Youtube comments of Nattygsbord (@nattygsbord).
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I wonder what future Ukrainians will think of this video 50 years from now. No war have been so much video documented as this one.
All the fear, but also some events of military glory. And never in history have there probably been such a strange exotic mixture of different weapon systems within one army of Soviet, American, Ukrainian, British, Swedish, German, French, Polish, Czech, Turkish, Slovenian, Norwegian and Slovakian origin.
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If I was an American I would do Bernie or bust. The election is now just about the usual which cleptocrath corporate clown to pick for president. He/she is not your president, he/she is wall streets president.
I stay firm in my old belief for some reasons.
1. Trump is not a new Mussolini.
2. And when Cenk says that we should fear Trump because Hitler also never openly said he would build death camps, then my respond is that the same bad argument can be applied to Hillary and anyone else as well.
3. Trump got a few good policies. And besides that, he also needs to fight both the democrats and republicans to get anything done.
4. If Trump makes America great - then we all get happy. But if he fails with his mission, then neoliberalism will take the blame.
5. If the corporate democrats lose every election, they will have to turn to the left or die. They have to get rid of some of their privilegies, or lose all those they already have.
6. Hillary already got blood on her hands, and the Clinton family is to a large extent responsible for the financial crisis and the trade deal that did cause those damn Mexicans to come after their economy went bust. Hillary also care more about her donors than the health of the American people. Maybe Trump isn't any better, but he can't atleast not be worse. Its of course bad for a democracy when the quality of the opposition from the right is so bad, but it is even worse when there isn't even a fucking alternative. By voting Hillary you guarantee the lack of opposition to bad neoliberal policies next time around you go to make a vote.
7. Cenk says we shouldn't punish Hillary but instead try to reform the system. Well reforming the system sounds nice to me, but I cannot see how a new constitutional amendment would stop fascism. "All men are created equal" didn't stop slavery in America, a constitutional court havn't stopped the half-fascist government in Hungary, and Weimar Germany had the best and most democratic constitution in the world, but that didn't stop Hitler. And besides from not stopping dictators, the risk is also just more bureaucracy and more power to judges and less power to the people.
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Italys warproduction also failed because Germany took most of the Axis valuable resources (such as Romanian oil) for their own consumption, and thus leaving little over for Italian consumption. One could say that Germany was a bit parasitical on Italian warproduction, rather than co-operating. More than 2 million italians worked as guest workers in German industry 1944-45. And when Italy gained some German resources, it was never gifts, but rather exchange under harsh terms from the Germans. Germany never gave italy any StuGs or so, because they prioritized their own needs first.
Italys warproduction was like you say a failure even from the start of the war, and lack of resources was their largest handicap. And not only that, Italian industry was non-existent in World War I, and Mussolini took the lesson and tried to build up an industry, but progress was slow and Italy was not really an industrialized country making ships, planes and automobiles, but instead it was a poor country with a textile industry.
Anyhow, the needs of war forced Italy to pool her resources into building her own industry as best as she could for the sake of victory. She lost the war, but she won the peace, because those investments made Italy come out of the war with a stronger industry than she had at the outbreak of the war. Many Italians had became trained into skilled industrial workers, and the loss of human lives in the war was light, especially in comparison with her losses in World War 1.
Most of the war damages was suffered in southern Italy, while most of the industry was in northern Italy, and Germany kept control over these areas and tried to expand warproduction there as best as they could.
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@MehrumesDagon
The American "bodycount doctrine was stupid and it didn't bring America close to victory. On the contrary, it incentivised false statistics, and massacres on civilians to get the body count number up.... because if the enemy lost more men than they could replace then the war soon be won the US Military promised.
However, this promise turned out to be false. Truth is that the US Military had no idea how many Vietcongs and North Vietnamease army men were out there. So while the US Military promised a soon victory in 1967, those dreams were soon scattered with the tet-offensive in 1968. And the tet-offensive was far from this outstanding American victory like the mainstream narrative goes, because even despite the Vietcong leadership got totally wiped out in the cities and the vietcong took heavy losses, the war still progressed as before with equally high losses for the Americans as previous years. And while the Americans won the battle for the cities, they also at the same time lose all the control of the countryside as units were moving from the countryside into the cities to take them back.
So the war continued. And American solidiers got tired of this stupid bodycount doctrine, because the military leadership just saw them as expandable materia that could be replaced with new recruits if someone died when a careerist officer wanted his medals and promotions.
The stupid and costly fighting to take Hamburger hill is a typical example of this doctrine. In other wars Armies fight to gain control over vital areas - the Normandy beachhead, the Caucausus oilfields and so on.... But in Vietnam the Americans just attacked the worthless Hamburger Hill to kill Vietcongs, and then they just abandoned this hill soon after, even if many men had fought and died to get it, and within a few months would the Vietcong be back in control over it.
So all this crap made the morale in the American Army to fall apart, and fragging became common from 1969 and onwards, and the unreported numbers are surely higher than even the official statistics. And the reason was simple, the solidiers were throwing handgrenades at their own officers because they didn't wanna die in some pointless offensive.
And the search-and-avoid operations became common as well as more fraudgelent reporting of bodycounts, so that the leadership would be happy with the numbers and not try to play more aggressive and the send the men out on dangerous missions to get the bodycount number up.
All in all did the morale fall apart and a continuation of the war was no longer possible for Americas part, as the men refused to obey their own officers. So who is the blame for the defeat? The US Military and its stupid doctrine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFvcuuS5eUI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hpr1HYZDzHY
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Prussia was the first state to enter the industrial revolution after Britain (and possibly Belgium). It was in the forefront in many areas like religious toleration and freedom of the press and abandonment of torture. Prussia was also early in introducing Conscription, and the Prussian school system have been copied by most countries in the world and many countries used modified copies of the same school system that Frederick the great created.
Frederick the great turned a backwater with no natural resources into the strongest economy in Germany and greatly increased the size of the population in his kingdom. Prussia have a reputation of being a warlike militaristic kingdom, but it spend less years in war than any of the other great powers during the 18th century. And many other countries would probably want to have the same economic model as Prussia, but the problem was that most German states did have a very small population and could therefore not have a large army of over 200.000 men as a reliable customer for mass produced goods in textiles, iron making, making of fire arms and leather. The huge Prussian army could mean large orders for companies and it would be possible to start mass producing things.
But for minor German states like Hannover and Baden this was simply not possible to do because their population and army was too small. So they could not have any strong state-led economic growth like Prussia. Instead did their governments have to rely on supporting existing industries, or having their governments creating a few new industries and then privatizing them after a few years because their countries did not have enough tax payers and economic muscles to support all new industries year after year like Prussia did. So Hannover had to rely on civilian products instead and selling sails for ships. And Baden produced low quality drinking glass.
And the Prussian rhineland was a purely civilian economy.
Saxony was an economy something in between militaristic Prussia and civilian Rhineland. Saxony did also make cannon balls like Prussia and invest heavily into making uniforms and opening new iron mines to secure the access to this important strategic resource in times of war. Saxony also had many flourishing civilian industries, and the Kingdom was one of the richest countries on the planet during the early 1700s thanks to its high-tech products of that day - the making of high quality luxury porcelain.
Saxony had learned the art of how to make porcelain, and the government tried to keep it a well guarded state secret how to make it since it didn't want other countries to also make it and get competition from other countries.
The kingdom of Saxony earned enormous amounts of money from their porcelain, and the King August the strong did have so much money that he not only could spend large amounts of money on making a large army, or bribing Polish nobleman so he could become the new King of Poland, but August could also spend large amounts of money on building projects in Saxony and on his personal luxury consumption. He was a fat guy who once upon a time was considered handsome by the women. He was the father of kids of many hundred different women, and he was called "the strong" because of his strong hands - he was able to bend a horse shoe with his own bare hands.
August and Frederick the greats daddy - Frederick Vilhelm, used to go out and party togheter and get drunk, and August could then order a salute of many hundreds of cannons, or feasting on cakes made with over 600 eggs. But August did suck at warfare and he lost the battles he fought against Sweden in the great northern war despite always having the odds in his own favour.
Anyhow, he would later on die.
And then Saxony was taken over by a new monarch, and the country got invaded by Frederick the Great who plundered the Kingdom. Frederick also used industrial espionage and tried to steal the technology of making Meissen porcelain.
And Prussia then learned to make porcelain on their own.
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Operation Barbarossa could have ended in disasters the first weeks if the German Airforce wasn't so lucky that they could win total control of the airspace on day 1.
The German inferiority in numbers were great regardless if we talk about manpower, tanks or planes. But worst of all was the lack of artillery, which was small compared to other nations, and the Germans started the war outnumbred in artillery 12:1 and 20:1 later in the war.
So the only reason why Germany could press forward was the intensive bombings by the Luftwaffe, that destroyed lots of Russian tanks while they were sitting on the railway. Luftwaffe made many sorties per day, and had so many potential targets to bomb that they had to abandon many of them as they soon ran out of bombs to drop, because of the underestimation of the numbers of the red army.
Germany wasn't ready for this war, and even if they did know that Russian railways had wider tracks, they had forgot to plan for building a new railway network, since German trains were smaller than Russian trains and needed water and refueling stations in a shorter distance from one-another.
And the some books claim that Germany lost 2000 men per day in operation Barbarossa, but I think the numbers are higher. Anyways, only in the battle of Moscow alone did Germany lose 130.000 men - thats even more than the 100.000 men Germany lost in the wars 1939-40 against France, UK, Luxemburg, Denmark, Holland, Poland and Norway combined. And furthermore, the men lost were to a high degree NCOs, and men out of German elite Divisions such as Totenkopf and Großdeutschland.
And when Stalins winter offensive came, Germany would also lose enormous amounts of their heavy equipment. And only the over-extention and bad coordination of these attacks, as well as the failure at Kharkov in may 1942 made it possible for Germany to dominate the eastern front in 1942 as they did.
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I read in the book "The Economic Life of the Ancient World" by Jean-Philippe Lévy, and I concluded that the economy of the Ptolemian Egypt must have been the most dystopian economic system in history. And that doesn't say little with all the crappy regimes that have existed throughout history. And I happen to know a lot about economic history as a nerd I am into the subject.
Its an interested topic for exploration, but I don't know any books written about the economy of the Ptolemian Egypt specifically.
To me is Ptolemian Egypt a blueprint of how a rich ruling class opress the rest of society and steal all wealth from everyone else only to enrich themselves. They raise taxes on the poor and on everything they consume. They own all property in the country and charge fees for their use, so there is really no incentive for any person to do any work at all so the economy of the society goes into total stagnation.
And to make matters even worse, was the ruling class not even Egyptians, but Macedonian Greeks. So no solidarity at all existed between the ruling class and the people, as they did not even feel any pity for them or cared the slighted about their fellow Egyptian subjects, as the rulers were not Egyptians themselves and therefore did not even care a bit over the people who lived in the country.
This was just a simple parasitic plundering economy. Egypt had a huge economic potential. It was the breadbasket of Rome. It was the mightiest and richest country in the mediaterranean sea during the middle ages. And ancient Egypt was one of the most advanced and early human civilizations in antiquity.
So to me its clear that this country had a huge economic potential. But the Ptolemian rulers did manage to let it all go to waste.
To me they were the proto-neoliberals. They can be said to be a blueprint for what happens when a selfish powerful rich ruling class takes over the state machinery in a country and start using it to steal money from the poor so the rich can make themselves even richer that way.
It reminds me how the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth destroyed itself from within, or how Swedens time as a great power ended with its corrupt aristocracy taking power during its "age of liberty". And it also reminds me of Yeltsins oligarchs that took over Russia, and Carlos Menems corrupt regime that transformed Argentina from one of the richest countries of the planet into a 3rd world country.
The Ptolemaian Egypt is a historical warning. Just like George Orwells book 1984.
This is a dystopian, dysfunctional and extremely crappy economy and society. And a lesson in how to not do things.
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@doomedwit1010
Just in time is good idea for the car industry, and horrible idea for a military.
You see it right now. Not even when the entire western world + Korea and Japan ramp up production of 155mm artillery shells can we produce enough to meet demand at the frontline.
Russia sends 21.000 artillery shells down on the Ukrainians each day. While the Ukrainians only respond with less than 6000.
This shows that we need large stockpiles with artillery shells. So many that we can respons with the same amount of artillery fire as the Russians until we manage to pump up production rates.
Having minimal stocks of artillery shells makes troops vulnerable. At limits the options a commander have.
The problem with Lean Production and Just in Time is that it is extremely vulnerable to interruptions. If you get for example a workers strike at a sub-contractor or an earthquake disrupting the world supply of microchips... then will all your car factories soon have to shut down production because there are no stocks of supplies that you can use until the strike is over or the world market has recovered from the worst effects of the earthquake.
And in war will of course your enemy do whatever he can to cut off your supply chains. He will bomb ball bearing factories like the allies in WW2, or try to cut off your access to microchips like with Russia.
A chain is no stronger than its weakest link.
And if you have nothing in reserve and have a very thin supply line with too few workers
at your factory, and hope to hire extra workers when needed - then of course is your logistical system extremely vulnerable to bottlenecks.
Lean production along with idiotic ideas such as NPM (New Public Management) destroys everything they touch) in the government.
By measuring success in terms of economic output per tax dollar you often destroy the quality of government services.
You can double the output per tax dollar if you double the size of a school class from 15 to 30 students per teacher. But you will probably see worse results among students.
Obsessing about numbers also just makes you lose focus on what is important. McNamaras obsession with bodycounts, sorties flown, kill ratios, output of sorties per aircraft carrier, tonnes of bomb dropped each month and so on was unhelpful to US war effort in Vietnam.
Just like it is unhelpful when the police wants to impress people with increasing the percentage of crimes solved. So they start to prioritize catching people who drive 5km/h too fast over solving more sever crimes like murder, rape, and physical violance.
Mimimizing waste also leads to understaffed organizations, because why not cut away unnecessary workers so you don't have to pay out so much in wages?.
This results in too little spare capacity.
What do you do when your country have the lowest number of hospital beds in the entire EU and you suddenly have a gigantic pandemic, and you do not have enough personnel to take care of them all?
-People die as a result. Workers get overworked and never get any vacation and time to rest. And nurse students gets a poor education since there are no one who have time to teach them.
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The war led to state-led economies all over the world - which was a total shift away from the laissaz faire dogma that previously had ruled the world.
Countries had become more self-sufficient because the war had forced countries to make their own stuff instead of importing products from other countries. Europe had started to use tractors and invented artificial fertilizer, so there was no longer any need for importing food from South America.
Free trade had died already with World war 1 and the German uboats and the British naval blockade of German ports. And the fascist regimes of the inter-war years were more interested in self-sufficiency than free trade. And WWII did not help free trade either. It was not until the 1980s and 1990s that free trade would start to come back to the same levels as before 1914.
And countries like Argentina that had relied heavily on free trade and exporting food to Britain. That trade was very hard hit by WWII, and when Britain had become self-sufficient in food production as I earlier mentioned.
Soldiers, factory workers and farmers were paid by the government, but they got no opportunity to spend their money during the war because rationing prevented them from buying stuff, so when the war ended did Americans have lots of cash and people were eager to spend it after years of harsh war time restrictions that prevented people from buying what they wanted.
The huge war debts countries had piled up during the war was paid off by inflation. And higher prices did make it more profitable to sell products for corporations, and wages for workers could increase. And rich people saw their artificial wealth being wiped out. So economic equality improved greatly in society.
The higher household incomes allowed people to spend more money - which led to more sales for businesses, so they could start to hire more people, and unemployment then fell. And the low unemployment helped to create even more equality.
To win the war against the nazis it was necessary to get people willing to fight and risk their own lives. Men also needed to feel that they had some reason to care about fighting a rich mans war against the Commies during the cold war.
So welfare state programs were created all over the industrialized world. And free healthcare because a right for every citizen as the NHS was created in Britain, and similar institutions was created in both western and eastern Europe.
Societies were generally well organized with the heavy state control, and protectionism allowed countries to build up their own infant industries. Governments had Keynesian doctrines of full employment that helped to keep unemployment away and pressing up wages thereby. Governments began building roads (like the interstate highway system under the statist leftwing Communist president Eisenhower in the USA).
Oil was cheap which helped economic growth, and the new wartime inventions could also perhaps have helped a bit.
And high wages and low unemployment created a large consumer base. And mass consumption allowed mass production.
Many countries like Germany had built lots of factories during the war, so they were more industrialized after the war than before it despite all allied bomb raids... so Germany only needed to switch over production from war time material towards civil production instead.
While Soviet Russia on the other hand lost about half their GDP in the wartime destruction and therefore did not have an easy economic recovery. Russia won the war but lost the peace. While Germany, Italy and Japan did the opposite.
Russias economic structure had also changed during the war. The economy was much more militarized after the war, and factories in western Russia had been transported to huge industrial complexes in the Ural mountains. Russia started the war with many small factories, but at the end of the war did have huge factories in a few cities instead, where mining steel smelting and tanks building happened all in the same town.
And it was difficult for Russia to switch over production to civilian goods. Partly because of the lobbyists of their military industrial complex, but also because Russia had lost over 20 million people under the war and was determined that a similar thing would never happen again. Russia would never again stand unprepared of a German invasion.
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Airwar:
Strategic bombing - attacking factories, cities, railway hubs, bridges
Tactical bombing - Supporting your own ground troops by attacking tanks, infantry, bunkers and such.
Land war:
Tactical level - Units of a minor size (less than say 5.000 men) fighting battles of very limited importance to the outcome of the war. And the study of tactics involves much around co-ordination between tanks, air support, artillery and infantry... and what tanks attack formation should look like, and how trenches, machine guns and land mines are best put to use, and how helicopters best can cooperate during a helicopter landing so that losses can be kept low by careful planning and cooperation between attack helicopters, recon helicopters, transports and attack aircraft.
Strategic level - Are about seeing the war from a bigger picture and ignore the minor details (such as what type of tanks and machine guns that being used by each side). A Strategic General is much more interested in the logistic situation since supplying and feeding big armies of 200.000 men are much more of challange than to someone who is just leading a battallion of 750 men.
Getting supplies forward to your own troops and cutting off the supplies for the armies of your enemies are much more important than worrying about how many men who died in a small battle with 50 men of each side.
For a strategist terrain does matter, mountains, trenches and minefields are excellent defensive positions. While bridges, railway hubs, oil fields, industrial centres, powerplants and such are valuable key areas to take. And encirleing enemy armies can destroy them more cheaply and effectivly than winning a 100 small tactical battles.
Then there are of course not always so easy to put things into the right box. Its not always black and white. There are sometimes greyzones between tactical and strategic level combat.
Fighting about a single building in a town is usally just an unimportant tactical level operation - but in Stalingrad did thousands of men die over the control over builds such as Pavlovs house. And it was not uncommon that small German and Finlandic units could fight off entire soviet armies during world war 2, So should battles with 2 Finnish regiments fighting against multiple Russian divisions
be classed as tactical or a strategic battle? I think it is often hard to tell.
Small battles can sometimes impact the larger strategic situation.
And while losing 50 tanks might not be a big deal for the allies, but losing 50 panthers in the battle at Korsun can have much negative consequences also for the eastern front as a whole.
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@rogerpennel1798
"Both Ukraine and Russia have ruggedized aircraft that supposedly can operate from improvised bases. However, neither side has been able to establish air superiority and I don't know that either side has been able to leverage rough field capabilities to their advantage."
I think this sound a little bit a guy calling everyone else stupid for saying that rain will come, just because it havn't happened yet.
And likewise if Russias asymetric warfare of shooting inexpensive drones at Ukraine so they use up all their supply of S-300 missiles, then you will likely see that Russia will crush the remains of the Ukrainian air force .
The only reason why the Ukrainian air force have survived at all for this long is because they have dispersed their planes and moved around them often enough to disrupt the chain of events from identifying a target to sending away a missile do destroy it. The Russians are poor at this and needs 7-10 days normally. So even moving an object 100 meters is enough to be safe.
Ukraines air force is a like a fleet in being. It diciplines the russians to not take too big risks. Altough the biggest deterent from air superiority has been the strong Ukrainian air defence. S-300 and Manpads have made life a hell for the russian pilots.
The russian planes needs to fly low below radar to avoid S-300. But flying low also make planes vulnerable to stingers, starstreak, piorun, strela, RBS70. So flying low to drop dumb bombs is very risky. It reminds me of the heavy losses Americans suffered in Operation Rolling Thunder when they had to fly low to be able hit their targets with their dumb bombs - just like pilots in WW2. But the Vietnamese were not stupid, they quickly figured out that the americans would come to their factory or bridge, so they positioned many Anti-Aircraft guns near those targets and shot at the american planes as they dived down and to bomb their targets and thereby got within range of the AA guns.
When losses piled of did the Americans look for other solutions for destroying their targets - and smart bombs were being developed so that planes could destroy targets from far away without putting planes and pilots at risk. So after hundreds of costly failed attempts to destroy the Dragon Jaw bridge did the Americans finally destroy it by using a smart bomb.
Russia on the other hand is a poor third world country. It does not have the capability to mass produce large number of smart bombs. And especially not after the sanctions. And their crappy bombs do not have any precision comparable to the western bombs, but they often miss their targets by 10-20 meters. And that is good enough if you want to fire nuclear weapons on a city, but not so good for conventional warfare where its more difficult to compensate lack of precision with more firepower.
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The United States could never have won that war. Not with their stupid body counts doctrine. And the only chance for South to survive would had been a landreform, which is a political action and not a military.
There are instances when entire units had been wiped out, so I guess the definition of "battle" is a bit arbritrary. Anyways, Vietminh had control over the situation and started 90% of the firefights. And that casulity ratio have been inflated... both by politicians who wanted the public to believe that the war was progressing, and the numbers was also inflated by commanders in order to get promotions and not getting fired from their job so they can't support their family and send their kid to collage. And each unit also had a quota of enemies to kill, and had to risk their lives to fullfill it. So soliders often lied, they didn't want to die in a pointless battle like Hamburger Hill, so one of their higher ups could have his medals and rewards, while people with the ass in the grass dies for nothing. They said dead civilians was dead VC's. They said that they had a kill, but the artillery bombardment of the area had made that no body was left.
The statistics was bullshit, and America never got halfway to that magic casulity number when the enenmy losses men in higher number each month than they could find replacements. Not even with their own manipulated fakestats.
Furthermore don't I understand why casualty ratios would be important, since the Russians could defeat Germany despite taking higher losses.
And America never managed to control the countryside. In fact they completly misunderstood the entire conflict to begin with. The narrowminded brains of the American political and military leadership just saw the world as either communist or capitalist and ignored all nuance.
Ho Chi-Minh was more of a nationalist (and initially also a democrat), than he was a communist. He recieved foreign aid by America when he fought the Japanease occupation, and he was person much liked by America, and Ho Chi Minh admired America and wanted to shape Vietnam after the founding fathers of America. He was an intellectual man who had studied in Europe. But when he suggested a Vietnam with a high degree of self-governence and still being a colony under France, his moderate suggestions got rejected. America didn't want to piss off the french just to make some poor vietnamease happy.
So Vietminh had to fight the french, and they had no support from America so they had to turn the communist block to get arms for their national liberation. And after Dien Bien Phu Vietnam won their independence, and it was agreed upon that South would have a democratic election about a reunification of the country in 1956, but that promise became ignored because it was believed that Ho Chi Minh easily could have won that election.
So the war didn't have much to do with a communist invasion or the domino theory. This was a seperate event. And the conflict was about many things. It was firstly and foremost a peasant revolt against opressive landlords, it was a war against a corrupth and unjust government, it was a protest against the unpopular strategic hamlet program that forced people from their homes to go into camps where people starved and had their freedom of movement taken away, it was a war about national liberation, it was protest against Diems Catholic governments rule over a Buddist population, it was a war about revenge over the many civilian casulties inflicted by the Americans in free fire zones.
In short, it was more than just a war about imposing communism over another country.
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@C.CUMM1NGS Georgia did. Unfortunatly is Georgia a small country while Ukraine got 44 million people and 600.000 Square kilometers of landmass, so they can afford to lose much more and still keep on fighting until victory can be won. Ukraines victory therefore feels like a victory for all victims of Russian aggression. It will feel much safer for small countries in the Baltics and Finland to have such a large country as Ukraine to guard their southern flank against Russia. The Ukrainian army have now also proven itself to be very tough. So when peace come and tension gets lower, I do think that Ukraine as a Nato/EU member will help Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland to feel much calmer. The destruction of the Russian army in this war will finally make Eastern Europe satisfied with the EU, as their no.1 goal has always been to use the EU do deal with the Russian threat. And now has the Russian threat been destroyed.
So now can the focus target other questions instead for those countries. Perhaps can the old bad memories from the USSR finally be put to an end for Eastern Europe. And meanwhile is Russia isolated and dwindeling into international irrelevance... militarily, economically, politically, culturally, and in every other way..
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I guess the reason why Sweden was focusing so heavily into the air force during the Cold war was because the only realistic way for the Warsaw pact to invade Sweden would have been across the Baltic sea. And with the worlds 4th largest air force would Sweden have been able to sink most Soviet landing ships before they could drop russian troops off on Swedish soil, and russian paratroopers would get shot down. And the rest would be dealt with by submarines, missile boats, coastal artillery, and army troops.
Swedens big interest in anti-ship missiles probably stem from the same reason I guess.
The cold war Swedish navy did always extremely tiny amounts of money compared to the army and air force. And the Swedish army despite being 800.000 strong and equipped with many of the best weapon systems in the world like Bandkanon, was still an army that did not have enough funding to become fully modern.
Camouflage uniforms did not come into use until the late 1980s, long after most Nato countries. And our fleet of tanks was relativly old and small for most of the cold war. We bough some Centurion tanks in the 1960s which were upgraded. And they were perhaps okaish for the 1960s and 1970s with some upgrades... but after that they were obsolete. And the S-tank which was the best tank in the world when it entered service, quickly became old and a little bit outdated, and definatly so during the 1980s when the T-80 tank entered service which was immune against hits from the 105mm L7 gun frontally.
And the use of farm tractors to draw soldiers on bicycles was common during the cold war, as the army could not field enough armored personnel carriers for its infantry.
In the end would the air force be the most modern and strongest part of Swedens military. Perhaps also because it would be a good tool for quickly supporting Finland or Nato in times of need, while also keeping Swedens own manpower losses low.
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why wouldnt they wait to build up and get a decent military?
Military spending made up 20% of GDP before ww2, and 40% in 1941. Compare that to other countries like Germany and UK who put 70-80% into their war effort. Its simply easier to mobilize your economy for war when you have a high income per head in your country. * Italy did suceed in squeezing private consumption and transfering the recources to the government, but too much of the government spending was not devoted to war and much money had to be invested in building up the industrial capacity, with plants and machines.
why couldnt they get industrial output up to speed?
