nationalists greatly overstate the extent to which European culture is under attack today. The world is not out to get India (although admittedly some people are, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't include Dr, Miano). I am happy to see India advancing economically and regaining its place with the leading societies of the world. I have enjoyed working with colleagues in India in the last couple of decades.
10. I'm not sure exactly what you are saying. When and where was Buddhism lost? It seems to have a continuous presence in, say, Sri Lanka for well over 2,000 years. (One of my best friends is from there.)
11. Of course I do, and of course I care. That's why I have such an interest in history. However, I think some new evidence is reliable science but, regrettably, some of it is "evidence" in name only and is the product of a desire to support an ideology, not a quest for knowledge for its own sake.
One thing I think Indian nationalists often fail to appreciate is the extent to which ethno-nationalist and nativist beliefs have been discredited in mainstream/liberal western societies precisely because we do understand the ugly history of European racism and cultural chauvinism associated with colonialism and culminating in the Nazis and other extremist right-wing ideologies. We don't want to see others make the same mistakes we did and start down a path we know will end in horror. I don't mean to be condescending, it's just that it's often easier to see mistakes from outside the cultures they're occurring in than from within those cultures. Of course this is complicated by the fact that many in the West still fail to see the deep flaws in such beliefs.
I also hate to see people link liberal thought in Europe and the US with Marxism, because most true liberals in the west despise Marxism, especially in its violent 20th century form of Bolshevism. Marxism claims to be scientific but in my opinion it is really just a false God.
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I don't think most people understand the enormous spans of time we're talking about before the beginning of recorded history. The original phase of Stonehenge is older than the Egyptian pyramids, but Cheddar Man lived over 5,000 years before that, and his people, the Western Hunter-Gatherers, had long since been replaced by or assimilated into the much more numerous Neolithic farming people who originated in the northern Levant thousands of years earlier. But whatever color Cheddar Man's skin color was, his last African ancestors had probably left Africa 40,000 years or more before, and we don't know the extent to which they interbred with people who had left Africa hundreds of thousands of years before that.
I don't think you can say that "Out of Africa" is complete nonsense because we know a significant number of anatomically modern humans did leave Africa and spread to the rest of the world in the last 100,000 years or so, and while we do know that other hominins existed outside of Africa long before that, there's not any firm evidence that, aside from the Neanderthals and Denisovans whose DNA we can track, any significant number of those hominins survived to interbreed with the newcomers and become our ancestors. One thing that we do know is that genus Homo almost certainly evolved in Africa and nowhere else - the only question is when the first ancestors of modern humans spread beyond Africa.
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@ricardokowalski1579 That's the big question, isn't it? Get three socialists in the same room and you'll get at least four answers to it. Through the state, through the party, through workers' councils, through unions, through local communities, or directly themselves are some of the more common ones. I'm sure there are others I'm not recalling atm. But the important point is that the government is only one of the options. There are many socialists who don't believe in having a state or government as we know it.
And there are systems, like Nazism, in which the government controls the economy to a large degree but the system is not socialist since the benefits don't go to the workers as such, even theoretically. In some of these ownership and control is by and for the benefit of the military, which is largely autonomous or even controls the state rather than the other way around - Egypt and North Korea are examples of this.
But the biggest and most irreconcilable difference between socialism and Nazism is that socialism is by definition based on class loyalty and conflict while Nazism is based on ethno-national loyalty and conflict. In socialism, a Russian atheist, a Polish Jew, and a German Christian who are all workers are allies, the religious and ethnic differences between them being deemed completely irrelevant, and their enemy is the upper class, while in Nazism a German industrialist or financier and a German worker are allies, their class differences deemed insignificant next to their loyalty to the German people and Aryan race, and their enemies are Slavs and Jews (who are defined as an ethnicity, not a religion).
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@hayek218 Mostly a good summary but I would strongly dispute your second point - the Japanese were trying to negotiate a settled peace, not a surrender. They still hoped to end the war with their government intact, no occupation of the home islands, and preferably keeping Korea and some part of Manchuria. None of that would ever have been acceptable to the Allies.
But what people lose sight of is everything that had happened up to that point. The decision to surrender then and there was caused by the events of August, 1945, but the war was irretrievably lost for Japan well before that. There never would have been any question of surrender if the Allies, which really means the Americans with a little help from the UK and Commonwealth, hadn't won control of the Pacific right up to Japan's doorstep, destroyed the entire combat strength of the Japanese Navy, devastated Japan with repeated conventional bombing raids which Japan had no effective means to oppose, and cut Japan off completely from its vital overseas resources. Those were the real reasons for the surrender. Everything after Okinawa was just a question of how long the killing would have to go on before Japan admitted the utter and complete defeat it had already suffered.
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@goodaimshield1115 Care to explain this map, then? Note in particularly the difference between the UK and southern France, and the similarity of England to Sudan and southern France to Burma and Mongolia. What cephalic index typifies the white race?
Keep in mind that cephalic index was one of the key factors 19th century pseudoscientists tried to use to distinguish races. Until they had to give up, because the data in no way corresponded to their model, and they couldn't find any other markers that did. And, of course, skull shape was precisely what caused the term "Caucasian" to be used to refer to the white race, because people living in the Caucasus were found to have the skull shape most closely corresponding to what was considered the white race. And, of course, corresponding to Burmese and Korean people, but not Japanese people. Not sure how they tried to explain that before giving up in frustration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalic_index#/media/File:PSM_V50_D602_World_cephalic_index_map.jpg
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@JRDavies "In the modern sense" is a shortcut because I didn't feel like typing a book-length explanation of how racism as we've known it for the last 400 years or so differs from its antecedents. Obviously it wasn't invented from scratch, but the pseudoscientific racism of the modern (including early modern) era has some very important differences from the simple ethnic or cultural prejudice many people are trying to cite here as evidence of pre-modern racism. The evolution of those differences is very closely linked to early capitalism, particularly, but not exclusively, cash crop plantations in European colonies in the Americas. I have studied this pretty extensively in the context of the history of my home state, Virginia. Most of the other colonies (aside from Louisiana) followed Virginia's lead in developing the institution of slavery and in defining and codifying race, although for economic reasons slavery never became the predominant mode of economic activity north of the Ohio River and the Mason-Dixon Line. The evolution of indentured servitude into race-based chattel slavery as a legal and economic institution is a complex and interesting subject.
Racism and abolitionism are not mutually exclusive. As Exhibit A, I give you Abraham Lincoln. And of course many British people, particularly the ones making enormous profits from West Indian plantations and from the slave trade, were opposed or indifferent to abolition. And there were several centuries of slavery in British colonies before abolitionism became a significant social force.
I don't believe racism is particularly associated with capitalism today. (Some academics, Angela Davis and Michelle Alexander, for example, disagree, but you can take that up with them.) It was 300 years ago. The economic conditions that made racism such a convenient prop for certain forms of capitalism have been gone for over a century. Neither the US nor Caribbean islands nor Brazil have any need for a mass import of cheap labor, indeed quite the opposite, nor do the first two need to justify treating the native inhabitants as subhuman because for the most part those natives no longer have anything (mostly land) worth stealing. (Sadly, in Brazil, using racism as an excuse to steal natives' land is still very much an ongoing process.)
Authoritarianism covers much more territory than the economy. Many East and Southeast Asian countries are extremely authoritarian but capitalist. Many mixed, but much further toward the socialist end of the spectrum than ours, economies exist in liberal democracies in Europe.
Stalin, Mao, Kim, etc. are all from a specific branch of Marxist ideology. On the left, they are not seen as representatives of Marxism as a whole. You may disagree. I suspect that you are not on the left end of the political spectrum. This is the same as Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, etc. being seen on the left as discrediting everything to the right of Bernie Sanders, but on the right as not representative of the right wing in general. Democratic socialism emerged specifically as a response to the violence and authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks before they had taken power anywhere.
I watched this video and TIK's original video on Hitler being a socialist. I think there are some very serious problems with his analysis and even more with people supporting him here. Most of the people commenting, including you, seem to be using this subject as a way of using Hitler to discredit the left rather than the right. Both approaches are highly flawed and driven by ideology rather than scholarship, just as your using Stalin to discredit everyone to the left of Ronald Reagan is highly flawed and ideologically motivated. It's also mistaken to equate class struggle with racism or tribalism. They are completely different ways of looking at the world. Just for one, race and tribe are intrinsic, mostly unchangeable, and 100% heritable conditions while class is none of those things (other than for a few extremists like Pol Pot). It is true that both can be used by authoritarian governments to create an enemy to justify repressive measures, but the similarity ends there.
I'm doing this for fun and not getting paid for it, so please excuse me if I don't feel sufficiently motivated to look up and post a long list of citations. My university education in this area was 35 years ago and my graduate education was in a completely different subject, so I remember much of what I read but not much about where exactly I read it. You do your own research easily enough yourself with a trip to Google.
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The real problem that they introduced without meaning to is that the way the transporter works is essentially the same as a replicator, which means a transporter must also be a replicator - but one that can replicate something as complex as a living being perfectly (which their normal replicators can't do). If the machine can turn information into Kirk once, it could use the same information to create a hundred Kirks. We know that the ethical vision shared by most members of the Federation would make them unwilling to allow this to be done, but the possibility still exists and could be abused by anyone who doesn't have such scruples. For instance, if Kirk beams through a Romulan transporter (or Picard through a Cardassian one), they would possess all the information necessary to recreate Kirk (or Picard) copies for examination and interrogation. There could be a hundred Kirk copies undergoing perpetual torture in Romulan prisons to get any military information they might divulge. Or a warlike race could create their own equivalent of Rambo or Jason Bourne, then replicate them to create an invincible army of a million Jason Bournes.
Someone in another comment mentioned the Altered Carbon series and books, and they do explore this possibility - although in the AC universe it is only possible to replicate minds, which can either be put in a new body or put in a sim environment. The books go into the possibilities of creating a literal Hell by putting someone's mind in a sim environment where they are tortured beyond the possibility of any body to endure in an infinite loop - and because the sim can run in computer time that means you could literally have someone tortured to death over and over for a subjective thousand years while only an afternoon passes in real time. The books also posit an extremely strict government policy against creating multiple copies, but of course some people violate this policy for nefarious purposes when the stakes are high enough.
In ST:TNG we learn that it is possible for a person (in this case Reg Barclay) to have subjective experiences while in the process of being transported and to retain memories of those experiences when the transportation process is complete, so in theory that should mean that, for instance, the millennium of torture in the process of being transported would be a possibility in the ST universe as well.
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@rockybalboa5743 Old Norse and Old English had evolved to the point of not being mutually intelligible by the 8th century, but Old English changed considerably under the influence of the Danish incursions, and the Norse spoken in Britain likewise changed under local influence, and by 1066 an English-speaker from what is now Yorkshire could probably understand a Dane from the same region better than either could understand an English-speaker from the Thames Valley. The changes were mostly to grammar and syntax since the basic vocabulary of all Germanic languages was pretty similar.
The Normans had become entirely French speakers by 1066 so their language was completely different from anything spoken natively in England at that time, although there were doubtless plenty of people in England who could speak Norman French because of the widespread contact between England and the continent. In fact Edward the Confessor, the king before Harold II, had been brought up in the Norman court (because Knut and his sons still ruled England during Edward's youth) and spoke Norman French better than he spoke English, and since many of his courtiers came with him from Normandy when he became king they were also native French speakers. However, many of the native English nobility resented the influence of people they viewed as foreigners and this tension was one of the factors leading to the Norman conquest.
Of course the language of the Church, and thus of diplomacy, science, and most law and written literature, was still Latin for most of western Europe at this time.
Curiously, Norman French, known as Law French, hung on for several centuries in England for legal purposes long after the language had merged with English as Middle English for all other uses. Anglo-American law still contains technical phrases that preserve this distinctively Norman and medieval form of French long after it disappeared entirely everywhere on the continent.
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@rodg011 The Apollo astronauts didn't say they couldn't see stars. They said they couldn't see stars from the surface of the moon, and that was because they only ever landed at the height of the lunar day (which is 29 earth days long), and the moon in full daylight is a VERY bright place - brighter than the brightest noonday desert you'll ever see on the earth. (There's no atmosphere to make the sky blue, but there's also no atmosphere to refract or absorb sunlight, so the surface is blindingly bright - that's why the astronauts had to have those highly reflective visors on their helmets.) But, for instance, they were quite able to see stars when they were in orbit around the moon and were on the side of the moon facing away from the sun at that time. But they never landed on the night side (because they'd have no way to see the surface they were trying to land on.)
This is something Neil DeGrasse Tyson got famously wrong - but then, NDT has never been to the moon, and he just didn't think it through very well before trying to answer that question off the cuff.
Likewise, modern astronauts can't see stars when something extremely bright like the sunlit side of the earth is in their field of view, but they can see stars when they're on the night side of the earth just like you and I can.
Second of all, there is a south pole, I have seen the southern stars appearing to rotate around it with my own two eyes. I highly recommend that you travel to Australia sometime, it's well worth it not even considering astronomy, but you can see that the way the sky behaves is 100% incompatible with a flat earth. This is one reason there are almost no flat earthers from the southern hemisphere - FE explanations are almost universally dependent on an observer in the northern hemisphere.
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@rodg011 Belief without proof is religion. Understanding from evidence is not belief without proof. I don't need to go to space to understand the evidence that proves it exists.
if the ISS is fake, what is it that people see passing overhead at close to 17,000 mph when ISS orbital plots say it's going to? We know it's not a projection because there's never any discontinuity when it passes from one projector to another, and we know it's not just a light because a telescope or the favorite camera of flat earthers, the P900, can reveal significant detail of it as a physical object, and we know it's not a plane or anything else in the atmosphere because at that speed it would burn up almost instantly. Even if every video supposedly taken of astronauts is fake, there's certainly something man-made up there orbiting hundreds of miles above the earth.
If satellites are fake, what is my satellite dish pointed at? It isn't a tower because the angle would mean the tower would have to be miles high - many times higher than a cell phone tower - and would be highly visible, and it isn't a plane or balloon because it is completely stationary. Moving the dish the slightest it off target causes it to lose the signal. So what's the dish aimed at and where does the signal come from?
if satellites are fake, how does GPS work thousands of miles from the nearest land? Where are the signals to my phone coming from?
If space is fake, where is the moon? We've known for almost 2,000 years that it's more than 200,000 miles away because of parallax observations from the earth's surface.
if space is fake, what causes the aurora borealis?
If space is fake, what are the planets? Observation with even a modest telescope shows that they are 3-dimensional physical objects, in some cases (like Saturn) you can even see shadows on them. And again, we know from parallax observations that thy are millions of miles away.
If space is fake, why don't all the rockets we launch crash into the dome? You could see them traveling many miles up into the sky from not too far from where I used to live in Virginia.
If space is fake, what are meteorites and where do they come from?
All of that adds up to a lot of EVIDENCE. Not blind belief. And the evidence you have that space is fake is... well, it just seems fake to you, and you want to believe it is. THAT is blind belief.
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That concept has been around for decades - remember the Brits winning (albeit with heavy losses) the Falklands air war with V/STOL Harriers? - but the problem is there's no way to gain that capability without making sacrifices to some other area of performance. There's a STOVL F-35 variant, the F-35B, but the catapult and arrested landing F-35C has slightly but still significantly superior range, payload, and maneuverability, and neither of them would survive long against a 5th generation dedicated air superiority bird like the F-22. And while smaller and lighter-sized carriers are an option, they'll never be as small and nimble as a destroyer because to make them useful you still need a certain amount of deck space, ordnance and fuel storage, and above all the greater stability in heavy seas that a larger ship offers. I can't imagine the nightmare of landing a fixed-wing aircraft, even a purely VTOL one, on a ship the size of a destroyer in heavy seas.
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Shaun Thornhill (1) An experiment IS an observation of natural phenomena. There is no such thing as an un natural phenomenon. The Cavendish experiment proved that, independent of other forces, two masses will attract each other at a constant and measurable rate. You have yet to explain why that experiment did not prove that. What else caused the weights to accelerate toward each other at a constant and measurable rate if not their mutual gravitational attraction? If it were a flaw in the setup or something like random air currents, why do millions of students get the exact same result when they repeat the experiment?
(2) Look up magnetic containment, it is very easy to recreate in a lab. (You do need a much more powerful magnet than you're likely to have around your house, plus a source of ionized gas.)
(3) As I said, astronauts, like spacecraft, need a container for their air because their gravity is insignificant and nowhere remotely near what is necessary to contain an atmosphere. You would expect the gravitational attraction of an astronaut massing a few dozen kg to be the same as a planet massing 6 trillion trillion kg?
Again, it's not that the questions you ask are bad ones, it's that you refuse to listen to the answers. For example, you have now been informed about magnetic containment, and you can very easily learn all about it online, so if you continue to assert that gas pressure cannot exist without a physical container you are either a liar or too stubborn to look at any evidence that might contradict your uninformed beliefs. The simple fact is that gas pressure without a physical container CAN exist and HAS been showed to exist many, many, many times. This is not a matter of belief or interpretation, it is easily verifiable fact.
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@britaniawaves4060 "So you believe/use data that ancient astronomers but forth even considering they thought the world to be flat?"
None of the ones I'm talking about considered the world to be flat. Ptolemy, for example, knew it was round. Even before that, you're missing a distinction between data they recorded and wron conclusions they drew because their data set was incomplete or their reasoning faulty.
As to your numbered points:
1. This is just nonsense word salad.
2. No, they do not. This only happens when ignorant flerfers run their "experiments" badly. But see Jeranism's experiment in the documentary "Flat Earth: Beyond the Curve" where he proved that the surface of a lake is curved.
3. The amount of tilt is too small to be apparent to the naked eye. Classic flerf fallacy: I can't detect it, therefore it doesn't exist. But towers as close together as those of the Verrazzano Narrows suspension bridge are farther apart at the top than at their bases as determined with very precise equipment.
4. No, a sextant works just fine when it is aligned to a curved horizon. You've just assumed your conclusion in your premise. And I'm betting you've never even seen a sextant outside of a museum, let alone used one.
5. You are simply incorrect here, all navigation uses spherical geometry unless it's at a scale so small that the difference is insignificant. The difference between us on this is that I have studied navigation in the US Navy and actually seen it being done on ships at sea and you have not - you're just talking out your ass, presumably based on some nonsense you heard on YouTube from someone who is equally without the slightest shred of knowledge or practical experience in this subject. And trust me, if navigation were done using planar geometry it would be a lot easier.
As an example, on what sort of flat plane can you set out from your starting point and travel 6,000 miles, make a 90 degree right turn, travel another 6,000 miles, make another right turn, travel another 6,000 miles, and arrive back at your starting point? Yet this is exactly what happens on our round earth.