Firstly, resource constraints. Especially liquid fuels,which showed a decline in avaiblity already in 1940.
And Italy had too few firms, and too small. They had too many lines of production, fragmentation into other lines, and the plans to enlarge scale of production were too hastly made, too many types of weapon prototypes were built, and none adequatly testested and none produced in suffiecent numbers.
And the most scarce resource of all was organization.
* UK and USA had the highest incomes per head among the major powers in WW2, and they could therefore afford expensive tractors to replace human workers so they could be sent to they therefore could be sent to the army or to the factories. And they could also afford to use machines in mines and factories to increase output, and replace workers so even more men could be sent to the front.
As you see, when you got a rich country you can use machines to free up men for the fight, and therefore mobilize your economy for war more effiecently.
When you have a country like Russia with a low productivity, you need to use more men in order to produce the same amounts of stuff as a one guy with a machine. So you therefore need more men in agriculture, mining and industry just to produce the same amounts, and you got less men to spare to fight at the front. But Russia did suceed in mobilizing their economy despite these handicaps thanks to using female workers to replace the men, and by good central planning, and large pre-war stockpiles of resources vital for war production.
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Often the best men were selected for those units. And unlike normal army units did they have very much firepower at the lowest levels in the organization and stormtroopers were equiped everything from body armour, to submachine guns (which was a raririty back in those days) and they could carry flamethrowers and all kinds of modified weapons.
And they had tactics which was basicly the opposite of the common wisdom of the day - which was bombarding an area for days or even weeks and then making large assault on the enemy positions. The stormtroopers did the opposite. They tried to use surprise attacks instead of alerting their enemy ahead of time that an attack were about to come. And stormtroopers were not shy to night fighting. But they could also fighting during the day. And before an attack they tried to make a short but very intensive and powerful bombardment which surprised and chocked the enemy, and shortly afterwards would the stormtroopers attack while the enemy was trying to recover from the confusion after the artillery bombardment.
Decisions were also made by the NCOs (lower officers) who were fighting togheter with their men at the frontline - unlike ther enemies which followed orders from their Generals.
And that was a huge problem when no radio existed, so it would on average take an order 8hours to get from the Generals headquarters to reach the frontline. And then it took 8 hours for the information from the frontline to reach the General.
So it is needless to say that orders often became completly outdated once they reached the troops. The enemy could for example have brought forward reinforcements, prepared defensive positions and weather could have become bad so an order of an attack that was earlier sensible could later on become foolish and impossible to follow.
But if you are having good commanders at the front who knows the situation, then they can decide and determine the situation instead. And that was what the Germans did. Normally they would follow orders from their Generals, but the NCOs were also free to use their common sense and make changes to their plans if they deemed them necessary. And that helped the Germans to react faster than their enemies and always be one step ahead.
So I think one could say that they were a bit better than the regular infantry. But I don't think they were Rambo like elite troops. And I think their kind of warfare was a little bit revolutionary.
I don't think that there is a coincidence that Germany would invent this tactic, since the Prussians had a tradidion of mission type tactics. And another reason why they discovered this new concept was that Germany realized that the odds were stacked against her. The Allies had more resources, so Germany was not likely to win a long war. Therefore it became more important for Germany to fast find new ways of quickly winning this war. So they tried posion gas, flamethrowers, uboats, zeppelin bombraids and new better tactics of course - and stromtrooper tactics became one those new superweapons.
Neverhteless I do still think it is amazing that the ideas never gained more popularity after all the gigantic stipidity Hötzendorf, Haig, Cadorna, Enver Pasha, Nivelle, Falkenhayn and others had commited. It was incompetence beyond just incompetene, their behaviour was criminal in how wasteful they were with their solidiers lives and kept on repeating the same stupid mistakes that had lead to failure, over and over again........until the 287th battle of the Isonzo river.
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The rightwing populists aren't so much for the working man, so if the left just bring its shit togheter it can easily fix that matter. BUT the left must also stop all warmongering, stop all mass surveillence, stop taking away civil liberties... right now I would say that the left absolutly suck on these issues.
The democrats supported the wars, they never closed down Guantanamo, they never revoked the anti-terror laws after Bin Ladin died, they never got rid of spying on the people and they continue to wanna fuck their freedoms over with TPP.
Here in Sweden we got the same shit. And while the Nationalists oppose those things, most of the left vote for this shit in parliament.. they happily signed away our sovereignty and constitution with the Lisbon treaty without even asking the people.. and the media didn't mention a word about it. We are country with the longest tradition of peace and neutrality in the world, but EU wanted us to participate in an imperialist colonial war in Libya and the left voted yes to it despite the people being against it.
And then we got private buisnesses spying on peoples internet communication, since we signed a law to protect copyright material against filesharing.
We had the government licking Americas ass and having the government reading every Swedes private email communication in the name of fighting the war on terror.... just as if terrorists in Afghanistan somehow would talk Swedish and use uncrypted communication... anyways, the left supported all this shit.. So no wonder I have a hard time of supporting them.
They are in fact acting more fascist than the nationalists.
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I think that conscription armies are a bit different.
Lets say you fight a war with blackwater troops, Gurkhas and the french foreign legion... then the civilian population wouldn't protest as much about having to fight an illegal war on foreign soil in order to steal natural resources. But if you have spend your own peoples blood abroad just for the sake of a rich scumbag wanting more money in his pockets, then people would be furious.
On the other hand I think that national conscription army would be superior in fighting moral to a mercenary army when it is fighting a just war, that say a war of defence... or maybe a war to stop a genocide.
Then you talk about the economic aspects of war. In the past was an imperial power punished for being militaristic and having an aggressive foreign policy, since the cost of war would mean higher taxes for the population in that country. That in turn would make the products that that country produces more expensive and less competative on the world market, and foreign competitors would grab more shares of the world trade.. while the warlike country sinks to the bottom, and the empire declines.
But today America have new system: The petrodollar. All countries around the world needs dollars, since its the only acceptable payment for oil.
And that in turn keeps up the demand for dollars around the world, and America can print more money and other countries happily grabs more dollars to increase their foreign currency reserves. And America can pay for things by just printing money. America doesn't have to pay for wars and a huge miliary like empires in the past, she can't dump over that cost on Europe and Asia.
So why don't Europe and Asia then just stop taking dollars? Because if the demands for dollars go down, then the value of the dollar goes down. That would hurt America, but a cheap dollar would also help their industry to take marketshares from European and Asian producers. So its simply a dilemma for Europe and Asia.
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"Stronger and and better concealed the French front. "
No it wasn't. Stop making up lies about history. Finland was a massive failure and humiliation for the Red Army. If a weak poor shitty country with nothing in plenty besides swamps and mosquitos could defeat a military/industrial gigiant, then an attack on Germany would have been suicidal.
"BT tanks which was designed to fight in Europe not Russia..... Amphibious tanks and the largest airborne force I think some of the high numbers was 5 million but probably close 500,000 cant use that for offense you also missed a critical analysis."
When you copy a good imported American tank design, its not strange that the tanks you produce are more suitable to Europe than to a poor 2nd world country.
And having a massive army isn't the same thing as having aggressive intentions, and likewise doesn't military experimentations in offensive weapons mean you are going to use those weapons.
Countries develop new weapons and tactics all the time, because things that worked well in the last war, doesn't necessarily work well in the future wars. Mounted knights became unfashionable when gunpower came, and battleships dissapeared when planes and uboats came.
And building amphibious tanks isn't anymore strange than Kaiser Wilhelm II deciding to build the largest fleet of battleships in the world, despite the geography says Germany isn't a real naval power.
"Why would an defensive nation eat 3 nations, eat half of poland, take parts of Romania, and Finland and destroy a Japanese army."
Russia wanted to retake land lost in world war 1 (just like Germany). Stalin was bully who only cowardly attacked small countries. Attacking Germany + the Axis powers + occupied Europe, when the army have failed terribly at Finland, when the defensive lines are unfinished, when officer corps have been slaughtered, when dissent in the country is widespread, when tanks and airplanes need repairations and spare parts, when the international community always have been hostile towards USSR... all just seem foolish and suicidal.
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@rogerpennel1798
Gripen E can carry a payload or 15,875lbs while Eurofighter with two engines can carry 16,500lbs.
So I don't think the difference is so huge that it is a problem. Furthermore do Gripen have a superior ferry range compared to most other western planes - superior to F22, F35, Eurofighter, Rafale and Super Hornet. And superior combat radius compared to F22, F35, Rafale and Super Hornet. And it is capable of aerial refueling.
And it have a faster turnaround time and a MUCH lower number of maintance hours on the ground for every hour it flies up in the air compared to all those mentioned planes.
So I don't see the problem why this plane cannot be used for offensive operations as well.
"So, the question is how well would small numbers of forward-deployed aircraft do against large enemy airstrikes against your infrastructure? The answer is there would be penalties of payload and coordination but being dispersed would limit the number of aircraft destroyed by attacks on your airbases."
Gripen is a plane cheaper than other western aircrafts. Which means you can afford to build many of them. Which means a lower likelyhood that you will be severly outnumbered by your enemy. And Gripen spends more time in the air than on the ground, unlike American hangar queens. That means that you have more planes which you can fly more often. That means that you will be able to mobilize much larger number of planes towards your enemy.
And Gripens payload problem is in my opinion enormously exaggerated. And I think people just comes across as ridiculous. Gripen can carry more payload than F16. And Gripen can despite its small size carry a payload nearly twice as large as MIG29 that have two engines.
And as I say earlier, when you nothing stops you from stop dispersing your planes and move them into a nice and tidy airfields once you have you have gained air superiority.
"The lesson from the last 50 years is that you can cripple your enemy through airpower without actually invading."
Here you make a baseless claim. This is not what I saw in for example the air war against Serbia - despite Natos overwhelming superiority in air power. Despite hundreds of days of bombing was Nato unable to inflict any serious losses on the Serbian military, all in all was only 9 old Soviet tanks destroyed. And Nato lost a F117 stealth bomber.
So against an opponent that skillfully use the terrain, camouflage, intelligence and have at least a semi-modern air defence will it be hard to accomplish anything at all.
In the end will wars be decided by boots on the ground. This idea that air power could win wars alone is hundred years old. But Giulio Douhet's ideas have never been true. They were not true in WW2, not in Vietnam, not in Serbia and not in Ukraine either.
So air force guys should step down from their piedestal and stop overrate themself and view themselves with such self-importance.
Personally do I consider an air force to be completly worthless in itself. Its only value comes from being a force multiplier for the ground war.
*"The success of OFFENSIVE airpower during the last 50 years has come down to two critical elements AEW/ACC aircraft and refueling tankers and these don't operate from short improvised airfields."
Nothing prevents you from buying those machines even if your country is built around self-defence. Sweden have developed Global eye - a plane with a superior spotting range compared to American E3 Sentry.
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I am no expert, but are they really mixed togheter in the same ways as in natural foods?
GMOs to me just seems to be a fast and sloppy way to rehash the genetic code of an organism without much considerations what unknown side effects that could have. While evolution is a slow and safe process of constantly improving a fruit to suit human needs, and unexpected and unwanted results can be removed under controlled circumstances.
And making crops that only can grow for one season and then becomes infertile and can't grow anymore seems devestating to live on this planet. Is there any good reason to want plants like this? In what way would that make the world a better place?
To me it seems preferable to have plants that gives us new harvests for free year after year, after year...
And biodiversity is also preferable to mass produced plants with an identical DNA. Especially when GMOs only benefit over normal plants is the ability to withstand toxins like roundup.
In that case would I say normal plants are superior. They provide better taste and a better profile of nutrients for the consumer. They offer variation of hundreds differnt flavors instead of the same boring taste of this GMO crop. And they are less vulnerable to attacks from insects, fungus and diseases since not all plants do share the exactly same DNA - like the Monsanto crops have.
The Panama disease should have taught us by now that a total monoculture is a bad idea.
So if what you say is true, then my question is: Why do we need GMOs if they do not offer anything new?
And considering how corporations misbehave... like Facebook who steals personal data and sells it, or how wall street scammed poor Americans and stole their homes, or how the food industry and the tobacco companies cynically put profits before health... then why should I trust a company like Bayer to act responsibly and not put profits before human health, biodiversity and health of the planet?
Personally I have very little faith in the German chemical industry, given their track record of selling the gas that that the nazis used for murdering a million people with and how they enslaved thousands to build the Monowitz factory.
When this industry is so insane that they think they got the right to patent genes of ordinary pigs, and think they have the right to sue farmers for property right infridgement for their neighbours seed had blown over to their field... then I do not have much respect for the companies here.
And mixing genes from different species might have potential risks that I think we need to evaluate before we plant millions of plants into the enviroment. Everything else would be to act reckless - like corporations have done with the Covid vaccines.
If a batsoup created a virus that killed 4 million people. Then will surely combination of genes from all parts of nature create enormous potential for creating new diseases that can spread across species in more ways than a bat virus ever could.
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France had a larger population than England, and while America was friendly to England during the world war, it was not so friendly during the Napoleonic wars. And the British dominance at sea was total in World war II. Germany was forced to dismantle her entire Navy with the peace treaty at Versaille, and after that she was prohibited from building a new one. And building a new powerful navy would have taken decades even under a militaristic dictator like Hitler, so Hitler never started the war with a Navy powerful enough to challange the British home fleet, and much less so when it was combined with the enormous fleets Britain also had in Asia and mediterranean.
And the loss of Graf Spee and the costly Norway invasion left Hitlers navy in even less shape to invade England, and nor was there any suffiecent amount of transport ships for an invasion. And plundering food and living off the lands could work for an army of the 1300s, 1500s, 1600s, 1700 and even early 1800s.... but a modern army doesn't work that way - it need tonnes of petroleum, and tonnes of ammunition. The 6th Army at Stalingrad consumed 13 railway cars of small arms ammo each day. And then we havn't even included artillery that consumes even more ammo than that.
So I would Guess that Napoleon had a better chance. France had a naval tradition as well as her allied countries, while Germany never really been a naval power. England didn't have much timber of her own to build ships, and her population needed food imports.
German uboats was quite close to starving England, but they were never any threat to Englands dominance at sea, and Germany would never outnumber England at sea as Spain and France did at Trafalgar.
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I think the German assumptions on where the allied D-day landings would go were reasonable - after all it would be dumb to make a landing outside air cover, and having long distances for ship to transport, and not taking a harbour so that the invasion force can get supplies and reinforcements.
Making an attack directly into Prussia would give the Germans all the advantages of having short supply lines, knowing the terrain, having men more determined than ever to defend their homeland (instead of just a outpost in France). And meanwhile would it the allied ability to use their massive air power be very limited as no planes had the range and no paratroops could capture bridges and protect the flanks of the amphibious landing.
So a landing in Germany looks foolish to me. And same goes for an invasion of Denmark since the land is close to Germany and far away from Britain, and Germany could easily gather troops in Germany and by land just walk into the country. And German air fields would be perfectly in range of reaching any invasion force, while the allied planes would not be able to reach the area.
Norway is a country with excellent defensive positions. The country is basicly just mountains and forrests, and it was not this rich oil nation back then as it is today, so the bad infrastructure would probably also become a huge allied invasion force.
And the climate is not so friendly either. So it is a country which is suitable for defensive warfare. And the allied advantage of air power and large numbers of tanks would not come to its right in this terrain. It would simply be more wise to use them elseware.
The Balkans were a more credible threat to the Germans. It could potentially outflank the German eastern front in the south, and its proximity to the Romanian oil fields were probably also worrysome. Even having allied bombers in airfields in Greece that close would be problematic enough.
But on the other hand did the balkans and Greece have many mountains that offered good defensive terrain - as Mussoline learnt the hard way. And Germany could use airpower and send reinforcements to the area by land. So an allied landing here could very easily just have ended in one deadlock after another just like the campaign in Italy.
Taking Greece could probably be done since most of the country laid in good range for naval bombardment, and bombers in North Africa and Italy could reach it. But then breaking out further from there would be hard and would require so much troops to get through the bad terrain that one could once again start to wonder if it would be worth it?
France and the Benelux countries offered bigger rewards, and they allowed the allies to use air power and not overstretching their maritime supply lines unnecessarily much.
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The traditional view of Sigismund is the following:
"As it was, Sigismund proved to be a weak monarch, being tardy, disposed to procrastination, of vacillating spirit, diffident of his own judgement, prone to accept bad advice, and-most irritating of all considering his sovereign power - timorous of grasping the initiative. Even his Jesuit advisors and not least his Apostolic Nuncio in Poland, the brilliand Germanico Malaspina, were bewildered at his unruffled composure in moments of crisis, which led him so to trust the rightwousness of his own policies that he could let matters drift in the firm belief that the Almighty would set things right if He so willed."
And he never won the hearts and minds of the Poles and Lithanians.
Charles IX was on the other hand a strong King which got things done. And having a bloody reign is a good thing in my opinion. Sweden was well runned because Christian of Denmark, Erik XIV, John III, and Charlex IX had scared the sh1t out of the Swedish nobility so they never again dared to oppose the King.
So Sweden never became a weak dysfunctional decentralized serfdom state like Poland, Denmark or Spain.
Instead did Swedish farmers have a high degree of freedom and the power of the King was strong so he could lead the country for the sake of the greater good, rather than have a dysfunctional country ruled by hundreds of nobles own personal self-interest.
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I don't like Hillary, and I cannot blame any person for not wanting to vote for her. But at this stage, I think it is quite clear that she is better than Trump. If the GOPs wasn't so nutjub crazy like they are today, I would even suggest voting for them instead of Hillary, but now you got Trump.
A man who have been screwing workers, a man of the establishment who pretend to be an outsider. Someone who's too ignorant to have the most powerful position in the world, he don't know what GDP is, and he have even suggested to shut down EPA and FDA. He support war crimes - everything from torture, to theft of natural resources from the natives. He's against abortions and he think that Scalia.. fucking SCALIA was a great judge.
His talk about defaulting on the American debt is not only stupid, its also unnessary. And if that would happen, you would have the mother of all economic depressions. It would be Armageddon.
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The problem was that Germany was producing luxury cars before world war 1, and the car manufacturers was happy with producing small numbers of cars to rich customers instead of massproducing things for the masses. And the German ministry of war was also of the opinion that it wanted to get its trucks from many companies instead of being dependent upon on just a few... and all this made the German automotive industry very ineffective during world war 1, because the lack of standardization when every company built their own vehicles and types of trucks.
So the allies could easily outproduce Germany in tanks and trucks... when their industries was used to Fordism, taylorism and massproduction.
And the German industry never solved this ineffectivity problem. Economic crisis can be painful, but they can also be necessary in order to create a strong economy in the long term. Structural rationalization means that demand for products falls in a market, and competition among companies gets harder about the smaller number of customers that are left. And some companies doesn't survive this struggle of life and death.... so some companies go bankrupth and their workers lose their jobs and they have to sell all their machines and tools to pay off their debts, or they get bought up by a competitor at a low price.
So when the economic crisis have killed off all companies with uneffective, uncompetiative ways of production... then only the strong companies with good leadership, management are left.
And when then garden has been cleansed of all weed, then there is plenty of room for expansion. And companies could grow stronger when many competitors are gone, and they can increase sales and hire more workers.
Germany was hard hit by the hyperinflation and the Great depression, but it got out of very quickly when Hitler turned the economy around with his defence spending. People got their jobs back and companies produced stuff for the military at full capacity of what their factories could bear. Germany never had as a painful structural rationalization as USA and many other countries, so she never had mass unemployment like USA had during the 1930s, but on the other hand did the German car producers remain ineffective and old fashioned... while American car producers increased their effectivity.
The Great Depression had helped the nazis. Without it people would have been angry on Hitler for increased taxes to pay for his military spending, but now people could not see how much the military took from their pockets... since the standard of living had fallen so much in Germany during the economic crisis that people had forgotten what was normal... so when Hitler gave people jobs it felt like a great improvement of standard of living that people atleast could support themselves with their own job and have something to eat.
And the quick mobilization for war that America did after 1941 would also not have been possible without the great Depression that started in 1929 and lasted to 1941. Millions of unemployed Americans was hungry and queing at the soup kitchens and large factories was closed, and with the war those millions either got to wear a military uniform, or going to a factory making the uniforms.
And since millions were unemployed and factories was unused, the American government didn't have to force people to move to a job in the defence industry and neighter did they have to steal any factories that was used for civilian production when there was so many closed down factories that could be used.
So massmobilization was going through very smoothly, and people didn't mind taxes and war rationing as much when they were used to starvation during the economic crash, and people wasn't so unhappy about paying more taxes, instead they were happy to just get a job.
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The Russians wasn't so interested in building tanks that could take out other tanks from long ranges, so they rather massproduced tanks with less quality and less precision of the guns and having gun sights that leaked in dust.
85mm and 122mm guns became standard, because the russians had made tests firing all their guns on a captured Tiger tank and concluded that only the 85mm Anti-aircraft gun and the 122mm field gun could penetrate it.
And russians designers also liked the idea of making tanks compact and small so armour thickness in millimeters increased without adding extra weight, and the tanks would also be harder to detect and a smaller target to hit, but the disadvantage with low cost compact tanks is that when it gets a penetrating hit, it will become very hard for the crew to abandon the crampy tank.
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Germans was a people of perfection, so they were building tanks complex high quality tanks that could take out the enemy from long ranges so they didn't have to risk their few expensive machines. The Germans had problems dealing with KV1 and t-34 on the Russian front, so they decided to put a longer gun barrel on the PanzerIV tank.
So the replaced the old 75mm L24 gun with the longer 75mm L48 gun, with gave the tank better ability to deal with tanks, because a long gun barrel gives more muzzle velocity - and when the bullet flies faster it can go through more millimeters of armour. And another advantage with long gun barrels is that they have better precision.
So when the Panther tank came, it had a very long 75mm L70 gun with amazing capabities and it could penetrate any allied tank on the battlefield. The gun was extremely accurate and the gun sights was also best of any tank in the war.
But the disadvantage of having a long thin gun instead of a short fat, is that the shot you fire doesn't contain much explosives, so they aren't as effective when firing on soft targets such as footsolidiers, trucks and buildings.
And the 88mm guns had been in use the entire war, since the 88mm anti-aircraft guns had proven themselves as excellent as dealing with enemy aricrafts, but also good at taking about enemy tanks from long ranges, and sometimes the guns was also used as artillery support.
And in 1941 the Germans meet superior russian tanks that was hard to knock out for all German weapons - but the 88mm anti-aircraft gun. So it was decided that new German tanks would be constructed with this gun.
And 2 variants of this gun was under development, and one was longer than the other.
The Tiger tank got the shorter 88mmL56 gun, which was an excellent gun, since anti-aircraft guns are designed to reload fast and the velocity of the shots is very high because you need lots of speed to throw up a bullet thousands of meters up into heaven - but that good velocity also means that anti-aircraft guns are excellent in penetration armour.
The Nashorn got the other gun (88mmL71) which was even longer and more powerful. The Nashorn could snipe and kill tanks at distances almost comparable to modern tanks. The gun was rapid firing, accurate, had extremly good penetration, and eventhough the caliber was smaller than some Russian guns, so was it still a monster in 1942-43 when the best allied tanks only had a 75mm caliber.
And later on would the Jagdpanther and the King Tiger also be given the same gun, while the JagdpanzerIV was given the same gun as Tiger I (88mL56), or the same gun as the panther (75mmL70).
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"He didn`t have the numbers to face that army and it was his equal or better in terms of quality."
Wrong his army defeated Austria and Poland.
"Authoritarian governments are able to be more ruthless"
I think there is a difference between being authoritarian and being centralized. They are not the same thing.
Sweden was not a Hitlerite dictatorship under Gustavus. The country was still having remains left from its time as old feudal state. The King had to make concessions to the nobility before he could become King. Otherwise would they not accept to vote in favor of letting him become the new King at his young age.
When wars were fought in Germany and more money was needed, did the King need to negotiate with the peasant class and beg them kindly to accept extra war taxes.
The King also realized his own limitations and did delegate out responsability of economic matters to his advisor Axel Oxenstierna. The King was a passionate man with strong feelings, temper, energy, impatience and big dreams... while Oxenstierna was a pragmatic realist, a man with a big brain, and a very cynical and macchiavellian view of the world. The two was close friends and in combination were those two men invinceable.
The King laid out bold plans and invested his energy to make them work. While Oxenstierna made the King calm down and abandon his most wild and unrealistic ideas, but keeping most ot the rest of the plan and fixed all money and logistics to make it work. He always found out ways to get money, he was an expert negoatiator and he was a clever player in diplomacy that could lure Denmark into playing their cards wrong and lose despite a strong hand.
If I could make a clone out of one brain to rule Sweden - then I would pick Axel Oxenstiernas.
So Sweden was never authoritarian in that sense that the King had unlimited powers. The Swedish King was in fact pretty weak compared to the absolutist Kings of the 1700s, like Carolus Rex who did not have to listen anyone except God.
But Sweden was a centralized state. The King, his advisors, the nobility and the peasants all stood unified to win the war in Germany. The nobility did not try to stab the King in the back and use dire times to expand their own powers at the expense of the King - like what often happened in other countries.
Instead did the nobility realize that they had a common interest with that the King and country was doing well.
If the nobles did their duty and fought the war and did it well, then they would get rich from plundering cities, and they would get more power and status by showing strong capabilities as a General on the battlefield.
By making themselves useful for the state would they help the country, and in return would the country help them get rich and promote their career.
It was a system of win - win for everyone involved.
So one can say that Sweden was an extremely centralized state. And extensive documentation was done to make best use of limited resources like money and manpower. Churches did document how many locals lived in their area so the state would know how much taxes that could be collected, and the newly born male children were put into the system so the state would know how many potential future soldiers it had available.
Its perhaps no coincidence that Sweden with this obsession also became the first country in the world to get a Central Bank, and in 1749 also first in the world to regulary count population numbers on an annual basis.
This institution responsible for all statistics gathering already existed back in the 1600s so even long before 1749 was government control without equals.
But even with such a massive "surveillance state" I would not call Sweden opressive. The tax burden was more equal and fairly distributed than in most other countries - like France, Austria, Denmark, Russia.
A peasant back in those days would probably have been most free if had been born in the Netherlands, Britain or Sweden.
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Germany started to massproduce things from 1943 onwards. And Germany couldn't do any "American style massproduction" before then, simply because it lacked factories for massproduction and enough skilled workers.
The Americans could on the other hand start massproducing tanks almost right away, since they already had huge factories for massproducing cars that could be converted into producing tanks and there was lots of skilled workers. And America and Britain was also richer countries than Germany, so those countries could afford more tools and machines which made their workers more productive.
So I would say that Germany couldn't have done much about their low military production prior to 1943. Maybe they could have increased workhours, removed weekends and used women in the war effort earlier.