6.Airplanes, Helicopters, Drones, or Hot Air Balloons are all much too small for the Coriolis effect to be significant - it is a force that becomes significant at distances of hundreds of miles, not dozens of feet. I suspect you don't even understand what the Coriolis effect actually is.
7. No, it does not. This has been debunked literally thousands of times. See Wolfie6020's numerous videos where he shows this using very advanced cockpit instruments on a jet in flight.
8. No you don't, flerfers are just incompetent at geometry. They consistently do things like ignoring the elevation above sea level of where the observer is standing, using the wrong calculation for curvature, and ignoring refraction.
9. No, they did not. they proved that there is no lumeniferous ether. This is another one that was debunked over 100 years ago, flerfs are just too ignorant to understand the experiment.
10. More ignorance. Most of the stars in these constellations are much too far for parallax from the relatively tiny orbit of the earth to have any visible effect. However, parallax has absolutely been measured for nearer stars like Alpha Centauri and Polaris. You could easily discover this with 30 seconds on Google.
11. This is just another popular flerf saying that means nothing. First of all, it doesn't, look at any photo of a water drop, they're round. Second, you misunderstand "level" in this context, it means equidistant from the center of gravity, which means the surface is curved.
12. More failure to understand scale. You're talking about curvatures of 1/50,000th of one degree or less at that scale, which is insignificant and undetectable. Idiot flerfers seem to think the earth is only a few feet in diameter.
13. Bob Knodel says otherwise.
14. 30 seconds on Google shows how lazy and ignorant you are being in this comment. The ROMY laser complex is not meant to test whether the earth is rotating or not, it is built to detect tiny variations in the rate of rotation. They have not failed to detect rotation of the earth, they have so far failed to accurately measure the variations in its rotation because they're still working on isolating and factoring out all the other motions you mention. You're just too stupid to understand what you're reading, or else you're just lying about it.
15. No, they just prove how stupid flattards are for failing to understand something they love to talk about, perspective. Any 5th grade art student understands that parallel lines will appear to converge toward a point in the distance.
16. Aren't you precious. No, it does not prove either of things, it proves how stupid you are for failing to understand simple geometry and VERY basic astronomy. The moon appears in the sky with the sun because for most of its orbit it is not directly opposite the sun in the sky, and only a slobbering, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging idiot of a flattard thinks that anyone claims the moon's phases are caused by the earth's shadow.
However, you might wish to note that no matter where the sun and moon are in the sky, the lit side of the moon is always oriented toward the sun, and the dark side is always oriented away from the sun. And if you bother to look at the moon through even a very cheap telescope you can see that obects on the moon like mountains and crater walls cast shadows, and those shadows always point away from the sun. Why do you imagine that might be?
And you might further wish to note that you NEVER see the moon and sun together in the sky during a lunar eclipse - a phenomenon for which flat earthers have absolutely no explanation.
17. Good Lord, just how stupid can one person possibly be? I think you've broken the record here. The sun is always above the horizon when it is VISIBLE, because when it's under the horizon, as it is half the time, it isn't visible. Seriously, how fracking moronic do you have to be not to understand this? I doubt you'd find one first grader in fifty who is enough of an idiot to think that the sun's rays would shone through the earth. And yet, here we are.
However, you might wish to note that while the sun's rays always illuminate objects on the ground from above, they frequently illuminate clouds, planes, and other objects in the sky from below. Pretty had to explain that on a flat earth - in fact, it's flat-out impossiball.
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@catttcattt The Us wouldn't need to defeat China, it would just have to disrupt the invasion. Amphibious ships are extremely vulnerable and a couple of carriers operating hundreds of miles east of Taiwan plus a dozen or two nuclear attack subs in the straits would make it damned near suicidal for slow, bulky transports to try to make the crossing. They wouldn't need to control the strait, just deny its use to the PRC, which is a much easier task.
It's the opposite of the scenario we trained so much for when I was in the US Navy - during the Cold War the expectation was that in the event of war in Europe the US Navy would need to keep full control over the Atlantic to make it safe for ships with troops and supplies to get from the US to western Europe; the Soviets didn't need to control the Atlantic, just conduct enough raids with subs and bombers to make it too risky for American ships to cross. Likewise for the Germans in WW2, they didn't need to control the Atlantic, just sink enough ships to make the crossing impractical. And they very nearly succeeded despite the overwhelming size of the US and UK fleets. China doesn't have superiority in skill or numbers at sea, let alone the overwhelming superiority it takes to make an amphibious invasion over open ocean practical. And it's large numbers of troops, aircraft, and missiles won;t help them against opponents who are either out of range of those weapons or underwater and undetectable.
(And the same goes for the sub war - I think US and UK subs would have a very favorable kill ratio against most of the types China can field, but the important thing to remember is that the US and UK subs wouldn't have to hunt and kill PRC subs - all they have to do is avoid being killed while sinking transports that are nothing but large, vulnerable targets.)
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This is extremely deceiving on several points. The biggest is the notion that Germany "decided" to attack France after France and Russia had declared war. This is complete nonsense. Germany had decided to attack France more than a decade earlier. It was automatic, all the mobilization plans were made, if there was war with Russia, Germany would attack France no matter what France did or didn't do. In fact the Kaiser, understandably worried about the prospect of fighting a two-front war, wanted to explore diplomatic measures to try to keep France neutral, and there were signs France was open to such approaches, but the German General Staff, the real rulers of Germany when it came to military matters, refused point blank. The plan DEMANDED an attack on France, the plan was too massive and complicated to change on the fly, therefore France would be attacked. The plan also demanded that the attack be made through Belgium, so Belgium would be attacked unless it just surrendered itself to German occupation. And that is how and why a local crisis in southeastern Europe turned into a general war between all the great powers.
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The Iraqi army wasn't indiscriminately bombed, it was bombed very precisely. If Russia had the capability to do that, they would have. But they don't. If Russia had the American ground forces, the war would have been over by now too. But they don't, and it isn't.
Iraq showed, among other things, that the US military is extremely competent, extremely well-equipped, extremely well-trained, extremely well-led, and extremely well-motivated. What we are seeing now is that the Russian military is incompetent, poorly equipped, ill-trained, badly led, and has abysmal morale.
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It was absolutely an Anglo-Saxon defense against a primarily (but by no means exclusively) French invasion in terms of the ethnic and linguistic background of most of the direct participants. However in terms of the issue at stake they would have seen it as a defense of one claimant for the English throne against another claimant for the English throne. That is partly because William advertised his venture that way, while privately promising his followers that there would a complete replacement of the existing English upper class by them. However this was not any sort of planned change in the ethnic identity of England on William's part, certainly not any sort of nationalist project, he just had no other way to pay his mercenary followers.
The armies were by no means homogeneous. Very few of them would have been able to understand the language(s) spoken by the other side, and their personal reasons for being there were very different. The English army was about half fyrd, a militia of free farmers from the local region who were fulfilling a legal obligation to the crown. They were not from a military class and were entirely English in culture and language. The rest were housecarls, personal household guards of the king and the great lords who were professional soldiers, more akin to the buccellarii or scholae palatinae of late Rome than to true feudal armies, some foreign but most English (although no doubt many of them had Danish ancestry). They weren't fighting for England or for Saxon rights, they were fighting purely out of personal obligation to the man who employed them.
William's army had some men who were his feudal vassals, but the vast majority were mercenaries, some from Normandy, some from Brittany, and most of the rest from other parts of France, who were fighting purely for the promise of payment in the form of lands and titles to be stripped from their English holders (and which William had no legal authority to expropriate even after he won the throne).
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You can't understand nuclear weapons in the early 1960s in isolation, they were seen as one component in a comprehensive national defense strategy. For the US, nuclear weapons were seen as a counterbalance to the massive Soviet superiority in conventional weapons in Europe - the Soviets wouldn't dare use that massive superiority to overrun West Germany and France for fear of provoking nuclear retaliation. If the Soviets could effectively retaliate with a nuclear strike of their own, that would deter the US from launching a nuclear strike in any circumstances, which meant the nuclear deterrent against a Soviet conventional attack was now off the table. This made the prospect of a massive conventional war in Europe much more likely. That, and not the unlikely event of an actual Soviet strike on American cities, was the threat that Kennedy and his administration were so concerned about during the crisis.
That's something the western public never understood about the Reagan-era buildup of short and intermediate ranged nuclear missiles in Europe in the 1980s. The point of those weapons was to have a force that could be used against a Soviet conventional invasion force without provoking a general nuclear exchange, because they didn't have the range to hit the USSR itself. Of course, the idea of their country becoming a "limited" nuclear battlefield was understandably very unpopular with the German people for reasons that should have been obvious.
As it tuns out, the Soviet leadership never really had much stomach for starting a massive conventional war in Europe, but the western leaders had no way to be sure of that.
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@ev25zv Beatlemania was only the start of it. If the Beatles had broken up in 1964-65, I wouldn't be saying any of these things. But they didn't, and their career thereafter didn't just change popular music, it radically changed the position of popular music within the larger culture. Adults, critics, journalists, intellectuals, all thought very differently about popular music in 1970 than they had in 1962, and while the Beatles were by no means solely responsible for the change, they were what started the ball rolling and made it possible for others to follow.
Nobody thinks differently about the place of popular music in our society because of anything Taylor Swift has done. All she's done is make some nice tunes and make massive piles of money. There's nothing wrong with that, it's certainly more than I've ever done in my career, but it isn't remotely comparable to the effect the Beatles had on society.
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@ETBrooD Again, only if you expand the definition of socialism to the point of meaninglessness.
No reputable historian or political scientist I'm aware of would call, for example, New Kingdom Egypt or medieval monasteries socialist. And I've done a good bit of study of the Bronze Age and the Middle Ages in a university setting. (Much more, I'm pretty sure, than TIK has.)
(Edit: and before you respond that that's because academics are all socialists, medieval and ancient history are probably the least leftist subjects in academia - you can't possibly call, for example, Victor Davis Hansen, a number of whose books I've read, a liberal, much less a socialist.)
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"How was that possible if the Red Army wouldn't have been mobilized?"
Because there were massive numbers of troops near the border. They just weren't mobilized. They weren't in defensive positions, they weren't in offensive positions either - they were in long-term quarters with an almost peacetime level of readiness, because it's much cheaper to keep soldiers that way. They were completely unprepared to undertake mobile field operations, and in any case STAVKA was completely paralyzed and unable to issue coherent orders or organize any strategy because the Soviet system was so rigidly top-down and Stalin was completely paralyzed - almost catatonic, they literally couldn't get a single word out of him - and unable to make decisions. That's why the Germans were able to take those massive numbers of prisoners - they weren't in a posture to fight, and they couldn't retreat or move into a better defensive posture without orders, and orders either never came or were completely detached from reality.
The Germans had just vastly underestimated the size of the Red Army. They captured something like 600,000 men and destroyed or captured thousands of planes and tanks in the first week or two of the invasion and figured they had half the Soviet army in the bag, not realizing that that was only a small fraction of the actual total. If Stalin had been planning an attack in the near future he could easily have had two or three times that many troops on or near the front.
I don't doubt that Stalin was planning on turning on Germany at some point, but the idea that he was ready to do so in 1941 has been completely debunked. And anyway Hitler had been telling anyone who would listen that he was going to invade the Soviet Union ever since he wrote Mein Kampf, it was not a reaction to anything Stalin or anyone else did or intended to do.
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@tumaldo7887 Also, 20,000 Poles is about 2.5% of Ukraine's army, and they are by far the largest contingent. So, like I said, less than 5% total. And they aren't mercenaries, they aren't doing it for the money, they're doing it because they know how disastrous a Russian victory would be for Poland. Russia's mercs, by contrast, are in it purely for the money, or to get out of prison.
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@ikindawanttodie2236 That is incorrect. Control and profits are both part of the equation. Pure socialism is when control of the company and profits from the company both belong to the workers in the factory. State socialism interposes a state organ between the workers and the factory, but the profits flow either to the workers in that factory, or communally to all workers in society. And in Soviet socialism the manager of the factory is appointed by the Soviet, which is at least theoretically a council of workers, or by the Communist Party, which is, again theoretically, a body made up of and working on behalf of workers.
None of that was true in the National Socialist model - the profits from the factory went to its private owners, not to the workers or the state, and control over the factory was distributed between the owners, who oversaw how production is performed, who is hired to do it, etc., and the state, which means the Nazi Party, which was NOT an organization made up of or working on behalf of workers.
You and TIK are arguing that National Socialism and left-socialism are the same because they both involve state control of the means of production, but socialism and state control are not the same thing. Many socialists advocate a stateless society, and what Marx called the feudal society and the slave society both involved a substantial amount of state control (through the feudal aristocracy in the former) of the economy but were not socialist by any stretch of the imagination.
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Nospam Spamisham Exterminating most or all of the population of Vietnam would not have been a win. You have to consider the war in the broader context of the Cold War, as Johnson and Nixon had to. It's not that they were unwilling to kill, they killed hundreds of thousands of people. But apart from humanitarian concerns, in purely practical terms completely indiscriminate bombing would have carried a cost that exceeded any benefit from "winning" the war that way. We would have forfeited any claim to moral authority in the world, completely alienated our vital allies in Europe, and run the risk of Soviet retaliation - not directly on the US, but against our allies elsewhere. It could very easily have started WW3 in Europe. Vietnam was never about Vietnam, from the American (or Soviet) POV, it was a hot theater in the much wider Cold War.
The problem in Vietnam wasn't that our soldiers failed to carry out every task assigned to them, it was that the political goal was not one that military force could possibly accomplish. You might as well send the army to fight a hurricane or inflation. The best we could do - and did, for a decade - was prevent the RVN from being toppled by outside military force. But that was all for nothing since that regime was incapable of governing competently or achieving any sort of legitimacy with the South Vietnamese people. And while you might fairly say that the people were foolish for expecting anything but death and misery from a communist regime, the simple fact is that Ho Chi Minh and his government had attained enormous prestige in fighting and ultimately abolishing French colonial rule. The US was very foolish to align itself with the French imperialists in the 1950s (against the advice of the OSS and later CIA), but again, they were looking at it in the context of the Cold War, and the need for French cooperation and support in Europe was seen as absolutely vital - and the price of that support was siding with the colonialists.
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@ironxxvi "Sextants work on flat as well, thats not a globe proof"
But they would work differently on a plane. It's very simple geometry. If Polaris were 3,000 miles above the north pole on a flat earth, it would appear to be 45 degrees above the horizon 3,000 miles south of the pole, but 6,000 miles south of the pole it would appear to be about 26.5 degrees above the horizon. Again, simple geometry. But 6,000 miles south of the north pole Polaris is not 26.5 degrees above the horizon, it is almost exactly on the horizon. This is exactly the result you would expect with a Polaris an effectively infinite (for this purpose) distance above the pole on a sphere with a circumference of around 24,000 miles. There is NO distance above the north pole on a flat earth that would give these results. It simply cannot happen on a flat earth. It is mathematically impossible.
This is one of many reasons that as soon as people in the ancient world started looking at the world critically and applying reason to their observations they concluded that the earth couldn't possibly be flat and must necessarily be roughly spherical. Nothing has changed since that time.
The same goes for the distance to the sun and moon. The ancients were able to calculate the distance to the moon fairly accurately using simple trigonometry and the parallax between observations a known distance apart on the earth's surface. The moon simply cannot be 3,000 miles away from the earth because the parallax would be enormously greater than what is observed. But flat earthers still haven't caught up to what ancient Greeks figured out more than 2,000 years ago.
"You appear to think that the system is static, no production or removal of gases."
First of all, gas isn't produced, it's released, it's always been there. But that's a nitpick. The real point is that the rate of release and removal of gases at the earth's surface due to natural processes is well known and it is very, very near equilibrium. There is not a massive net addition of gas into the atmosphere as you speculate. And if there were, and the atmosphere were contained by a dome, why doesn't the pressure inside the dome increase radically over time? (As it happens, there is a slight net release of gases from the surface, and after nearly 5 billion years it is in equilibrium with the net escape of gases into space. This only makes sense - if the net release were too low, the vast majority of the earth's atmosphere would have long since escaped into space like Mars' did, and if it were much higher, the resulting pressure would just increase the rate at which gases escaped into space, forming a new equilibrium. Aren't natural processes fascinating?)
"General relativity and quantum mechanics oppose each other."
That is true, and that is why neither is considered to be a complete explanation for the universe we live in. There is more to it that we haven't discovered yet. But each of them is 100% within its own limited sphere. If quantum mechanics were just a bunch of nonsense, the computers we're using to have this discussion couldn't possibly work, because they were designed based on quantum phenomena and equations.
The same is true of Newtonian physics - if it didn't work, our rockets and artillery and other things like that couldn't be designed nor their performance accurately predicted. But they can, because Newtonian physics works perfectly well up to a certain point. Likewise, it gravity weren't real, the equations for things like lift and buoyancy wouldn't work, but they do, and millions of people every day rely on the predictable performance of machines designed using those equations. Gravity explains not just why planes fly and ships float, but exactly how they will behave under any given set of conditions, and lo and behold, they behave exactly as predicted. The simple fact is that science works .
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"Africa is Egypt, meaning Egypt is Africa"
What the hell does that even mean? That's like saying "Japan is Asia, therefore Asia is Japan". Yes, Egypt is one corner of Africa. But there is no "African people" any more than there is one "Asian people". They're both enormous continents with a huge variety of people living in them.
You Afrocentrists are so silly and ignorant. You don't even know anything about your own cultural history, and you want to go around stealing everyone else's. Also "Caucasians" did not come from the Caucasus Mountains, that's not why they're called Caucasians, it's all a very silly mythology that was originally created by racist pseudo-scientists in the 18th century - which, again, you don't understand, but that doesn't stop you from going around repeating nonsense that was originally invented to try to establish your own inferiority.
Also, who asked YOU anything? Everyone else here has just as much right to talk about it as you do.
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Both of those examples are more a matter of design priority and execution than technological superiority. The Mark 14 wasn't a more primitive design, it was just badly executed, and its flaws undiscovered because the Navy wasn't given an adequate budget to test it. Like the Zero, the Type 93's superior performance came at the cost of a dangerous and explosive propellant that was more of a design choice than a technological advantage - the Allies didn't want anything that dangerous on their ships. You see the drawback when they detonated on the ships that were carrying them, as on the Mikuma at Midway. Likewise, the Zero had paper stats better than Allied fighters, but at a terrible cost: flimsy construction, poor handling at high speeds and especially in a dive, no armor, and unprotected fuel tanks that made it incredibly vulnerable compared to an F4F. Once Allied pilots learned to fly to the Wildcat's strengths and the Zero's weaknesses the kill ration turned in favor of the Wildcat.
Put it another way: there was nothing in either of those designs that the Allies couldn't have copied if they'd wanted to make the same design choices. This is unlike, say, the proximity fuse or the a-bomb that the Axis powers couldn't possibly have built.
The Japanese crews did have advantages in training and experience at the beginning of the war, but that's also not quite the same as technological superiority.
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@TimeGhost Call it idiocy all you want, you don't live in Charlottesville. One group came to my hometown, held a torchlight rally - marching by a statue of Thomas Jefferson, a legendary proponent of tolerance and liberal democracy - during which they shouted anti-semitic and literal Nazi slogans ("Blood and Soil!"), and the next day proceeded to riot and beat counter-protestors until they eventually murdered a young woman who was doing nothing but walking down the street. The group that did that was not Antifa or any other left-wing group. I am neither a leftist nor associated with Antifa, but I hate Nazis, and when people wear Nazi symbols, wave Nazi flags, shout Nazi slogans, and behave exactly like the S.A., I have no hesitation in calling them Nazis. And we have a serious Nazi problem in the US right now, as does much of Europe.
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William claimed that Edward had promised the throne to him, but Edward had no legal authority to do that. William really had no claim but right of conquest. There was also a little charade with a captive Harold, years before he took the throne, swearing on a saint's relic (though not to his knowledge) to support William's claim, but again, Harold had no authority to give the crown away, picking the new king was the prerogative of the Witan, the assembly of nobles. William did have the support of the pope, which was certainly helpful, but again, in no way legally binding.
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If I had a choice to go back in a time machine and see one or the other, I'd much, much rather see Monetery Pop than Woodstock. Many of the performances at Woodstock weren't particularly stellar, but (judging by the movie) the ones at Monterey Pop absolutely were. Ball and Chain alone was absolutely stunning, and I don't think I've ever heard a better live recording of Jefferson Airplane.
Quinn Palanuk the 80s were absolutely awesome for alternative music. Bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Smiths, the Cocteau Twins, and the Cure were making phenomenal music, metal was at its all time peak, and in all my life I have never experienced anything to top early 80s hardcore shows for pure, raw ENERGY.
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@johnbowman7555 A Winchester is way faster than any bolt action, but if need to reload and you're loading from something like a belt with bullet loops you spend more time loading than shooting. A lot of bolt action rifles are the same way; you might theoretically be able to shoot 45 aimed shots per minute if the action is very smooth, but if it's a hunting rifle that top loads one round at a time you'll spend more time loading than shooting, so your actual rate of fire will be 30 RPM or less. With an AR you're loading a fresh magazine with 30 rounds in less than two seconds, so time spent reloading is insignificant.
The best bolt action I've ever fired by far for sustained rapid fire is the Enfield Rifle # 4. Unlike most other military bolt actions the action is smooth enough that you don't have to reacquire the sights and target after every shot, it holds 10 rounds so you only have to reload half as often as most bolt-actions, and it is fed very quickly by stripper clips or better yet with a spare detachable mag (although the British Army didn't issue extra magazines, preferring to use stripper clips). But I doubt most moderately skilled and experienced shooters could get more than 30 aimed shots off in a minute with one, and even then "aimed" is more like a man-sized target at 100 yards than a bullseye target. By contrast 45 rounds with a semiauto, even with a full-power battle rifle like a Garand or M-14, is a piece of cake. Anyway that's my experience and I've shot all three in competition.
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"The conflict was between Austro-Hungary and Serbia and no one else." That is a naive and silly statement. The Austrian leaders knew that Russia would feel compelled to stand up for their fellow Slavic allies or else lose all respect for their status as a great power, and they knew that any aggressive move in the Balkans would become an international incident.
Germany's military leaders - primarily Moltke and Falkenhayn - wanted a general war while they felt they still had a military and economic advantage, before Russia could recover more completely from the disasters of 1905, and they deliberately engineered a general crisis over Sarajevo. They encouraged, even pushed, Austria into a very aggressive response knowing the Russians would feel compelled to intervene and fully intending for that to be their excuse for invading Russia, and for invading France in order to isolate Russia. So yes, the war was the fault of a lot of people, but if you had to pick one party it would be Germany's military leaders. The "blank check" was their doing and they knew full well, and intended, that it must lead to a general war. That the kaiser was too weak to keep them in check, as well as being an idiot at diplomacy, was also a major factor.
France declared war on Germany only after Germany had begun mobilizing its army to invade France. There is absolutely no way France could have ignored that, it would have been national suicide. What started the general war was German mobilization.
As for a French "blank check" to Russia, I don't know what fantasy land you plucked that figment of your imagination from, but it certainly has no basis in historical fact.
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@matthiuskoenig3378 Lincoln died before the war ended, and when his successor, Johnson, tried to institute his lenient policies, he was strenuously opposed, sidelined, and eventually replaced by the hard-line radical Republicans, to the point where he became the only American president impeached by the House of Representatives in the first 200 years of the nation's existence.
What prevented a second civil war was that the issues that caused the first one became irrelevant. Slavery was gone and was never coming back, but after a decade or so of Reconstruction the southern states were allowed to institute Jim Crow policies that prevented the former slaves from having any part in governing the southern states or the US as a whole, while the sharecropping system as well as the massive employment of convict labor kept them exploited economically far more efficiently than slavery had. At the same time, the south was so economically devastated and essentially colonized by northern moneyed interests that former system in which tariffs that fell chiefly on the south were the main source of revenue for the federal government no longer functioned - the south didn't shoulder the burden of supporting the federal government because there was little wealth left to be extracted from the southern economy. Along with this the economic and political power of the planter class who had brought the war on was broken.
What put Reconstruction to its final end was one of the most corrupt political bargains in US history in 1877, in which the southern states agreed to let the blatantly fraudulent election of Rutherford Hayes stand in return for a Republican promise to withdraw all remaining troops from the south and cede control of the southern states to the exclusively white southern Democrats.
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@awakenedaristocrat I'm not sure exactly what you mean by an Indo-European text. English is an Indo-European language, so any text in English is an Indo-European text. If you mean a Proto Indo-European text, I have never read one and neither have you, because there are no texts in that language, it was never written down.
And by a hypothetical language, I mean Proto-Indo-European as it exists today is not a real language that was ever spoken by anyone, it is a hypothetical language that has been created through comparative linguistics which is useful for comparing and classifying modern languages, and it is as good a guess as we can make at an ancient language that is the common ancestor of all modern Indo-European languages, but don't make the mistake of thinking it actually is a language that was ever spoken by anyone.
And matching that original common language to any actual groups of people living 4,000 years ago is also guesswork - highly educated guesswork, but still guesswork, because we have to assume a relationship between genetics, material cultures, and languages that may or may not be accurate or run along the exact same lines. Y-dna haplogroups don't map to a language.
"guess what, genius, languages are spoken by people"
Sure, but what people?
"Modern dna testing has also further proved an ETHNIC link of high caste indians and europeans"
That issue is FAR from as settled or as simple as you imagine, and as I said to start with, SO much in this area is nonsense racialist fantasy (from several different ethno-nationalist factions) that it makes the whole subject difficult to discuss. Suffice to say that what you're saying was conventional wisdom 100 years ago but it is not the consensus view among objective scholars today.
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With respect to Jesus' ethnic ancestry, while it is true that there was admixture with other people in the history of the Jews, I don't think it would have been possible for him to have been accepted as the Messiah by many people in 1st century Judea if his appearance was too foreign - if he'd looked like a Greek, Roman, or Egyptian, surely at least some people would have said "He can't be the Messiah, he's a Roman [etc.], just look at him!" But we have no record, either Biblical or otherwise (in Josephus, for instance) that anyone questioned his claim on that ground, or questioned his ancestry in any other context, such as when he went into the Temple (which was, of course, completely forbidden for non-Jews).
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@MeBallerman One small correction: in a modern car with an engine designed to use high-octane fuel, you will get better performance using high-octane fuel without having to do anything yourself to the engine, because if you use lower-octane fuel the car's computer will sense the lower octane and restrain the engine's power to avoid damaging the engine (down to a point, too low and the computer won't be able to compensate and the engine will be damaged), whereas if you use high octane fuel the computer will sense that and allow the engine to run at full power. But this is ONLY if the engine is designed to benefit from high-octane fuel. My car, for example, according to the owner's manual, gets full performance using 93 octane, lessened a bit using 92 and 91 because the computer is limiting the power, and is only supposed to run on 89 for short periods and below highway speeds and not at all on 87.
In WW2 you had to mechanically alter the engine to restrict the compression ratio if you were going to run lower octane fuel. If you don't, you don't get more power, you get pre-ignition, which does not increase power because the piston is still in the compression stroke when the fuel ignites which means the expanding gases work against the momentum of the turning crankshaft. And, of course, causes severe damage to the engine because of the pressure spike.
The Germans didn't run high octane because they weren't producing it - AFAIK only the US and UK were, and some was supplied to the Soviets through Lend-Lease. High-octane was (and is) more expensive to produce and, more important for the Germans, you get less of it from a given volume of crude than you get if you're producing lower-octane gas.
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"You're either gay, or you're not." This is SO not true. Otherwise how would you explain how commonplace same-sex relations are in prison across so many societies? Do men's genes change when they go to prison?
This falsehood has been spread and made almost mandatory to believe by the gay rights movement, but it falls completely apart if you take even a shallow dive into history. Sexual relations between mature men and adolescent boys were commonplace and tolerated in classical Greece, but were prohibited and considered perverse and sinful a thousand years later in the Byzantine Empire. Was there some random mutation that spread among Greek speaking people to cause this change? Did someone put a "gay potion" in the drinking water? Of course not, the shift was purely cultural.
Sex is like food, what is or isn't to any individual is largely conditioned by the culture they grew up in, or sometimes a radically different culture they are initiated into. Sure, some people have more of a predisposition to like some things better than others, and some people develop aversions to things other people around them enjoy, but chances are, if you grew up in Thailand you like hot spicy food but if you grew up in, say, 19th century Germany in the working class you didn't like hot spicy food. Likewise, if you grew up in Athens in the 4th century BC you may not have found it to your taste, but you probably considered same-sex relations to be normal and healthy in at least some contexts, while if you grew up in 12th century Constantinople, unless you were a member of a very small minority, you more than likely found the idea of same-sex sexual relations to be disgusting and sinful.
There are, of course, a small minority, maybe 2-3%, of people who have a built-in predisposition to enjoy same-sex sex and/or an aversion to heterosexual sex that is so powerful that it overcomes any cultural conditioning to the contrary, but in times and places where homosexual relations are tolerated and considered normal - like, say, prisons, or many of today's liberal arts colleges - those people are only a small portion of the people who engage in same-sex relations, and the majority do not consider themselves gay despite the fact that, at least as long as they are in that situation, all or most of the sex they engage in is with members of the same sex.
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Nothing is wholly natural. Everything is shaped by culture. Whether you find snails or oysters appetizing or disgusting depends in a large part on the culture you grew up in. Likewise whether you find rail-thin or Rubenesque figures attractive or repulsive. Knowing this, it is hard to believe that whether you find the same or the opposite sex sexually attractive or sexually repulsive is not at all influenced by culture.
As for "switching sides," it has been extremely well documented that many people do this when they move from a mixed-sex to a restrictive single-sex environment. Men go into prison or, in societies in which the military is more strictly segregated from civil society, into the army or navy believing they are 100% straight and repulsed by same-sex sexual activity, and they come out enjoying, or at least being gratified by, same-sex activity and in some cases preferring it. This is partly dictated by environment, but there is also an element of choice (if circumstances permit it) in deciding whether to engage in the only sexual activity available or suffer in involuntary celibacy. And many men (presumably women as well, but I know less about that) voluntarily engage in same-sex sexual activity in prison, but do not do so when they are released, some because they greatly prefer heterosexual contact if it available, but also because the social environment stigmatizes same-sex activity much more on the outside than in prison.
This is not to say that most people who are gay just up and decided they felt like being gay. But it does seem to me to indicate that the topic is much more complicated than most people would like to think.
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@Qvadratus. It was NEVER taken away. They were exiled from it, which is not the same thing. They were exiled, and then God decided they had repented sufficiently and they were allowed to come home. No one else ever acquired title to the land, they were just occupiers. All of them have come and gone: Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Mamluks, Turks, British, all the great empires rose and all of them fell and none of them has ever been the rightful owner of the Promised Land. Only Israel.
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@nicolesmrekar5866 I got my degree in history before you were born, son.
The difference you're missing is that European armies weren't completely ignorant of the existence of guns one day and then confronted with a unit of elite riflemen armed with 21st century firearms the next. They didn't panic and run because they were gradually introduced to firearms technology over several centuries. The Romans would have absolutely no idea what was happening to them, it would be completely outside anything they'd ever experienced or even heard of. And the rate at which men were dying and the nature of their injuries, to say nothing of the noise, would be utterly incomparable to sling bullets or arrows. Even a few light machine guns and grenade launchers plus 30 or so riflemen would be mowing down hundreds of men packed in dense units (by modern standards) every minute. It would be like the first battles of the American Civil War, when they didn't know any better than to stand in dense formations in the open, except the Romans would have no effective way to shoot back, no idea what was being done to them or how, and probably wouldn't even be able to see the men who were slaughtering them from hundreds of yards away.
Rome was a very impressive military machine but the Romans did get their asses handed to them on a number of occasions, from Cannae to Arausio Teutoberg Forest to Adrianople. They were men like any others and when things got bad they broke and ran just like any army. The strength of Rome was not that its armies never lost, but that it was always able to come back from even the worst defeat, raise a new army, and apply the lessons learned from their defeat. The third or fourth time a Roman legion faced a small unit of modern soldiers would be a completely different story.
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"you don't have history. We Aryans gave you Sanskrit, Vedas and Civilised you."
Literally no one in academia is saying that. There is no disagreement about the fact that the Vedas were written in India, by Indian people.
" It is from there certain words seems similar to Sanskrit like Russian and Lithuanian."
And it was observations like that that led to the notion of Indo-European languages.
"Everything started from Indian subcontinent mainly due to its GEOGRAPHY. "
Nonsense. Humans first evolved in Africa, the evidence for that is absolutely certain. Exactly how and when the humans found today outside of Africa came to be there can be argued, but every human being on the planet today is descended from someone who lived in Africa long ago.
"That's why Vedas, science, astronomy, music, mathematics .. everything came out from India."
What you're doing is showing the same bigotry you claim to be opposing. Claiming that no one else on the planet has developed any civilization or culture. That is fascist nonsense. And it shows an appalling ignorance of cultures in places like Africa, China, and the Americas. Do you honestly believe that Inca or Mayan civilization came from India?
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That is one interpretation, but it's at least as controversial as Balrog wings. I believe the prevailing view is that this was another example of Tolkien's flowery language and Merry's blow with the barrow-blade (in the book) simply wounded the Witch-king - for one thing, if he had already died, neither Eowyn nor her sword would have suffered the drastic effects of striking him. Another interpretation is that Merry's blow wasn't fatal in itself, but it removed the protection spell which was necessary for him to be vulnerable to a normal sword like Eowyn's. Certainly in the film he is only wounded by Merry and is very much alive (or at least undead) until Eowyn stabs him.
There was never a reason that no man could kill him, btw. There was a just an ancient prophecy by Glorfindel that he would not fall by the hand of a man. This is very much in the literary tradition of prophesies like no one born of a woman being able to harm Macbeth, or Oedipus being doomed to kill his father and sleep with his mother. Macbeth wasn't magically immune to being harmed by anyone, it was just fated that one not born of a (live) woman would be the one to kill him. Likewise the Witch-king wasn't immune to harm by men, it was just foreordained that he would be killed by a specific person who was not a man, and Glorfindel had seen this end in a vision. The Witch-king and others who were familiar with the prophecy assumed that "Man" referred to race, not sex; apparently no one ever thought to ask Glorfindel for clarification on this point and Tolkien leaves it ambiguous - although the very dramatic reveal of Eowyn being a woman seems to me to indicate that sex, not race, was the significant factor.
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You make that sound very one-sided. Like Hitler, the Japanese militarists engaged in a long series of violations and escalations, invading Manchuria, invading China itself, conducting numerous massacres and atrocities in the course of that invasion, bombing a US naval vessel, invading French Indochina, bullying Thailand into a very one-sided alliance, and making their intentions very clear to absorb other European colonies like Malaya and the Dutch East Indies into their "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere". What was the US supposed to do, just sit by and whine while Japan conquered and brutalized half of Asia?
And why was it unreasonable to expect japan to surrender half of China? (To the Chinese government, not to the US.) They were conduction an aggressive war. No one was asking Japan to give up an inch of territory it controlled before 1937, including its conquests in Korea, Formosa, and Manchuria.
And as for the US naval buildup, Japan, not the US or UK, was the first to repudiate the Washington and London Naval Treaties. The US naval building program was a response to Japanese aggression, not the cause for it.
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@SILENCEINTHESOULS That's a lot of nonsense. Just for starters, no serious scientists talks about race any more, they haven't for probably 60 years. And pretty much everyone south of Austria has some brown in their skin tone, what is that supposed to signify? Also, yes, the Greeks migrated into Greece, even Homer knew that. And yes, most of the ancestors of today's Indians were there before the Vedic period - again, no one today speaks of a total population replacement. You're talking about badly outdated ideas.
I'm not sure what you're claiming "bunks the whole aryan Theory", or even what you're talking about when you say the aryan Theory. Literally no one today thinks that has anything to do with race - mostly because, again, literally no one in the scientific community today thinks that race is a thing.
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Wow, that's an impressive lot of nonsense. If the IVC civilization persisted through all that, why is it that no one for the past 2,500 years has been able to decipher a single word (if it even represents words) of their script? In that sense China has much more continuity to the present. For that matter cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics lasted longer than the IVC script did, and the language of the pharaohs is still recognizable (with changes, of course) as Coptic today. Classical Greek and classical Hebrew can also be read today, unlike the IVC script. We can even read Cretan Linear B script written more than 3,000 years ago, doesn't that show more continuity than the IVC?
Not to mention that the IVC declined and collapsed around 3,000 years ago and centuries went by before urban centers appeared in India again, and when they did re-emerge they were very clearly organized along very, very different lines than the IVC cities had been.
Also, it's been decades since anyone has seriously defended an Aryan "invasion," that term is a shibboleth that marks an ethno-nationalist agenda trying to knock down a straw man.