But I think that Germany was at an disadvantage from the start, since they lacked oil and had to waste industrial capacity to get oil by other means (converting coal into oil), and Germany was also under allied bombing while Germany could do nothing against America, and Germany had been suffering under the Versaille treaty and their automotive industry was not used to massproduction.
The only trumpcard the Axis had was their superb, experienced military and skilled leadership.
And all this was thrown away in 1942, with the defeats at Midway, Guadacanal, El Alamein and Stalingrad.
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The Americans were overconfident in themselves and not so realistic. They rejected the Hobart Funnies because they thought that airpower would be able to cancel out any problem. But at Omaha it didn't. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong at that beach. The bombers all missed their targets. The ships with rocket artillery also all missed their targets so the rockets fell into the water instead of hitting the German defences on the beaches, and the smoke the rockets created prevented the Americans from seeing the German defences. So the Americans had a rough day at Omaha beach.
And once the beach had at Normandy had been secured, then the Americans tried a breakout. The Americans thought that once the tanks was ashore then the advance would be easy. But things turned out to be harder for the Americans than expected - it turned out to be more difficult to do tank warfare in Normandy than in the open training grounds in Louisiana. The Terrain at Normandy was filled with ditches, narrow roads with stone walls on the sides, and hedgerows (the infamous bocage) everyware.
The ideal terrain for ambushes and defence, and the American attacks were driven into a halt. Since it proved to be a difficult task to get through the thin but excellent German defensive line and things wasn't so easy as in American theory. The British troops also got stuck in their breakout operation, but they faced more German divisions than the Americans and the brits were short in manpower as many British divisions were sitting in Italy.
And the Normandy landings seemed to end up in a disaster for the allies after being stuck on the beach for 2 months without being able to make a breakout. According the plan should they have conquered a harbour and being able to send in supplies to their 1.5 million men strong army on the beach. But without a harbour it would be impossible to supply such a large force in the long run, and enormous amounts of allied troops would be stuck in a little prison of northern France and not being able to be used elseware.
Had the allies not been able to push through the German defences before the end of that year, then the Germans might have won their greatest military victory ever. And the Brits and Americans started to blame each other for the failure.
But then Hitler decided to save the allies from defeat. He took his small number of troops and ordered them to do the same mistake as the allies - attack with tanks in the Normandy terrain totally unsuitable for armour and the losses were of course high. And unlike the allies did the Germans not have any reserves so once the operation was canceled (the Avranche offensive) after its failure, then the German army around Normandy had been weakened and the allies could now punch through the German defences and finally do their breakout.
And the German defences were completly rolled up and the allies won one of their biggest strategic victories as the westfront collapsed.
So I think it is fair to say that the Americans were overconfident in themselves. And they were inexperienced and not very realistic in their goals. Their lessons from the fighting in Sicily were perhaps too much in recent memory for the Americans to being able to absorb the knowledge.
For a long time did I think that the war was basicly over for the Germans by 1944 and that the superiority in numbers was so total that there was no way the Germans could win on the western front - The Luftwaffe had only 2 planes to take on ten thousand allied.
But now I think that I was wrong earlier. I see atleast 3 possibilities how the Germans could have won.
* During D-day did the Germans act logical and reasonable like any of us would. They heard that the situation at Omaha beach was reasonably under control and that the much more acute danger were in the other landing zones so they therefore rushed their reinforcements to those places instead of sending them to Omaha.
But history could have ended very differently if the Germans had done the complete opposite and reinforced Omaha instead and pushed back and destroyed the allied landing there. And once that had been done, then the Germans could free up troops to fight back the allied landings on the other beaches and place after place roll back the allied offensive back into the sea.
And D-day would have ended in an allied disaster.
* A second possibility is of course that the Germans would never have launched its Avranche offensive and that the allies would have been stuck in a siege at the Normandy beachhead and that the entire allied operation would end up in a disaster for that reason instead.
* And a third possibility would have been if the Germans somehow have gotten into clarity about the situation. Even after 2 months of fighting in Normandy was the Germans unwilling to send more than half of their troops to the Normandy area because they still believed that the Normandy landing was not the real landing but only a distraction for the "real" allied landing which would take place somewhere else. And the Germans expected that this real landing would probably happen near Pas de Calais, so they concentrated the bulk of their forces there. Later on would they become a little more hesitant in their earlier beliefs so they reluctantly sent away some of their divisions to support the German defence at Normandy.
But during the entire battle did the Germans choose to keep their 15th army in Pas de Calais instead of helping the 17th army fight the allied invasion at Normandie.
Had the Germans concentrated their forces elseware then the defensive line would have been able to hold the allies back. And the allied troops in Normandie would have been starved from supplies.
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Swedens and Russia's history have been tied togheter for a long time. The word "Russia" comes from "rus" which were the name of the people from Roslagen in Sweden, and those people were vikings that created Russia.
And later on would Sweden and Novgorod fight a series of battles during the baltic crusades.
An in the early 1600s would Sweden conquer Moscow - which is of course a proud moment in Swedish military history when our army managed to accomplish a thing that even Hitler mighty army failed to do.
Sweden also nearly put a Swedish King on the Russian throne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Philip,_Duke_of_S%C3%B6dermanland.
Sweden had started a war of aggression and stolen the provinces Ingria and Karelia from Russia. And Russia would of course be angry and want those provinces back.
During the great northern war was it instead Russia's turn to play the bad guy and start the war with Sweden. And Sweden offered a good fight despite being outnumbered in resources 40:1. Sweden won over Denmark and Saxony and Poland. And Russia had been humiliated at the battle at Narva in 1700.
And after some years had past and Swedens enemies in the west had been defeated, then Sweden could focus on Russia and trying to bring the war to an end. But King Peter of Russia had used his time well and used the years to rebuild his destroyed army and improve it. The odds were against Sweden - which were outnumbered.
Things was however far from certain. The long war, the war taxes and the military defeats had not been popular in Russia and another big defeat could have sparked a rebellion against the Tsar - which also had been unpopular thanks to his western modernizatiation reforms. There was also this chance that Mazepa and his cossacks would join the Swedes if the Russian's had lost another great battle.. and then the Ottoman empire could also feel tempted to go to war again. And that would of course not end well for Russia if that would have happened. But things didn't go that way.
The battle of Poltava in 1709 became an epic battle, and it started well for the Swedes and the first attacks hit the Russian troops with such a force that they started to retreat and Tsar Peter started to prepare a withdrawal since he thought that the battle had been lost. But the Swedish attack became disorganized later on the day, and the Russian troops counter-attacked and strongest army in Swedish history had been defeated.
Swedens days as a great power in Europe was over, while Russia was now seen as a new great power by the world. This battle was epic and a struggle of which side would dominate the baltic. It was a dramatic end of our empire, this battle is for Sweden what the battle of Waterloo is to the French, what Stalingrad is to the Germans, or what Kosovo Polje is to the Serbs, or what Gettysburg was to the south in the American civil war.
Sweden fought on for many more years and managed to save most of its empire from being lost. And the war ended in 1721 without much terrain lost for Sweden besides the baltic provinces, and some land in Germany and in the Netherlands.
And Russia had opened a window to western Europe thanks to its strip of land on the baltic coast. And a new capital - St. Petersburg had been built there on Swedish soil during the war.
Many international observers did however think that Sweden would recover soon after the war and retake its former great power status. During the middle of the 1700s was the power of the Swedish monarchy strongly reduced, and the nobility, the burghers and priests took over the control over the country. And the country tried to focus on trade and scientific discoveries instead of only building guns, farming and fight wars as in the past.
But the military aristocracy in Sweden didn't like this new cowardly development and they wanted to retake all land that had been lost and restore Swedens honour. But the problem was that the Swedish army was crap. In the 1600s and the early 1700s it had been one of the best in Europe. But in the mid 1700s it was mediocre and badly funded.
So when the aristcrats started a war against Russia it ended in a humiliating disaster for Sweden and the country was lucky to not lose Finland..and instead only had to agree to marry a Russian monarch into the Swedish throne. And then later on Sweden joined the seven years war against Prussia which also ended badly. And the Russo-Swedish war that Sweden started in 1788 was also a fiasco.
And in 1809 did Sweden lose all of Finland to Russia. And the power struggle was over once and for all.
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Sweden used to have a strong military. Perhaps the strongest in Europe as late as 1994. Sweden did have hundreds of top modern battle tanks. it had 400 modern fighter jets. And some of the best submarines and combat boats in the world. The country had an impressive weapons industry that was making everything from tanks, self-propelled artillery, APCs, IFVs, to fighter jets, submarines, anti-aircraft guns, anti-tank weapons, and much more.
Gripen E is in my opinion the best fighter jet in the world right now. Bandkanon and the S-tank was way ahead of their time when they came. The Bofors 40mm gun is probably the most popular anti-aircraft gun in the world.
Carl Gustav rocket launcher is also a big international success, just as combat boat 90, and Combat Vehicle 90.
And the Gotland class submarines is so stealthy that they managed to sneak through the defense of an entire US fleet and sink an American aircraft carrier during an exercise.
So Sweden could have a strong military if it wanted to. But the politicians are traitors who rather waste that money on the EU, immigration and wasteful stuff.
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Frederick displayed interest in many women - like the girl from England that someone proposed to be his bride. But his father instead married him away to an awkward ugly girl that he was not attracted to, and that can explain his lack of interest in her and his childless life. Frederick's servants did however hear the couple making love from outside the room, so all this talk about him being gay is probably just a way to either tarnish his reputation, or an attempt for the gay community to claim another celebrity into their own camp on very loose grounds.
His friendship was a very deep one. But being best friends is not the same thing as being homosexual.
Frederick's childhood was a terrible one where his father did beat him up and humiliated him, and denied his son all pleasures in life... music, philosophy, fashion, reading latin, speaking French, partying with friends, marrying a pretty girl etc.
And he was forced to endure pointless boring hunting trips with his father and his endless military inspections. And when his foolish father got outmanouvered in the game of world politics by Brits, Austrians and others, then he took out his on his son.
It simply felt better for him to take out all rage on someone else and blame him for all the faults in the world instead of fixing himself. His father was a simple man who hated fashion and philosophy, he was a christian fanatic while his son was an atheist. And he was a man who liked to live a spartan lifestyle and expected everyone else to do the same, and his entire Kingdom was forced to eat saurkraut so the government could save money and build a large military.
Fredericks father was a physchopath opressor who wished his oldest son to be dead. And Frederick's did beat him very badly, and encouraged him to commit suicide. And later on would he also murder Fredericks best friend in front Frederick's own eyes in an attempt to break his own son down and once again feeling sadistic joy in taking away everything that Frederick held dear.
Katte shared many of Frederick hobbies and he was a loyal servant to the Hohenzollern family so it became natural that this solidier became a close friend. And Frederick needed good friends in this harsh and lonely time when he was in the mercy of his father and no adult to stand up for him and protect him. So Frederick and his sister and Katte was of course then people who stood very close to Frederick.
And it is not hard to understand why Frederick feared for his own life and felt a desperate urge to seek freedom from his fathers opression.
At first did his father want to kill both Katte and Frederick, but in the last moment did massive diplomatic protests from Kingdoms from every corner in Europe come in and demanded that Frederick's life would be spared and many felt pity for the young prince. So Frederick William had not much other choice than to back off from his plans to kill his own son for high treason in a kangaroo court. So to safe face he would allow his son to live, but instead try to get him to admit desertion and get a confession that he was unfit to rule the Kingdom and force him to abdicate, and his best friend Katte would be murdered to break Frederick down and if not pushing him over the edge to commit suicide, so atleast break his will to fight on and give up his ambitions to become King.
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I think we should stop looking at the individuals and think of countries instead. Why are some countries filled with people with a high standard of living, and why are some filled with poor instead?
And the reason as Ha Joon Chang says is not that people are hardworking or lazy. The reason is rather that some societies are better developed than others.
The people in many 3rd world countries are hardworking and spend 10, 12 or even 16 hours working in factories. They have no freetime in the weekends. And they get no vacation. But even if they work hard people there don't get rich.
People in Scandinavian countries are lazy on the other hand. They don't work on the weekends, they have paid vacations and they also get maternity leave and such. And people in those countries are still richer than people in China, Bangladesh, and Africa.
So how hard you work doesn't matter that much. It is more important what the circumstances is in the country where you are born. Warren Buffet himself said that he didn't think that he would become rich if he had been born in a 3rd world country instead. Because then would probably have to become a farmer, and Buffet said that he isn't good at farming.
Countries in scandinavia can produce more stuff per worker than workers in poor countries because they have been roads and infrastructure, better internet, they have an electric grid without constant energy blackouts, there is no need to pay bribes to government officials or extortion money to a local maffia. There is a plenty of educated workers and "human capital". And there are lots of machinery. robots, computers and advanced tools.
So a Scandinavian worker can produce things more effiecently than a factory in a poor country can that needs to deal with all kinds of problems that a factory in Scandinavia doesn't need to spend much time caring about.
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Look at history. Russia typically outnumbered Sweden 4 to 1 in most battles fought in the Great Northern War and Russia typically lost most of those battles and suffered 10 times higher losses than their opponent.
And the story is the same in most other wars as well. Russia got humiliated by Frederick the Great, they got humiliated by Finland in the winter war and the continuation wars, and the Germans humiliated Russia with the same catastrophic losses for russia in 1941 as seen in the battles in the Great Northern war.
So for Russia it is usual for them to suck. They always suck at war. Incompetent leadership, corruption, crappy doctrine, bad dicipline among the soldiers that rather spend time for rape and loot than focusing on combat, low willingness to fight among the soldiers, poorly maintained rusty old equipment, political meddling in the war effort, Putins nepotism, insecure communication...
well the reasons are many why I do not consider the russian military to be nothing but a mob and a barbarian horde.
It does not deserve to be called a professional force since it lacks professionalism, dicipline and skill.
Its year 2023 and the stone age barbarians in the east have not yet even invented the pallet for their logistical system.
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@aymarafan7669 "the Great" is a title used by bad men as well, like Charlemagne or "Karl the great" as he is known as in German. Charlemagne murdered heathens and did crusades and forced his religion on other people and he gained children with large numbers of women (and perhaps even his own sister according to some mythological tales).
Alexander the Great was basicly a Hitler of antiquity who destroyed mulitple cities like Thebe and Persepolis and commited genocide on one ethnic group after another.
So of course are many persons named "the Great" not so great people.
Frederick the Great on the other hand was a great person in my opinion.
He did not create constitutional democracy, but on the other hand would only an idiot judge a person from the 1700s with the same standards as we have for people of our own day. Abraham Lincoln would be called a racist if he presented the same views on blacks as he held back then, when the normal thing was to be a racist. But fact remains that Lincoln was a great man who abolished slavery and the blacks have him to thank for their freedom. And Aldous Huxley who fought for the rights of blacks in the civil rights movement also held quite racist views. And Fredrika Bremer who fought for womens rights here in Sweden, did see women as intellectually inferior to men. So I don't think we should judge people with the standards of our own time, but instead we should judge people for the standards of the time in which they lived.
And the same goes for Frederick the Great.
Frederick was a man way ahead of his time. He abolished torture, while other countries like for example Britain did use flogging as a punishment on their solidiers. Frederick the Great was raised by religious fundamentalist father and knew how opressive religion was, so he gave everyone religious freedom regardless if they were protestant, catholic, calvinist, jewish, muslim, or an atheist like himself.
In my opinion was this a great achievement, since other countries still burned witches and applied the Bible like sharia law. King Charles the XII in Sweden did for example take the law of Moses and make it the new Swedish law during his reign. And the Austrian emperor Josef II burned jews.
Frederick the Great also created freedom of the press, and he was the only King in Europe that was not interested in trying to improve stories about himself to make himself look better in history books.
While other countries like France did burn books and forced Voltaire to flee from the country for mocking religion and criticisng the government.
Prussia was also the great power that is today is known as aggressive and militaristic and the Sparta of Europe. But facts remains that this image is false, since Prussia was the great power in Europe with most years in peace during the 1700s, and the share of tax money the military got was less than in many other countries as for example Austria.
Frederick the Great also had another mindset than other rulers. Louis XIV of France said "I am the state" - which means that his will was the law and that he was not accountable to anyone but himself. Frederick on the other hand said "I am the first servant of the state"... which means that Frederick saw himself as equal to the rest of the people in his country to the duty of serving the country's interest. And as a servant he would be held accountable to his own country and his own people.
One could argue as you Frederick haters do and say that he was still a ruling dictator as the other kings. But on the other hand do I think it is undenible that Frederick took his job as King very seriously unlike other Kings who only took their farmers tax money to spend on luxuries and wasted their time on sex and delicious meals.
Frederick on the other hand woke up 6 AM every morning and began answering 30 letters or so by government officials. And later that day he would speak to his ministers or generals and inspect his troops or visiting farmers or merchants and listen to their concerns. So he worked very long hours each day, and the only few breaks he took was used for playing flute or having philosophical discussions.
Frederick the Great was also a man who fostered the industrial revolution in Germany, and the man possessed a great talent for finding great men for important positions in government. And Silesia would togheter with England and Belgium be the first place in Europe to enter the industrial revolution, thanks to the many succesful state-owned mining industries there. Frederick the Great was also interested in new technologies and he started to make porcelain in Prussia, and his country became the first in Germany to grow potatoes. So when Germany suffered from a great famine and millions were threatned by starvation, did Frederick and his military magazines filled with potatoes open up to share the food with the startving people and save many lives.
It is true that Frederick held contempt for the Polish, jews and despised the German language, and the idea of a unified Germany and that he mocked religion. But Frederick was on the other hand a man who also was capable to look beyond his own biases. He could respect the great talent of General von Ziethen, and he didn't turn him away only because he was a warm believer in Christianity. And eventough he thought that aristocrats would usally make up better officers, he would still not deny poor farmers the right to become officers if they could display great talent for the job. So he was indeed a believer in meritocracy.
He wanted to abolish serfdom, but the restistance towards such a reform was too hard for him to being able to finish that task within his own life-time.
So to summerize, do I think that Frederick the Great was one of the greatest rulers who have ever lived. He was a man way ahead of his own time - Almost like Leonardo da Vinci in that sense.
His ideas spread to the rest of Europe, and gave us all some of the freedoms we have today such as freedom of speech and freedom of religion. He created the enlightenment which would replace all opressive religious dogma. And his school system is still used in many modern countries around this world, including my own: Sweden.
He had a few flaws of course. He started one war of agression in 1740. But on the other hand was Europe in the 1500s, 1600s and 1700s a place where this was normal and every country had to decide if it would eat up other lands, or become eaten itself. So we should not judge Frederick by measurements of today, but rather see him and judge him according to the standards of the 1700s.
And in that light, one could say that he was actully a great King in many ways. And not just a brutal uncivilized warlord or a lazy wasteful indifferent King who drank wine and slept with women all day long.
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@Pewpewpew88
USA is making her allies stronger so that they can support her in the future. Ukraine will be grateful for getting their country saved by the USA. And Ukraine benefits as they gets their military modernized and they are also breaking their dependency on Russian weapon systems - something which is a huge drawback when you at war with Russia and need spareparts and ammunition for all the stuff you have bought.
The only drawback as I sees it is that Ukraine gets their airforce build around planes that are 50 years old. Inheriting things from your 70 year old grandpa is not that fun when it comes to other things.. and in a high-tech buisness as fighter aircrafts its very much a disadvantage.
Planes cannot be upgraded like tanks either, since airplanes are light and small things that cannot carry too much heavy stuff or fit tonnes of new sensors into a limited space. And the airframe gets exhausted once you have flown a plane a large numbers of hours, so all planes will get old and die one day.
You can of course change some components and make a few upgrades here and there... but then will the plane start becoming more and more costly to upgrade and upkeep so it will become smarter to just buy a new plane instead.
The old Swedish Draken was kept in service for decades just like the old F4 Phantom because it was a great plane, and with some upgrades it could probably still be competative (and especially so against old Russian junk). However Draken needs 50 hours of maintance on the ground for every 1 hour it flies up in the air. And the same is true for F14 Tomcat. So keeping old planes in service means that you will have to do much maintance and get very little flying from them.. and they become very costly to operate.
Compare that to Swedens newest fighter jet - JAS-39 Gripen - which only needs 5 hours of maintance for every flight hour. That allows you to fly many missions in a single day. You can get your ground crew to refuel and rearm the plane in less than 45 minutes and you can go up in the sky and shot down a few more MIGs and help your troops on the ground by dropping some bombs.
So I think modern planes are preferable for that reason. But if you are a rich country like Saudiarabia and can afford a big airforce with expensive planes and don't mind a huge logistical organization, then of course I say go for it. They can keep their F15 eagles and upgrade all their old planes. F15 Silent Eagle and F16 Viper are still good planes and respectable opponents even to the best planes in the world like Gripen, F22, Eurofighter, Rafale, and F35.
And lets not forget that all those best planes on that list are planes are either American or belonging to Americas allies...
And compared to hostile powers like Russia will they outclass that junk. SU57 is a fake stealth plane with engines similiar to those on F15 so it cannot hide its heat signature.. and the plane has not been built yet, and only a half dozen prototypes exist, and it is likely that Russia never can afford to build many such planes. And MIG35 is just an upgraded old MIG29, and it is considered inferior to the SU35 (which is also an old plane, as it is just an upgraded version of the old SU27 flanker that entered service in 1977).
Furthermore are Russian pilots badly trained with only an average of 120 flight hours per year (including "test flying" other aircrafts). And Russian planes also got crappy coordination with ground forces, inferior GPS and sensor systems. Russian rockets and missile technology used to be superior that of the west. But now have the west almost closed that gap, and now when digital computer technology have become more important for precision, have the west now instead become superior to Russia in missile technology, as the Russian weapons got very crappy precision.
So yeah, even old western planes would probably do well against Soviet junk.
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The Russias military is developing many weapons that are superior to anything the west have. The Armata tank is the most modern tank in the world. The PAK-FA is the best fighter jet in the world - by far. And Russia also got other weapons that are if not the best, so among the best in the world - such as the Ka52 attack helicopter, the S-400 surface-to-air missile, the Kornet anti-tank missile, the T-80 tank, and the SU35 fighter is atleast on paper superior to any western fighter jet, and the MIG35 and even the old MIG31 is comparing well to the most modern European fighter jets.
So considering Russias small size of the economy, one should not mock them for achieving so impressive technological achievments but rather applaud them. I am not a Russian fanboy, and much less a fan of Putin. But I can respect Russia for doing some things well, unlike retarded Russia-haters who say bad things about the country regardless if they deserves it or not.
And yes, Russia is poor compared to Europe and USA. But Russias industrialization also started much later, and the country had its economy destroyed in a world war and a large chunk of its economy destroyed by the Germans and a large part of its population murdered by Hitler.
And then in the 1990s Russia implemented neoliberal economic reforms under Yeltsin that crashed the economy, bankrupted 80% of the farms in Russia, and made the Russian GDP go down by 2/3rds.
More Russians got killed Yeltsins corrupth economic reforms than the amount of Russians killed by Hitler. And HIV, drug-use and prostitution started to spread where it was previsously unknown. The hyperinflation ruined ordinary Russians while corrupth oligarchs and the Maffia made big money.
So western powers share some of the blame for Russia's economic development after the world war and the economic policies pushed by the Washington consensus in the 1990s.
The Soviet union also made disasterous economic decisions as we all know with its over-spending on the military and its creation of mass-starvation in Ukraine.
But its economic development was none the less impressive in many aspects. And if one does not call the Soviet economic development a success, then I don't know what country one could then possibly call an economic success.
Soviet started as a poor feudal country of farmers that became one of the largest industrial countries in the world and entered the atomic age. The average life-span for the population more than doubled. The country managed to win the space race against the richest country on the planet. It managed to defeat the mightyiest invasion army in history. It managed to industrialize the country in record short time, not only once, but twice after the Germans had wrecked most of the industrial centers in the country. The peasant country became a superpower.
I think the development by the Soviets can be impressive in many aspects. But I don't think starving a million Ukrainians and censoring and killing political dissidents was a price worth paying. Nevertheless, did Stalins brutal industrialization financed by all stolen Ukrainian food save the world from nazi world domination. For without all those factories and machines that was built, Russia could never have defeated Germany.
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The Ukrainians are not perfect. They still have much old Soviet equipment mixed with their Nato stuff. So of course will they be stuck with some old Soviet tactics which they have to use for their Soviet weapons. Firing rockets from a distance from an attack helicopter and then flying low to avoid manpads and radars is of course a very ineffective Soviet way of fighting a war, but I guess they are stuck with what weapons they have so there is not much else they can do.
Their military is also a mess. With Soviet, USAish, British, French, German, Polish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Spanish weapons and old WWII stuff is the logistical system of course a mess. The troops are civilians with Ukrainian military training, combat experience, and some have foreign military training.
So the diversity is very large in this army. And this do of course create much limitations of this force. I do not think that diversity is a strength. But I do not think one can deny that in some few instances can be very useful. The Russians can never know what type of weapon system they will face in an area - it can literarly be anything, so it is very hard to plan and prepare for any kind of surprise that can await them. Who knows? If they walk over a field they might get HIMARSED, or hit with Caesar, PZH2000, Archer, and Krab.
And it might be difficult for every russian tank crew where to aim on weakspots on Ukrainian tanks when they use so many variants of Slovenian, Polish, Czech, Albanian, Slovakian, Ukrainian, and Russian tanks with all kinds of armor modifications and upgrades from different time periods.
The Ukrainians have the option to use cheap anti-tank weapons like AT-4, PV1110 and RPG7 to destroy Russian tanks. But they also have large amounts of more sophisticated weapons which all have their unique strenghts like the long range Javelin, or the short range Panzerfaust-3 with 800mm armor penetration which then can theoretically turn any tank on the planet into a burning wreck even if you hit it where the armor is the thickest.
All this will of course make life a nightmare for a Russian tank commander. The options that their enemy have are so many that it is impossible to fully guard yourself towards all of them. You can never feel secure and relax. You are always stressed out, afraid and feeling uncomfortable.
Your enemy is very creative, innovative and brave so every turn on a forest road is a potential ambush site. And with the crappy infantry support and crappy coordiantion with helicopters and such are you and your tankers left to your own to fend off Ukrainian attacks - which is not fun. Especially not old outdated commie cocker tanks with flying turrets, no gun depression and no vision what is happening outside the tank - so when the enemy stars shooting you quickly get blind as the commander have to dive down into the turret and close the hatch to avoid getting hit from machine gun fire or snipers
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Of course would it be more difficult to train 4x more tank crews if Germany built StuGs and PanzerIVs instead of Tigers.
But on the other hand would Germany not have to bother with making special military bridges, special trains, recovery vehicles, and storing more types of spareparts and such.
Germanys biggest problem was after all the lack of numbers of tanks. So the few they had would they have to drive around much to counter allied attacks on one front, and then they had to move to another front to fight back an allied attack there... and so it went on.
If Germany had more tanks deployed along the frontline then it wouldn't have to move around as much. And having tanks in defensive positions would not consume much fuel anyways.
Another benifit of lighter tanks would be that they would be easier to pull away from the battlefield so they could be repaired. Because controlling the battlefield after a battle is almost as important as to win the battle. If you control the battlefield afterwards, then you can repair your own tanks and perhaps also repair and steal some enemy tanks as well.
But if you don't can control the battlefield after a battle, then you have to fast pull away your heavy tiger to a repair shop before the Russians take over the area. And if that is not possible, then you have to blow up your own tank so that the Russians don't steal your tank and use it against you.
And recovering a 20tonnes tank is much easier than a Tiger I tank. A Tiger tank was so heavy that only another Tiger had enough power to move it. Or otherwise you would have to use 3 big Famo trucks to move your tank away from the battlefield - which is a complicated thing.
Your trucks are rare and in short supply in the German army. And even if you got 3 trucks, then you don't wanna use drive those weakly protected machines on a battlefield where the enemy is firing around you just so that you can use hours to drive away a Tiger tank to a safe place where you can do repairs and maintance.
Germany was losing the war after the start of 1943, so having heavy tanks that were too precious to lose and too difficult to evacuate from a battlefield was not optimal.
Earlier in the war could Germany use hundreds of captured T-34 tanks. But Germany would not use any later T-34/85 models in their army because they rarely controlled the battlefield after the battle and could therefore rarely ever capture any such tanks.
And Germany had to start using overkill tactics, and after they knocked out a tank they kept on firing on it until it catched fire - and only then would it be counted as a kill.
And the reason for this was that the Germans did rarely control the battlefield after a battle, and they had to therefore make sure that the allied tank was completly destroyed and could not be repaired and used again another day.
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I don't know the exact numbers, but I think I somewhere heard that Russia put 2500 tanks into Ukraine, while Ukraine started this war with 800 tanks. Russian losses have been heavy. Indeed much heavier than Ukraines despite having better tanks.
Ukraines losses have been smaller, and they have been able to compensate much of it by taking over some Russian tanks and put them into use against Russia. However, even if the losses are smaller does it not mean that the situation has improved. Ukraine started the war with much less tanks so every lost tank is felt. Russia on the other hand started this war with a few thousand tanks in storage... most of them old and in bad condition, but still..
Giving Ukraine 200 modern western tanks (M1 Abrams, Leopard2, Challanger2, Leclerk) and say 200 lighter tanks (AMX-10 RC, Leopard1) will not give Ukraine more tanks than Russia. But then of course are the Russian military made up by idiots, so the combat power of this Ukrainian force is multiplied by many factors.
First of all are the western tanks better built and less old than the Russian tanks. They also have trained crews while the Russians use mobikis with less training. Ukraine is training combined arms warfare, while that concept is not understood in Russia. And those tanks will be assisted by other modern superior western weapons such as Archer, Panzerhaubitze 2000, and Caesar...and modern infantry fighting vehicles such as CV90 and Bradley which makes Russian BMP-1 and BMP-2
looklike grandpas old garbage by comparison.
This is a powerful force addition to the Ukrainian army. If I was a Russian general having to take counter-measures against an Ukrainian offensive I would be very concerned as the old Soviet tanks are no match the modern western tanks. And even the old partially outdated old Leopard1 is still superior to the old T-54, T-55 and T-62 junk fielded by the Russian military.
However this force in itself is far from enough to guarantee an Ukrainian victory. 200 modern and somewhat modern western tanks vs 2000 Russian tanks + 300.000 men...... I think the numbers speaks for itself that the west are sending too little to Ukraine to help them win this war fast
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A good army got brains. Finlands army in the winter war and in the continuation war had brains. The Israeli army in the six day war and the Yom Kippur war had brains.
The US army does not have as much brains. It got more muscles than brain. It is a bit like the Roman army. It is large and well supplied and can afford to take heavy losses and still win a war - unlike Finland's big brained army that lacked the muscles to destroy Russia.
USA do not have the smartest Generals, its doctrine is stupid (it have neglected Auftragstaktik unlike the Israelis for example) and it have become a bit lazy by beating their enemy by using air power, fire power and technological superiority instead of finding ways to win their enemy without using such luxuries.
But with all that contempt for the US military I shown, do they also deserve some admiration and flatter.
They are extremely good at technological development - DARPA gave us internet, GPS, microelectronics and so on, so without the US military would there have been no economic wonder with great IT companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon that gives USA enormous economic power around the world and brings them enormous economic wealth.
The US military is also extremely good at organising acute medical care for wounded soldiers. Both military and civilian healthcare around the world have copied the model of the US army and is now organized by the same model
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_(medicine)
And like the Romans, are the Americans good with logistics and at organizing things like planning for a military operation.
And sometimes are the Americans creative as well - like operation Bolo.
And there are of course a few good american Generals, like George C Marshall, Matthew Ridgway to just name a few
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Fact remains that the US had the strongest economy in world war II by far, even if they started to demobilize their economy before the war was over. It doubled its GDP during the war years, it created more planes than the rest of the world combined in 1943, it not only expanded its agricultural output and industrial production at the same time but it did also let the military grow from less than 200.000 men to 12 million.
And yet, so did America not even mobilize more than a fraction than what they potentionally actully could have.
The Soviet economy was more mobilized for war than the American - which is an impressive feat, since poor countries usally lacks the tools and effectivness in production in order to spare manpower from civilian agriculture so they could be put into the industry to make military equipment, or so that the farmers can provide the army with enough food.
Russia had large stacks of supplies before the war and thanks to skilled centralplanning it could even for a short while use 80% of its GDP to fight the war. Which is normally something that only the richest countries in the world are able to pull off.
Russia survived and won the war, but the price for victory was enormous. Millions of workers/taxpayers/consumers were dead. Factories, bridges, homes and roads had been destroyed all over western Russia - where 60-70% of Russia's GDP had laid in German hands. More than 13.000 villages and hundreds of towns had been under German occupation.
One could also compare GDP between the Axis powers and the Allied countries here:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.590.924&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Of course does GDP not tell everything. But it can oftentimes help to get the bigger picture of things. And in this case it can clearly demonstrate the American superiority. But I would go even further, and say that it understates Americas strenght, since it doesn't say anything about technological superiority, fighting morale, or the armount of resources at hand. And oil is the lifeblood of any economy, now as then.
And since America was the largest oil producer inte world and had plenty of cheap oil, I would say that that gave them a huge advantage to the rest of the world. They could replace human labour with cheap energy. And they didn't have to waste money and having to research facilities that could transform coal into oil.
Instead they could just focus all of their industrial capacity towards winning the war.
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The main problem was not what Germany did at the frontline, but rather what it did behind it. Killing civilians at the frontline sometimes happens, but rounding up millions of people and have them standing next to a ditch and have them shot is another doctrine.
At the frontline did the German army behave well. But behind the front did Germany create crimes of epic proportions. Most of the blame goes to the SS, SD, and Gestapo of course. They deserve 97% of all the blame for what happened. And without them would the German army, the reichbahn, and the German chemical industry never had became helpers of genocide either.
The genocide was unique in that sense that it s co-ordinated effort of all departments of the state-machinery of a modern government. The industry provided expertise in cremation ovens, poison gas, gas tight rooms, computers for data storage, and gas vans. The reichbahn provided railway transports. The intelligence agency tracked down people.
The military provided land mines, barbed wire, machine guns and much else. Doctors gave lethal injections and selected which people who would die and which were strong enough for slave labor.
Everything was systematic. Murder methods were systematically improved.
The cost of killing a person were kept at a minimum. And a tiny guard force of only a hundred men could easily kill half a million people. Only 2 people managed to flee and survive from Belzec while a quarter of a million died. And at Chelmno did also only 2 people survive out of half a million. Victims were systematically mislead by being given soap, and seeing shower room signs, and seeing sprinkles in the roof. Thousands of people could be killed in just an hour.
And the guards did not have to look their victims in their face as they died.
And all information about their crimes was supposed to be hidden, bodies were burned to ashes to hide their crimes.
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America send large amounts of help. So I am not questioning that.
All I am saying is that about 80% of that help came between late 1943 to 1945... when the German army already had been severly beaten in Stalingrad and the axis forces was on the retreat. And Germany was unable to recover the huge losses of men it suffered from the winters and the many epic meatgrinder battles. After Stalingrad many axis countries tried to withdraw from the war. And the battle of Kursk was the beginning of the end of German air superiority over the Russian skies. German tank production had increased greatly, but none the less did tank losses keep phase with tank production.
Maybe Hitler could won the war on the East if he had gotten a peace treaty with the western powers. And attacked Russia in 1943, and grabbed the oilfields, the industries and farms from southern Russia so the Russian economy had gotten severly mutilated while the German resource shortages would have been permanently reliefed.
But besides from that, I think it is unlikely that Germany would ever win a war with Russia.
The Great victories won in 1941 wasn't just caused by German mastery of the art of war and Russian incompetence. But a huge deal of it was also caused by pure luck.
Had the Russians not so foolishly lined up the air force on the runways so they became simple targets and sitting ducks for the Luftwaffe, so they could totally destroy the worlds largest airforce in just two weeks... then the war could have ended very differently. Had Stalin been wiser and allowed retreats and concentrated all his supertanks into large units, he would certainly had caused much trouble for the Germans. And had he not overextended his winter counteroffensive, then it would have ended up as a huge success instead of a failure. And if Hitler had listened to his Generals instead of order "not one step back", then the Russian counteroffensive probably had destroyed the Wehrmacht, and the war would have been over in 1942.
So many things could have gone wrong, that it is strange that the Germans could become as succesful as they were before Stalingrad happened.
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Treason by the political class is the reason why Sweden no longer have leftwing economics. Idiot migration is something that only took absurd proportions the last years.
Sweden deregulated the financial markets in the 1980s so capital could move in and out of the country without regulation which lead the economy into dangerous waters. Sweden had also pegged the Krona with the Ecu (the predecessor to the Euro) and with all currency speculation that was possible to the deregulations, the Swedish currency peg came under attack. And the politians was determined to defend Swedens commitment to the Ecu, regardless of how hard the Swedish economy would be hit.
So our central bank raised the interest rate to 500%! to defend the Ecu peg.
And as a result, Sweden lost half a million jobs - which is a lot for a country with 8 million people.
Swedens unemployment rate became record high.
But after all damage was done, Sweden abandoned the idea of staying in the Euro-project.
And after the crisis, the Swedish government made harsh cuts in our welfare system and lowered taxes for rich people and made taxes for the poor and the middle class higher. And as a solution to get the country out of the troubles the politicians promised the people that EU would be the solution.
And since the 1990s Sweden has privatized the post office, our tele communications, our railroads, and Swedish companies has been taken over by competitors in other countries. The marketization of our electric grid had led to an oligopoly, which have pushed up energy prices at the expense of consumers and our manufacturing industry which have lost its advantage over other countries it had with cheap energy.
Our wages has havn't increased because our centralbank no longer cares about trying to keep the unemployment rate near 0%, but instead it tries to increase unemployment so the balance between supply and demand doesn't push up wages and inflation, because thats what they say it leads to. But centralbankers are idiots and losers.
The workers are now poor and indebted since they can't live off their wages. And since people don't get high wages anymore we can no longer buy anything that our industry produce. And our large private debts are now the highest household debts in the world, which will lead to an economic crash in the future. Companies make record profits, but they cannot use their money for anything, since buying new machines and creating more factories would be pointless if people don't buy more of their products.
But they like our policies, since the low wages makes them rich. And our products are cheap on the world markets since our centralbank have made our wages artificially low.
So what our companies do is to steal jobs and economic growth from other countries. Like Italy and Greece, who already got weak economies and unemployment. So we just make their problems worse, while our companies and government are fucking our people over.
Sweden should export less, not more. We should make our own market stronger. We should pay higher wages. We should tax the rich. And we should stop immigration. And get out of the EU.
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I rather have a Europe where each country have their own currency, so they can stimulate the economy in bad times, and slowing down inflation in good times so crashes can be avoided.
I rather have fair system where a country with high taxes can have good welfare system, without having it destroyed by inflow of people from countries with low taxes.
I rather let every country themself decide how many migrants to accept, than forcing the decision down their throats by another country. People who defend the idea of one country deciding over another country, defends imperialism - which is quite ironic since most EU-fanboys hate nationalism, but loves the bad sides of it - which is when one country tries to force their will upon another people. Such EU lovers are hypocrites, imperialists and fascists.
I think each country should have their own coscription army designed only for self-defence. Such an army can be made strong at a low cost, which Finland shows perfectly. And what I don't want is an EU army that isn't directly accountable to its own people, and doesn't consist of its own citizens, but rather a mobile proffesional army and foreign troops, such as Gurkhas, the foreign legion or black water troops.
Such an army is not designed for self-defence and keeping the peace, but rather for imperialism and colonialism... and attacking poor countries and force our rule upon them, and have them bow down to interests of our large corporations.
I think each country have the democratic right to ignore EUs idea of a common market and the four freedoms - which says that Europe must have a market economy. I for my thing want some stateowned companies. I want to nationalize my countries failed private railroad system. I wanna ban all meat from animals that have been mistreated. I want to refuse sharing my countries resources with other EU members. And I wanna scrap EUs harsh laws on intellectual property completly and go back to my own country's old laws..... The list could be made longer, but the point is made. I want my democratic right to do leftwing economic policies that I am prohibited from Neoliberal EU fascists from implementing.
..........................
I want a Europe with many small countries, where each country is to a high degree self-suffiecent and produce most of their stuff locally. Peak oil will give us high transportation costs, so it will simply be cheaper to buy stuff from your own country than import it from Asia.
Each country choose policies that suits their own interests and traditions, so Nordic countries that are ill adopted to southern tradition of regulating everything will no longer have that problem, and southern countries doensn't have to implement highly unpopular German style of fiscal dicipline.
Economic crashes is a thing of the past, when each country is given the tools to prevent them by capital controls and their own central bank.
Democracy and freedom and political interest will be increased when people can choose their country's own direction and equality increase.
When Northern Europe is forced to abandon the idea of exporting tonnes of goods to Southern Europe with cheap labour, Northern Europe will be forced to make a job creation policy by producing things for their own home market instead.
And for that high wages is needed so people can afford buying goods that companies produce. So with higher wages poverty and inequality will go away, companies will make more sales, and hire more people and invest in more machines. The working class is getting stronger, and unemployment will disappear.
Southern Europe, will have their industry back when they can help it with inflation and some temporary protectionism. And when Northern Europe doesn't take their jobs and growth they will be helped. And with a currency under their own control, they are now able to pay of their debts with inflation, while inflation also helps them getting out of their hard economic crisis.
And by giving them their own manufacturing industry, the productivity in the economy increases, which in turn enables the countries to pay higher wages and higher taxes.
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"Why didn't people in ww2 just have infantry with diffrent support weapons in response to wathever threat they might face?"
Because of failed doctrine. Before world war 2 there was a belief in a breaktrough doctrine of modern weapon systems. Douhet spoke of huge airfleets of bombers who would breakthrough any air defences and transform every enemy city into rubble, and Liddle Hart instead spoke of huge fleets of tanks that would breaktrough any defences and force enemy to surrender.
Both of those doctrines failed in World War2. German warproduction rose the entire war despite the bombings, and at the end of the war production started to decline because Lorraine's steel and Romanias oil fell into Allied hands.
And Germanys early victories had nothing to do with massconcentration of all tanks at one place, but people later on started to believe it.
The list of failures of this tank doctrine can be made endless... allies in Normandy and Pattons failed breakout, and Montgomerys failed attacks at Caen, followed by Hitlers failure to learn from his enemies mistakes that attacking with tanks in bocage terrain with narrow roads is a terrible idea, launced his Arracourt offensive. Then they all decided to repeat their mistakes, with Patton at Metz, Monty at Operation Market Garden, and Hitler with the Ardennes offensive.
Tanks aren't invinceble machines, not even Tigers and Panthers. They can't move and fight in all kinds of terrain, such as forrests and towns. And even if they got good cross-country abilty, their supply trucks can't get there, and those wheeled vehicles are also vulnerble to enemy fire, and if the supply lines to the tanks are cut off, even the best tanks become worthless.
So the tanks can only move as fast as the supply tracks can supply them. And the supply trucks needs protection by friendly troops (usally the footsoliders), so the movement becomes limited. And that explains why the German troop movements in World War2 was no faster than in World War 1, since they were both determined by the phase of the foot-soliders.
The German army was famous for its rapid speed, but that has to do with auftragstactic and their extremly skilled NCOs. In fact, the German army was less motorized than the British, French and American armies, and still relied much on horses for transports.
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I agree with this thing you say that the army should be training people for the army and not the civilian life. But I disagree with this thing that 16 year olds should be sent to combat. Preferbly see men 24+ or atleast 22+ being sent to combat. Because I don't wanna see politicians exploit idealistic youngsters that are clueless about the world and how the politics rules it... wars for profits and geostrategic interests power and shit.
And I think a 16 year old should be having sex and live life, instead of dying as a virgin, crying for mom during an artillery bombardment or dreaming nightmares and having life long traumas after seeing his young buddies getting ripped into pieces.
I think combat should be an activity for grown up men. If ISIS aliens invaded the planet, then I would accept 16 year olds in the frontline. But I think society got a responsability to take care of its youth and try to spare them as much as possible.. but I could also see that society sometimes needs to protect itself, and might have to adapt the rules sometimes.
I think voting is a buisness for grown ups, and with the right to vote obligations also come with the citizenship, such as the obligation to defend the country - with your own life if necessary.
I don't want 16 year kids to die like in the Vietnam war. But if a 26 year old goes to fight a war out of strong conviction, then I see no problem with it. He know what he is doing (or atleast he is old enough to know better if don't), and if he dies he have probably done so with an active choice.
I know that I have pissed off lots of teenagers with my text. And I know that teenagers have been fought wars in the past - Alexander the Great. The American infantry and German Hitlerjugend Division who fought in Normandy, the boys in Vietnam etc
and they put up a good fight. I also know many 16 year olds easily beats me in Jeopardy.
But I also know that I was less cynical about the world as a teenager than what I am now. Idealism is a beautiful thing that belongs to youngsters, but I think it should be kept in moderation. That's why I think soliders should be 24-35 years old.
And if old farts could keep their body and brain in shape, I would prefer to send the 90 year olds to combat first of all - they have already enjoyed life, fucked, tried things, and will soon just die anyways. But teenagers got their entire life ahead of them. Such a waste.
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The idea of letting everyone into your country sounds wonderful, and yes we all wish that we would be for it. The problem is that the world is a shitty place. All billions of people in the 3rd world are willing to come here, and who can blame them? The problem with allowing that is that wages would stagnate down to asian levels where people have to survive on a few cents per day, and that the welfare system can no longer cover people in your country since there are too many in need of help but too few paying are paying in too little into the system.
The capitalists got a huge pool of people desperate to survive and therefore willing to work really cheap, and therefore out competing the native population. You will not have enough housing for everyone either, so people have to live home with mom until they are in their 40s... and housing shortages have pushed up prices into the skies, while your low shitty wage cannot support yourself and much less a family.
You will also get criminality, and people who despises your norms and culture.. and that problem becomes extremely large when you have unrestricted immigration and take in too many people in a short period of time and can't give them all jobs, and you can't build housing fast enough so immigrants get dumped into areas with an oversupply of housing where no natives wanted to live.
And in those areas you will have criminality, gangs, drugcartels, shooting.. and a breeding ground for radicalization.. such as for islamic bullshit ideas for ISIS terrorists.
The sex attacks in Cologne Germany is a perfect example. The Rotherham scandal in England is another example. And Stockholm have become famous as the rape capitol in the World thanks to immigration.
These problems are a heavy price for immigration from 2-3 world. And it does not got anything to do with race, even though I support the principle that a native population of a land should have the self-determination. I can't just go and settle a colony in the middle east and impose my shit on people there, just like people who are marketing sharia over here can fuck off. If it is racism to treat everyone equally, then I am a fucking racist.
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@callsigndd9ls897
"if you look closely, the amount of arms and equipment supplied by Britain is no greater than the amount supplied by Germany"
Not true. Britain have sent tonnes of NLAWs at the beginning of the conflict. Germany did send no anti-tank weapons for two months - 300 panzerfaust came to Ukraine, but they were from the Netherlands and NOT Germany.
Britain have sent anti-ship missiles. Germany have not sent any anti-ship missiles.
Britain has sent APCs, Germany has not sent any APCs but they like to take steal honor from Czechia who sent some BMP-1 to Ukraine.
Germany did send some strela - which is good altough being 40 years old, but Britain did sent some Starstreaks which are the most modern manpads that exist.
Britain have promised to send MLRS to Ukraine, while Germany have not sent any MLRS.
Britain sent troops to train Ukrainian forces early on in this conflict - while Germany did not.
Britain have also talked about all kinds of other support as well, some sources say they will perhaps send AS-90 and perhaps even some Challanger2 tanks to Ukraine. Britain have also been one of the strongest stupporters of rebuilding the airforce, and have recently given Ukraine a bunch of drones.
Britain has been one of Ukraines strongest and bravest defenders. It is not part of the EU and is a bit isolated in that sense and have recieved nuclear threats for its help to Ukraine. Boris Johnson was also an early vistor to Ukraine before it was cool by world leaders to go there. That gave Ukraine a strong moral support boost and helped to get other countries on the train to support Ukraine.
Britain has also put itself into even more danger by guaranteeing the independence of Finland and Sweden the coming months as they plan to join Nato.
So no, Germanys lazy half-assed disinterested support of Ukraine is lame compared to Britain. Its even insulting to claim that Britain had not done more. No other country in Europe have supported Ukraine as little as Germany in relation to its GDP -- aside from Hungary, Serbia and perhaps also France.
Britains economic support has been larger. And the weapons it have sent have been better, more effective and more modern. And while Germany did almost nothing for two months, did other countries - and USA and UK in particular save Ukraine from dying.. as their shipments of NLAWs and Javelins gave the Ukrainians a chance to stop the Russian tank armies.
There are porbably many reasons for dislikeing Boris... and maybe one can see his actions from a cynical angle and say that he do not care about Ukraine, but only wants to get involved in this war to shift focus away from party gate to save his own political career. However, despite his flaws do his love for Ukraine and his support for their cause seem geniune. And he have also invested a lot in building relations with foreing powers lately.. Ukraine, India, Sweden, Finland.. which suggests that Britain is breaking out from its post Brexit isolation.
Germany is slowly abandoning its failed Ostpolitik and finally listening to Eastern EU and begin to support them against their Russian threat by aiding Ukraine and looking for alternative sources of energy and stop throwing friendly countries under the bus for the sake of trade with Russia.
But countries all over Europe are frustrated how slow things always are going in Germany... and that nagging is always needed to get something done.
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@vladimirpecherskiy1910
"80% of the tank crew died when the tank caught fire" - and source of that info is?"
Ostfront: Hitler's War on Russia, 1941-45 by Charles Winchester
Russian vehicles had durability problems throughout the war and tank losses remained enormous throughout the war. Its perhaps no surprise that quality is not the best when you have old women and young children working in heavy industry in long shifts building those things. But that those tanks could be built by using such unskilled labor is an impressive achievement in itself. But Russian tanks were also primitive and lacked crew comfort, crew safety, good optics western tanks had.
Britishers are also better at self-criticism than russians are. In russia you can go to jail if you say T-34 was a crappy tank.
But the same is not true in England. So unsurprisingly are the Britisher more self-critical, and often times too much so. Crusader is often called a crappy tank. But I disagree. I think it was a quite good tank for its time, but it was never built for warfare in the desert so unsurprisingly did it not perform well there with its sand filter constantly getting clogged up.
Matilda was a pretty strong tank, when you consider that the most common German tank 1939-1941 was the Panzer II. Only in 1942 did Germany get more powerful tanks, but then did still the majority of their tank force consist of weak junk like Panzer II, Pz38t, and PanzerIII that Matilda easily could handle.
Cromwell was not a bad tank either. Comet was competative with the best German tanks. And Centurion is considered the worlds first MBT. And Black Prince was a heavy tank that could fight German heavy tanks on equal terms.
Indeed, Centurion, Chieftain and Challanger were all some of the most powerful tanks in the world and very succesful ones. They also helped India to design the Vijayanta.
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@geniusderweise400
"It is more that its typical that russia is only thought of in superficial clichés, and only the fitting parts of russian history are taken out and the losses of the other side are rarely considered"
Not really. You Russians can never look back at history and learn from your mistakes, because you can never admit that you sucked.
But remains that Russia have lost almost all the wars since the Crimean war if we exclude small countries like Georgia which were so small that it did never have a chance.
Russia lost the Crimean war. It got humiliated in the Russo-japanease war.
It lost World war 1. It lost the Polish-Bolshevik war. It got humiliated in the Winter war and in the continuation war against Finland.
It suffered catastrophic losses against Nazi-Germany, but with lend lease help it still managed to stay alive until victory.
Russia then lost in Afghanistan against Mujaheddin which should be considered amateurs in guerilla warfare compared to Vietcong. And no match for the North Vietnamese army.... but russia had its ass kicked anyways.
And then it got defeated again in Chechenya.
So Im not that impressed by Russias track record.
And I am not impressed by its performance in older wars either. Like the Great Northern war 1700-1721.
It outnumbered the Swedes 4 to 1 in the battle of Narva, and still managed to lose 9000 men and get 20.000 men captured. While the Swedes only suffered 667 dead.
A few months later in 1701 there was the battle of Düna. Russia and Saxony outnumbered Sweden 2 to 1.
And yet Russia lost with 1300 dead and 700 men captured. While Sweden lost 100 dead.
And next was the battle of Rauge the same year, where 7000 Russians faced 2000 Swedes. The battle ended with 50 Swedes killed, while Russia lost 2000 men killed, wounded or captured.
This humiliation was followed by the battle of Saločiai in 1703. Here did 6000 Russians face 1,100 Swedes. The battle ended with a Russian loss of 1500 men killed and over a thousand flags and banners captured.
Sweden lost 40 men killed.
In 1704 did a Russo-Polish force of 15.000 men get beaten by a Swedish force of 3000 men with 2000 Lithuanian auxilliary troops.
Sweden won the battle with 238 men dead, while the Russo-Polish side lost 2300 men dead and 500 captured.
In 1705 there was the battle of Gemauerthof and 7000 Swedes faced a Russian force of between 13 or 20.000 men. Sweden won with 1900 men casualties, while Russian losses numbered 5000.
In 1706 did a Russo-Saxon force of 20.000 men go to battle against 9400 Swedes in the battle of Fraustadt.
Sweden won the battle with 400 men killed, while the Russian and Saxon losses were 7377 dead, and 7,900 captured.