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@dying0d You're all wrong. The Three Rings don't corrupt their wearers because they were never touched by Sauron, and because they were never worn or used while he still had the Ruling Ring. But because Celebrimbor learned the art of ring-making from Sauron, Sauron was able to influence the design of the Three (even though he didn't yet know they even existed) so that they would also be subject to the rule of the One and, according to Galadriel, lose their power when it was destroyed. It is never explicitly revealed whether the Three actually would lose all their power after the One's destruction, but since their wearers took them into the West at the end of the novel it became a moot point. From a thematic POV, it is made clear that the decline and departure of the Elves was a foreordained part of God's plan, so the use of the Three to delay those things was to some extent a sin of pride, and it was necessary that they either leave Middle-earth or stop working for the dominion of Men to come about..
Sauron absolutely had dominion over the Three, which is why the Elves who wore them had to take them off the moment Sauron tried to use the One to control them and never wore or used them again while he still had his. It was only after the One was lost that they dared use them again. This is stated many times in the novel and in other sources.
The Nine were never worn by anyone after Sauron lost the One, so we don't know how its loss would have affected them. By that point he had so enslaved the Nazgul to his will with their Rings and the One that he no longer needed the rings to control them. And the Dwarves were largely immune to his control through their rings with or without his having the One by virtue of their own nature, but their rings still had a corrupting influence because they were made with Sauron's direct participation. (It is also never clear whether he made any changes to the rings after he recovered them and before he gave them out to Men and Dwarves, nor is it ever revealed whether the Dwarves' belief that Durin's Ring was given to him by Celebrimbor and never held by Sauron. But even Durin's Ring had a corrupting influence.)
In short, anyone other than a Dwarf who wore any of the rings while Sauron still had the One would have become subject to his control, but anyone of any race who wore the Three that were never touched by Sauron would not be corrupted by them once he had lost the One, at least, not to anything like the extent the Nazgul or Smeagol became corrupted. (They might still be very difficult to give up because they still represented the lure of power, although Cirdan apparently didn't have any problem giving his to Gandalf after having worn it for a good thousand years by then.)
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@garyseeseverything8615 The Merlin didn't "need" high American octanes. Both engines had improved performance with higher compression ratios made possible with high-octane avgas. You might as well say the 109Ks were inferior because they needed MW-50 injection. In both cases it was a strength, not a weakness.
Also, they developed a carburetor that was less prone to choking, and then moved the fuel outlet on it to eliminate the negative g problem altogether.
The 109's biggest weaknesses were very short range, which the Spitfire and Hurricane shared but of course that was much less a problem for the British in 1940, and that it was extremely difficult for novice pilots to fly, in particular because of its atrocious behavior on takeoffs and landings. A lot of planes and pilots were lost that way. That wasn't so much of a problem in 1940, when the Luftwaffe had had years of peacetime growth to train pilots, but it was a serious drawback later in the water when replacement pilots had very little training. The Spit was not great for novices but not as bad as the 109. The later F4U had similar issues, but the US was able to afford the luxury of more extensive training for new pilots before putting them in frontline fighters.
Also the pilot in the video notes, the 109 also suffered from an excessively tiny cockpit, which made for a nice slender fuselage and the tiny airframe you're crowing about but at the cost of greatly increasing pilot fatigue and the ability to turn to look to the side or rear. I've heard or read dozens of former 109 pilots complaining about it, as well as modern pilots who've flown the 109 and other aircraft from the war. I honestly don't know how a 6 foot pilot could even jam himself into that tiny space, let alone fight effectively in it. (The Spitfire had a small cockpit as well, but by all reports it was not as cramped as the 109 and had slightly better ergonomics. I've seen both up close and the 109 definitely looks more cramped. But for real comfort on long flights, give me an F4U or better yet a P-47! Or for German iron, a 190. Messerschmidt may have been a genius at designing the fastest possible plane, but Tank had a better understanding of the all the intangibles that made an effective combat plane.)
That's not to say it wasn't a great fighter, one of the greatest of all time, but I think you're overlooking its weaknesses.
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@walterlaten7662 This has nothing to do with fossil fuels. It doesn't even entirely have to do with things that are already fossils.
In a million years the evidence of the Columbian exchange will still be very obvious in the fossil record and things like preserved pollen and evolution of DNA. Dozens of animals and hundreds of plants that had been exclusive to one hemisphere or the other for millions of years were suddenly transported across the Atlantic and thrived in the hemisphere they had never before been found in. Even if all evidence of how that exchange happened is erased, the exchange itself would be a very obvious anomaly.
Likewise, things like the almost total replacement of tall-grass prairie in the American midwest with crops like wheat and corn in just a few years will be very obvious even thousands of years from now. And the very rapid (in evolutionary terms) domestication of cattle, pigs, horses, camels, sheep, and chickens, as well as the explosion of their population despite the new forms being much less well-suited for survival in the wild, will be a very, very obvious change that will be visible for hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of years because it is written into the DNA of those animals.
We haven't found a shred of evidence of anything like this occurring since the Cambrian explosion. That's not absolute proof that there hasn't been a large-scale technological civilization before ours, but it does make the existence of such a civilization less plausible.
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@rebelxyz2077 Sure, and some people here say America is united by Christianity, and some people in Israel say only Jews belong there, and the ayatollahs in Iran say only Muslims (Shiite Muslims, of course) belong there. It's all just good old-fashioned religious bigotry.
I guess the only real question is when you and Modi stop beating around the bush and unleash your planned genocide to rid India of the 300 million or so Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis, and other religious believers who live there, which is plainly the ultimate agenda.
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@nowayjosedaniel And yet people WILL know it, because they have eyes.
There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding on this point. The purpose of recording race or ethnicity isn't to enable discrimination, it's to detect and therefore deter it. Say you're applying for a home loan. If the loan officer is a bigot, he doesn't need to have your race recorded on the form to discriminate against you, he's right across the desk from you, he can take one look at you and decide to deny you a loan you are qualified for just because he doesn't like your ethnic group. But if his supervisor or a government regulator wants to check to see if he's denying loans to people of one group three times as often as otherwise identical applicants from another group, how are they possibly supposed to know that if the race of the people being denied isn't recorded?
Likewise with college admissions. I'm all in favor of doing away with racial preferences, but even after that, it will be necessary to record the race of applicants, because if you don't, how will anyone know whether Harvard is still admitting or denying members of one group at a very different rate from similar applicants of another group in defiance of the law? How could anyone possibly collect that data if it's never put on paper?
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4. The Rakhigarhi skeleton predates the proposed date of the migration, so of course it contains no steppe DNA. This actually tends to support the Aryan migration theory, because if there was no migration, that DNA should have already existed in India before that time and some amount of it would be expected to be present in the skeleton. I see so, so many Hindutva advocates making this mistake and i don;t understand how they can fail to understand something so simple. It's like denying the post-Colombian exchange between Europe and the Americas because there is no sign of European DNA that is now present in the Americas being there before 1492.
Of course, it's only one small sample and the steppe DNA could have entered India later. But to the extent it shows anything, it still shows the opposite of what you're trying to prove.
"When you invade a place with army you do not go with your women and family. But when you migrate you necessarily go with your family and women..."
Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't. In a polygamous society there are always excess males and these are the ones who will likely seek new homes elsewhere. They don't go with women and family because the ones who are going don't have women and family - that's why they're leaving. Based on comparisons of YDna, Mitochondrial DNA, and nuclear DNA, the general trend associated with the migration and expansion of people associated with the Indo-European languages, including in India, is that the new DNA was mostly carried and passed on by men.
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@danguillou713 Michael Corleone is very different from Tony Soprano. Tony is rotten from the start. the show spends six seasons teasing the viewer, humanizing Tony and making him likeable, but the viewer gradually begins to understand that Tony is 100% sociopath and will never change. At that point the show cuts to black with the implication that he's been killed. Tony has no arc, he never really changes through the whole series, that's the point. By contrast, Michael starts out good, gets drawn into the underworld, turns into a completely reprehensible person who murders his own family members, then finally (in the 3rd movie) genuinely repents and seeks redemption, only to find that he can't escape what he's done and what he's become. He's not a villain, he's a tragic figure. We're supposed to root for him, not to win against his enemies but to win against temptation and corruption. That he fails to do so doesn't mean we aren't supposed to root for him.
I haven't seen Dexter but from what I've heard it's more like the Sopranos in this respect, but a little closer to a conventional story. Dexter starts out broken and there's never any real chance he's going to change, but the people he kills are worse than he is, so we're mostly meant to root for him while questioning whether we should be doing so. Really he's more like an anti-hero.
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@jandron94 You could put it the other way round : "without the french support at the battle of the Somme we the Brits would have been annihilated by the Germans". Without French support and French demands for support there wouldn't have been a battle of the Somme, and the UK never would have been at war with Germany to begin with if the Germans hadn't invaded France and Belgium, so that's not remotely realistic as a hypothetical. I certainly never came anywhere near suggesting that the British could have beaten Germany alone.
It's not a matter of the British being better or more important or any such thing, but the fact remains, it was France that Germany chose to go to war with in 1914, and it was France Falkenhayn chose to try to knock out of the war with the Verdun offensive in 1916, because he realized that France was the strongest opponent and the linchpin of the Allied war effort, and without British support Falkenhayn probably would have succeeded in this aim. Yes, the French were heavily engaged in the Battle of the Somme, but they couldn't have launched the offensive at all without very substantial support from the British, which is precisely the reason the French demanded that the UK government order Haig to begin the offensive before he wanted. That's not cheerleading or chest-thumping, it's simple historical fact. If the facts offend you I'm not sure how to suggest you remedy that.
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I think it's dangerous to overlook the distinction between "insane" and "irrational". Hitler's decision to declare war on the US may have involved rational calculations, but it was also premised in part on his irrational beliefs: mainly, the notion that a racially impure society run by Jews and socialists couldn't possibly defeat the pure, Aryan German nation led by National Socialism. Hitler assumed that because he saw the US as a contemptible, corrupt society, its own citizens (at least the ones who counted, the Aryan ones) must see it the same way, and would never fight for it.
This is even more true of the Japanese decision to go to war with the US and UK. Yes, I fully understand the strategic considerations that went into this decision, but there were numerous rational voices in the Japanese leadership (most notably Yamamoto) who understood how hopeless such a war would be against countries that had industrial economies literally dozens of times larger than Japan's. (Of course it is possible for a poorer nation to win a limited defensive war against much stronger powers, particular if it has covert support from another superpower - Vietnam being a good example - but that wasn't the sort of war Japan was starting). The decision can only be understood in light of the fundamentally irrational belief that the superior martial and spiritual virtues of the Japanese race would make up for the massive industrial and technological superiority of the Allies. Of course, we can all see how this turned out in practice.
This may be easier to understand in the southern US when we look at our own past folly in this regard - thinking that the superior virtue of an agrarian society led by genteel aristocrats would make up for the large population advantage and fantastic industrial advantage of the northern states. Of course, the Confederates at least had the more rational possibility that the northerners wouldn't be willing to fight to keep other states in the Union against their will. The crowning folly of the Japanese leaders was failing to understand that beginning the war the way they did would certainly galvanize the American public to fight the war to its bitter ultimate end.
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If the judge thinks the evidence is indisputable in favor of the defendant, the jury never deliberates - the judge enters a directed verdict of not guilty. The judge in this case did not tell the jury what the evidence indicated, but it is the judge's job to tell the jury how to apply the law to the facts they determine - i.e., IF you find that the facts support/do not support X, then you must find defendant guilty/not guilty of charge Y.
The firearm possession charge was dismissed because the law was very badly written, as the judge explained in his ruling. I saw that coming from the day this case hit the news when I looked up the relevant statute, in fact I'm surprised that that charge wasn't dismissed months ago. I think that the Wisconsin legislature MEANT to pass a law saying that minors 16 and older could possess rifles and shotguns ONLY for the purpose of hunting or target shooting under adult supervision, but what they actually wrote was a law that said minors 16 and older can posses rifles or shotguns UNLESS they are hunting without adult supervision. But it's an ironclad rule in all criminal cases that statutes must be interpreted in the light most favorable to the defendant, and if the defendant does not violate the letter of the law the defendant is not guilty. Since Rittenhouse was not hunting without adult supervision, he did not break the letter of the law. I will be surprised if the Wisconsin legislature doesn't rewrite that subsection now that the trial is over.
(And it can get much more ridiculous than that - in my home state, Virginia a large number of traffic cases once had to be thrown out because of a simple typo in the printed statutory code annual supplement - I don't remember the exact law, but IIRC the word "not" was accidentally deleted by the printer.)
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They used Italian extras. Ray Stevenson, Ciarán Hinds, and Polly Walker don't look very Italian to me. Especially Hinds. He was the only one who looked really out of place, though, but still not like Wayne as Temujin jarring. James Purefoy was perfect as Antony. And of course Kevin McKidd is Scottish, but they discussed his character's looking suspiciously Gallic in the show.
I, Claudius is a bit of a special case because it's an adaptation of a speculative novel very loosely based on historical accounts of dubious accuracy, not a direct representation of history (although the distinction may be lost on most viewers). Graves stated that he deliberately wrote his characters to sound and act like early 20th century English aristocrats because he was writing for an English audience and he wanted the audience to perceive the characters the same way Romans of the 1st century would have seen the historical figures - as the natural, expected ruling class of the huge world empire of the day, of which they were subjects. In that sense casting British Shakespearean actors was being true to the source material. Not to mention it gave us some absolutely wonderful acting I'm not sure anyone else could have brought to that particular material - the adaptation of the novel, that is, not the historical events on which it was based. I don't think of the historical Augustus or Livia or Caligula looking, acting, or sounding anything remotely like Brian Blessed or Siân Phillips or John Hurt, but they absolutely owned those roles on screen. Italian actors might looked more authentic, but they wouldn't have had the same instinct for Graves' dialogue. Livia is easily my favorite screen villainess of all time - she's so beastly wicked you kind of like her just for how wicked she is.
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@jelenastefanovic2155 One, there are no US military bases or bio weapon labs in Ukraine, there never have been, and there were no plans or even discussions to put such facilities in Ukraine. Two, I didn't say the US would never invade Canada, I said imagine the outcry if it did, and especially if it did so in order to annex Canada. Three, the sum total of territory the US has annexed from other countries since WW2 is precisely zero - in fact, it's negative, since the US voluntarily granted independence to its largest prewar colony, the Philippines (and had planned to do so even earlier before the Japanese invaded).
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@emmitstewart1921 Really just Hitler. Mussolini would barely be worth a footnote today outside of Italy if he hadn't been foolish enough to ally with Hitler. I'm not saying the Fascists weren't nasty folks, but they didn't make mass murder of civilians on an epic scale a part of their policy the way Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot did. Same with Franco and Pinochet. Castro murdered a lot more people than Pinochet did - probably 5 to 10 times as many, though it's hard to day since neither one documented their murders like the Nazis did - and Castro was far from the most murderous communist dictator. I bet 90% of westerners have no idea he killed many more people than Pinochet, though. Franco was probably in the same ballpark as Castro, but out of a much larger population. None of them even remotely compared to Pol Pot, much less Mao, who probably had more people murdered than any other individual in human history (although with Mao and Stalin, both of whom used mass starvation as a political tool, it's not always easy to separate victims of murder from victims of gross incompetence).
The Japanese regime of the 1930s and WW2 did murder the way Hitler and Stalin did, but they don't fit as neatly on the left-right political axis of 20th century Europe as any of the foregoing do. They were insanely militarist and generally socially conservative, but conservative like Iran's revolutionary government in the sense of wanting to return to the Middle Ages (except in terms of arms industries), not the free-market classical liberalism of 20th century European and American conservatives.
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@engelsteinberg593 There are many and I don't know if I can come up with all of them offhand, but I would say militarism-pacifism, nationalism-internationalism, social conservative-social libertarian, authoritarianism-individual liberty, economic collectivism-economic libertarianism, centralized authority-devolved power ("states' rights"), and environmentalism-maximizing productivity at the expense of the environment are probably the most important ones.
And movements and people can align on some of these but not on others - Soviet communism was extremely collectivist, authoritarian, and militarist but as far opposed to environmentalism as it is possible to be, while Bernie Sanders is extremely collectivist economically but more or less pacifist, socially libertarian, and strongly environmentalist. To say they occupy nearby places on a political spectrum is just contrary to fact.
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It was okay for Britain to have an empire outside of Europe (as France, the Netherlands, Portugal, the US, and even Japan did) but not okay for anyone to dominate Europe.
Sure, it's racist, but it's also rational. Britain's empire in India was no threat to anyone else in Europe. Germany building an empire in Russia and/or France was an existential threat to everyone else in Europe, and thus, the world.
And you are incorrect about the start of WW1. It doesn;t make sense to you because you are ignoring the thinking and policies of Germany's military leaders, who effectively controlled foreign policy. Germany tried to keep Britain neutral, but its general staff worked very hard to make sure the Austro-Serbian crisis was fanned into a war between Germany and Russia and France, because they felt they could win that war in 1914 but in a few more years Russia's rapid modernization would make it impossible for Germany to win such a war. Read David Fromkin's Europe's Last Summer for an account of how and why the crisis played out the way it did.
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"It is a tentative answer, which can and will be responded in kind, in the following way. If based on your own parameters of culture and diversity, and national differenciation white people don't exist, then neither do black people. In fact, putting all black people into one single group is more nonsensical than doing it with white people, according to your own parametres. "
Yes! Precisely! There is no such thing as a black race, except to the extent we have made that concept up out of whole cloth. There is no genetic grouping that includes Africans and Australian Aborigines but excludes Europeans and Southeast Asians. I go nuts trying to explain this to Afrocentrists. There's no such thing as an Asian race either - Persians have little if anything more in common with Koreans than Italians do, and more important, there's a gradual continuum between the two in both directions, there's no line you can draw anywhere on the map of Eurasia where everyone on one side is unambiguously "white" and everyone on the other side is unambiguously "Oriental".
There are a lot of problems with the concept of race, but that's the biggest one - there are very few sharp delineations where everyone one one side shares one set of common ancestors and everyone on the other shares a completely different set of common ancestors. We're way too mobile for that, and too good at crossing geographical barriers. Chances are, if we crossed it once for people to get there, we crossed it many times since then. (The ocean barriers between the eastern and western hemispheres being the one really big exception, although even there, there are exceptions to the exception - Inuits, for one, and there's also now substantial genetic evidence that Polynesians mixed with Native Americans at some time before the modern era.)
Are you aware that for much of the 20th century Italian people were not considered white by many people in the US? Because "white" was an arbitrary, invented category, and it served the purpose of some of the people who invented it to exclude recent Catholic immigrants from the Mediterranean from the category.