In January 1708 did a Swedish force of 800 men attack a Russian force of 9000 men, in the battle of Grodno. Sweden won with
11 men killed and Russia had 150 of their men killed and 50 captured.
In 1708 was the battle of Holowczyn, 12,500 Swedes went into battle against a Russian force 28 to 40.000 men strong. The battle ended with a Swedish victory with 265 men killed, while Russian losses numbered 2000 men.
This dangerous river crossing became the favourite victory of the Swedish King Charles XII.
A few weeks later it was time for the battle of Malatitze. A 5000 men strong Swedish force faced 13.000 Russians. Sweden won the battle with 1050 men killed or wounded, while Russia lost 2,700 men killed or wounded.
A month later came the battle of Rajovka in september 1708. 2.400 Swedes fought against 10.000 Russians. Sweden won the battle, and lost 100 men killed while Russia lost 375 men killed.
In 28th of January 1709 was the battle of
Oposhnya, and 2000 Swedes fought against 6000 Russians. The battle ended with a Swedish victory with 19 men lost versus 450 Russians.
12 days later came the battle of Krasnokutsk–Gorodnoye. 2.500 Swedish riders went to battle against a Russian force of about 5000 to 10.000 men strong.
The battle ended with a Swedish victory, with 132 men lost while Russian losses was 1200.
Well I can go and on... but I am too tired to write more.
You can however see that pattern yourself.
You outnumber the enemy 3 to 1, and oftentimes 10 to 1 and still manage to lose time and time again.
And not losses with a small margin, but usually numbers 10 times higher than your opponents.
If any other country behaved like this, then their genepool would have been ended. Because losses like this are unsubstainable for countries with smaller populations, and socities which puts a value on human life - something Russia has never done.
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I think Japan was desperate for friendship with countries with white men. It had an inferiority complex towards the west, and despite Japans succesful industrialization and victory against Russia in 1905 was the country still treated as a typical non-white country to be bullied around rather than a recognized modern country and an equal to the powerful countries in USA and Europe.
Japans love for the west was unanswered, and the unequal trade deals and racist immigration policies and the bullying and contempt from western powers on the other hand fueled anti-western feelings among the japanese who began to despise the materialistic greedy west. So Japan had many strange contradictory feelings towards the west, as a great teacher and admireable civilization on one hand and as a hypocritical stupid racist materialistic and overly-comfy civilization on the otherhand.
Modernization brought Japan much pride over its great accomplishments. And it carefully selected the best from the western world and copied over to Japan. Here is what proffessor Ha-Joon Chang says:
"The best example in this regard is the far-reaching institutional reform in early Meiji Japan (details can be found in Westney 1986, ch. 1 among other things). Having been forced open by the Americans in 1853, the Japanese realized that they needed to import Western institutions if they are to industrialize. After scanning the Western world, they imported institutions that they thought were the most effective with suitable local adjustments – the Navy and the Post Office from Britain, the Army and the criminal law from Prussia, civil law from France, the central bank from Belgium. They also imported American educational system but ditched it in favour of a mixture of German and French systems, after it was revealed to be ill-suited to their country."
Modernization in Japan did however also face much backlash by traditionalists who throught that much had gone too far and that too much bullshit had been imported from the west and that Japan therefore needed to lock those things out and go its own way.
Japan had modernized their own country, but not everything was possible or desireable to copy from western countries, so they did not for example copy Prussian economic policies to 100%. Prussia was a different country than Japan, and they had both different strengths and weaknesses and economic policies therefore had to be adjusted a bit before they could be transfered into Japan.
But even if Japan did an industrial revolution with a Japanese touch, did the changes become dramatic for the Japanese society and many traditionalists didn't like what they saw. Ironically did Japan import European fascist ideas about the modern decadent western music like jazz and its harmful effect on society.
And Japans extreme nationalism that didn't exist before was also a new created built under western influence, since the idea of the nation state, and extreme worship for a powerful emperor was ideas borrowed from western countries. Japan have had an emperor since long back in history, but he was quite an unimportant person for most of Japans history before period of modernization. Dying for ones country and ones emperor now became a sacred ideal above everything else in Japan. Japanses culture was celebrated during the mid-war period while western culture like jazz got despised and the japanese who was seen as too westernized got bullied on the streets - like muslims who acts and dress too westernized are today in many parts of the world.
Japans nationalism also borrowed ideas from Europe about one people under a common empire. Germany had its pan-German dreams, Russia dreamt about bringing all slavs into a common empire. And Sweden, Norway and Denmark also dreamt about becoming one country.
And Japan dreamt about creating a gigantic empire that unified all Asians under one ruling country - like Prussia did with the Germans. And if Japan did that, then western countries would be forced to accept Japan as an equal and as a great power. Indeed, if Japans dream came true it would probably be the mightyiest country in the world.
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Its still a relevant comparison. America like most countries suffered from the great depression during the 1930s, which meant that ineffiecent car firms got knocked out while the most effiecent firms could grow their share of the car market. And that is the point in having what's called a "structural rationalization". It is this increase in effiecency and productivity that enables larger economic grow when economic crashes are over.
And this is also a reason why countries like America would do so well during world war 2, and the horrible structural rationalization Sweden suffered before all others in the early 1920 also helped Sweden to gain an economic leadership position in the world post world war2 since it had eliminated all outdated ineffecient production methods and was able to produce more stuff at a lower cost than all other countries during the 1950s and 1960s before others had catched up.
Anyways.. back to the topic.
Germany never undergone any real structural rationalization in its automotive industry during the 1930s, since Hitler had made the economic wheels of Germany go in high spin with his re-arment policies.
So the German industry never switched to American style massproduction methods with high levels of productivity. Speer also compared the productivity of nazi-slave labor with a rifle production plant in Springfield and concluded in his memoirs that Germany lacked productivity levels anyware near the United States.
And the German production of military trucks continued to be split up among many producers - which in turn created logistical problems with servicing the vechiles and pilling up spare parts for trucks of all kinds... Opel, MAN, Phänomen, Mercedes, Borgward, Hansa-lloyd Goliath, Hanomag, Henchel, Krupp, Magirus, Büssing-NAG, Ford, Daimler, Steyr, FAUN, Vomag, Adler, Framo, Nacke, Tempo
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I have only met one Chinese person, so I know its wrong to base the opinion of 1.5 to 2 billion people on him only. But due to the lack of better information I now do it anyways. My impression from him was that Chinese are very very nationalistic and a bit arrogant towards other countries and look down upon our culture.. like for example Swedens relaxed attitude towards face masks during the pandemic.
He saw the Chinese government as strong and doing what was necessary. My impression however, is that many Chinese was eventually fed up with the harsh lockdown in China last year and public protests was so strong that the government had to scrap all restriction as it no longer seemed able to guarantee regime security with huge protests in many Chinese cities all over the country.
China had some imperialist ambitions. It has not been that so much for thousands of years, with a few exceptions like the invasion of Vietnam that of course ended with a failure (as it always does nor the Mongols, Japanese, French, or Americans could beat them either).
However, since the introduction of Communism have China been quite imperialistic and aggressive. It joined the Korean war. It invaded Tibet. It invaded India. It have been shelling Taiwan. It invaded Vietnam to help their genocidal Maoist regime in Cambodia under Pol Pot.
They was also at war with russia for a while. And they have been sabre rattling a bit over some pacific islands against Japan. And they did not respect the promise to keep Hong kongs democracy and self-determination that they gave the British in exchange of being given back that island.
Chinas belt and road iniative is considered as a strategy of Chinese imperalist ambitions to seize control over habors and such by handing out shark loans to foreign countries. The Chinese themselves however claims that they only have noble ambitions. But personally do I guess that the truth lay somehwere in between.
Chinese bots can be seen online, even if they are much less active than Rusbots. China is however a country led by a wiser leadership than russia. And its strong 10% annual GDP growth it had in the 1990s and early 2000s was probably key for the self-preservation for the regime. It had to create jobs and lift millions out of poverty to avoid food riots and such. And to be fair have the regime been quite succesful and won some popularity and support from the Chinese people.
Today is the country however too technologically backwards and its navy too much low quality and small to win a war against USA. But the Chinese are aggressivly expanding its navy and military and they ruthlessly steals technology from USA, Europe and Russia. And to be fair, this is what every other country also would have done in their situation. They need to aquire modern technologies to make better products, increase military power, and to develop more production effiency and productivity in their economy so they can better compete on the world markets and lift millions of people out of poverty.
The west is unhappy that they steal our technologies without paying. But the Chinese respond that we did the same to them when we took their technolgoies like gun powder, paper, book printing and the compass.
Russia was very unhappy when they exported a small number of SU-27 fighter jets to China in the 1990s. And then they instantly saw the Chinese reverse engineer those planes and then copied then and mass produced them. Relations between russia and China remained salty for many years after that, but then China grow richer and could pay for their stuff and make the russians happy again. And Russia was starved of cash and happily sold more weapons to China. But personally do I doubt that this trade will go on forever. China is learning how to make weapons from russia, and in combination from all know-how they import from western countries are China soon becoming more technologically superior compared to russia and no longer need to import stuff from them as they can make better stuff themselves.
China is a country that also abuse its economic power to bully and blackmail smaller countries. But Germany and France are to pre-occupied to sell stuff to the Chinese so they happily throw allied countries like Sweden and Canada under the bus when China uses its enormous force to bully those small democracies into submission. France and Germany are not only betraying USA by not helping them in the trade war against China. They are also betraying fellow EU countries and allies like Sweden with their selfish behaviour and cowardice.
Indeed they are even harming themselves with their greed.
The Chinese only allows foreign countries access to the huge Chinese market if they hand over their secret modern technologies to China.
So the Chinese copies those technolgies and learn how to make cars just as good as the German ones and make cheaper copies of them with low chinese wages and outcompete western firms. Chinese money are flowing into Europe, and some say its a good thing. But when the Chinese buys up harbors like Hamburg then it is a national security concern. And when the crown jewels of future promosing high tech firms like Kuka industries in Germany gets bought up by China, then do China grow their economic potential on other countries expense with unfair competition, where China got free trade and free access to European markets where they can buy up European firms. But European companies are not allowed into the Chinese market without government permission.
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- If the russian economy was healthy then it would have large numbers of Fortune 500 companies, as those gigantic companies often is the home of lots of technological know-how that leads to productivity increases in an economy. They also generate much profits. Russia have no such company outside of the fossile fuel sector, or banking related to it. To me this is a sign of failure, to establish any technological leadership in any field.
- If the economy was healthy, then I don't think it would have a 15% interest rate.
- If the economy was healthy, then the currency would be super strong and not lose value against the dollar when the interest rate is 15%.
- If the russian economy was strong would the number of car producer not fall from 60 down to a dozen in just 2 years.
- If the russian economy was healthy, then it would be diversified so it would not be fragile to economic shocks. The russian stock market took the most severe downturn of any economy during the financial crisis which can be interpreted as a symptom of this. Of course was the recovery fast. But the large volatility in itself is not healthy in my opinion, and makes long term planning and growth difficult.
- If the russian economy was healthy, then I do not think that 25% of the population would lack indoor plumbing and men have an average life expectancy than that of Haiti.
- If the Russian economy was healthy then I think that their government would have a lifting of western sanctions the top 1 priority for russia in the grain deal. If their economy is doing so well as they claim themselves, then why care about the sanctions? why not try to get something better out of the deal?
Russia is a country with 144 million people like Mexico that makes the claim of being a super power while only having an economy the size of Spain, or New York City. Income per capita is also pretty low, which matters for a countrys military potential as could allow a substitution for labor with machines/industrial robots/tractors if you got a high average income in your country. And that can allow you to replace more farmers, and industrial workers with mechanization so that more men can be dressed in uniform and sent to the frontline to fight.
Poor economies usually only can mobilize 40-60% of their GDP for war. While richer industrial countries like USA could easily mobilize 80% during WW2, and then did USA not even try their best to go all in. USA did actually begin to demobilize their war economy already in late 1943 before it had fully geared up, because it had realized that the axis had already lost the war. So orders for more weapons was cancelled - like the worlds biggest battleship of the Montana class.
Economic strength do in itself of course not determine the outcome of a war. Sometimes do small economies beat larger ones. But economies with a low GDP per capita is usually more fragile and will break from economic pressures.. as could nicely be seen in World war 1... where the first countries to break apart was the weakest economies. First fell russia in 1917, then fell the Austro-Hungarian empire, and then did Germany fall before the richer Britain did.
Russia is a country with much corruption. It have an ageing population and low birthrates. And having young men fleeing the country. And having young men die before they can make kids and contribute to the economy is a painful loss to russia. Losing 400.000 young men was the best part of the population for russia. Its said that for every 1 dead soldier are there 2 wounded - and one of them is severely wounded. This ratio is a rough estimation that is of course not true for every war. American medical care is certainly better than the russian one, so there are less fatalities and less amounts of smaller wounds that are left without treatment and become more serious problems. In Vietnam did USA have 6 wounded soldiers for every 1 soldier killed. And I think it is highly unlikely russia ever will come close to such a ratio.
So russia have thereby lost 400.000 young men in battle. Another 400.000 have ended up with losing arms, legs and eyes. And another 400.000 got minor injuries and will likely come home after the war with PTSD, alcohol problems and drug use as a coping mechanism as the non-existent state care for their veterans will offer them no help at all. And the result is more crimes, and more relationship problems and men beating their wives.
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Pewdiepie, IKEA, vikings, Greta Thunberg, the corona strategy, ABBA, Absolut Vodka, and being a social democratic fantasy utopia for Bernie Sanders around the world is what people know Sweden of.
The Swedish establishment are ashamed of the Pirate Bay and Pewdiepie and they love Greta Thunberg and Spotify. But personally I feel the opposite way about those things.
I more think of Sweden as a great power during the 1600s and early 1700. And a country of scientists/innovators (Scheele, Linneaus, Nobel, Ericson), and country with the best snacks, candy and sugary drinks in the world (trocadero, julmust, pommac, loranga, etc).
Sweden is also the home of much rock music and Max Martin - the father of nearly all pop music in the world the last 30 years.
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"Even Sweden isn’t buying very many new Gripen. Sweden has not maintained their cold war fighter strength levels."
Its air force have been prioritized over its army and navy. Its defence spending overall is low and hence do we a low number of fighters compared to the Cold war. But it is hard to argue why Sweden should have 400 fighter jets when countries like UK or Germany have say half that number.
"Gripen is a neat little aircraft but light fighters are limited in firepower"
It have more hardpoints than F15, F16, AV8B, MIG29 and F35 (if we exclude its external). It can carry all kinds of Nato ammunition - American made, European, and Swedish made - unlike American fighters that cannot carry the superior meteor missile from Europe, or french fighters like Rafale that is very limited in what non-french weapons it can carry.
Its bombload is roughly the same as other planes. But compensate its slightly lower bombload with being faster to fuel and reload than any other plane - and while other planes needs hours for that can Gripen do that within 15 minutes.
And despite being a small plane can it still carry a bombload bigger than many two engine planes - its bombload is almost twice as large as that of MIG29 for example.
"Gripen is a neat little aircraft but light fighters are limited in firepower and radar antenna size."
Its radar is superior to most other fighters - it carry the same radar as the larger Eurofighter. But Gripen E carry a better upgraded version of the same radar.
And still have we not yet even mentioned that Gripen is supposed to fight togheter with SAAB Globaleye which is a much better spy plane than what F35 ever could be. Wouldn't surprise me if its radar can see 10 times further than the F35.
"That means that even with a well designed aircraft that is capable it isn’t as competitive as other options because of the size."
You don't seem to speak a lot about aircrafts, even if you have not looked up the facts. A concern-trolling Lockheed lobbyist.
1. Fact remains that Gripen E can fly from unprepared airfields - other modern western planes can't.
2. Gripen only needs 5 hours of maintenence per flight hour - lower than any other western plane.
3. Gripen have a more ergonomically friendly cockpit than any other western plane.
4. Gripen have a lower cost per flight hour than any other western plane.
5. Gripens logistical footprint is smaller than any other western plane and only needs one 1 skilled technician and 5 conscripts to keep it flying.
6. Gripen is Nato compatible. And American planes cannot carry the Meteor missile. And Rafale is limited in the choice of weapons.
7. Gripen E can turn sharper than any other western fighter thanks to its better wingloading. Its range of 4000km is superior to F22, F35, Super Hornet, and Rafale. Its thrust to weight ratio is better than that of Super Hornet, F35, Rafale. Its RCS is better than that of F16, Eurofighter, Rafale, F18 Hornet, and F15E. And not only is its RCS better than any other western jet (aside from F22 and F35) its superior electronic warfare suite makes Gripen E harder to kill than F35.
Lockheed tries to bullsh*t people by saying that stealth is all that matters and that nothing else is relevant anymore.
But if that was true, then I wonder why USA doesn't use B2 Bombers as stealth fighters instead. I mean they have a lower radar cross section than what F35 have. And the only advantage F35 have over B2 are speed, manouverability and such. So its almost like this american company does not believe its own propaganda ;-)
Gripen E is better at F35 in almost everything but radar signature. Better wingloading, better thrust-to-weight ratio, better range, bigger variety of weapons, better electronic warfare, cheaper to maintain, less demanding of a big ground crew.
Better top speed, better at turning.
And overall do I think it is better to handle russian air defence - which is good at seeing planes, and even those with low radar signature. While it is not that good at resisting attacks from electronic warfare. So Gripen is better at attacking ground targets.
And if you want a small bombload delievered swiftly with close air support - then Gripen is also a better option, as it is plane with a high sortie rate and is cheap to fly. While F35 is an overpriced way of delivering a bombload.
Gripen E is thanks to its superior qualities mentioned a better fighter than F35.
"but is less suitable for large scale forces."
Sorry to hurt Johnny foreigners feelings, but the opposite is the case. Gripen E is overall the best plane in the world right now. That is how things looks to me.
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I never given this topic much thought, but when I think about it I see that...
Hitler was nervous and wanted the invasion of France to happen under the winter, but it happened in the summer. The final push at Dunkirk in 1940 got deleyed. Barbarossa was supposed to happen in may, but was launched 22 of june. The battle of Moscow got deled because of the need to deal with troop concentration at the Kiev. Malta was bombed for months, and the air invasion then got canceled the same week it was supposed to take place. The evacation of the Rzhev pocket was a very old idea when the order to abandon the position finally came. The order of breakout from Stalingrad was also supposed to happen but it never came, and at one point it got too late for that to happen. Germany's handeling of the Afrika korps in late 1942 - early 1943 was wishy-washy, and the Germans couldn't take a firm decision to either evacuate the troops from Africa, or to plan a strong firm last stand, or to reinforce Nort Africa and try to play the game to win.
Mansteins rescue campaign of army group south was filled with much hesitation from Hitler and decisions back and fourth, and the Kharkov offensive was partly part of the same story. And the Kursk offensive also got several deleys. The Korsun pocket was plagued with much bad luck, bad weather, mechanical failures of panther tanks, lack of big bridges to carry the heavy panther tanks etc.. so the rescue operation to save the encircled troops suffered from many deleys.. even if the operation itself started early.
The decision of no evacuation of the German garrisons during operation bagration turned out to be fatal mistake, even if a permission to retreat came only a few days later - but then things were already too late. The German reaction to D-day was also deleyed. Hitlers Ardennes offensive had been planned for months before it was finally launched in december 1944, the operation had been deleyd several times and was therefore not launched earlier.
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@AlexanderTch
Russia is a weak country which is why it constantly gets humiliated in every war it fights. It initially was able to steal some territory with its cowardly surprise attack but bit by bit is russia forced back. It retreated from the outskirts of Kyiv, then it was forced to retreat from Sumy, and then it was forced to retreat from Charkiv, and then it retreated from snake island, and the navy was forced away from the western black sea, and then it retreated and lost Khersun.
So russia once again gets humiliated on the battlefield like it have for most of the last 170 years... when it lost the Crimean war, lost the russo-japanease war, lost World war 1, lost the Polish-Bolshevik war, got humiliated in the winter war, suffered catastrophic and humiliating losses against Nazi-Germany in 1941-42 until lend lease help and US involvement could begin turn the tide of that war... but never the less would russia continue to suffer humiliation for the rest of world war 2 with its pathetic and bad performance against Finland in the continuation war. It later on lost the war in Afghanistan and it also lost the first Chechen war.
It is a worthless loser nation totally lacking military skill, and only have its large territory and a brutal disrepect for the value of a human life as it it is willing to waste its own soldiers lives in meat wave attacks. It is a country that needs help from other countries in a military alliance to beat a foe since it is too worthless to achieve anything on its own. It could not beat Hitler on its own, nor could it beat Napoleon, and not even the Swedes could it beat on its own.
And yes russia lose big wars - World war 1 is an example of that.
And this time around you get no lend lease help from a great power that could save your ass.
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The thing is that most of the lend-lease help came after 1943 when the war on the eastern front already had been lost for the Germans. So it was never any kickstart thanks to lend-lease to begin with. Russia could build its own tanks without American help.
My guess is that Russia would have won the war even without the lend-lease help. They would probably had cut back their production of guns and tanks, and instead increased their production efforts in make trucks and locomotives and food production if the lend lease help never happened. Russia would probably have played safer with her scarce manpower because the military, the agriculture, the mining industry, and the military industry would be competing harshly about all manpower they could get. And much more so than in richer countries such as Britain and USA, where tractors and machines were more plentiful and reduced the need for workers.
Lend lease was probably unimportant, since it probably didn't change the outcome of the war. When lend-lease started to arrive for real the second half of 1943, the axis had already lost the battle over the Atlantic, Japan had been beaten at Midway, the Africa Korps had been beaten at El-Alamein and kicked out from Africa, Germany had bleed much blood in the winter 1941-42 and in the winter 1942-43 had the Sixth Army been destroyed at Stalingrad.
It was too late for the Axis to turn things around.
Germany was beaten even before any real quantaties of lend-lease help had arrived. And the small amounts that arrived before 1943 barely made any difference.
After 1943 help started to arrive, which helped Russia greatly, and that in combination with the reconquest of Ukraine helped to relief the Soviet economy from shortages of food and manpower. And when food and trucks came from America, the Russians didn't need as much men to work to work as farmers or workers in an automotive factory, but could instead put more men in uniform to fight the Germans instead.
If the Germans had somehow kept Southern Russia under control and lend-lease never happened, then perhaps the Russian economy would have been under serious problems like it was in 1917. But that's another topic for discussion.
I am baseing much of my argumentation on the book - the Economics of World War II, by Mark Harrison
https://books.google.se/books?id=ZgFu2p5uogwC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=the+economics+of+world+war+ii+mark+harrison&source=bl&ots=5FivRGqGxO&sig=GpvSPtwGQvMAywRJfgMqx4jSjUo&hl=sv&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjNzfTVwaDUAhVHjiwKHTkJCV44ChDoAQgnMAE#v=onepage&q=the%20economics%20of%20world%20war%20ii%20mark%20harrison&f=false
German war production was never started for real until 1943, and didn't exceed Russias until 1944 (if I remember correctly. But by then the war had already been lost for Germany. And Germany couldn't have done much to increase their war production before 1943 either, since you cannot start large scale mass-production unless you first got a trained workforce and built factories for that purpose.
And Germany had to spend the first half of the second World War to train German men and women to become industrial workers and to build those factories (and military construction works such as the atlantic wall that consumed about a quarter of all concrete, steel and manpower in Germany).
So there was no way for Germany to outproduce the USSR, unless Germany had decided to wait with invading Russia until 1943.
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Worse than Hitler and resemblence with the the 30s...pfff, if you cry wolf too many times like now.....you will end with badly for real one day.
Trump won thanks to white low educated men who are so racist.. but yet for some reason that group of people voted for Obama last election. Trump is also a man who never went anti-gay.. even if you will risk losing the election by doing so as a Republican candidate. And meanwhile was Clintons trackrecord on gay rights as leaast as shitty as Clintons.
And deporting illegals isn't racist discrimination, its about kicking out people who crossed the border to a country without permission of the law. If you don't believe in deporting, then you don't believe in laws.
Its true that he have said things about mexicans and muslims, but thinking he would go as far as Hitler... come on.. the guy got a latina wife. And he never said anything about kicking out muslims living in the US.
The left is simply retarded. It cries about Brexit, illegals and Trump all the time, but remains totally silent all the time when real fascists takes away peoples liberties through the patriot act, the TPP, the mass surveillance, PIPA, SOPA, or when politicians bans online trolling in Arizona.
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America never won the war in any sense, and there was no way they could. They were backing up a corrupt regime that put the foreign aid into their own pockets instead of the people, and it even sold weapons it was given to the enemy. And their solidiers lacked
will to fight. Vietnam was more than just a communist invasion, it was also a war of national unification, a war where people joined VietCong because they were feed up with terrorbombings and strategic hamlets, and most importantly of all - it was a class war of farmers who hated their oppressive landlords that often took 60-80% of their incomes in tax when they had to work for them because they owned all land and no land was left for the poor farmers. South Vietnam was controled by the landlords who used their Army to defend their own interests.
So the easiest way, and perhaps the only way to win the Vietnam war was to do a landreform and give the poor farmers a bit of land so they could feed themselves and their families.
But that would never have happened if USA didn't pressure South Vietnam. And if they pressured South Vietnam, they would have gotten accused of USA-imperialism by meddling in the affairs of independent countries.
The US Army had no idea how to fight the war so they could never have won the war militarily. Over half a million men, and a large chunk of their aircrafts wasn't enough. They used faked statistics that was supposed to show that the war was almost won by 1967 since the enemy lost more men than they could recruit. But with the tet-offensive in 1968 people lost faith in that talking point.
The US army had no idea how to fight, so instead they relied on this stupid idea of body counts and the absurd thinking that the war was a mathematics game.
So soliders were sent to places like Hamburger Hill to kill a bounch of enemies at a high price of their own, and when the hill was won they just left it and let it be taken by the enemy a time later.
Things like that made soliders furius. Their lives was worth nothing, they were just seen as a replaceable commodity in a production system, based on the same ideas as profit and loss in a company. And if a worker died, no big deal, America had plenty of men.
The soliders were tired of risking their lives by being told by their commanders to walk into enemy ambushes just so the warmanagers could produce high enemy body counts by rain artillery and air support over them when the enemy was found.
The soliders were just used as a bait, and sometimes their missions were almost suicidal. But the high level commanders didn't care, they just cared about high body counts so they could get a promotion, a bounch of medals and economic rewards.
So the soliders started a revolt against their commanders and started to refuse orders, and fragging became commonplace and the fragging incidents went up dramtically, but most of them was never reported.
So the commanders was then unable to push their soliders too hard. And in the end, the losses that got inflicted upon the communists were never anyware close to being impossible to replace by North Vietnam.