Also, it's very important to understand the difference between "___" is a social construct and "___ doesn't exist". Race exists because we have made it up, just like rich and poor do. But they are both social constructs. The difference is that few people today try to find a biological basis for the distinction between rich and poor. The same goes for gender. Sex is a biological fact. Gender, the set of social expectations we have created around sex, like boys wearing pants and girls wearing skirts, is a social construct. It exists, because we have created it, but much of it is also completely arbitrary and divorced from biology. There's no gene that makes boys like pants and girls like skirts. This is what's so nutty about today's trans movement, they seem to think that there is a gene that makes girls like pink frilly dresses, and some people born with Y-chromosomes and penises (i.e., boys) somehow got the "wrong" gene and are biologically destined to like pink frilly dresses.
Next up: why it's so ridiculous to say that "Caucasians" came from the Caucasus (hint: because we didn't, and no one ever said we did).
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@johnburns4017 The Matilda was an excellent tank, just too early to call it the best of the war IMO. It could never have been upgunned to deal with late war tanks. The Churchill was also an excellent design, but only in a specialized role, it was too heavy and slow to be a general-purpose tank. You can't call it versatile if it's too slow to carry out a tank's primary mission which in WW2 was to rapidly exploit breakthroughs.
Guns and armor are good but for a tank mobility and reliability are more important. The Sherman was a great tank because it had an adequate gun (in the 76mm version) and armor but great mobility and fantastic reliability. It could ride in landing craft, cross bridges, and climb slopes that none of the late-war monster tanks so beloved of fanboys could even dream of. The only one in the same league was the T-34, for the same reasons, but the Sherman was considerably more reliable and easier to service than the T-34, as well as having vastly superior ergonomics (which is a field too often overlooked in evaluating tanks - a tank with a fatigued, overwhelmed, and half-blind crew is a much less effective tank). There's a reason the T-34 and Sherman were the only WW2 tanks that saw widespread use after the war, most notably in Korea. If you're looking at gun, armor, and other paper statistics, the Pershing was a fantastic tank, but in real life it was mediocre at best because, like the Panther, it was overloaded and consequently had mediocre mobility and poor reliability.
The Challenger was a good design as well, but not enough were built in WW2 for it to have had much effect on the outcome of the war. But the Cromwell and Challenger were both immature designs - the really outstanding tank from that line of designs was the Centurion, which was better than any WW2 tank but didn't see combat until Korea. (It was a bit slow compared to the Sherman or T-34, but otherwise had excellent mobility.) For its time I'd say the Centurion is one of the best tanks of all time - but it wasn't around in WW2.
The Firefly was also a very good tank but again built in fairly small numbers and more of a specialist than a general-purpose war-winner. The 17 pounder barely fit in the turret (sideways) and that caused serious issues for the crew trying to load and fire it and otherwise fight in the tank. Many of the overgunned late war German tanks and TDs had similar ergonomics issues.
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Sure, Churchill had plenty of flaws. But he was the only man west of the Rhine in 1938 who really understood who and what Hitler was (as you still do not), and if not for his conniving, badgering, and outright bludgeoning the Conservative government to prepare for the war, and without his steadfast insistence on holding out in 1940, half of Europe might have suffered under the Nazi yoke for at least a generation, with who knows how many millions more Poles, Jews, Russians, Ukrainians, and others deemed "untermenschen" by the Nazis dead.
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@devvratmishra9000 I don't see where I said anything good OR bad about you in my post, I just said you were reducing the argument to a crude generality and your argument in response is fallacious. And you can be expected to "branded" with ideology when you take your talking points straight from the ideology. There is no one who takes "Out of India" seriously who is not deeply enmeshed in that ideology.
As for the cognate for elephant, unless I am mistaken that cognate exists in other IE languages, but does not mean elephant in most of them. All it shows is that Vedic people repurposed an existing word (which did not mean "elephant" prior to that time) to mean "elephant" when they encountered elephants.
And there's nothing to say that usage of the word couldn't have traveled back out of India after the Vedic people invented it. As Dr. Miano points out in the video, it's absurd to pretend that migration can only go in one direction, ever. Of course people traveled out of India and took words with them. I'm not sure whether the Greeks had a word for elephant before Alexander the Great got to India, but they certainly had one when he left, and if they'd never seen elephants before, they probably called these terrifying new animals the same thing the local Indian people called them. And since elephants became a common feature of warfare all around the Mediterranean that word could spread to many places that did not have elephants living in the wild in or even near them. That's why English even had a word for elephant, borrowed from French and before that from Latin. They certainly didn't have that word when they first settled England in the 5th century CE.
(I've seen people making this argument before and they almost always repeat a fallacious assertion that elephants were only found in India and sub-Saharan Africa, when in fact elephants were native to North Africa in the ancient world and were taken as curiosities or for warfare to many countries where they are not native.)
What you're missing is that finding a cognate or two by itself is child's play next to the deep linguistic analysis that has gone into the study of Indo-European languages. Everybody borrows the odd word. The Finnish word for reindeer comes from the Proto-Indo-European word for cow, but Finnish is in no way related to IE languages - they picked up the word along the way from the Urals to Finland, and when they got to Finland and had lots of reindeer around but no cows, they repurposed the word. You have to look at a large number of cognates from which you can reconstruct systematic language-wide or family-wide changes. And this painstaking, very deep analysis has convinced every reputable linguist outside the Hindu nationalist movement that the original place where PIE was spoken was somewhere on the Eurasian steppe, and that it was brought everywhere else IE languages are spoken - east OR west - by migrations of people speaking those languages.
And that's not even starting to go into genetic evidence, which overwhelmingly supports a major migration INTO and not OUT OF India in the 2nd millennium BCE - roughly around the same time different migrants brought IE languages into central and western Europe and 1-2 thousand years after IE languages and the people who spoke them (coming from a different direction) entered Anatolia and the Balkans.
(And don't bring up the Mitanni, their language isn't closely related to languages from the Anatolian subfamily and probably did result from a migration west through Iran around the same time the related Indo-Aryan languages entered India. As I said, migrations don't go in only one direction! The fact that it is so different from the Anatolian languages provides further evidence that the latter did not come from India as they plainly split from the common root of PIE at a very early date, 1000 years or more before the Indo-Aryan languages did.)
I don't understand why it so painful and difficult for Hindu nationalists to admit that the Indo-European languages spoken in India originated someplace else. It doesn't seem to bother people in England, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Albania, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, or anywhere else to admit that their languages were originally imports thousands of years ago. The only people in the west or, AFAIK, the Middle East who are offended by that notion are the religious fundamentalists who reject it because it supposedly contradicts the Bible and the rather dubious date calculations they get by adding up the "begats". Likewise, the only reason I can see that anyone in India has a serious problem with the scientific view of IE languages is that it contradicts the scientifically completely unsupportable claim that the Vedas were composed inside India (which they probably were) centuries before anyone on the planet even had writing, much less spoke Sanskrit (which is absurd). As I said before, all the so-called evidence really just boils down to "my holy book says it and that's more important than all the evidence in the world" - just as it does with Christian and Muslim fundamentalists.
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@mr.curious6872 "and there is a mass migration from central Asia not from Europe or something "
Yes, and that's exactly the view of mainstream science. The Indo-Aryan languages did not come directly from Europe, and not from central or western Europe at all. OTOH European languages didn't come from Iran either. The evidence points to the Anatolian languages (which are NOT, as Dr. Miano points out, Indo-Aryan languages at all) branched off first and migrated west along the Black Sea coast, while the other European languages followed later and the Indo-Iranian branch moved west into west/central Asia and then south, to the east of the Caspian and Aral Seas, to Iran, Afghanistan, and India. It was a branch of the latter group that continued west through Iran and gave the Mitanni their language, which is not closely related to the Anatolian languages that happened to end up nearby.
"their are evidences of mass invasions and killings in large numbers found in Europe"
Yes, but the evidence shows they came from central Asia, not India, and had split off from the Indo-Iranian languages well before the latter reached India and Iran. Why the invasion of Europe was so much more violent will probably remain a mystery, but I suspect it was because the IVC civilization, even in its decline, was more densely populated and politically cohesive than "Old Europe" and thus not so ripe for invasion.
There were later migrations of Iranian languages (Scythian and Sarmatian) west into Europe, but that was thousands of years after the initial invasion by Indo-European speakers.
Also, the word "Aryan" and its cognates were never used in Europe in any context other than referring to Persians until around the 19th century, it seems to postdate the splitting off of Indo-Iranian languages and also seems to have referred to a social and religious status rather than a racial or ethnic one. So "Aryans" did not spread throughout Europe.
As for the steppe, you are correct that there is more steppe in Asia than Europe, but it's a fairly unbroken terrain type from central Asia to what is now southern Russia, and archaeological evidence points to the original Indo-European culture arising in the western portion. The book "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World" by David W. Anthony goes into this archaeological evidence in great detail, I highly recommend it if you want to understand the scientific consensus on this subject.
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"Egyptian Records of Atlantis" is a very misleading title since no such records, or even records of those records once having existed, have ever been uncovered. Everything you mention is nothing but a story being told by Plato. There is precisely zero confirmation that any of this ever happened beyond later writers repeating Plato's story. It's not like Homer, where there are copious records of other oral and written sources discussing the Trojan War independently of Homer, showing that the Trojan War was the subject of widespread mythology and oral history. And absolutely nothing about Atlantis, even vaguely resembling Plato's story, has ever been discovered in actual Egyptian sources.
Given that Plato was fond of using fables (involving, for example, magic invisibility rings) to make a philosophical point, the overwhelmingly most likely conclusion, in the absence of the tiniest shred of evidence to the contrary, is that he just made the story up.
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I think you are confusing Romanesque architecture and neoclassical architecture. All the fascist architecture I'm familiar with is neoclassical, which is very different from Romanesque. Neoclassical architecture was a revival of styles that had been dead for nearly 1,000 years, a reaction against medieval architecture that was considered barbarian, hence "gothic" - and the 20th century neoclassical revival was a revival of that revival after several centuries when other styles (baroque, rococo, Georgian, Victorian gothic revival, art deco, and various types of modernist, to name a few) had predominated (although neoclassicalism had never disappeared entirely).
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@britaniawaves4060 "8 inches per mile squared doesn't seem to work"
Perhaps because that equation defines the curve of a parabola, not a circle or sphere.
"Never has an gaseous experiment been conducted without a container"
Literally millions of times gaseous experiments have been conducted without a physical container. It's called magnetic containment, look it up.
"i would love to hear your simple explanation for for the invisible untouchable unmeasurable magic that is gravity that is in such perfect balance with the entire universe that not one star has ever moved one inch in our observable history"
The stars have moved significantly in our history, records of ancient astronomers prove that. Polaris was not as close to the north pole 2,000 years ago as it is today, numerous ancient astronomers recorded that. They appear to move very SLOWLY because the distances involved are so immense. It takes literally hundreds of millions of years for us to orbit the center of the galaxy, to expect much apparent motion on the scale of a human lifetime is silly.
" density and buoyancy explains all the effects required"
Gravity is part of the equation for buoyancy, buoyancy literally cannot happen in the absence of gravity.
"If you believe we can see trillions and trillions of light years away but have to composite every picture of space"
We don't have to composite every picture of space. We have to composite many pictures of the earth, especially those taken by human astronauts, because the earth is much too large to see more than a small part of it from low earth orbit and most of our satellites (and all manned spaceflight for the last 45 years) doesn't get much higher than that because there's no good reason to go to the considerable trouble and expense to get there. Try to take a picture of a globe (or even a basketball) from 2 inches away and you'll see what I mean. But, for example, the famous Blue Marble photo and others taken by the Apollo astronauts are not composites, because they went much further from the earth than any satellite does. (Composites are also useful because at any given time much of the earth is completely obscured by cloud cover, so if you take 10 photos and then combine the least cloudy bits of each of them you'll see a lot more ground detail than you'll see in any of the individual photos.)
No complete photo exists of the wreck of the Titanic, only composites, because no light source the submersibles are capable of carrying can illuminate the entire wreck at once. Does this mean the wreck of the Titanic doesn't exist?
"FE's don't think that the sun is 93,ooo,ooo miles away"
Fine. How far away is it? Give me a figure and a way you've reached it and I'll tell you not just why it's wrong, but how you can use very simple everyday observations to prove that it's wrong.
Scientists don't believe the sun is (roughly) 93,000,000 miles away, they know it is, because its distance has been worked out with trigonometry. It's a little tricky at such a great distance, but the methods are sound and you can look them up if you like. The moon is much easier because it's so much closer, the ancient Greeks worked out the rough distance more than 2,000 years ago using parallax from different observation points a known distance apart on the earth's surface. Trigonometry doesn't lie, and it's simple enough that a reasonably bright 8th grader can easily understand it. But not, apparently, the average flat earther.
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@catachandevilfang Visit some countries outside of western Europe. Try the poorer parts of Mexico, or Indonesia, or Uzbekistan (granted, I haven't been to Uzbekistan, I'm only going by what I've read on that one), and the US won't seem nearly as bad. I'm not saying it's perfect, far from it, but there's a long way from perfect to authoritarian nightmare state. Just look at the current protests - sure, they are indicative of deep systemic problems, and the police are overreacting, but in most of the world they would have long since opened fire with live ammo and there'd be thousands of dead.
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@waw4428 Germans have already had one crazy tinpot dictator, they have no desire to live under another. As for those 6,000 nukes, they'll be lucky if 100 of them work, and in any case if they are stupid enough to use them the US, Britain, and France have 6,000 of their own warheads, all of which are in perfect working order.
(Also, only about 1/4 of those warheads on either side are currently actually deployed on missiles, and most of Russia's are short range, relatively low-yield tactical weapons.)
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@Warcraft40000 I get what you're saying, but the problem is this: in the academic world you're often talking about a very specialized context, and bringing in a definition from a dictionary that is not meant for that context only creates confusion and makes meaningful discussion more difficult.
I am an attorney, I've made a career in statute interpretation and annotation, and I can tell you that if you try to apply definitions from Webster's or even the OED in a legal context, or even worse if you look at the etymology of words that are used in legal jargon, you will get things very badly wrong. This is not because lawyers are trying to bamboozle the public, it's because its a very specialized and technical context that requires its own terminology to describe concepts that don't even exist outside that context, and while that terminology borrows words from everyday English and from other languages like Latin and Norman French, the meaning of those words changes when you use them in that context.
This is no less true of history, economics, politics, or any other academic field. If you are involved in a discussion on economics that involves the concept of elasticity and you insist on making pedantic points about the physical properties of rubber bands or the meaning of the Greek word elastos you are only adding confusion and removing actual meaning from the discussion.
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@mrpumperknuckles1631 "HYDROGEN ISNT A COMBUSTIBLE GAS" That's nonsense! Ever hear of something called the Hindenberg? As for turning oxygen into carbon, you're claiming nuclear fission is occurring inside an automotive engine? Again, that's 100% nonsense. What happens in an engine is the heat first breaks the bonds between the carbon and hydrogen atoms in gasoline (or diesel fuel), then the hydrogen combusts with atmospheric oxygen from the air intake to form H2O (water vapor), then any oxygen that's left combusts with the carbon to form CO and/or CO2. The exhaust is mostly nitrogen (from the intake air), water, CO2, CO, a bit of soot (unburned carbon), a small amount of NO (nitrous oxide from the small amount of nitrogen that does combust) and some amount of unburned hydrocarbon (fuel). The latter two are very bad for the environment so cars have a catalytic converter that combusts them in the exhaust system but the energy from that combustion is wasted. There are, as you note, also impurities in all fuel that of course turn up in the exhaust as well. What goes into the engine must come out.
"if the combustion causes the Oxygen turn into CO2 how can it turn into H2O? the answer is that it won’t it will turn into HC2O" No, it will turn into a mixture of H20 and CO2, which is exactly what you find in the exhaust of every internal combustion engine (and every jet engine as well, for that matter). Also, as stated above, combustion doesn't cause oxygen to "turn into" anything, there's no nuclear fission or fusion going on turning one element into another - what it does is cause the oxygen to combine with other atoms (carbon and hydrogen) to form chemical compounds. The net reaction is exothermic so you get heat along with the compounds. There is no such thing as HC2O, that's just gibberish. I'm guessing you slept through chemistry class in high school, or haven't gotten that far yet.
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@judicooke7533 Yes. The past is the past. Tom Brady is arguably the greatest quarterback in the history of football, but nobody's putting him on the field now, because it's not about what you did last year or ten years ago, it's about what you're going to do now. Willie Mays, who just passed away, was one of the greatest baseball players of all time, but nobody had him in center field when he was 81 years old, because it's not about what you did when you were in your prime, it's about what you're capable of doing now.
No matter what he did in the past, Biden is plainly incapable of functioning mentally. He could be Gandhi, MLK, FDR, Caesar, and Solon all rolled into one, and he still won't be a competent ruler when he's obviously suffering senile dementia.
And it wasn't a poor performance, it was a catastrophic performance, the worst performance in the history of TV debates.
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Never Mind the Bollocks, the Sex Pistols, punk; B-52s self titled debut, new wave; the Pleasure Principle (specifically the single Cars), Gary Numan, electronic; Pronounced Leh-nerd Skin-nerd, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Southern rock. I'd also have Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow tied with Sergeant Pepper's; the Beatles reached a larger audience, but Surrealistic Pillow is more thoroughly psychedelic and it hit the charts and the airwaves a few months before Sergeant Pepper's. Jefferson Airplane became pretty much the definitive soundtrack for the Summer of Love.
The Velvets' debut was hugely influential to other musicians, but it didn't popularize anything with the general public because it had very low sales and got no airplay when it came out. After the Velvets became famous and other popular musicians started talking about them being such an influence, fans looked back and discovered their first album.
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@johnburns4017 Whatever, little boy. What got you so butthurt about the US?
American aeronautical inventions are too numerous to even begin to mention, including, of course, the airplane itself. American fire control computers for naval guns and submarine torpedoes were the most advanced in the world; the US was the only country producing 100+ octane avgas, which gave a huge performance boost to Allied fighters; the Higgins boat, often called the weapon that won the war; synthesis of penicillin on a useful scale; blood plasma transfusions; radar fire control for warships; synthetic rubber; and, of course, the atomic bomb, probably the most important development in weapons technology since the invention of stone tools.
"Even the A-Bomb was worked out by the MAUD Committee then given to the USA free"
I don't think you could possibly make a more ignorant statement.
The theoretical science behind the a-bomb was the product of many people in many nations (although the world's first nuclear reactor was, of course, in Chicago, not London or Berlin), but the only nation that actually developed a working bomb, indeed the only nation that had anything remotely approaching the ability to refine enough uranium or synthesize enough plutonium for a bomb, was the US. You might as well say the V-2 was an American invention because of Robert Goddard.