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Stalingrad meant the loss of the momentum of the German army...1942 was the year when Germany was supposed to have given such a hard punch on the allies that they wouldn't recover and Germany could then direct her forces to deal with the Americans when they finally was ready for war. As we all know did Germany fail completly with that and lost the battle of the Atlantic, they tought the capture of Tobruk had been so devestating that they never bothered to attack Malta and then they lost the battle of El-Alamein, and then Germany lost all her accomplishments in 1942 with the disaster at Stalingrad.
Germany fought on, but the Kursk offensive failed. It wasnt the catastrophy for the German tank arm as documentaries says, but it was a severe diplomatic backlash and Hitlers allies began negotiating and end to the war, and Spain withdrew from the war if I remember correctly.
And Germany began losing air superiority in the east by now, and the consequences hit them hard as their army had a relativly little artillery compared to other armies and now couldn't use air support like they did in the earlier war years.
The losses of experienced troops was replaced young boys with less experience.
Meanwhile did the allies become better at fighting the war. The Russians had learned from past mistakes, their air force have copied tactics from the Germans, their massed attacks with infantry now had become more effective when morale didn't collapse ase easily when they had much tank support when Russian factories finally had began producing tanks at a higher rate than they were lost. Lend lease help had also began making the Russian army more mobile with trucks.
So the quality of the German Army constantly sank, and the power in their attacks gradually declined and became less and less effective. So with the lack of oil, air superiority and much else did the front finally break and collapse
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Hillary won this debate by any standard, American, European, my own... Trump have no policies, and when he tries to he just copy from Hillary or say some stupid shit that contradicts his other stupid shit. And when he gets outed for his lies, like his support for the Iraq war he lies.
The man knows he's a fraud, so there his only strategy is to attack. Attack his opponents caracter, because he fails so hard on his own policies. And shit like tax avoidance and stealing oil from another country might be popular among rightwingers in America, but here in Europe such shit would be political suicide to say even among the hardcore right.
Hillary can be proud of herself for the nights performance. She only made a few mistakes at the end when she lost her thread in he talking when Trump constantly interrupted her, and at the end she made some PC-bullshit that make us Bernie supporters cringe... but I don't know, maybe PC-outrage is important to gain/ keep the support from some segments of the idiot-voterbase.
Trumps only moments of strenght was his super-predator quote attack, and his talk about the economy and the marketing myth of himself as an extremly succesful buisnessman... I don't think his arguments was convincing, but I guess rightwing idiots were impressed by his nonsense. He was near to crush Hillary on the Iraq war, but Hillary's counterattack on Trump was as brilliant as Mansteins at the russians at Kharkov 43.
Hillary won a minor victory. And when Trump can't go on the attack he just loses. Because when he tries to explain his own policies everything just gets confusing - especially for himself.
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Tanks in real life doesn't act like in World of Tanks. If the enemy shots off your track, you will need half and hour to repair it, you cannot do it instantly and you can absolutly not doing when the tank is still moving lol. Furthermore, if your tank gets penetrated by a shell its game over, its not like in games where you can take 4-5 hits before your tank gets wrecked. And if your tank takes serious damages, it can take many hours to fix.
And unlike WOT can't you turn your tank gun trough walls and destroyed tanks, like your tank was a ghost. And you cannot drive full speed into a mountain wall and backflip with your tank without serious damages.
And your tanks will also have to refuel in real life. And your tanks will be organized under a commander, instead all 15 tanks acting independently. And in real life will also vision be limited in tank combat, and often does the driver have the best view of the outside world. And tanks will have to take mines, infantry, planes, Anti-tank guns into consideration, and not just other tanks.
So its a tank game without much realism. Its for entertainment and not real life battle simulation like the game creators says. A realistic tank game would probably be pretty boring, as the game would be over as soon your tracks been blown off. And a single hit could take your tank out, so people would hide like cowards.
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With the growth of the middle class and drastic reduction in the rate of poverty across the world over the last thirty years, I beg to differ. Everybody comes out better off in a free-trade world.
Africa had negative GDP growth this time period and is performing worse on many health parameters such as maternal morbidity. How is that good for economic development? How is this making a world a better place?
Argentina and the East bloc got raped by the Washington consensus bloc. And neoliberalism turned Argentina, once one of the rich countries of the planet, into a poor 3rd world shithole.
And Russia lost two-thirds of its GDP during Yeltsin and 80% of its farms closed down, and alchol consumption rose, Aids spread along with prostitution, maffia gangs, and drug use. Maybe thats what you mean by neoliberal success stories?
Because you certainly cannot take claim for the poverty reductions that have occured in mercantilist economies like China and India, because you yourself say that such policies always are bad. Both countries use a high degree of capital controls. And stateowned banks provide strategic support of certain industries, instead of letting the market allocating the resources. And Chinas total disrespect of intellectual property rights and many stateowned companies makes it impossible to call it a free trade economy. Its just a protectionist East-Asian economy that have copied the mercantilist moderls used by Japan and South Korea.
So you simply have no growth and progress to show. Just a shitty world economy with growing inequalities, more crisis and instabilities, and in 2008 the banking system of the world was of the brink of total destruction and had to be saved by the taxpayers. Free market capitalism only worked because it was saved by the taxpayers. Thats what I call a shitty system.
Neoliberalism excuse all cutbacks of social services by saying everyone will become better off if we make the pie grow instead of slicing a small pie up and shate it. Growth will be great with neoliberalism, we have been promised. But so far there have been not much to show, and the tiny gains in growth have been insufficent to compensate the losers that was trown under the bus by the neoliberals when they privatized everything.
So I rather go back to the protectionist period 1945-75 with harsh capital controls, state directed investments, full employment policies, and a taxsystem that was soft on labour and hard on capital. Growth was stronger 1945-75 than it was during the free trade period 1980-2017.
Bringing up examples from the 19th century is simply ingenuous. The world back then was very different.
You provide no arguments why everything is different now, but Okay. What about South Korea? What about post-war France?
Using modern Russia as an example and comparing it to Hitler just makes me think of Godwin's law.
Think what you want. In my eyes, I see economic freedom contrary to human rights time and time again in history. Yeltsin is one example. Pinotchet is another example. Suharto another. George W Bush chockdoctrine in Iraq in another example. The troika bullying of Greece, and IMFs rape of Argentina are other familiar cases. The market reforms in China that lead to the student uprising that was crushed by the military is another example of a fascist regimes marketliberatzation.
And Bushs and Thatchers were warmongerers and the first one threw the 4th ammendment in the trashcan and the second brutally knocked down striking workers at Orgreave.
Commodification of the economy needs a strong state, because rightwing economic policies are unpopular and the people will oppose them. So the only way to get them through is to use brutal force by the military or police. So extreme neoliberal policies needs a fascist state to succed.
Because most people just don't quitely accept to lose their job, all their benifits, being forced to subsidize the rich, see schools and factories close down and see sick and old people getting thrown out on the streets to starve.
People will fight back. 60-80.000 leftwingers died in operation Condor. But the neoliberal regime will never win any popularity
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Sweden fought alone against an alliance of countries with a 40 times larger population for 21 years during the great northern war, and still did it at many occasions come close to victory. I would say that the russian army was as much garbage back then as it is today. Just look at its track record.
The Swedes did beat the Russians at Narva in 1700
37.000 Russians fought 10.500 Swedes. Russia lost 9000 men and 20.700 men was captured. Sweden lost 667 dead.
In 1701 came the battle of Düna. The Russian and Saxon forces outnumbered Sweden 2 to 1, and had the advantage of a strong defensive position behind a river. Russia lost the battle with 1300 dead and 700 men captured. While Sweden lost 100 dead.
Next came the battle of Rauge in 1701, where 7000 Russians faced 2000 Swedes. Russia lost the battle and lost 2000 men. Sweden lost 50 men.
The next humiliation was the battle of Saločiai in 1703. Here 6000 Russians stood against 1,100 Swedes. Russia lost the battle with 1500 men killed and over a thousand flags fell in enemy hands, while only 40 Swedes died.
In 1704 was a Russo-Polish force of 15.000 men beaten up by a Swedish force of 3000 men (plus 2000 Lithuanians) in the battle of Jakobstadt. Sweden won the battle, and lost 238 men, while the Russian-Polish side lost 2300 men dead and 500 men were captured.
At Gemauerthof in 1705; did 7000 Swedes fight a Russian force of between 13.000 or 20.000 men. Sweden won the battle with 1900 men in casualties, while Russian losses numbered 5000.
In 1706 did a Russian-Saxon force of 20.000 men go into battle against 9400 Swedes in the battle of Fraustadt.
Sweden won the battle with 400 Swedes killed in battle, while the Russian and Saxon losses were 7377 dead, and 7,900 captured.
At the battle of Grodno, in january did a Swedish force of 800 men attack a Russian force of 9000 men. Sweden won the battle, and lost only 11 men killed. While Russian losses was higher: 150 men killed and 50 captured.
The battle of Holowczyn took place in 1708, 12,500 Swedes went into battle against a Russian force 28.000-40.000 men strong.
This dangerous river crossing by Swedish forces, became the favorite victory of the Swedish King Charles XII. Sweden lost 265 men killed, while Russian losses numbered 2000 men.
A few weeks later was it time for the battle of Malatitze. A Swedish force of 5000 men fought 13.000 Russians. Sweden won the battle, losing 1050 men killed or wounded, while Russian losses was 2,700 men killed or wounded.
Then a month later came the battle of Rajovka in september 1708. 2.400 Swedes fought against 10.000 Russians. Sweden won the battle, and lost 100 men killed while Russia had 375 of their men killed.
In January 1709 was the battle of Oposhnya, where 2000 Swedes fought against 6000 Russians. The battle ended with a Swedish victory. 19 Swedish men were lost while Russia lost 450.
12 days later came the battle of Krasnokutsk–Gorodnoye. 2.500 Swedish riders went to battle against a Russian force of about 5000 to 10.000 men strong. The battle ended with a Swedish victory, with 132 Swedish soldiers lost while Russia lost 1200.
1719 was the battle of Stäket where 1200 Swedish soldiers defeated a Russian force of 3000 men. Sweden lost 101 men while Russia lost 500.
So which army was the better one? I would argue that the Swedish army was clearly the better one.
Russias army was garbage. It fought only against 1 enemy unlike Sweden. And yet did it performed so poorly. And almost every war russia fought is like this. World war 1 is like this. World war 2 is like this. The current war in Ukraine is like this.
High losses and a snail phase of advance are what is typical for the russian army throughout history.
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Money itself is neutral. But how wealth is distributed is just a social construct which have nothing to do with merit or what is good for society. Rich people in power during the middle ages abused their own power and influence to not have any taxes at all on the nobility, while the peasants had to pay extra much taxes. And the same principle is true today. The system is rigged against the poor who have to pay much taxes while rich people pay proportionally less.
Personally I think we should make rich pay more and poor people pay less taxes so we can get a fairer system.
Why didn't France, Spain and Austria/Germany conquer Europe in the 1500s,1600s, and 1700s? Probably because their tax systems was very unfair. The rich paid no taxes at all in those countries.
England, Sweden and the Netherlands on the other hand was all very succesful empires despite their much smaller populations. Those countries governments was all high tax economies by European standards. But their tax burden was much more evenly distributed between rich and poor. So those countries had less tax revolts and French revolutions, and they had a better economy, and their state apparatus was more effiecent in mobilizing resources for war.
That is why England with only 5 million people would conquer the world despite France had 20 million inhabitants.
The Netherlands only had 2 million inhabitants but could resist Spains invasions despite Spain had 15 million people and all the resources of Spain, America and Italy behind them. And Sweden with its 1.5 million people was able to conquer Moscow, Prague, Warsaw and Munich and basically all of Germany despite the Holy Roman empire had 20 million people.
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Sweden did suggest that Finland, Norway and Denmark would join them in a nordic military alliance. But Norway did shot down the idea and joined Nato instead. Finland was afraid to anger russia by breaking their peace-treaty with russia that said that Finland should never again join a military alliance. And little Denmark which is a continental power have always felt a bit closer to Nato and the EU than the other nordic countries, and for that reason have it also been less interested and loyal to the pan-scandinavian idea.
Neutrality has been a great thing for Sweden. Joining the 2 world wars had almost no upsides for Sweden and many downsides. It had made no difference to the outcome of the war regardless which side Sweden would have joined, because Sweden was a poor country back then with a small population and a small economy and an outdated military.
By staying neutral did we probably do out nordic neighbours a favor. Finlands war refugees could flee to Sweden, Denmarks jews fled to Sweden from a certain death in Hitlers death camps. And Norways political opponents of the nazi regime could save their own life by fleeing to Sweden.
This is a history we should be proud of. We should be proud of not being a warmonger nation. And Swedens long tradition of neutrality did also exist back in the 1700s and 1600s. Our country became rich by foreign ships from France, England and the Netherlands came to Sweden and paid money to get the right to call themselves a Swedish ship and carry a Swedish flag. And since Sweden was the strongest super power of Northern Europe did no one dare to attack Swedish trading ships without provocation, as that would bring one of the most powerful navies in the world against them.
Thanks to the many wars between England, Holland and France could the Swedish merchant navy expand from maybe 300 ships to long over a thousand, and become one of the largest in Europe. This helped Sweden get richer and more powerful.
The age of liberty (1719-1721) is also known as a period of peace and neutrality. That claim is a bit unfair because it is not that true, as Sweden did start 2 wars during that time period against russia and prussia. And later on also under King Gustav III. However despite corruption and mismanagement of the country by greedy nobles, was this also a time period with some nice golden glimses. Sweden did create some fantastic art pieces, like the sculptures of Tobias Sergel. Sweden did also buy many famous art pieces from around Europe, before it was cool to do so. Which have led the situation we have today when many of the worlds most famous paintings can be found in Sweden like paintings from Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and portraits of Martin Luther.
So have neutrality served Sweden well?
- Absolutly. And we should be proud of our long history of peace. Other countries should learn from us, and not the other way around.
Those who say that EU is a peace project, should just sit down and shut up and learn from Sweden instead as we got a hundred more years of experience with peace than what continental Europe do.
And joining Nato is nothing that I got strong feelings about. I just wish it was done in a democratic way.
But we must learn from our own history that we must never leave our military weak and think that we could get away with it because we join a military alliance, so we do not have to tax rich people. We tried that in the late 1600s and it failed, when our alliance with the no1 Super power in the world France dragged Sweden into pointless wars that France had started, and the Scanian war was a disaster for Swedens economy when half of our battle fleet was sunk in battle and the other half sailed home and was sunk in a storm. And then was Swedens reputation of invincibiliaty as Europes best army destroyed when Sweden lost the battle of Fehrbellin in 1675.
So we must never repeat the same mistake again. We must never again make ourselves dependent on USA or any other country like we was to France back in the late 1600s. We must never let our military become weak and unprepared for war and hope someone will save us and do all the fighting for us. And we must never let tax cuts for the rich go before national defence and leave our military weak and our country dependent on military alliances with foreign powers.
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I think Russias economy will outlast the russian army in this war. The fastest and easiest way towards an Ukrainian victory is probably on the battlefield. I hate to say it, but so far has russian capital controls effectivly prevented the ruble to in price against other currencies. This has effectivly limited the harm from inflation - at least for some time.
Furthermore is Russia rich in natural resources, it have money reserves stored up from before this war, and it have customers in China and India that can to some extent make up the loss of the western markets. Something like 20-30% of Russias population don't have any water in their homes, and they are used to extreme poverty and their knowledge about the world outside russia is zero and their entire worldview is based on the manipulative lies that Russian stateowned TV brainwashes them with.
Furthermore do I think that the tax increases that the Russian state has done so far has been very moderate. 1.5 billion Euros in extra taxes is not even much money for a smaller country like Sweden where the government yearly takes in about 150 billion in taxes.
And we have peace time here. And I would expect that the tolerance for higher taxes would be higher in a country at times of war.
And as immoral, stupid and evil Russias war effort has been does over 80% of the Russian people still support Putin according to polls. So there is therefore plenty of room that the Russian government would have for tax increases to pay for the war if the money reserves starts to run low.
And raising taxes will cause deflation. And that deflation will compensate for some of the harm that inflation causes.
Just like inflation will compensate for some of the damage that too high deflation causes. So the Russian economy can be stabilized through those means as well if need be.
Wests economic war have not been a success.
But in a few areas have it been very effective. It sanctions have caused a severe lack of advanced components that are needed to make advanced weapons. And the result is an extremely low montly production of cruise missiles - which lead to the failure of Russias terrorbombing campaign on Ukraines energy grid.
The lack of components have also forced Russia to cancel tank production of Armata, T-90, T-80 and T-72 and the country has to rely more and more on old garbage tanks like T-62 and T-55 instead. And those tanks cannot get excellent gun sights and such because of the western sanctions.
The Russian civilian aviation is living on borrowed time. The 500 passanger planes that Russia stole from western countries will sooner or later become impossible to fly due to the lack of spareparts.
And when Russia began the war it had over 50 car producing companies. And now less than a dozen remains. And China is taking over more and more shares of the Russian market. So the future does not look good for Russian industry, and it seems highly unlikely that Russia will ever recover its lost trade with the west for decades. I do not think Germany is eager to undone all its hard work to switch off its energy dependence on Russia, Russia to go back again and piss off all her allies and anger Germans at home who no longer see Russia as a geostrategic friend but more as an evil dictatorship and a potential threat after it just have threatened to nuke it. Such things will not be forgotten.
Overall have the sanctions been effective in depriving Russia from war materials.
Of course does Russia smuggle components - and that was just expected before the sanctions were introduced as well.
However the smuggeling does not render the santions worthless. It becomes harder and sometimes impossible to obtain components, in any significant large amounts to make military production worthwhile.
And the lack of cheap easily accessible components also dramatically drives up production costs for making advanced weaponary - which in turn means that less of them can be produced.
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I think it is worth pointing out that Swedens army was one formidable opponent at this time and Prussia, Poland, Austria, Denmark, Saxony and Russia all feared it and usally got beaten by it.
But Swedens population was small and the resources were limited, and in the end could not great administration and tactics compensate for all the superior strenght of the enemies... but even so, was Sweden able to put up hell of a fight against a 40 times stronger enemy and almost win and crushing the Russian empire in 1709.
Most contemporary people (including foreigners from countries all over Europe) thought that Sweden would soon retake her lost provinces, so the loss of the great northern war wasn't necessarily the end of the Swedish empire - but a pro-peace administration took power in Sweden for the coming decades so nothing of that happened.
But times would later on change...
The times of civil war and caos in Germany, Russia, Poland and the Baltics had made it easy for Sweden to expand it territory on it their expense during the 1500s and 1600s. But in the 1700s, that oppurtunity was beginning to dissapear as Prussia and Russia were building their mighty armies.
And the Baltics fell into Russian hands, while Poland would get cut to pieces by Russia, Austria and Prussia later on. So all the oppurtunities for cheap victories were gone.
Sweden was a poor country and it opted for peace time policies and spending cuts for its military after the great northern war. So the army became smaller and underfunded and the army was no longer the best in Europe by the mid-1700s, but instead other armies had more modern equipment and the Swedish wars declared on Russia in 1741 and Prussia in 1756 would both end in failures.
And Frederick of Prussia didn't think as much about the Swedish threat as he more worried about his much more powerful enemies - Austria, Russia and France.
So 1721 became the end of the Swedish empire from our todays hindsight perspective, but things never needed to be this way.
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" the Swedes were almost expelled from the Holy Roman Empire"
And Frederick the Great was almost crushed in the seven years war, and the Romans were at the brink of disaster after the defeat at Cannae, so what is your point?
"the ones who won the war were the French"
Thats like saying Brazil won World war 2 for the allies. The majority of all troops fighting in Germany was under the Swedish flag. The Swedes fought this war longer than the French did. France begged for Swedish help when Spanish troops threatened Paris.
And it was mainly Swedish troops that made the final push to end this war.
"they were the ones who almost dominated the whole continent in various phases from the second half of the 17th century to the beginning of the 19th century"
France was the strongest power in Europe up until 1815. Or at least until after the Seven years war. However it was no unrivaled super power. It had several mighty neighbours that kept it in check. And that was possible to do back then because England, Holland, Sweden and Brandenburg were countries well with well managed government administrations that allowed larger military than what badly mismanaged countries like France, Austria, Poland and the Ottoman empire had.
They also tended to build up militaries that also was able to punch over their own weight - and so in particular in the case of Sweden and Brandenburg. The English army was not any remarkable, but the English navy was so enormous in size that by the 1700s that no country on its own could ever hope to defeat it.
Even the second and third largest navies in Europe would togheter have less ships than England.
"It is almost impossible that they could have dominated all of Europe with such a small population without the help of allies like France or England"
It dominated the area called northern Europe and the Baltic sea. It did not have much power ouside of that area. Just like Spains, France and Englands power in the Baltic sea was very limited. Did England and Spain have much saying in what happened on the Balkans in the 16th and 17th and 18th century? - No.
But that fact does not mean that they were powerful great powers. And Sweden was the dominant great power in northern Europe in the 17th century. If you asked Poland, Brandenburg, Denmark-Norway, Saxony, Russia, and Kurland which country around the Baltic sea they feared the most, then they would answer Sweden.
In the end was it tiny Prussia that came to dominate Germany and not Austria. And little England would dominate the world and not France despite it had a 5 times larger population than England back in the 1500s. And it was Sweden who occupied and bullied the much larger Polish-Lithunian commonwealth at multiple times and not the other way around.
In the past it was easier for small countries punch above their own weight. And it is stupid and historically ignorant to try to apply game rules from the 1900s and 2000s back on the past. Then you will not understand anything. And you will have no clue why England came to domitate the world. How Portugal and the Netherlands could build sizeable colonies worldwide, and how Sweden could beat the crap out of big countries like Germany, Russia and Poland and build the largest navy in Europe in the late 1500s and early 1600s.
Had one travelled back in time it to the 1500s and proposed your worldview. Then people would have felt certain that the Ottoman empire would be the strongest country on the planet. And the incestious Habsburgs would continue to gobble up more land with royal marriages. And France would forever be the most powerful country in western Europe as it had the largest population and a good climate that allowed the place to be rich thanks all the bounty of food their lands produced.
After all, did the muslims call crusaders for "franks" since most and nearly all of them came from France - the most powerful and most populated country in Europe at that time. England on the other hand was militarily weak and had a small population. It could not win any wars on its own but constantly had to ally itself with a strong land power like Prussia.
"they did not even prevent the Russians from winning the Great Northern War a century later."
I think it is astonishing that Sweden came close to winning the war at multiple occasions.
Sweden stood alone against Denmark, Norway, Saxony, Poland, Russia, and later on also against Hannover and Brandenburg.
The enemy had a 13 times larger population than Sweden, but for two decades were they force Sweden to the negotiating table. Compare that to Frederick the Greats Prussia which had to fight against enemies with a population of only 9 times stronger, and Frederick also had allies like Britain, Hanover and Hessen that provided troops that could help fight off French and German empire attacks before they reached Prussia.
But despite all this, and despite many impressive military victories stood his Kingdom at the brink of total destruction after the defeat at Kunersdorf after just 3 years of war. However the Russians remained passive and that saved Prussia from destruction, as Frederick had no troops left after that defeat to stop a push into Brandenburg. Frederick kept on fighting the war, but by late 1761 had his luck runned out again as the Austrians had for the first time made a succesful winter campaign. After that could only a miracle have saved Prussia.
And that is what Frederick got when the Russia empress died, and the mentally ill prussian fanboy King Peter III took power in russia and made peace with Frederick and decided to join the war on Fredericks side.
So which side handled the war better? I would argue that Sweden did. And many of Prussias military defeats just oved to Fredericks own stupidity, hubris and arrogance - like Hochkirch and Kunersdorf.
Sweden on the other hand continued to fight outnumbered for the entire war, but despite that deliever impressive victories time and time again: Narva 1700, Düna 1701, Rauge 1701, Kliszow 1702, Saločiai 1703, Pultusk 1703, Jakobstadt 1704, Poznan 1704, Poniec 1704, Gemauerthof 1705, Warsaw 1705, Fraustadt 1706, Grodno 1708, Holowczyn 1708, Malatitze 1708, Rajovka 1708, Oposhnya 1709, Krasnokutsk–Gorodnoye 1709, Helsingborg 1710, Gadebusch 1712, Stäket 1719.
Indeed had Charles XII not died in 1718 had Norway likely fallen into Swedish hands as two of Norways biggest cities were only weeks from falling. Fredriksten fortress, was the gateway to Oslo and it was estimated by both sides to fall within half a week. And Trondheim only had food for two more weeks before it had to surrender.
And after that would Denmark be kicked out from the war. Saxony was already eager to make peace and saw no reason to keep on fighting as it likely would not lead to any territorial gains, and the King have become more hostile towards Russia and Brandenburg.
The tiny Hanoverian army could easily have been crushed by Swedish forces after Norway was taken, and no Danish navy could block Swedish troops from being sent to Germany. And with Denmark and Hanover out of the way would Brandenburg stand no chance alone against the Swedish troops and would likely soon have surrendered as well.
So then would only Russia be left to defeat. And while the strong Swedish navy would protect Sweden from a russian invasion could Swedish troops march into the undefended Baltics and retake the breadbasket of Sweden. And without the Baltic harbors would the entire russian army in Finland starve to death - so russia would have then been forced to retreat.
So basically all the land gains by Swedens enemies since 1721 would have been undone by that point.
So even at the last years of the war did Sweden stand a good chance of winning the war.
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The North Korea military is like a 1950s museum.
The army is unmodern but large, and most of its equipment is just garbage eventough a few weapons can still be very capable despite their old age. Some I would try to not underestimate the army.
But the airforce however is a complete joke. And no, even if it is an air force with a large numbers of planes I will not take it seriously. Any airforce with MIG15 jets in service is just fucking joke.
And yes, I also think the Chinease airforce is garbage for the same reason.
North Korea can never defeat South Korea with its badly equiped army, that is underfed, untrained, and have low fighting morale and lacking of oil and spareparts.
And no matter how a World war wiith China vs USA would play out, I feel pretty sure that USA would get 100% air superiority over China within just a month. F35 might be hugely over-rated. But it would still outclass Chinease Mig17 jets.
And Chinease tanks from the 1960s would simply be target practice, unless they break apart by themselves just like low-quality Chinease toys do the day after Christmas.
So even if China would intervene also in the next Korean war, I still think that North Koreas regime will only be able to exist under the mercy of the leader in Washington. Because if he wants to take over North korea, then the Communists would be unable to stop them.
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@leavingglobe4442 It lost 20% of its army to the winter.
But it was still a strong fighting force the next summer. The supply lines had been cut so the army was trapped with one option - attack the Russian army nearby and win a battle or slowly die from starvation.
There was a line with small, but strong forts protecting the base of the Russian army. The Swedish plan was to in the middle of the night launch a suprise attack on those forts before the Russians could wake up.
But the Swedish horsemen got lost in the dark and got delayed for 2 hours so the attack could not be launched. And when the horses finally arrived and began to position themselves to help the foot solidiers storm the forts... then the worst thing that could happen happened - One Russian soldier had discovered the Swedish army assemble outside the forts. He fired a shot. And soon drum rolls and people shouting orders could be heard and the Russian troops woke up and sent massive amounts of deadly fire towards the Swedish troops that not yet had moved into formation.
People died left and right. The surprise attack had failed. The Swedish troops were not prepared for the new situation. The troops were not yet in formation. And if you want to storm forts then you need Cannons, ladders, hand grenades and fascines - but the Swedes had hoped that the Swedish horsemen could storm those forts in a surprise attack so nothing of that would be needed. And bringing all that heavy equipment would have slowed down the Swedish army that was moving quickly in the cover of darkness to make their surprise attack, so it had been decide that no cannons or tools would be brought with them.
So the situation was disasterous.
Calling off the attack would have left the Russians aware of the Swedish armys intentions to break out from their starving position - something that would have been bad in the long run.
And attacking the Russian forts without good equipment, an orderly battle plan, and men in order and formation would lead to a bloodbath.
The Swedes choose the latter alternative and attacked the redoubts. Swedish numerical superiority was often more a disadvantage than an advantage, as it was impossible to find room to manouver and the defenders did not have to aim in order hit Swedish troops caught behind the cheval the frise, moats, or when they tried to climb up the walls to the forts without equipment. And when an attack of the first line was beaten back then 2nd line could not move forward as their path was blocked by retreating men running in the opposite direction.
The orders had been given so quickly this morning that commanders did not know what their objectives were.
The Swedes managed to capture many of the Russian forts and destroy a counter-attack by the Russian cavalry.
But when the struggle over the forts were over was the Swedish army chaos.
Most of the Swedish army had moved into position north-west of the forts and stood ready to attack the camp of the Russian army. The problem was only that a many battallions of Swedish infantry were missing. Those batallions commanded by Roos had just been storming and captured two forts. And now there was silence over the battlefield. The Swedish army was gone and nowhere to be seen. Roos and his men had been fighting all the morning and now when they had other things to do that to focus on that to fight for their lives to capture a fort, they now could look around themselves and realize that they were alone.
No one had any idea where to go. The Swedish field marschal had only told them to attack this fort. He had not said a word what would happen next or what the battle plan was. Everything had been done in a hurry that morning after the Russians had began shooting.
The Swedish army waited for hours for Roos and his men to show up. But he never came. Instead had some Russian survivors from the fighting moved to the Russian army camp and told what he had seen. The Russians found out that a small troop of Swedish foot soliders had lost contact with the main force. So Tsar Peter the Great send out a strong force of cavalry and infantry to destroy Roos and his men - which they did.
The hours passed. And the Swedes began preparing for an attack on the Russian camp without Roos.
But then they saw something they did not expect - the entire Russian army moved out from their fortified camp.
For the 9 years of fighting had the Swedes gathered a strong contempt for the Russian army to remain passive cowards in the battles they fought. But this time around it was the Russians who decide to move into battle.
The Swedish Field Marshal Rehnskiöld had even been arrogant enough to dismiss multiple individuals that had been reported that they had seen the Russian army move out. He had not even bothered to send out any horsemen to reconnaissance because he felt so confident, and he underestimated his enemy greatly.
Once again did things have to be done in a hurry because he had been slow to act.
The Swedish army had to be lined up for battle in the terrain. But because of the forrests could the horsemen not be lined up to protect sides of the Swedish line, so in the narrow terrain did the Swedish cavalry have to move behind the Swedish infantry. And this made the infantry very nervous that they would not get cavalry support the first moments in the battle because they were not in formation or standing on the sides where they were badly needed. The Russian line was much longer than the Swedish one, so the horses was needed to protect the flanks.
4000 Swedish infantry attacked 28,000 Russian infantry. 4 Swedish guns fired, while the Russians had over a hundred that fired 1,300 shots on the Swedish foot soldiers and caused massive death. The Swedish troops moved forward quickly to not allow the Russians much time to reload and cause even more death. Then came the deadly Russian musket fire.
And the Swedish troops pushed forward towards the Russian line. Swedish Carolean tactics was extremely offensive and based on attacking at all costs - which this attack against insane odds shows. Attacking with pikes, swords and bayonets were prefered over long fire fights. And the Swedish infantry normally only fired 1 or 2 shots at 20 meters range before they launched their attack with their swords (the bayonets were mostly just used to kill wounded prisoners of war).
The quality of the Swedish gunpowder had declined during the months the army had been trapped in Ukraine, so for that reason did the Swedish General wait until the Russians were even closer than usual before he ordered his men to fire. Than would prevent the musket balls from falling down into the ground before they could hit their targets. The Swedish fire was deadly, and the Swedish attack with swords destroyed the first Russian line.
The Swedes were winning on the right side.
But the attack on the left was going slowly and the infantry there had not yet come into contact with the enemy.
And as the right side was moving forward and pushing back the Russian troops was the Swedish line beginning to be thinned out. Victory was close. Could the Swedes push forward on the left and make also that side to start panic, then would the Russian numerical superiority only turn into a disadvantage for them like it had in earlier battles, as panic, stampede and lacking of space to manouver would making fleeing Russian troops an easy target, and the dicipline of the army would fall apart.
Warfare was mostly about psychology back in the 1700s.
The Swedish left side of the line came into contact with the enemy and began fighting. On this side did Närke-Värmlands regiment and troops from Östergötland stand, and they were facing all the elite regiments of the Russian army. Fighting was desperate. Calls for help from the Swedish cavalry was made, But the Swedish cavalry had once again f*cked up this day, and they were nowhere to be seen.
Some Swedish cavalry moved to the right side of the line to help the fighting there.
But it was now crucial that help quickly reached the left side of the Swedish line which was under enormous stress and was threatened out being outflanked.
Finally did the Swedes find a few small cavalry units it could send to the left, and they moved forward to get ready to join the fight.
But then when victory seemed near, did the thing happen which was not allowed to happen - the men in Närke Värmland regiment began to flee, and the left side of the Swedish line fell apart because of some cowards.
And the regiment from Uppland suddenly had no men to protect its left side of their line. And they got encircled by an ocean of Russian troops in green uniforms and all but 34 out of the 700 men were slaughtered. And then the next Swedish regiment suffered the same fate. And the next...
The Swedish cavalry was sent in to plug the holes in the line... but it was too little too late.
The Swedish army had been destroyed in just 15 minutes or so.
So yeah, the battle at Poltava could have been won. But incompetence of Rhenskiöld, Roos, the Cavalry commanders, and the cowards in Närke-Värmlands regiment made Sweden lose the battle this day.
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PanzerIV was a tank that entered service in 1935 so of course the tank would become outdated as the war progressed. And with out outdated I mean that it would become clearly inferior to the best versions of the M4 tank and hoplessly inferior to the IS-2 tank on the eastern front.
And the 76mm on the Sherman didn't have any problems dealing with most German tanks, including the PanzerIV that you claim to be so superior.
"While the 76 mm had less High Explosive (HE) and smoke performance than the 75 mm, the higher-velocity 76 mm gave better anti-tank performance, with firepower similar to many of the armored fighting vehicles it encountered, particularly the Panzer IV tank and StuG assault gun vehicles. Using the M62 APC round, the 76 mm gun penetrated 109 mm (4.3 in) of armor at 0° obliquity and 1,000 m (3,300 ft), with a muzzle velocity of 792 m/s (2,600 ft/s). The HVAP round was able to penetrate 178 mm (7.0 in) at 1,000 m (3,300 ft), with a muzzle velocity of 1,036 m/s (3,400 ft/s)"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/76_mm_gun_M1
The PanzerIV variant had 80millimeters of armour at its best protected area of the tank, and the Sherman 76mm gun could go through 109mm of armour. So PanzerIV was no match for a m4.
That doesn't say that armour is completly useless, since it can give protection against some guns, and from long distances and certain angles it can also protect against some of the bigger guns. But this armour protection that Panzer IV H had came at a price, since all extra armour doubled the weight of the tank and made life difficult for the engine, which in turn slowed the tank down and possibly increased the risk of an engine failure.
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Frederick conquered the province from Silesia from Austria in the first Silesian war. And in the next Silesian war (also known as the Seven years war) the Austrians were determined to take back Silesia and crush Prussia once and for all. France was angry for Frederick had signed a peace instead of helping them in the previous war, so they also wanted revenge.
And Russia was also ruled by an angry lady just like France and Austria, so they ganged up on Frederick, who realized that a war was on its way and therefore decided to strike first before the odds would getting even worse. And then the Seven Years war had started and Frederick had no allies except Britain - which was a sea power with no troops to help Frederick with.
So had to fight on his own and rely on his well trained troops and his own skill as a Commander. And without those things Prussia would never had survived. The 1700s are known as a boring age in military history when battles were fought with two lines firing on each other and the side that runned out of manpower first lost... so no impressive crushing victories were won with big losses on one side and small on the other.
But Frederick turned upside down on all this with his bold, agressive, and unorthodox kind of warfare. Things looked very dark for Prussia in late 1757 when massive enemy troop concentrations were massing around the Kingdom. And Frederick striked back first with the crushing victory at Rossbach where the French army got a bloody nose.
But even after the victory, did Prussia not seem to survive for long. Frederick had to kick out the Austrians from Siliesia or lose the war. That rich Province had large economic value and big importance for its military industries, and even a temporary loss of it would be devestating. So Frederick decided to make a large flanking attack on the Austrian army at Leuthen with everything he had, only a month after the battle of Rossbach.
He set off his men in the very early hours of the morning and they took the Austrians completly by surprise and managed to inflict heavy losses on a much stronger enemy force and suffering much smaller losses on their own.
Prussia had been saved for the moment, and Frederick had become a popular national hero in Britain. He got financial aid from Britain. But the war was far from over. Morale was high and Prussia had won some crushing victories, but even the tiny losses in Leuthen were felt for such a small nation. And every man would be needed for the rest of the war against a mighty coalition of Austria, Russia, France, Sweden and Saxony.
There was simply not enough troops to hold all the enemies back at all places at once. And the overmight would eventually take out it right when Frederick's luck was running out. He would take some heavy defeats in battles against the Russians and Berlin got plundered. And Britain was happy with their victories on other continents, so they abandoned Prussia to its own fate. And the King was once again thinking of commiting suicide.
He and his troops had fought well but it led nowhere. And suddenly the monarch of Russia died, and the new Tzar
was a mentally ill boy who literarly liked to strangle rats. And he was also a great fanboy of Frederick the Great, and he used to dress himself in a Prussian uniform. So of course did he want to sign a peace with Prussia as soon as possible, and which he later did. And he even wanted Russia to join the war on Prussia's side against Austria - but that was too much for many Russian who protested. But he would become assassinated before such an alliance could be signed. But the peace between Russia and Prussia would remain.
And the future started to look much brighter for Frederick. Soon would also Sweden sign a peace deal with Prussia, since its half-assed military campaign had gotten nowhere despite the Swedish occupied provinces had been the hardest plundered in the war. The Queen of Sweden was also Fredericks sister so she of course never liked this war to begin with.
And then Austria was fighting alone had to sign a peace with Frederick. The war had been a costly world war. But Britain could heal its wounds by the riches gained from her conquest of America and India. Prussia, Austria and Russia decided to make peace with each other and fix their economic problems by grabbing land from Poland.
And France was left with economic problems - which became worse with the involvement in the American Revolution. France had no land to steal, and ending up with social caos and the French revolution.
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@kotkamrade1292 Как Россия помогает всем русскоязычным в Украине превращать русскоязычные города, такие как Мариуполь и Бахмут, в руины и пепел? Как российские ракетные атаки, убивающие русскоязычных украинцев в Харькове, Одессе, Днепре и Запорожье, могут заставить людей чувствовать благодарность за вторжение России? Разрушение домов, уничтожение целых городов, где люди выросли... По словам ООН, 98% всех зданий в Мариуполе разрушены после ракетных атак России. Женщины и дети погибают, школы, детские площадки, больницы, торговые центры, церкви, музеи, мемориалы жертвам Холокоста теперь стали объектами тысяч российских террористических бомбардировок.
Меня не удивляет, что даже русскоязычные украинцы, такие как Зеленский, становятся в ярость и ненавидят Россию за то, что она сделала. Россия убивала членов семей, разрушала дома, похищала детей, пытала людей просто потому, что они хотят независимую Украину.
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Single engine planes are usally better. - And here is the long answer......
Single engined fighters have typically been favored due to their low procurement and operational costs, ease of maintenance and assumed better air-to-air performance. Yet there is also a belief that single-engined fighters are inherently less survivable and lower-performance than twinengined fighters.
In the end, P-38 had to withdrawn from Europe in fighter role (it did continue in photo reconnaissance role) due to heavy losses. For these reasons, twin-engined configuration was typically reserved for lumbering bombers, and night fighters whose only task at the time was bomber-hunting (Me-110 and Mosquito were notably successful in such role).
And also after the war have single-engined planes been the most successful Western fighters – F-86, Mirage, F-16.
Twin engined fighters only became popular when multirole requirements became standard, starting with F-4. But F-4 had disastrous performance in air combat considering its cost, and its ground attack performance was not stellar either.
Single engined fighters tend to be cheaper to buy and operate, easier to maintain and have lower basing requirements. Easier maintenance is primarly due to twice the number of engines means twice the work and twice the likelyhood of something going wrong. It also means that twice as many spare parts are needed, increasing aircraft’s logistical footprint. Even with a possible benefit of fewer peacetime losses.
This means that they provide advantage in two most important areas: 1) pilot training and 2) allowing larger number of combat sorties for the same cost.
Furthermore, does a small size tends to make single-engine planes easier to camouflage on the ground.
Reasons why single engined fighters tend to have better combat effectiveness are several. Single engined fighters tend to be smaller, lighter, and better optimized aerodynamically, which automatically improves survivability in a dogfight. Having one engine means that mass is distributed closer to the centerline axis, which reduces roll inertia and improves roll onset rate.
Wing loading is also typically lower for single-engined fighters. And smaller size means that they have surprise advantage, as they are harder to acquire and track either visually or with optical (visual, IR) sensors.
Lower drag oftentimes (though not necessarily) means higher cruise speed despite often lower Thrust-to-weight ratio.
Gripen C similarly is capable of cruising at Mach 1,1 at dry thrust and with 6 missiles despite being underpowered, and its economical cruise speed is again Mach 0,92. F-16 can achieve Mach 1,1 at dry thrust and with two missiles, most likely due to added drag of horizontal tail, while the F-15 can achieve a cruise speed of only Mach 0,71 despite far higher thrust-to-weight ratio, primarly due to the high cruise drag.
Note: increased drag in twin-engined fighters is primarly a result of a number of factors. First is increased tail-boat drag due to shaping required to place two engines next to each other – there is an area between the engines which typically ends in a flat plate if engines are close together, and if not then additional fuselage required to separate engines still leads to higher drag.
Secondly, a typically wider body leading to higher form and profile drag. Single engined fighters also tend to have higher fuel fraction, and thus combat persistence, than twin-engined ones.
This resulted in the F-8 and the F-16 having significantly greater persistence and range than their twin-engined counterparts (F-15 and F-18 for the latter; speaking of USAFs competence, USAF did not want a single-engine fighter to have a
greater range than the F-15, but focused on total fuel capacity as opposed to the fuel fraction and thrust-to-drag). With modern European fighters situation is opposite, mostly due to differing requirements France, Sweden and Eurofighter consortium had for their fighters. That being said, Gripen E is expected to have almost as high fuel fraction as, and better endurance/range than, twin-engined Rafale.
And as counter-intuitive as it may sound, single-engined fighters have better combat survivability as well. Most modern Western fighters have engines so close together that any amount of damage taking out one engine is almost certain to take out another as well. Even if a twin-engined aircraft loses a single engine without another one getting taken out, it immediately looses 50% of the thrust and 81% of the performance, making it a sitting duck and easily killed by the opponent.
Due to all above factors, twin-engined fighters are more likely to get hit in combat while not being any more likely to survive getting hit.Twin engined designs do not necessarily have better peacetime survivability either. F-106, despite being single-engined, had 15 losses in first 90.000 hours, compared to 17 for the F-4.
Single-engined F-105 also had low peacetime loss rate.
Swedish JAS-39 has a better safety record than the F-18 despite having one engine less – 13% of Canada’s CF-18s have been lost in crashes compared to 2% of Gripens; a loss rate of 0,36% per year versus 0,08% per year for Gripens. Rafale suffered 4 crashes in 64.000 hours.
Gripen suffered 5 crashes total in 203.000 flight hours. None were related to either engine or aerodynamic configuration of the aircraft: 2 were due to underdeveloped FCS, 2 were due to the pilot error and 1 was due to ejection seat issue. Typhoon suffered 3 crashes total in 240.000 flight hours. One was due to double engine flameout and two due to unexplained reasons. F-22 reached 100.000 flight hours on 11.9.2011., and by that time had 4 losses.
Overall, F-15 had a crash rate of 2,36 per 100.000 hours and F-16 of 4,48 per 100.000 hours. Less than quarter of the F-16 losses were due to the engine failure, with leading cause of losses being FCS issues and human mistake. On the other hand, most F-15s lost have experienced engine fires, meaning that engine-related loss rate is actually higher for the F-15 than for the F-16.
F-18 crash rate is 3,6 per 100.000 hours, and Gripen’s is 2,46 per 100.000 hours, and 6,25 for Rafale.
Overall, statistics show that single-role air superiority fighters tend to be safer than contemporary multirole fighters regardless of number of engines.
And while very rare, it is also very possible to land a single-engine fighter with engine out. More common are crashes of twin-engine aircraft due to a single-engine flameout. In the end, theoretical superior peacetime survivability of a twin-engined aircraft is neither large or certain enough to offset lower combat survivability and performance, typically smaller fleet size, higher maintenance downtime and higher operating cost. That being said, aircraft has to be well designed aerodynamically in order to take advantage of a single-engined configuration (ref. Gripen); single engined F-35 is the worst-performing Western fighter, and one of most expensive ones, due to two factors: bad aerodynamic design and weight more typical of twin-engined fighters. It is also likely to have high crash rate – not due to its single-engine configuration, but due to its extremely complex hardware (overly complex engine and avionics) and software (24 million lines of code) design.
Analysis of air operations in Vietnam and Arab-Israeli wars has revealed that 62% of losses of single-engined aircraft was caused by fuel fire, 18% was caused by the pilot being disabled, 10% by damage to control surafces, 7% by engine loss and 3% by structural damage.
https://defenseissues.net/2014/08/09/single-vs-twin-engined-fighters/
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I guess Denmark would soon have been eaten up by Sweden. The Kola peninsula would become Swedish. And Archangelsk would have become Russias most important port in the north. Poland would probably be swallowed by the Swedish sphere of influence. More Swedish colonies in the new world would become a thing.
Sweden would probably try to stay out of more future wars since it already had enough problems with consolidating all conquests, and integrating all new territories into the country.
Norway would probably undergo an intensive campaign to become Swedenified, like the stolen Danish provinces were.
And Finland would perhaps become next on the line.
Without wars would the empire prosper. And neighbouring countries would think twice before attacking its strong neighbour. Poland would be too weak to attack Sweden. Prussia and Russia would be too weak to attack Sweden on their own.
Swedens population (including all stolen land) would now be over 50% larger than that of the Netherlands.
But in the late 1800s would probably the cracks in the empire appear. Russians, Poles, Balts, Germans, Danes and perhaps also Finns and Norwegians would have their hearts filled with nationalism and dream about independence. And they would start seeing Sweden as an obstacle to their dreams, and therefore they would hate Sweden and try to destroy it.
Much like slavs hated the Austro-Hungrian empire, and how poles resisted their German and Russian occupants.
Sweden would become dysfunctional as a democratic state.
The Swedish minority could not stay in power under democracy, so it would have to be an opressive regime to keep minorities in their place. But if it tried to be generous to minorities, they would still remain ungrateful Sweden haters and want independence - like Norway did.
So nothing could be gained form appeasement, so the empire would probably be doomed once nationalism led to movements for independence. Civil wars could break out. And foreign powers would probably be more than willing to help independence movments to weaken Sweden and divide it up.
The days of the empire would then be numbered.
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I consider the counter-offensive to have been a great success. Look at loss statistics. Russia had lost 2000 artillery pieces in the beginning of this year - now they have lost more than 5000 this year if you include MLRS into the numbers. Not even Russia can substain those losses. For the first time do Ukraine now fire more artillery shells per day that russia 9000 vs 7000. Compare that to the beginning of the war when Russia fired 63.000 shots per day compared to 3000 for Ukraine.
Furthermore have Ukraine better artillery pieces now with superior range, precision, shorter reloading time, more powerful explosives, and ammunition with better range and precision and which do not fail to explode like old russian ammunition often do.
Ukraine do furthermore have more drones to guide their artillery. They have GPS guided ammunition. They have lots of counter-battery radars while the russian radars are nearly extinct. Russias best artillery gunners are now dead, so they use low skilled newly mobilized civilians instead to fire grandpas old 1950s artillery guns.
So in the most important set of weapon system in this war do Ukraine now have a total superiority. If this has been caused by succesful Ukrainian artillery strikes or because of sanctions that have destroyed the russian economy and its ability to make artillery ammunition remains to be seen. It could very well be both of those reasons. Regardless do the future look very unfortunate for russia as their ammunition production fails to keep up with the enormous artillery consumtion rates they had in the beginning of the war. In the first year of the war was the russian artillery a deadly hard fist and Ukraines most dangerous enemy as it fired 17 million shots that first year of the war. And even if the precision is garbage on russian guns you will be enable to hit and damage lots of things with that ammount of fire.
But next year will russia only be able to produce about 200.000 to 1.000.000 million shells (depending on if you believe ukrainian or russian numbers more). And that is not nearly enough to maintain russias previous rates of consumtion. Add to that that many of their best artillery pieces have been lost in battle and been replaced by WW2 guns. And the few good guns they have left have probably worn out their gun barrels and lost accuracy by firing so many shots day after day... and soon the gun barrels needs to be replaced or the gun might explode and kill all men around it.
Despite wests weak half-assed support for ukraine do the country now also have more tanks than russia. Some people are dissapointed that Ukraine mostly only got old tanks like Leopard1. But then I want to remind people that artillery is the most important weapon system in this war and not tanks. If Ukraine could choose between more artillery or more armor, then they will choose more artillery.
And furthermore russia have lost more than half of its tanks in this war. And that is a fact. This is not pro-ukrainian numbers, but conservative estimates by neutral Oryx open source image confirmed photos and videos taken of tanks destroyed. Personally I trust the Ukrainian numbers even more. But it is possible that even they understate how bad russian tank losses have been. As Arthur Rehi said in a video some day ago, did he himself count more destroyed tanks on drone footages from Avidivka than what the numbers from Ukrainian military staff stated as enemy tanks lost. Russia is losing tanks so fast that Ukraine cannot keep up counting them all.
Ukrainian offical numbers says 5000 russian tanks lost. This is a huge number. And to make matters even worse for russia should we remember that russia used up their best tanks in the beginning of the war. So the majority of the tanks that russia now have left are junk like T-55 and T-62. Old tanks from grandpas days - things that even a Leopard1 would be able to kill.
Those russian losses are terrible. But they are just tank losses, add to that that they have also lost 9300 armored combat vehicles. So all in all have russia now lost nearly 15,000 armored vehicles in this war.
I don't think it will be easy to recover from that.
And the west still got the ability to send thousands of more tanks and infantry fighting vehicles if they want to. Ukraine plans to build 2000 CV-90 in the next 2 years which is the best infantry fighting vehicle in the world, with a 40mm gun capable of cutting infantry, tanks, helicopters, planes and drones into pieces.
So the long term prospects for russia seems doomed. I guess Putain now hopes his boyfriend Trump will save his ass, because there is probably no other way out of this for russia without a catastrophic defeat.
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The problem with capitalism is that it only focus around 2 things.
1. Maximizing profits.
2. Crushing competitors.
So if you don't maximize your profits you will be crushed by a competitor who will. That can sometimes be a good thing to incentivise technological innovation, meritocracy, and efficient forms of organizing things. But most often its a bad thing, because this crazy hunt for profits makes corporations ignore what is beneficial to society, what is moral, what is good for healthy and what is substainable.
If a capitalist own a factory, and a competitor starts selling products made with cheap child labour because its more profitable to produce things that way, then our capitialist is forced to do the same thing in order to maximize profits, and if he refuse to sell out his morals his company well eventully go out of buisness.
And when the market price signals tells our capitalist its more profitable to sell porn magazines than Bibles, then he must either obey the price signals and producing porn magazines, or go out of buisness.
Without any regulations on working conditions, protection of consumers and the enviroment and so on, capitalism would be a system totally lacking morality, it would be a system where benificial goods wouldnt be produced. Most people would die before they get 30 as in England, before the sanitasion movement and labour unions enforced programs for disease prevention that capitalists opposed. Capitalists didnt want to pay higher wages so people didnt have to eat garbage, capitalists didnt want to pay higher taxes to pay for sewers so people didnt have to use the same water for shitting and drinking, capitalists didnt wanna pay for better housing. Capitalism doesnt care about public health unless they can make money out of it, so they dont make research on diseases unless they are sure they can make a profit. Not only does capitalism doesnt care about health, its anti-health. The food industry make people obease, the tobacco industry kills people, they meat industry mistreat animals and making them sick so they have to use anti-biotics on such a large scale that anti-biotic resistens is getting more and more common.
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Farage is a mixed bag. He have supported Greece in the darkest hour of their crisis when the entire world was against them, and in the harshest words possible attacking the EU and the troika for their totally unaccaptable treatment of Greece and the total contempt they had for democracy.
So for that reason, Farage has become somewhat of a hero among people in Europe, as a voice who refuses to stay silent while billion dollar interests tries to silence him, EU hates him the governments in Europe hates him, and not a single opinion dissenting with the establishment have been allowed to talk in mainstream media - but Farage's voice havn't been silenced. Because they can't. He is hugely popular on the internet... so the mainstream media have realized that they can't simply ignore him.
And the EU-skeptics on the right, and also us on the left atleast have some voice thanks to this man.
He is funny and a skilled speaker. And he is not overly polite in order to not offend anyone, nope, he is really the opposite. Scandinavian politics could therefore never produce a politician like him.
But that man also got downsides. Despite his image of being for the team of the little guy against EU and the big banks that wanna throw the people under the bus under economic austarity to save the greedy banks from collapsing...... he is a banker, and banking lobbyist himself. He have opposed more regulations on the British financial sector, and is therefore against any measures of stopping the reckless behaviour that caused the lead to a banking crisis that have costed British taxpayers more money than the cost of fighting world war 2.