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@danielkirpichnikov2007 Ludendorff, the mastermind behind the German war effort for the last half of the war, lost heart when his 1918 offensives failed to knock France out of the war and the Allied counteroffensive gained more ground than all previous Allied offensives put together, and he told the kaiser in September, 1918 that the war was lost and the government should seek whatever terms it could get from the Allies. In the same month the Balkan front collapsed and Germany's ally Bulgaria surrendered, and in the following month the Austro-Hungarian army collapsed in the face of Italy's final offensive and both Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire surrendered. To add insult to injury, the crews of the German battle fleet mutinied when the ships were ordered to sortie in a suicide mission, and the soldiers of the German army began deserting in large numbers since they knew the war was lost.
So no, Kaiser Wilhelm did nothing to bring the war to an early end, and Allied armies were going to be in Berlin within a month at most no matter what the German government did or did not do. The Allies won the war decisively and the only effect of the German request for an armistice - which was sent by the civilian government that had declared Germany in effect to be a democratic constitutional monarchy - was to save lives that would have been wasted fighting for a lost cause, and to keep the Allied troops west of the Rhine and avoid an occupation of most of the country.
if the end of the war was any one person's initiative , it was the US President, Woodrow Wilson. Before the US joined the war in 1917 Wilson had made repeated attempts to mediate a peace between the Allied and Central powers with no success.
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Before watching: The question isn't whether the plane can take off - it absolutely will - it's why people think it shouldn't. It's because they used to thinking about cars, which generate thrust purely by the friction of their wheels against the ground, so if the ground is moving under them as fast as their wheels are spinning they have no way to generate thrust. But a plane doesn't thrust against the runway, it thrusts against the air with either jets or propellers, and it uses airspeed, not ground speed, to generate lift, so the motion of the surface under it makes no difference. (It will generate a little more friction because the wheels have to turn faster, but this won't be enough to make a difference unless the plane is dangerously close to its maximum takeoff weight.)
In fact, it is possible for airplane to fly when it is completely motionless with respect to the ground if there's enough headwind (as on a carrier or in a wind tunnel, although manned military planes are much too heavy to do this on a carrier).
After watching: Nailed it!
I am a little surprised that the pilot didn't understand this right away. Understanding the relationship between air and ground speed is pretty fundamental for pilots.
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@astonm1990 Germany also had only a relatively small number of troops to defend Normandy; most of their troops were on the eastern front, the ones in the west were dispersed over hundreds of miles of coast, most of their troops in the west were second-line and comparatively immobile units, and above all, the Allies had used those months of complete air supremacy to isolate the battlefield by demolishing the transportation infrastructure of occupied France. To top it off, Hitler and von Rundstedt were not as familiar as Rommel was with the extreme difficulty of moving troops and their equipment in the face of the Allied tactical air forces, and had kept their best and most mobile forces as reserves which, in the actual battle, took far too long to reach the invasion site to stop the invasion before the Allies were able to land overwhelming forces. Rommel understood the need to get whatever forces were at hand to the beachhead within 24 hours rather than larger forces arriving weeks later - but he was mostly overruled. That was not helped by the successful bluff of a second invasion across the Pas de Calais, which fooled Hitler completely and kept powerful German forces tied up doing nothing in the Calais region while the decisive campaign was being fought in Normandy.
So as it turned out, because of all of these circumstances (which the PRC would not have in an invasion of Taiwan) the Germans theoretically had enough forces to defeat the invasion, but the Allies were able to use their complete air and naval supremacy and ships and landing craft built up for years just for this effort to bring superior forces to the actual battlefield more quickly than the Germans could and keep them supplied better than the Germans were. But it took an absolutely gargantuan effort. That capability simply doesn't exist anywhere in the world today, and it would take years of massive military spending and building programs to create it.
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You really should avoid repeating the cliche that plebeian = poor or common people. That may have been true 300 years before Caesar's time (although it's far from clear what the actual social structure was in Rome that far back) but it absolutely wasn't by Caesar's time. Most of the senators, including Pompey, Cicero, Cato, and Antony, were plebeians, as were most of the wealthiest men in Rome. A law mandated that at least one of the two consuls for any year had to be plebeian, and the powerful office of tribune was only open to plebeians. There was certainly a heightened social status that came with being from a patrician family, but that didn't automatically equate to wealth or power; some patrician families had long since gone extinct by this time and others had been reduced to poverty and obscurity. By Caesar's time there were only around 8 or 10 patrician families that were still politically significant in Rome, including Caesar's and Servilia's. (Brutus was a patrician, but only because he had been adopted by Servilia's brother: the Junii were a plebeian family despite being one of the most ancient and noble families in Rome.) All of the rest were plebeians.
A more accurate term for poor commoners of Rome in the late republic would be proletarii or capite censi.
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@person4905 The only chance any surface ship, Russian or US, has against modern submarines is operating in a task force with enough escorts, including friendly submarines, to cover a wide area densely enough to detect any enemy subs trying to penetrate its perimeter. This isn't a weakness specific to the Kirov, it's simply the state of modern naval warfare. Modern submarines are absolutely deadly to surface ships, and if the only mission was sea control and taking out enemy surface ships, submarines would be the only ships worth building.
Carriers exist because of their unparalleled ability to project power ashore hundreds of miles away; the reason I say the Kirov is a relic is it doesn't have that ability or really anything else to bring to the table that a submarine or carrier can't do better. (Its air defenses might be able to control the airspace immediately above it, but that's of zero strategic use.) It might make a decent escort ship, but without a carrier to escort that leaves it with no mission, and in any case you could build two or three modern destroyers or smaller air defense cruisers for the same cost and collectively they'd make a much better escort.
And the Kirov's air defenses are just outdated. Enemy planes have no need to get within effective range of its SAMs and its point defense systems can easily be overwhelmed by an enemy that can launch literally hundreds of missiles against it at the same time. Its defenses are only "unlimited" if the enemy is considerate enough to throw missiles at it in batches of 8 or 10 at most. A CBG has a lot more launchers available but more important its aircraft can at least theoretically prevent enemy planes from getting close enough to overwhelm its defenses like that, as well as giving it a standoff strike capability so the ships never have to get within effective range of enemy ship- or shore-based ASMs. Without that standoff capability the carrier would be just as pointless as the Kirov.
As I noted elsewhere, you might note that navies like China's that are focused on winning the next war rather than reliving the glory days of the 80s aren't wasting money building super-heavy missile cruisers primarily designed to take out enemy surface ships - they're an outmoded concept that have no point in modern war.
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@LucioFercho It had everything to do with the blockade, just not directly - the whole point was to even the odds so the Germans could win a decisive battle at a later date, at more even odds, and thus end the blockade. The effect of Jutland was to put that goal more out of reach than it was before.
Sunk, damaged, killed, everything else all has to be evaluated in terms of the larger strategic picture. The damage to the German ships put them out of action for the critical window in which they still had a chance to make a difference. In that sense they may as well have been sunk, since by the time they were ready for action again the numerical disparity had become hopeless. The British could afford the loss of a few battlecruisers (two of which were never intended to fight Dreadnoughts and had no more business being anywhere near a general fleet action than did the German pre-dreadnoughts), the Germans could not afford to have the bulk of their battle line put out of action for the rest of the year.
As someone else pointed out, if you just look at numbers of people killed, number of weapons platforms destroyed, etc., the Germans won the Battle of Kursk and the Confederates won the Battle of Antietam. But the relevant question isn't who scored the most kill points, it's who did what they needed to do to preserve or alter the strategic balance in their favor and who didn't. At Jutland The Germans lost the chance to ever take on the Grand Fleet at any odds better than suicidal, so strategically the battle was a failure for them.
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"We cracked their code" is an absurd oversimplification. There wasn't one code, there were dozens. The only one the Americans were able to crack before December 7 was the diplomatic code, and the Japanese (like everyone else) were very careful to reveal absolutely nothing about operational plans in diplomatic codes because diplomatic communications were inherently insecure. Even if we had cracked the top-level naval operational code, which we hadn't, we wouldn't have learned anything useful about the Pearl Harbor raid from it, because virtually nothing about that mission was sent via radio, which was the only way we could intercept coded transmissions - the Pearl Harbor strike force left directly from Japan, and the plans for the attack were conveyed by hand and further communications were sent by secure landlines. The task force maintained very strict radio silence for the whole journey - the Japanese even took the extreme measure of removing the hand keys from the radios on all the ships in the task force so no radio operators could inadvertently break radio silence. The only communication sent to the task force was the go code, "Climb Mt. Niitaka," which would have meant nothing to anyone but the recipient. The task force sent no acknowledgment of receiving that message. The Japanese also went to the trouble of having radio operators in Japanese home waters send routine messages pretending to be the carriers still in port so there would be no indication that they were anywhere else.
There were no carriers at Pearl on the 7th by sheer dumb luck. The two carriers stationed there, the Lexington and Enterprise, had been sent to ferry planes to Midway and Wake Island. The Enterprise was actually scheduled to be back in the harbor by December 6th, but she was delayed by bad weather (which no one could have predicted) and didn't arrive until the 8th.
There is absolutely no evidence that anyone in the US had any prior knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack. Whether it should have been predicted is another question. The diplomatic messages that indicated an attack on the 7th were only decoded the night before, and alerts were sent to all overseas commands in the Pacific. It's worth noting that MacArthur's forces in the Philippines were caught just as off guard by the Japanese air attack there even though that attack didn't come until 9 hours after the Pearl Harbor attack.
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I think that depends on the context. If your political goal is, say, to free your country from a military occupation that is itself established through violence, sometimes violence is the only means to accomplish that. This is something that I think Gandhi and King were wrong about - they both had the luxury of having opponents that, however brutal they could be in their systems of control, had to operate in the larger context of more or less liberal democracies. They were wrong in thinking the policeman will always tire of beating his victim - what happened with both of their movements is that the people back home were repelled by the policeman's brutality and eventually refused to countenance it any longer. The SS and NKVD are perfect examples of how, with the backing of a like-minded (usually totalitarian) government, it is sadly very easy to build a police force that will never tire of beating its victims, or indeed of murdering them, until it runs out of victims to murder.
Ireland probably could have been freed without violence, but as pointed out above, the disproportionate violence of the British response to Irish nationalism convinced many Irish people who had previously not supported the IRA that the British would never give up control of Ireland unless they were forced to, and violence was the only means of forcing them. The execution of the leaders of the Easter Rising was probably the most important British action in this context, but bringing in heavy artillery to level downtown Dublin in response to a few hundred ragtag, badly-armed, an largely unsupported rebels didn't help much with public opinion either.
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@Fluesterwitz If you're going to leave out the pre-Dreadnoughts, which I agree should be done, you should also leave out the early British battlecruisers that were designed solely as cruiser-killers, which had no more business getting anywhere near a clash of battle lines than the pre-Dreadnoughts did.
If you look at it in those terms, the losses in ships sunk were precisely one capital ship for each side plus a lot of obsolete or supporting ships that had little or no bearing on the strategic balance, and a 1-1 loss ratio favored the British. Add to that the severe damage to the German battle line that put it at a severe disadvantage for months after Jutland, which is precisely the time in which the HSF had a chance of further evening the odds before new British builds and eventually the entry of the US into the war made the Allied naval strength unassailable, and it's clear that Jutland was a complete failure for the Germans (if less than a complete success for the British).
It's a bit like the battle of the Coral Sea, where the Japanese won in terms of tonnage of carriers sunk, but lost in that the balance of carriers available for the critical next campaign was less in their favor after Coral Sea (4 to 3) than before it (6 to 4). The difference is that after Coral Sea the Japanese went on to risk battle with the lesser odds and lost spectacularly, while after Jutland the Germans decided not to risk any further general engagements and so lost by default. In the long run it was certainly better for the Japanese that Shokaku and Zuikaku were merely put out of action for few months rather than being sunk, but given the immense difference their absence made at Midway it would be a huge mistake to discount their being put out of action in evaluating the results of the Coral Sea battle.
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Race is more than genetic variation between people or even populations. The reason race doesn't exist is twofold - one, while traits do vary between local populations, but the way they are geographically distributed varies between different traits - there's no single border where everyone on one side has one set of traits and everyone on the other has a completely different traits, each trait has its own border. For example, take a look at the distribution of sickle cell trait - you'll often see it described as being common among Africans, but that isn't strictly true: there are parts of Africa where it is very common and other parts where it is as rare as it is among Europeans, and there are also parts of the Middle East and Asia where it is very common and other parts where it isn't. Its distribution does not match the distribution of, say, the genes for dark skin or kinky hair. Or look at the cephalic index, which represents head shape - there's not one head shape unique to Europe, another to Asia, and another to Africa, there are populations on all three continents with longer heads, and populations on all three continents with broader heads. Here's a map showing that distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cephalic_index#/media/File:PSM_V50_D602_World_cephalic_index_map.jpg Compare the similar index for Turkey, Poland, Burma, and Central America to the extremely different index for the UK, Arabia, India, and Japan. Doe those patterns match any race models you know of?
And two, humans have been far too mobile for there to be exclusive lines of descent. Almost everyone has mixed ancestry - like most male Europeans my own R1a Y-DNA haplogroup originated in southwestern Asia, while my mDNA comes from early western European hunter-gatherers. 5,000 years ago those ancestors lived ~ 2,500 miles apart. R1a is also found from India to the Bering Strait, those guys really got around. And there's also been large-scale migration between Africa, the Middle East, and southern Europe for thousands of years, including large numbers of sub-Saharan Africans traded as slaves and even used as soldiers by Arabs for centuries before the tansAtlantic slave trade began. Madagascar was colonized by Malays and Mongols reached as far west as Hungary - where they found Magyars who were originally from western Siberia. Outside of a few very isolated places like the Amazon rain forest or the Andaman islands, the idea of "racially pure" populations anywhere is nonsense.
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@davedoe6445 No, I am not, and you are misconstruing what race means. Tall and short are not races in literally any sense of the word, they are categories of otherwise unrelated people who share ONE single trait. And you completely missed my point. The point isn't that there are fuzzy boundaries, it's that the boundaries are completely different for different traits.
Yes, there are short people and tall people. There are fat and skinny people. There are intelligent and stupid people. There are blondes and brunettes. But if someone suggested that tall people are also intelligent, skinny, and blonde and short people are stupid, fat, and dark-haired, you'd laugh at their stupidity, because these traits are not linked in any way, there are many different combinations and someone's height tells you absolutely nothing about their intelligence or the color of their hair.
This is why race is a myth, except the differences we're talking about are between small(ish) groups of people rather than individuals. Of course there are groups of dark-skinned people and groups of light-skinned people. There are groups who tend to be tall and groups who tend to be short. There are groups where hair is almost always straight and groups where hair is almost always very curly. There are groups who tend to be long-headed and groups who tend to be broad-headed. And none of these traits are related or necessarily found together, or with any other trait. Dark-skinned populations can be (on average) tall or short, they can be long- or broad-headed, they can have straight or curly hair. If you map the world into regions based on any one of those traits, say, dark skin, and then map the world into regions based on another, say, skull shape, the maps don't look anything at all like each other. The boundaries of whatever races you propose are completely different depending on which traits you choose as your criteria. There is no possible racial breakdown you can create that coincides with all the maps for all traits, because they don't coincide with each other. What you end up with isn't three races or six races or ten races, it's 3,000 races - at which point you're no longer talking about races, you're talking about local populations.
Races are by definition broad categories - black people and white people, Europeans and Africans, Slavs and Aryans - who share not just one trait but a whole list of traits, traits which are generally exclusive to that group. A system that includes 500 or 3,000 races, each with its own arbitrary list of shared traits, where there is no individual trait that isn't shared with many other groups (just not in the same combination with other traits), isn't race.
Your second point is, again, not about race, it's about individual populations. Inuit, Sherpas, Andes Mountainers, these are not races, they are small populations. Yes, Sherpas and Andes Mountainers are very good at surviving at high altitude. So which race is the race that is good at high altitude, Asians or Native Americans? The answer is neither. Yanomamo aren't any better at surviving high altitude than Irish people are, nor are Khmer. These are not traits shared across a broad group of people occupying a whole continent or even a whole country, they are traits developed locally by small groups living in specific conditions. And the map of people good at surviving at high altitude does not even remotely match the map of people with dark or light skin, or the map of people with long or broad heads. Whatever list of traits you use to define your race, there will be some people good at high altitudes in it and some outside it, and there will be some people who do poorly at high altitudes in it and some outside it. It is not a racial trait, it is a local trait.
Likewise, dog breeds aren't race, they are something entirely different, something that can only come to exist through deliberate selective breeding. No dog breed is a natural adaptation to environmental conditions. And no dog breed would survive for even one generation if purebred dogs were allowed to mate with whatever other dogs they happened to encounter. (Thus the strict laws against miscegenation in highly segregated societies - they know race would soon cease to exist if the races were allowed to mix. The problem for them is that no such laws have existed for most of history in the vast majority of human societies. I was actually very surprised when my ancestry test came back 100% northwest European, because that's fairly uncommon for anyone whose family has been in Virginia as long as mine has, because European women were pretty scarce here in 1631.)
This is also what people mean by saying that the variations within each race are greater than the variation between purported races. Which race is taller, Europeans or Africans? The answer is neither. Africans includes both Pygmies, who are very short, and Masai, who tend to be very tall. If you measure the difference between the average Pygmy and the average Masai, that difference is much greater than the difference between the dead average African (with or without including North Africa) and the dead average European. So there is no tall or short African race, there are populations of people in Africa who tend to be very tall, and other populations within Africa who tend to be very short. You have to get to a very local area - usually only one of many groups within any given country - before you can find groups that are distinct in that way.
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"William of Normandy did rule the region as a vassal of the French King"
That is... complicated. As was feudalism. You could rule one territory as the vassal of one overlord, and another as the vassal of a different overlord, and yet another as vassal to no one. So while William was a vassal of the French king as Duke of Normandy, he was not a vassal of the French king as King of England. However, the French king could force him to do homage in the former capacity, and when it came to a war between the French and English crowns it got downright ugly.
It got even more complicated later when the Count of Anjou, who was also Duke of Normandy, became the first Plantagenet King of England. And then his descendants inherited the Duchy of Aquitaine from their mother, and later still inherited the French throne according to English, but not French, inheritance law. Positively messy, it was.
Free farmers in Anglo-Saxon England were not as poor or oppressed as you might imagine, although they certainly became more so after the Norman conquest. How much that was due to the conquest is still hotly debated.
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@tylerdurden6882 "other than whatever drag is in the plane's wheel's bearing's"
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
I expect it would be pretty easy to build a treadmill that could go fast enough that you couldn't keep your feet, or that your skates would suffer a catastrophic failure if you kept at it long enough. Although OTOH it would undoubtedly be possible to engineer a skate that could withstand speeds of 100mph or more, but you'd better be a damned good skater if you're going to try to keep your balance with such extreme forces, and you slip up it would get very ugly. It would be like trying to waterski at 90 mph - it's possible, and skilled ski racers do it, but the average person would probably kill themselves trying to do it even if the water surface was smooth as glass.
Of course an ordinary exercise machine won't go nearly that fast, but that's not because it's impossible to build a faster one, it's because there's no reason to build them that way. Gyms tend to eschew equipment that is likely to prove fatal to their patrons. Moving walkways already move way faster than most exercise machine belts.
What this means for the plane is that yes, theoretically the plane could take off from a conveyor belt at any speed, but I'm betting it is possible IRL (if not easy) to construct a conveyor belt that moved fast enough that an ordinary plane's landing gear would fail before it reached takeoff speed.
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@notahotshot "How about this, can a plane take off from an aircraft carrier which is moving in the opposite direction, at or above the takeoff speed of the plane?"
Short answer: no, because modern military planes can't take off under their own power in anything remotely near that short a distance, they need a catapult, and if the catapult is attached to a ship that's moving backwards at, say, 120 knots, that's the same as the car trying to generate thrust by friction with pavement that's moving backwards at 120 mph. When the plane reached the end of the catapult and got launched off the bow of the ship it would be moving 120 knots with respect to the ship but motionless with respect to the air and it would drop like a rock. Also the planes need the head-start on airspeed from the headwind created by the ship's motion.
Older, WW2 era planes did take off under their own power, but still, taking off with the wind instead of into it requires a much longer runway, and no carrier ever built would be long enough to reach takeoff speed before running out of deck. Carriers have ALWAYS steamed into the wind for takeoffs and landings because that's the only way to land or take off in such a short distance. (Some older planes and trainers can take off from a stationary ship, but not with a significant tailwind.)
Something like an ultralight or a drone could probably do it, though. And of course helos and VTOL aircraft can. But their takeoff mechanism is very different from a conventional fixed-wing aircraft, they don't need airspeed to generate lift.
Fixed-wing aircraft always land and take off into the wind for the same reason - otherwise they need a much longer runway because their ground speed is higher rather than lower than their airspeed.
The key differences with the conveyor are one, the conveyor matches the motion of the plane and doesn't start out with the plane moving backwards relative to the air, and two, the belt is endless, you're never going to run out of belt before you reach takeoff speed, even though you're moving twice as fast relative to the belt as you are relative to the air or the rest of the airport.
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More after 1945 than before, and only because the Nazis lost the war. If they'd won and carried out their plans for the east, they would have eventually murdered hundreds of millions of people. But the biggest difference was less the extent of Nazi crimes than the loose cannon Hitler was on the world stage - Stalin, for all his crimes, never deliberately started a world war, and for the most part was very careful to avoid letting local crises like Berlin and Korea escalate to world war. He might not be entirely honest, but he could generally be counted on to keep agreements as long as they were to everyone's benefit - for example, he gave the British a free hand in Greece in return for having a free hand in Poland, which, if not great for the Polish, was FAR better than provoking the West to war over it. He stole nuclear secrets from the US and UK, but used them for deterrence, not to launch a nuclear war. Hitler had no such scruples and deliberately sought a rematch of WW1 and a struggle to extinction with the USSR. And we can only imagine the horror that would have resulted had Hitler gotten his hands on nuclear weapons.
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@gg_rider I have, innumerable times, given the reason National Socialism is neither communist nor, in the sense the word is used today, socialist: because communism and socialism are by definition about class struggle, with other divisions like race and nationalism being treated as distractions from the real issue, while National Socialism was about race and nationality, with class being treated as a distraction from the real issue.
The fact that National Socialism has "Socialism" in its name is about as significant as the fact the North Korea has "democratic" in its name.
As to fascism, I would say you have to treat that label the same way we treat communism: there is capital C Communism, which means the specific movement and party in the USSR and those other movements and parties (like CPUSA) that are subordinate to it, and small c communism, which means all the many other movements and parties that share a certain amount of doctrine with big C Communism but also differ from it, especially in terms of how the doctrine is put into practice. Likewise Mussolini's Fascism and the broader category of global fascism.
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Assault rifle bullets tend to have considerably less energy, less penetration, and less stopping power than full-power rounds used in WW2 battle rifles or in most modern deer hunting rifles. The whole point of an assault rifle was to use a cartridge midway between a pistol and rifle cartridge so the rifle would have more range than a pistol-caliber SMG but less recoil (and thus be easier to control in full auto) than a full-powered rifle. A side benefit is that the cartridges are lighter so a soldier can carry more of them. As an example, the first assault rifle, the German Sturmgewehr, had a muzzle energy of about 1,400 foot-pounds as compared to roughly 3,000 foot-pounds for the 7.92x57mm Mauser K98 that was the standard German infantry rifle of the time. Likewise the 5.56mm cartridge used in the M-16 and AR-15 generally has about 1,300 foot-pounds of energy (depending on barrel length) compared to about 2,800 for the .30-06 M1 rifle used in WW2.
Anytime you hear someone talking about those super-lethal, horrifically high-powered, "military grade assault weapons" it's a sure sign that the person speaking knows nothing about firearms and is just parroting media and political hype.
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I would dispute that the Shokaku class were superior to the Yorktown class. They were more or less equivalent in terms of carrying capacity, speed, and protection, and the Yorktowns had greatly superior AA armament and fire suppression equipment. The huge disadvantage the Americans had in carrier warfare was malfunctioning torpedoes carried by obsolete planes - if the Americans had had B5Ns and their torpedoes and the Japanese TBDs and Mk 13s for the first four carrier battles of the war, the only US carrier lost would have been the woefully underprotected Wasp (and that to a submarine) while Shokaku would have been sunk twice!
I would also dispute that Japanese cruisers were better than the Baltimore or Atlanta class or that Japanese destroyers were better or even as good as modern American destroyers. They were simply optimized for night surface actions, so of course they did better there, at least early in the war. But the American ships were vastly better at anti-air and anti-submarine warfare, and also had a huge advantage in radar once American commanders learned to use it properly (or even at all). And in the war these proved more important by far than night surface actions - aircraft (and carriers) and submarines decided the war, not surface ship. The Americans lost at Savo Island and Tassafaronga and still won the Guadalcanal campaign, while the Japanese lost at Midway and lost the battle vs. American commerce-raiding submarines and lost the war.
(Another factor you don't mention is that the Japanese were not so much better at designing ships as they were better at fudging treaty violations - or in the case of Yamato simply ignoring the treaties. The South Dakota class battleships were arguably the best treaty-compliant (more or less) battleships in the world and technically superior to the Yamatos in pretty much every respect, but having an extra 30,000 tons to play with makes a big difference, if not making much sense from an economic standpoint.)
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@petriew2018 To the extent they base this on anything remotely resembling evidence, it's that the classical Greek alphabet was based on Phoenician letters that ultimately descended from people adapting Egyptian logograms to represent sounds in their own language (the proto-Sinaitic script). But that was a good thousand years before the Greek alphabet developed, and, again, that was brought to Greece by Phoenicians, not Egyptians. And the Greek alphabet existed in some form for a good 4-500 years before Alexander the Great. It also wasn't the first script used to write Greek, that was the script we now know as Linear B, which was probably descended from Cretan hieroglyphs that were, as far as we can tell, completely unrelated to Egyptian hieroglyphs. And while the Egyptians definitely invented their own hieroglyphs, it is quite likely that they didn't independently invent the idea of writing, they got the idea from the Sumerians.
Of course the Afrocentrists also insist that the Sumerians, like basically everyone else on the planet, were actually black Africans before they got "replaced" by "Arabs". And any evidence for anything contradicting their claims is all fake news made up by racists.
Afrocentrists are very silly people.
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And yet, by 1944 the Germans deployed something like 2/3 of their fighter and AAA resources to oppose those "useless" raids (and the equally dangerous and inaccurate RAF night bombing) , and once the Americans had fighters with the range to escort the bombers all the way to their targets they completely broke the back of the Luftwaffe fighter arm.
Also, it took a lot of arm-twisting by Marshall and Eisenhower, but the USAAF did make quite a lot of bombers, even the heavies, available for the extremely effective bombing campaign in France leading up to the Normandy invasion. The crippling of the French transit network was what gave the Allies time to establish their beachheads and build up superior forces for the breakout from Normandy.
"Morale bombing", btw was a British notion, not an American one - the American effort was aimed at crippling the war economy with precision strikes on industrial and transportation choke points. The failure of that was partly because it was beyond the means of the tools at hand but also because of the extreme inexperience of the American aircrews for the first year or so of the bombing campaign. Most of the crews didn't even use their bombsights or navigate on their own, they just put the most experienced bombardiers and navigators in the lead planes and had the rest of the formation just follow along and drop their bombs when the lead plane did. The problems with manufacturing were the result of similar factors, and it should be noted that every one of the belligerent nations had similar problems, with the Germans and Japanese having far worse problems with defective equipment than the Allies ever did.
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After everything we read for 5000+ pages they just dropped or absurdly simplified massive issues with character arcs, history, prophecies, etc. like none of it ever happened. It was essentially the $100M version of "rocks fall, everyone dies". And absolutely none of it made any sense at any level.
What was the prophecy or vision that so radically changed Rhaegar's life and the history of Westeros? Who did the Valonqar refer to? Exactly what did Ned mean, if anything, by "there must always be a Stark in Winterfell"? What was responsible for the return of dragons and magic generally at this time, and what had caused their demise to begin with? What was the Maesters' secret plan and how and why did Marwyn get the glass candle to burn? Who was Alleras and what was he (they?) up to? What was with the years-long winters and why did the latest Long Winter occur when it did? What was Doran Martell's long-term plan? What was Littlefinger's ultimate goal and end game? What are the Faceless Men scheming towards and why did they take Arya in as a novice when she plainly wasn't ever going to be No One? What were the three betrayals Daenerys would go through? All these things fans have been furiously debating for decades now and the show not only didn't answer any of them, it just completely ignored their existence.
I think part of the problem is that GRRM has never really decided whether the beating heart of the story was Machiavellian power politics or the existential threat to humanity from ice zombies, and D&D just decided it was the former and that nothing involving the later really mattered other than something that had to be rushed through to get back to the politics. GoT/ASoIaF is a fantasy series but to them it was a corset drama, and a cheap, boring corset drama at that.
And then there are all the character assassinations, especially Varys and Tyrion going from masters of the game to bumbling idiots who couldn't tie their own shoes without help and Jon Snow having essentially zero significant part to play in anything until he stabbed Dany, and the utterly boring and anticlimactic Clegane Bowl.
And it's less Bran ending up king than how it happened and Tyrion's completely nonsensical justification for it. Not to mention, why was there even going to be someone on the Iron Throne when neither the Iron Throne nor the entire reason for it existing to begin with still existed at the end of the show? And why would Dorne put up with being subject to it any more than the North would? As several characters in the books pointed out on different occasions, the Seven Kingdoms paid homage to dragons and the Targaryens riding them, but neither was still around, so why should they still bend the knee? And forget about Bran's character arc, why would anyone from south listen to any of it or care about it enough to make him king?
It's plain that D&D not only didn't spend 10 seconds thinking about any of these questions, they had contempt for the idea that any of them were worth thinking about. They cared absolutely NOTHING about the source material or its fans.
And what's doubly ironic is that now House of the Dragon is raising all the same points again, including the legitimacy and reasons for of the Targaryen monarchy, like GoT hadn't just dumped all of it into the trash bin. And HotD is ten times better than anything in the last 2-3 seasons of GoT.
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stephen morris Dieppe was ONE lesson in how NOT to conduct a failed invasion. The Americans had dozens of lessons in how to conduct successful ones in the Pacific. You've probably never heard of most of them because of your Eurocentric bias. My uncle was at one of them, one of those places you've never heard of called Biak, where about 5,000 men on both sides died - about 4 times as many as at Dieppe, although as an American success the ratio of Allied to Axis casualties was the reverse of Dieppe. Some of the others include Guadalcanal, New Georgia, Vella Lavella, Choiseul, Bougainville, Cape Gloucester, Lae, the Admiralty Islands, Hollandia, Aitape, Kiska, Tarawa, Makin, Kwajalein, Roi-Namur, and Eniwetok.
Dieppe was an important learning experience for the British and Commonwealth, who at that point had a lot more experience with evacuations than invasions, but the most important thing that came out of it was probably the notion of building the Mulberry artificial harbors because the planners concluded that substantial ports like Le Havre or Cherbourg were too heavily defended to be taken at the outset of the invasion.
I replied above about the combat experience of several of the American divisions that landed or dropped on D-Day - the US 1st Infantry Division had nearly a year of continuous VERY hard fighting in North Africa and Sicily. And most of the British and Canadians who had been fighting those battles in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy were still in Italy - along with most of the many American troops who had been fighting in the same campaigns since late 1942. Perhaps you've heard of a place called Anzio? Or a certain obscure general named Patton?
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@ImperialSenpai The Holy Roman Empire was a relic by then. It didn't really function at all the way it did in the Middle Ages after 1648. There was a thing called the Thirty Years' War, perhaps you should read about it.
I just recently read a book about the Napoleonic Wars which concentrated on the political arena and argued that the Napoleonic Wars were less like the revolutionary wars and more like 18th century wars in terms of great power goals, ambitions, and tradeoffs. The carving up of the former HRE, as with the Ottoman Empire, took several centuries not because the petty states being carved up had any meaningful say in the process, but because each great power very carefully balanced the costs and benefits of any territorial change against the costs and benefits to its rivals.
Also, Napoleon never called himself the HRE, he was styled Emperor of the French, which was a novel institution that claimed no continuity with the Roman Empire.
Austria still exists because the Allies won WW2 and didn't want Germany getting any territory it hadn't had in 1918. Czechia was never German. Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, all the other old German states do not exist as sovereign states as they were in 1700, they are constituent parts of Germany the same way New York and Virginia are merely constituent parts of the US. In both cases its a federal union but supreme power resides at the federal level.
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@WingkKong If you really think that you are an idiot. Both Khrushchev and Zhukov, Stalin's best general, said in their memoirs that the USSR could never have won that war without massive assistance from the US and UK. Even Stalin admitted it in private. And that was while the US was fighting its own total war against Japan on the other side of the planet - a war whose main purpose, btw, was to stop Japan's fascist government from enslaving all Asia, and most of all China, in an empire that was more brutal and rapacious than any European empire had ever been.
China should send the US a present every year to thank Americans for sacrificing so much to save China from Japan's militarist fanatics of that time.
Fortunately for themselves and the world, Japan's people decided to become peaceable members of the international community after losing that war, and since that time, with the help and friendship of their former enemy, the US, they have become one of the most prosperous and free nations on the planet. Meanwhile every country unfortunate enough to fall under Soviet control endured 45 years of poverty and ruthless oppression.
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I don't think one can be "converted" like that, and I'm pretty sure no one just wakes up one morning at age 11 or 12 and decides to be gay or straight, but I don't think orientation can be completely isolated from behavior, choice, and culture either. How could it be when literally nothing else about human beings is?
You don't deliberately choose whether you find asparagus or whiskey or coffee appetizing or revolting, but you can acquire a taste for it even if you were initially disgusted by it, and whether you get the chance to acquire that taste depends on whether you choose to consume it that first time or not, and if you don't like it at first, whether you choose in persisting in your attempt to learn to enjoy it or not. Or you could choose never to try it and never discover how much you'd like it if you tried it. Why should sexual contact with the same sex, or for that matter with the opposite sex, be that different?
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That's something I think TIK, whose analysis is otherwise excellent, consistently fails to recognize. For Britain, for France, even for Stalin, war and foreign policy were inextricably tied to rational, if not always ethical, political goals. For the German generals and many other Germans, that was true as well. But Nazism was a romantic movement, one that placed itself in diametric opposition to Enlightenment rationalism - that's the reason for all those torchlit rallies and book-burnings and blood banners and all the SS occult weirdness. For them, while rational goals still mattered, ultimately war was a spiritual exercise, a way to both attain and demonstrate the dominance of the Aryan race, to purify the blood and purge the nation of weakness. You cannot understand Hitler by analyzing him solely as a rational actor, because the heart of his ideology was a rejection of pure rationality.
And Hitler had another motive as well: like many Germans but even more so, he was extremely bitter about the defeat in WW1 which he could never accept as a legitimate loss of the war by Germany. Hitler had to have a rematch against Britain and France in order to prove that Germany would have won the first time but for the "stab in the back" by Jews and communists. No matter how well off Germany might be materially after the new conflict, if it didn't accomplish that - humiliate the Western Allies and show the spiritual and military superiority of Germany beyond all doubt - it would not satisfy him personally.
Many of his generals understood that in 1938 and that was why they saw him as a dangerous madman who would bring ruin on Germany. And Churchill understood it as well.
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@misarthim6538 " In terms of air combat, that means that it could pretty much choose when to fight and thus only fight under favorable conditions." Only if the fight started low and slow. If not, F4Fs and P40s could always dive away from the fight while Zeros, which would become uncontrollable and even shed wings at speeds the American planes could easily tolerate, could not. It also had insufficient armament - the 20mms had atrocious ballistics and very little ammo, and the 7.7mms might as well have been peashooters against the tough American planes - and could take far less damage. And in a head-on, which was relatively easy to achieve with the right wingman tactics, the American plane had a huge advantage because of the advantages in toughness and firepower.
Climb rate is nice to have, particularly for bomber interception, but climbing into a fight would get you killed even in a better plane, and climbing couldn't save you from an opponent who started with a big advantage in energy and position. Climb rate mostly helped in an even engagement between similar small numbers of planes starting at a similar speed and altitude, and while often that's the expectation in games, in the real war the Americans quickly learned not to even think about fighting like that.
The Japanese pilots, even more so in the AAF, placed way too much stock on maneuverability, particularly tight turns at low speed, seeing air to air combat as a dogfight with victory going to the first plane to get guns on target. The planes they ended up in reflected that. The Americans, like the Germans, quickly learned to treat fighters as ambush hunters, not knife fighters, scoring kills when they had an initial advantage and refusing combat when they didn't, and the planes they flew reflected that.
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@misarthim6538 "Zero's could choose whether they'll initiate fight or not because they were faster in level flight and climbed better."
Again, only if they start on an equal or better E basis. If the Wildcats or Warhawks started with a significant altitude advantage, the Zeros were trapped because the American planes were faster diving than the Zeros were either diving or in level flight. If the Zeros started with a significant altitude advantage, the American planes could still dive away unless they were already on the deck. And...
"Zeros could fly circles around Wildcats without Wildcats being able to do anything about it."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thach_Weave Zero pilots never learned any way to counter this tactic. Part of its effectiveness was because a Wildcat could always turn into an attack by a Zero, while a Zero didn't dare turn into an attack by a Wildcat because the much sturdier Wildcat would win the resulting head-on nine times out of ten.
Anyway the numbers just don't bear your assertions out. Zeros racked up impressive scores for the first six months or so because the inexperienced American (and British, Commonwealth, and Dutch) pilots didn't know how to fight them properly. Once the gap in pilot skill and experience closed, Wildcats and P-40s could and did engage Zeros on at least an even basis. And of course once P-38s, P-47s, F6Fs, and F4Us, all significantly faster than Zeros, started appearing int he second year of the war the Zero was obsolete and doomed.
"Yes they could run away, but that's not really an option if you protect say squadron of SBDs."
Which is why American fighter pilots learned to cover the bombers from above so they could dive down and break up incoming attacks rather than flying close escort where they'd get bounced by intercepting enemy fighters.
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Okay, do just that. Draw a circular smiley face on the ceiling on one side of your room (preferably with washable crayons). Now walk to the other side of the room and look at your drawing. You see the same face, sure, but is the overall shape of the face still a circle, or does it appear to be an ellipse? Does the moon ever appear to be a narrow ellipse to any observer at any time anywhere on the earth? No, it does not. That's how your experiment will disprove the FE moon.
As for the moon spinning, it spins at the exact same rate it revolves around the earth, so the same side of it is always facing us. If you'd paid attention the video explains that. As for the earth spinning, yes, exactly, that's why the moon rises and sets.
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@bakters The US wasn't getting large numbers of replacement pilots either in autumn, 1942. But they understood that fewer pilots who were not half-dead from exhaustion, stress, and tropical diseases was better than more pilots who were at that point of collapse. Sick, exhausted, demoralized pilots were more of a liability than an asset. The Japanese simply expected their pilots to buck up and take it, and that was a terrible idea no matter how good the pilots were or how urgently they were needed.
Winning at Midway wouldn't have changed much except the temporary balance of carrier decks. Relatively few Japanese pilots went down with the carriers at Midway, most of their aircrew losses (a bit over 100 men) were to US AA fire and would have happened even if they'd won. Their pilot losses in the Santa Cruz battle, which was a tactical victory for the Japanese, were actually more severe than at Midway, despite fewer carriers being involved and none lost. Santa Cruz is a typical story: the Japanese inflicted more damage on the US fleet, but lost 99 aircraft to the US' 81,and, much more important, 148 pilots and other aircrew to 26 for the US. American aircrew were highly likely to survive the loss of their planes while Japanese aircrew were not.
The really bad human loss at Midway was the hundreds of highly skilled mechanics, armorers, and other technicians who were in the carrier hangars when they were turned into infernos. Even the engineering spaces of the doomed carriers had a better survival rate than the hangar decks.
But what killed the pilot corps of the IJNAF was the long, relentless slog of the Solomons campaign as a whole.
A major factor was the difference in recovery rates for downed aircrew, which was the result of several factors but had the united theme that the Japanese simply didn't prioritize this while the US did. This is where having a feudal death cult mentality in a modern technological war gets you. The US didn't need to throw hordes of untrained rookies at the Japanese, not because they were getting large numbers of replacement pilots, but because their veteran pilots were surviving to fight another day regardless of the outcome of individual battles while the Japanese veterans were dying gloriously for the Emperor.
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@bakters Armor was "fragmentary" because it is heavy, weight is a huge consideration for aircraft, and a lot of thought was put into where it was most needed and where it could be dispensed with.
The TBD wasn't a deathtrap because of any particular design feature or philosophy, it was a deathtrap because it was terribly obsolete by 1942. Both pilots and planners were aware of that and a much better replacement was in the pipeline, it just hadn't been built in sufficient numbers to replace the TBDs at Midway. You go to war with the weapons you have. By contrast, the Zero (and the Betty it was designed to escort) was a deathtrap because of a design philosophy: putting all priority into speed, range, and maneuverability at the expense of survivability. It was not obsolete and waiting replacement in 1942, it was the newest and best design the Japanese had for a naval fighter until 1944.
Many planes, including the F4U-1A and the Merlin-powered P-51s, had some self-sealing tanks and some that weren't. The idea was to use the fuel in the non-self-sealing tanks before reaching the combat area (and in the case of the F4U, jettison any remaining fuel in them and purge them with CO2 before commencing combat, I'm not sure if the Seafire had this feature or not). The Japanese did eventually realize the folly of trying to fight with non-self-sealing tanks full of fuel and added self-sealing tanks (as well as pilot armor) to many planes including the later Zero variants. But again, the early Zeros lacking any self-sealing tanks was not a matter of their not being available, it was a deliberate design choice, and, as it turned out, a very bad one. They felt range was more important, and their pilots paid the price.
(Also, I'm in this discussion with several people and I don't remember whether it was you or one of them who pointed out that many of these defects were inevitable due to the limitations of Japanese engine technology, which may deflect some blame from the designers, but saying the Zero suffered from being underpowered for a 1942 fighter, which it was, kind of negates the idea that it was technologically superior. it just means its technological inferiority had a different cause. Having 30% more engine power, as the F4F-3 and P-40E both did, was a form of technological superiority.)
You asked for sources, I gave some to you. I can't read them for you. Let's put the shoe on the other foot: cite me a source to support your claim that Japanese aircrew losses were not much worse than American from mid-1942 to the end of 1943.
As for feudal death cults, if you have any account of any Allied pilot declining to wear a parachute because bailing out and possibly being captured was dishonorable, I'd love to hear it. Japanese pilots having that attitude has been documented in too many sources to even begin to list them. It's been ages since I read Suburo Sakai's book, and I don't have it with me, but I'm pretty sure he mentions it.
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The real problem with this list is less who is or isn't on it but that it's based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what punk was and is - understandable since what punk is is pretty much antithetical to things like WatchMojo. One thing that separated punk from more mainstream genres from the very first is that it's always been about a scene, a subculture, an underground community, much more than about major record labels and other mass media. Punk was never a radio format, it was what bands that were in the punk scene played. people listened to albums, but it wasn't about albums, it was about shows. From a purely musical standpoint Bad Brains were as much a fusion or reggae band as punk, but they didn't play in jazz clubs or reggae clubs to jazz or reggae audiences, they played in hardcore clubs and hardcore punks came to see them. CBGB and the 930 were important because of the music being played there, but if you only heard the Ramones' or Bad Brains' albums (or later, saw their music videos) and didn't see them at CBGB or the 930, or the equivalent in your town, you missed out on what punk was all about.
That's why I don't think much after 1990, and certainly not Green Day or the Offspring, was really punk - by that point it was something you saw on MTV or heard on modern rock stations and maybe went to see in a stadium, not something you discovered in a roach-infested, reeking basement in the worst part of town. Before that you might have heard about it and listened to friends' records, but until you went to that basement you never really knew what punk was. When punk outgrew that basement it stopped being punk and started being nostalgia and tourism. Of course there still was punk in nasty basements after 1990, and there still is, but most of what went into the "punk" CD bin or radio format had nothing to do with real punk, with the subculture.
I'm told by my elders that the same is true about the hippie counterculture - when tourists from Peoria were snapping photos of themselves at the corner of Haight and Ashbury, hippies were dead as a cultural force and had become another flavor of entertainment for Hollywood and Madison Avenue to make great big gobs of money from. I still love that music too, but I don't delude myself that I ever had the chance to experience what was going on in San Francisco in 1966 - nor did any of my schoolmates who were wearing designer tye-dies to see Dead cover bands in the 80s. (The Dead themselves were a unique phenomenon long after the hippie counterculture was gone.)
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@elsemorris906 "Jesus was born to a JEWISH mother which automatically makes Jesus a Jew since Jewish law. observes matrilineal descent."
Modern and medieval Judaism define it that way. Jews in ancient times did not, or else David's grandfather Obed wouldn't have been Jewish and neither would Solomon's son Rehoboam, from whom the royal line of Judah descended. There's not a whisper in the Torah about matrilineal descent. Exactly how and when that changed is in interesting and as of now still incomplete story. But it parallels a fundamental shift in the concept of what it means to be Jewish.
Likewise, modern Jewish authorities say that any Jew who comes to believe that Jesus was the Messiah and joins a Christian church is no longer Jewish. Since Jesus believed that he was the Messiah and considered himself the founder of the Christian Church (he calls it my church when saying Peter will be the rock on which it is built), at least he's portrayed in the Gospels, by modern standards he was not Jewish, but Christian. However, like matrilineal descent, that doctrine only developed some time after Jesus lived and died, so by the standards of his own day even the highest Jewish authorities agreed that Jesus was a Jew (which is why they wanted to execute him for blasphemy - they wouldn't have given a fig if a Roman or Greek had proclaimed themselves the messiah, beyond telling their followers to have nothing to do with him).
I'm not saying all this to be pedantic, but to point out the danger of asking questions or making statements about ancient history without thoroughly understanding the context. Today, saying "___ is a Jew" carries a different set of meanings and expectations than it did in Jesus' day, so while you are correct in saying that Jesus was a Jew and considered himself to be a Jew, that means something very different than it does for someone saying the same thing today.
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@osiris7523 We're not. We're mad because you can't stop lying. African != black. As others have pointed out, Elon Musk is African, but he's about as pale as a non-albino can be.
Also, "Caucasian" and "Arabic" aren't things, at least, not in the way you're using them. Egyptians are not Arabs, they speak Arabic, which is not remotely the same thing. You speak English, does that make you English and therefore white? And "Caucasians" did not come from the Caucasus Mountains, that is pure ignorance. That's not even why they were first called that 150 years ago. And Kemet, Kush, and Nubia were three different countries. What you're doing is like saying China/Japan/Korea as if they were the same cultures. Nubians didn't even speak Egyptian except as a ritual language, like Catholic priests speak Latin.
Please, do yourself a favor and get a real education. A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
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From looking at that paper it appears that the surveys in question were just trying to determine if the explosion was from an atomic weapon at all, not what sort of weapon it was. They didn't even make the final determination that the bomb was atomic until August 10. The other objective was determining the effects on human health of the particular kinds of radiation/fallout found at Hiroshima.
And there was zero knowledge about the manufacture of plutonium in Japan in 1945. They certainly wouldn't have had the slightest idea about the capacity of the Hanford reactor or the uranium purification plant at Oak Ridge. Theoretical knowledge would be useless there, it was a question of the size of the facilities. Incidentally, plutonium wasn't first synthesized and discovered in a reactor, it was synthesized in a cyclotron (a type of early particle accelerator), but the amounts produced by cyclotron were far too small to produce a critical mass that could be used in a weapon. The whole reason the gun design was discarded for use with plutonium was that the reactor-produced plutonium contained unexpected impurities that were not present in the cyclotron-produced samples and those impurities would cause pre-detonation (a "fizzle") if used in the gun design. Again, since this was the only plutonium producing reactor on the planet it's extremely unlikely that anyone without access to the Manhattan Project (i.e., the US, UK, and Stalin's spies) had any idea about this as it had not been predicted by theory, it was only discovered once the reactor was up and running and the plutonium it produced could be analyzed. It's not even clear that during the war the Japanese knew of the existence of the reactor at Hanford that was producing plutonium as their own atomic program was focused on uranium.
There's also zero indication in that paper that the survey team was aware of any difference between the bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki until after the war.
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@NathanDrake0410 Congress hasn't declared war in the last 80 years. That hasn't stopped US presidents from committing air, naval, and ground forces to battle on numerous occasions. The War Powers Act grants the president the authority to commit US forces necessary to combat a national emergency including any attack on American forces 9which this would be, since there are American forces in Taiwan), but he or she must notify Congress within 48 hours and seek authorization from Congress for any action lasting more than 60 days.
As for Taiwan not being a core US interest, neither was South Korea in 1950 or South Vietnam in 1964. The problem now, as it was then, is that if you let a bully attack an ally who is not a core national interest, it will only encourage the bully to keep attacking until it reaches something that is a core interest - and by then your options for fighting back are more limited. It's the lesson Neville Chamberlain learned the hard way at Munich.
So the question isn't whether Americans will be willing to risk their lives for an island that isn't a core US interest, it's whether Americans will be willing to risk their lives to nip Chinese aggression in the bud now rather than facing an even more dangerous and emboldened enemy later, and also to prove to our allies around the world that we won't abandon them when faced with military aggression.
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@TheImperatorKnight "Can you not pay for these things directly through the market?"
No, you can't, because you can't buy public safety just for yourself, it is inherently communal. (You can buy private security, but it doesn't perform the same function.) The criminal who would mug me or rob my house would also mug you or rob yours, putting him in prison benefits you as much as it does me - it benefits all of society, not just the person he happens to be caught robbing. You can't pay for tanks and fighter planes to defend your own life and property but not mine, war obviously doesn't work that way. Either all of us are defended or none of are. Also things like pollution - we all breathe the same air, I can't pollute my air without polluting yours as well, so either it is prohibited for everyone or it isn't prohibited for anyone. You can't buy your own clean atmosphere. It's a combination of the problem of free riders and the tragedy of the commons. Libertarianism has yet to come up with any answers to these problems.
And these are hardly socialist ideas. Edmund Burke would agree with me 100%. I am pretty sure Thomas Sowell would as well, at least as far as national defense and public safety are concerned. Socialism is redistribution of wealth from individuals to other individuals to be more "fair", not banding together and pooling resources to handle issues that are inherently communal like national defense and public safety. In fact, those are the primary purposes for which governments were instituted, as America's founders stated in our Declaration of Independence.
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@Lashkor I'm sure there are a few, but few people who learn those arts have the chance to use them all that much in real life - how much literal hand-to-hand combat does any modern soldier ever engage in, and how much training in elite martial arts does the average prison or bar fighter have? - so I would guess that an MMA expert with many, many hours of actual experience in real fights - even sport fights - against aggressive, uncooperative opponents would beat the tar out of someone very well trained in a more lethal martial art who has little or no experience in real, non-training fights. There's just no substitute for experience.
The thing that I think makes MMA experience so valuable is that because it so open-ended as to forms, you can't just learnt to defend against specific types of attack, you have to learnt he flexibility to defend against any kind of attack. So defending against a lethal attack that is illegal in MMA won't be that different than defending against any other sort of unusual or unorthodox attack, except for the consequences if you fail. It's not like, say, boxing where the number of ways your opponent can attack you is strictly limited and you have trained to counter each one of those specific possibilities, and anything off that menu is going to be a completely novel experience for you.
And because of that open-ended environment I suspect it would be pretty easy for a very experienced MMA fighter to adapt to a more lethal environment - maybe not in one fight, but a lot quicker than someone less experienced but trained in a more lethal style could gain the experience.
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If you're going to discuss the origins of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, it borders on the criminal to exclude the crucial fact that in the wake of WW2 the US and UK underwent a massive demobilization while the USSR did not - sources vary, but in 1948 the US Army probably had approximately 400,000 soldiers while the Soviet Red Army still had something like 4 million. You speak of, for example, confrontations in Berlin as if these confrontations were on anything remotely approaching an equal basis militarily, which is absolutely contrary to fact. For the US, nuclear weapons were seen as a relatively inexpensive way to balance out this massive Soviet conventional military superiority. This policy continued throughout the Eisenhower administration: conventional US forces were built up substantially after the outbreak of the Korean War, but never to anything approaching the level of Soviet forces until the Vietnam War escalation. NATO was another part of the western response to this massive Soviet military establishment, the largest peacetime military force in the history of the planet.
This becomes particularly important in looking at the Cuban missile crisis. Less informed observers will point to the US superiority in nuclear warheads, and the deployment of land-based nuclear missiles in places like Turkey with the ability to strike the USSR, and say the US was overreacting because the missiles in Cuba weren't doing anything the US wasn't already doing to the Soviets. But this ignores the larger strategic context in which these weapons were deployed. No world leaders in 1962 saw nuclear weapons solely in terms of a nuclear exchange trying to wipe out the other's cities; they were assets in a much larger and more complex strategic picture. Specifically, the US nuclear threat was seen primarily as a deterrent to Soviet use of their massive conventional superiority to overrun western Europe. NATO didn't have the conventional military capacity to invade eastern Europe, while the USSR and the Warsaw Pact didn't dare invade western Europe for fear of provoking nuclear retaliation; thus, there was a stalemate in which neither side had much to gain by starting a war.
Putting missiles in Cuba or anywhere else that gave the USSR a substantial capacity to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike changed the situation dramatically. The threat Kennedy and the military planners feared from this wasn't a Soviet first strike (which still would have been suicidal), it was that by making Soviet retaliation a serious threat it removed NATO's nuclear deterrent from the table in the scenario of a conventional war in Europe, and thus gave the Soviets a free hand to launch such an invasion if they chose without having to worry about a nuclear response. Put simply, Soviet missiles in Cuba made the threat of a massive conventional war in Europe much more likely than it was in the absence of those missiles.
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@KI.765 I'm not saying they don't have specific meaning, I'm saying that when you get into detailed discussions in any specialized field those meanings are not found in a general dictionary. The meaning of "socialist," for example, isn't what's found in Webster's OR on Wikipedia or even the OED, it's a meaning that has to be gleaned from a thorough education in economics and political science. There's no shortcut to that. If you don't have a good professional education in those subjects, all you can do is consult someone who does, or be willing to do a LOT of reading - I mean years doing literally nothing else.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, I'm an attorney. I occasionally find myself getting into debates online about the interpretation of statutes or case law and the meaning of certain terms. Anyone who doesn't have a professional legal education simply isn't equipped to have that debate with me, just like I'm not equipped to argue the meaning of quantum theory with a particle physicist. And if I'm involved in a discussion of what is or is not included in the legal concept of habeas corpus and the other guy starts throwing definitions from an English-Latin dictionary at me, useful discussion will have ended because they simply have no idea what they're talking about or how irrelevant their points are. Habeas means one thing in classical Latin and something entirely different in a modern American legal context.
Saying TIK should stick to panzers isn't an insult, it's simply a recognition that he's out of his field and doesn't understand the definitions of the words he's using in the context he's using them, and is compounding that error by looking to the wrong places to gain that understanding. I have two very well-educated housemates, one is a PhD candidate in Political Science and the other in History, and if they tried to have a debate about tanks with TIK and started dragging in the OED definition of "tank" to say that an underground oil tank is a form of AFV, I would tell them to stick to their fields and let the experts say what is or is not a valid definition of "tank" in this context. OTOH, they both agree that TIK's understanding of the nature and meaning socialism is deeply misinformed.
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