Farage is also a believer in the idea that Britain become the factory of the world again, just if they leave the overly regulated EU behind and start deregulating and have free trade again. And when Brexit happened he should have taken the lead for his country, since he was the leader of the anti-EU movement in Europe.
But instead he resigned from UKIP and left the country in anarchy, when it need leadership.
UKIP is not a nazi party, by far... even if media always tries to connect EU-skepticism with rightwing extremism.. when they lack any good arguments why people should like EU.
However, UKIP is a clownish party with many creationists in it, and one guy explained away global warming by saying that rain and storms over UK was caused by God for he wanted to punish the island for its stance on Gay rights.
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Before the Euro, a country like Greece could devalue their currency and get out of their economic mess by increasing their exports with a cheap currency and the loans could be repaid with inflation and extra exports. The borrowers would get repaid, and the economy would recover. -But doing things this way doesn't work today, because Greece doesn't control their own currency, but instead they use a currency that they share with other countries.
So why doesn't states in America have the same problems as European countries that are overindebted? Because there is a flow of money from the rich to the poor states/countries. The American dollarsystem is different in that way.
And that is why the current Euro model is doomed to fail. The indebted countries are forced to tighten their belts, and that leads to a declining economy, and falling prices... which makes it even harder to pay off debts. So the rich northern Europe will also be harmed by Trichets stupid design, and not getting loans repaid, and exports will fall when Southern Europe is forced into austarity.
And you are right that this problem could be fixed if there was any political will. But the people don't want any United States of Europe. So if the USE-option is off the table there are only two options left: Either we scrap the Euro..... or we keep the status quo, and let this Frankenstein currency live on and cause tremendous harm, and killing all economic growth in Europe and cause so much destruction that Golden dawn parties rise up all over Europe, and scrap the Euro-project entirely.
Furthermore do I think that the Eurozone economy is way too complicated to merge over night. And when neoliberal economic policies is written into the very constitution and law of Europe, then I have absolutly no hope of the Europroject. The economy will be doomed to fail because of that alone. And if you are forbidden to have leftwing policies by law, then what is the point in having democracy? - None.
I for my part want both democracy and leftwing economic policies, so for me its obvious that I wish the EU to die.
EU have idiotic neoliberal fiscal policies that are almost impossible to change because they need approval from all memberstates to change the constitution. And the monetary policies are idiotic and doomed to fail as well, mainly because of the stupidity of deflationary fiscal policies, but also because the Euro is basicly designed like a stupid goldstandard system.
A country that controls its own currency will always be able to pay its own debts, while a country under a goldstandard will go broke - like Greece.
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A stable currency is the bedrock for finance and industry. Without it nobody can plan ahead and make investments that promote future growth
Look at history. During the Keynesian era 1945-75 the world had ZERO soverign debt crisis. And just a dozen banking crises.
And then the world tried this neoliberal bullshit recipy you are propagating between 1980-2017... with over 200 crisis following it, including a long list of sovereign debt crisis. (Source: Kenneth Rogoff - This time is different).
We tried all that bullshit. We scrapped democratic control over the central bank, that instead became politically independent. And the central banks abandoned the goals of economic growth and full employment, and instead targeted low inflation like you want. And governments have written into their constitutions that they need balanced budgets - with deflation and a stagnant economy as a consequence.
Without it nobody can plan ahead and make investments that promote future growth.
Facts doesn't support your claim. There is a difference between inflation or even high inflation on one hand, and hyperflation on the other hand.
Brazil and South Korea in the 1960s and China the recent decade all had very high inflation and very high high growth.
Loans are great when you can invest the money into the future and pay it off with the gains, but if you manipulate your currency and screw your debtors then who's going to loan you money in the future?
Investors come to countries with strong economic growth so I am not worried.
Secondly I wanna say that debtors can accept to get 80-90% of their money back by a little bit of inflation helping the economy. Or we can do like in your way of doing things, and get a deflationary collapse so A cannot pay B so B doesn't have enough money to pay C, so C also goes bankrupth and unable to pay D, so D can't pay E.
People agrees to wage cuts to save their jobs, which means that they get less money to spend, so companies make less sales and have to cut back even more... and fire workers, lower wages. Which in turn leads to even more people having no income to spend, so the companies have to cut back even more.... and the circle goes around and round.
This is what we have seen in the west. The governments are cutting back and trying to take in more money than they spend - which cause deflation.
And when people sees their incomes fall they must start to borrow money to survive. The wages have been stagnant in America the last 3 decades, while people are getting overindebted. Sweden got one of the lowest national debts in Europe, but that is because the households are the most overindebted in Europe.
Swedish companies make record profits, but the wage share out of value added has fallen from 78% to 56% since 1978.
So your stupid shit-policies have ironically helped the governments getting rich by crushing the people. I think that is kind of ironic, since rightwingers claim to hate the government and care for the individual more and say that the real economy is what matters rather than whats going on with the government.
Sweden and Germany are the parasites in Eurozone. They export much and import little. They keep wages artificially low so jobs and economic growth can be stolen from other countries.
And this is a reason why EU suck. Without this Euro nonsense, South European countries could just do some protectionism and devalue their currencies and keep their jobs and growth for themselves - which they now need more than ever.
While Germany and Sweden would be forced to rely on their own home markets instead. And with high wages people wouldn't be forced into debt-traps and the financial parasite sector would be very small.
And standards of living would be high when wages are high, and technological development would increase since strong consumer demand and expensive well paid workers would be more profitable to replace with computers and robots.
And the world economy would be more stable without all debt, and without strong over-dependencies on foreign markets. And with local production, the world economy would also be more prepared for peak oil.
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The Euro crisis would have happened even if the best economists in the world had ruled in Europe, simply because no monetary union in history can exist without a fiscal union. And combined with Trichets retarded ideas of balanced budgets, low inflation then EU was doomed to fail from the start.
A country either needs a national debt of the government, or having the private sector and the people going into debt... but Eurocrat retards doesn't understand this when they demand low national debt.
And retarded German EU-fanboys does also neighter understand that not all countries can be like Germany and export more than they import. Without an importer like Greece, Germany couldn't export. And wthout any debts, you cannot have any assets.. and everyone will be dirtpoor. And when people don't have any money to spend on buying goods, then companies will cut down production, close factories and get rid of workers.... which in turn gives the people even less money to spend, which leads to even more factories to close down.
This is what balanced budget amendments from the EU leads to: A deflationary crash.
And then there are of course other reasons why the Euro project is retarded, such as the idea of free capital flows across borders and having one interest rate for 19 different countries with extremely different economies. And when EU screw up, they always use their failure as an excuse to grab even more power at the expense of the national governments... just the same way as the free movement across borders lead to more criminality across borders, and then the EU used it as an excuse to take over the decision making over the police from the governments.
And now after the EU failure, the EU is talking about creating a fiscal union and continue their building of the United States of Europe against the will of the people, instead of scrapping the failed EU project that cannot survive in its current form. Because as I said earlier - there is not a single succesful historical example of a monetary union existing without a fiscal union.
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Prussia and Austria was unfriendly of each other from 1740 to 1871 because of reasons. They both wanted to unite all the German speaking people but only under an empire under their own leadership. One of them was catholic and the other one was protestant. Prussia and Austria also fought some wars over the province of Silisia, which Frederick the Great took from Austria. And then Austria and the Habsburg monarchy had wanted to crush all small German protestant states and force their globalism/papacy and central government upon its unwilling subjects with military force for much of the 1500s and 1600s, and a third of Germany's population had to die because of ambitions of the Austrian monarchy to dominate Germany....... so there was a lot of hostility towards South Germany from the North Germans, and vice versa.
Many Germans still kept on dreaming about a unified Germany in the 1800s, where Prussia, Austria, Switzerland, Hannover, Bavaria, Wurtemberg, Saxony and all other German speaking lands would join into one single empire. But the Austrian and Prussian monarchs simply didn't wanna give up their own power and prestige for this project to come true.
And then Germany was created without Austria. And Bavaria decided to join Germany despite it had more common interests with Austria than with Prussia.
So it was only later that Austria and Germany became allies and fought the first world war together. And then the outdated Austro-Hungrian empire died in this war, because the multicultural empire could only be hold togheter by a monarch... and then this fabric of society was torn apart, and Habsburg lands was turned into many different countries.
So one could say that the 1800s was a conflict of nationalists vs Conservatives. And the Conservatives liked the monarchy, they like multi-culturalism and they hated the nationstate and democracy. And the nationalists were strong patriots and liked democracy and the idea of landwehr mass-conscription army and they were very intolerant towards minorities such as jews and slavs in occupied lands who refused to assimilate.
And the nazis would simply pick the worst things out of both these movements from the 1800s, and incorporate the old conservatives hatred of democracy and the nationalists intolerance of jews and slavs.... and all this added with militarism and flagwaving of course.
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I do not see the point in puttinger Panther and Tiger I into service when countries are developing newer tanks that are better.
Retraining crews takes time. And USA, Britain, Germany and Russia all used different sizes for their ammunition. The germans used 150mm howitzers, while the Americans used 155mm and Russia 152mm.
Germany used 88mm guns while the American used 90mm guns and the russians used 85mm guns.
So getting a tank for which you do not produce any ammunition creates problems. And a tank without ammunition is worthless. Just look at the Ukraine war today and you see that Ukraines biggest problem they have is the lack of ammunition.
The german tanks were also built for German doctrine, while the American tanks were tailor made for American needs and logistical apparatus to be carried on ships, being transported on american railroads and being able to use american military bridges. Those things were not solved as well by the germans as their panther tanks were typically too heavy even for their own military bridges.
So the option would therefore be to borrow the best ideas from various countries and from the germans in particular to make a new tank. A tank a bit like Centurion with a powerful gun, good mobility and armor, and maybe the suspension from the panther, IR gun sights and good optics.
Personally do I think that Panzer IV was hopelessly obsolete in the 1970s. Indeed this vehicle was clearly inferior to the new allied tanks such as M4A3E8, Comet, Centurion and T-34/85. And even more so compared to T-55 and M60 Patton. Its short 75mm gun already had much problems fighting the most powerful allied tanks in 1944 so it would not be a tank I would want for an European army in the 1950s and 1960s.
It would only be a tank to consider if you couldn't get your hands on anything better. Finland used StuGIII after the war at that was truely a capable machine excellent for defensive warfare during the 1940s and 1950s but then it came too weak to fight allied tanks. However Switzerlands long use of Hetzer is in my opinion a bad budget choice. Hetzer was a good tank if you needed a cheap vehicle that could be produced fast. But in the cold war there was no longer any need for that which is why turretless vehicles as a class soon died out. Firepower, mobility and a turret was more important.
Swedens S-tank was a succesfull improvement of the StuGIII idea. But it when gun stabilizers came and chobham armor did this vehicle become obsolete. Swedens use of world war 2 tanks was not that impressive either. After the war it wanted to buy surplus M4 Shermans from the demobilizing USA, but USA offered older variant, and batches of small numbers of this or that model instead of allowing Sweden to buy large numbers of one modern variant to make logistics easier.
Britain refused to sell any tanks, but then the country got into economic problems and decided to sell some Centurions to Sweden to get some cash. But this was in the early 1960s so Centurions was clearly no longer the best tanks in the world so to say. Sweden made some upgrades to them. And they were okayish as 2nd line tanks I guess. But not so fun to use against T-72 or T-80 I guess.
Sweden did however do upgrade its own old WW2 tanks quite succesfully, Stridsvagn 74 did become something like Swedens M41 Walker Bulldog that was built on a M24 Chaffee chassi.
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His father was very abusive. He behaded Frederick's best friend and forced him to watch.
Frederick William also forced Frederick to marry an ugly boring girl that he didn't like instead of a princess from England which was attactive and which Frederick liked and which would have given Frederick prestige and a confidence boost.
Frederick william however hated the idea of giving his son any joy in life, and Frederick William also sucked at the game of world politics and made a wrong bet to pick a pro-Austria marriage candidate for his son. And later on he regreted his pro-Austrian stance.
Personally I wonder if this could have given Frederick the Great an own personal reason for hating Austria and wanting revenge and starting the Silesian wars, but this is just a theory.
Frederick William was a bully and he did beat up Frederick's teacher for teaching him latin.
Frederick William hated such things as latin, philosophy, fashion, flute playing and culture - which all were things that his son loved.
Frederick William himself was more of a 1600s kind of person. He was very religious and intolerant and unopenminded. He was a simple man in that sense that he was totally uninterested in any deeper intellectual reasoning. He had 3 hobbies and those were in the following order; his solidiers in his army, drinking alchohol and hunting.
He was a very loyal husband to his wife, and a man of his position could easily have fucked around if he wanted to, but he didn't. He was a christian. And a bully and a tyrant. And life for his subjects were not a funny one. He never gave them anything. His only two things he cared about was his army and a good economy.
He had a strong sense of duty, and while other Kings in Europe wasted tax money on luxuries for themselves, so did Frederick WIlliam live a simple life without luxury.
Frederick the Great however was more generous towards his own people and opened military food depots whenever food prices got high so that the poor people could afford to eat. He hated his fathers religious intolerance and the instead tolerated all faiths, even if he contempted christianity in private.
Frederick also used his newly won freedom when his father died to live out his cultural and intellectual passions.
But he also kept surprisingly many of his fathers policies intact, and did keep budgetary dicipline for his government instead of wasting money of fun stuff. And he did anger many friends by refusing to give them nice jobs and titles within his government in a nepostic way.
Frederick the Great also inherited his fathers contempt for Austria, and the military and the economy were still top priorities for the nation. And many of his fathers advisors could keep their jobs thanks to their competance, eventhough Frederick did not like them in the past.
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Inequality and how rich people become in rich countries are also not entirely decided by how hard working you are. You can be born in the same town as someone else and still got very different chances here in life even if you are equally smart and motivated to work hard as someone else.
If the government stops to pay for education, then that will not become a problem for kids with rich parents, but the kids that without any fault of their own wasn't born with rich parents this will become a problem. They will not get any education. And without an education it will become difficult to compete for a job with the rich kids that have an education.
So you will see untalented rich kids take more of the jobs.
And when the government stops paying for healthcare because the rich people want to "stop paying for other lazy peoples healthcare", then you will once again see a class society grow. Rich people can pay someone to fix their teeths or to take care of their old parents.
But poor people cannot afford that luxury. They have to go to work and feel pain in their mouth instead when they cannot afford to go to dentist and they maybe also need to stay home some days because they cannot do a good job with all the pain. And women needs to take care of their parents when they cannot afford to let someone else do so. And then they need to sacrifice their own free time and work less hours at their real job, so they can get the time they need to help their parents.
And the same thing goes for the kids at the kindergarden. I can certainly see that family values as a good thing, but I don't like the idea that relatives should burn themselves out trying to help others. They need to get help from the government so they can get some rest and also live their own life for a moment. It is way too common that relatives burn themselves out before they seek help to take care of their demented parent or handicapped child.
So if you are a poor woman in an unequal society where everything is privatized, then your chances of making a career and getting well paid job will be pretty small. But if you live in a rich country where the government helps you take care of your kids and your mother and father. And you don't have to fear of going bankrupth because you have to pay your doctor. Then you will have more oppurtunities in life.
You will able to take on a job with more a better wage and more responsabilities, instead of having to say no to the job offer because you need time to take care of your family.
And if you live in a country where the government will not let you die and starve on the street if you go bankrupth, then you can take some risks in your life. You can choose to take a career choice towards a job with a good salary but with a high risk of losing your job. So if things go bad and you lose your job, then you will not suffere a terrible fate.
But if you live in a poor country then the risk of dying on the streets if you lose your job is high, most people will probably take a job where the risk of losing ones job is minimal. The wage on those jobs will probably be bad, but people accept that risk. Because a low wage is better than dying.
Most people don't work to get rich. But they instead only see work as a necessary evil here in life that you have to do to be able to pay your bills and put food on the table.
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@alphalobster8021 The population in the rich countries are rich much because of the reasons you say.
However, national wealth is hardly to any use if it is not shared around among all the citizens in a society. If 1% of the country live like royals and the rest of the population are dirt poor then people will consider that country as poor. Many arab countries have gigantic amounts of oil money, but their populations live in poverty while the ruling elite drive luxury cars.
The most effective way of solving inequality is to give everyone a job as I sees it. The rich will hate the idea because they don't like to pay workers high wages, and unemployment makes people desperate and pushes down wages so therefore they rather have unemployment than full employment.
But for us who put the best for our country before our own greedy self-interest, we can see that this is idiotic.
Lots of people have to spend much of their day doing nothing and feel shamed for being unemployed. And since we are civilized societies we have to give them money so they do not die. And all this is just a waste of course.
So the best way to get equality is to let government policies do away with unemployment (by for example a job guarantee programme or fiscal or monetary stimulus).
And when everyone is working then your country produce more stuff and become richer. People will start paying taxes when they get a job, and no one has to live off welfare anymore. People get their pride and dignity back and feel like full-worthy citizen and a part of society.
And public health will also improve as society becomes more equal in this way. You will have less suicides and divorces caused by economic problems. Fewer depression. Less alcoholism. Fewer will feel sit home and feel sorry for themselves and eat chocolate and become overweight. And fewer people would feel shame over being fat, unemployed, depressed and miserable.. which means that they are less likely to cut themself off from society and not engage in friendships and public life and trying to influence politics.
People will feel less stress about not having to worry about their own economy so much, and they can feel like they are having control over their own life.
Government intervention to create full employment will empower people. And it will also create a meritocratic society where everyone has a chance to become something.
An equal society will also help technological innovation. Because robotization and mass production requires mass consumption. If most of your country is poor to buy things then you cannot sell much, and then it would be pointless to buy expensive machines if you are just going to produce a few examples. You do not open an entire furniture factory and buy expensive machines just to build 1 chair. You need to perhaps sell more than 1000 chairs before it will start to pay off to invest in new machinery for your factory and better tools for the workers.
A society will not develop well with much inequality, when there are many poor and rich, but no middle class at all. You will have a society like Rome with a landless proletariate that have no jobs and incomes to buy things, and a rich elite that buys almost nothing except luxuries like nice jewelry and wine. And the result is of course that all other industries stagnate when there are too few buyers to keep the Roman industries alive when the Roman farmers lost their farms after the punic war.
The pottery industry stagnated and died. And so died textiles, iron works, furniture factories and everything else.
If you are going to lift a country out of poverty you need a large consumer base for your industries. And if you cannot get enough consumers back home then you need to export to other countries that have them until you could build up a strong middle class in your own country.
And the government can also help producers and consumers to reach each other by improving the infrastructure in the country so industries can start selling goods over a larger area on the map before transportation costs starts to eat up their profits or making their goods too expensive for poor consumers.
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@MrFosite
"My conclusion, the fault lies squarely on the nonsensical move to try and become a military power over an maritime one, considering resources at disposal the limitation of manpower, and a history of shipbuilding."
Your post is nonsensical.
Sweden was never a shipbuilding nation. It became one thanks to efforts from the Swedish state. And for no other reason. Before the state decided to build a navy there existed no naval tradition at all in Sweden. Germany had Lubeck, Poland had Gdansk, Denmark had Copenhagen and Sweden had nothing. No fishing industry. No large trading centre. No seamen. No ships. Nothing.
So that Sweden did get a strong navy at all should be seen as a miracle. And the only reason it got one was because it needed to be able to transport troops safely from Sweden to Finland, Germany, the Baltics or Poland and preventing Swedens enemies from transporting troops to invade Sweden.
So it was for the sake of its army it did start to build a navy and not the other way around.
And having a strong army was necessary when you are neighbour with Denmark and Russia, and are involved with dynastic struggles with Poland - which was a Great power back in the 1500 and 1600s.
And without an army would no Sweden have existed. It would be called Denmark today. And Finland would have been called Russia.
That is what would have happened if your ideas had been tried out.
"A military power requires a contentious stream of manpower which small nations cant afford"
You make the mistake of thinking that warfare in the 1500s, 1600s and 1700s are the same as in modern times.
Well it isn't. Back in those old days could a small country have a much greater chance of beating a big one.
Sweden conquered Moscow, Warzaw, Prague, Germany. Would that be possible today? I highly doubt that.
The little Macedonia and the Mongols conquered gigantic plots of land with their relativly tiny population.
Prussia went from a small province with no natural resources into becoming modern day Germany, much thanks to its ability to beat many big countries at the same time in the Seven years war.
"If Swedish Empire would have gone the way the Dutch Republic did, it might have ended up overshadowing them."
The Dutch had been a part of the Spanish empire and had been shipping goods to America and the pacific. They knew all the routes to all secret new lands. While Sweden didn't.
The Dutch was an experienced maritime power that had been sailing ships during the middle ages. While Sweden was a total new comer in sailing the seas. The Netherlands had an easy access to the new world. While Swedens road to the Atlantic ocean was blocked by its enemy Denmark.
And much of its waters was frozen during the cold winters, while the milder climate allowed the Dutch to sail.
And using wind and water power to cut timber was easy when your water did not freeze into ice like it did for Sweden. And building canals is possible when you have a high population density, a rich population and not so much winter cold - but Sweden did not have that option to ship things across canals like the Dutch or British did.
So of course it could never create the same rich trade within the country.
The Netherlands were located between France, Germany and England and had perfect access to capital from all those areas and could therefore build a huge banking sector. Sweden did not have the same perfect location for becoming a banking centre of Europe. And get money and cheap loans for building large fleets.
And if one look at price levels on Swedish goods, do they usually have more in common with price levels in cities like Hamburg than they do with a Swedish city 100 kilometres away. And that is because it was easier to transport things by ships than by land. And as I said earlier, Sweden lacked good waterways like the Netherlands because of the curse of nature.
So of course it would have a harder time creating a flourishing trading empire. Its best chance rather laid with letting the army conquer cities in the Baltics and northern Germany and then continue to conquer the Polish and East German coast and turning all the coast line of the Baltic sea into Swedish territory. This the same way as Rome took over every part of the mediterranean.
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I think the Ukrainians have given much value for our money for all Swedish military aid given to them.
It is an obligation for us to help Ukraine, but it is also in our self-interest. Can we repair the country, then we do not have to see refugee waves coming to other countries in Europe and causing problems such as housing shortages, shortages for jobs, integration problems, the need for more doctors, nurses, teachers and policemen as the population grow and so on.
A strong Ukraine is also a good market for selling our products to. And it can contribute a lot with to us with their plentiful cheap resources and food. We are stronger togheter militarily and economically our fellow western democracy. It makes me sad to have to see them fight this war alone and sacrifice their own youth, and their men and blood for a war they never wanted.
So the least we could do is to help them in every other way if we do not wanna fight this war ourselves. Its simply a moral obligation.
And yes money will be wasted in theft, corruption, bad planning and so on. But that happens in all big buisness as well. And I never heard anyone say that our grocery store firms should be shut down because 3% of their products goes to waste due to shop lifting, or food pass its expiration date, or because someone working at the store accidentally drops a few glass bottles into the floor so they get destroyed.
Our grocery stores can still make a profit and provide valuable things to society.
And indeed even extremely corrupt dictatorships can improve lifes for their citizens. Suharto stole half of his countrys national wealth and put it on to foreign bank accounts. But thanks to strong GDP growth of his country was life improved also for the average citizen a lot under his rule.
So I do not think we should cut all foreign aid and turn our backs on corrupt countries. And especially not for Ukraine for us Europeans, as this country is in our own neighbourhood, and is soon a member of our EU club. Its also a young fellow democracy needing our help and deserving of it. Ukraine belongs to the same cultural sphere as us Europeans, so its our obligation to help them.
India says that they do not care about Europe. So if they don't care Ukraine, then we should care about them as no one else do.
And frankly, if thats the attitude people outside the western world have. Then I rather cut aid to the middle east and Africa and shove that money into Ukraine instead. Then can India pay for helping the middle east instead, as this area is not near us geographically or culturally.
I do not understand why my Swedish tax money should have to go to Hamas.
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Once air superiority has been won, it doesn't really matter what kind of plane that deliever the bombs.
The old ancient F16 can do the job just as well as the new F35 in this regard. So for that task I would prefer a plane that can carry much bombs, that is cheap to fly, a plane that doesn't cost much to build and isn't too expensive too lose.
So preferbly I would like to have a plane with A6 Intruders bombload, Gripen's low maintance cost and low production costs, and having a plane that isn't too expensive too lose - like the F35.
The F16 and Gripen are much better bombtrucks in that sense. F16 is an old plane that can be afford to be lost, while Gripen is also a low cost plane.
Another bonus with Gripen, is its ability to make many sorties per day. While the F35 is just a maintance hog sitting in the repairshop most during the time of the war. Actully I think that the F35 seems crappy for the bombtruck role, just as it is crappy and almost everything else - such as the close air support role due to its fuel thirsty engines, its high speed and vulnerability to fire from the ground.
And as I said earlier, flying a Gripen only costs 4700 dollars per hour while a F35 costs 31.000.
Letting F35 fly bombtruck missions is like hiring a Limousine to drive to the grocery store down the street to buy a package of milk.
It seems quite odd to me.
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@mishaten5548
"What kind of rescue of Russia from destruction are you talking about?"
Russia had lost battle after battle against the Swedes for 9 years. It now stood alone against Sweden. Tsar Peter did have a rocky start of his rule and he made himself unpopular with his westernization reforms. The war dragged on with no victory in sight. War taxes were going up. Men were dying and victory was no closer than 9 years ago.
The country had humiliated itself internationally at Narva, and most foreigners now expected Sweden to win this war.
Another victory like Narva, and that could have been the straw that finally broke the camels back.
A Swedish victory at Poltava would have left the possibility of Ukrainians and Crimean tatars to join the Swedish army as the Russians left the Ukraine alone. And another loss could have triggered war tired Russians to either pressure the Tsar into surrender with the Swedes, or another civil war could have started as the Tsar now would be more unpopular than ever after another big defeat.
And a divided Russia could not stand up foreign aggression - just as it couldn't when Sweden took Ingria and Kexholm from Russia a hundred years earlier.
A weak Russia would also be a tempting target for its enemies - Persia and the Ottoman empire.
The Ottomans had captured the Tsar during the war - which shows that the Russian army was not this improved amazing military machine that historians claim it was after 9 years of war witht he Swedes.
"And by the way, even according to Swedish historians, the Battle of Poltava was the beginning of the end of the Swedish Empire."
Bengt Liljegren is a clownworld popular historian I have no respect for. Peter Englund's book "Poltava" contain lots of references too clown books so I cannot take all his personal opinions seriously.
I think the author Peter From is more correct in his book about the battle of Poltava when ha makes the claim that I just earlier - A Swedish victory could have sparked a revolt against Peter the Great, and thus would a civil war throw the country into chaos and the war tired Russia would had to agree to a peace that was more or less on Swedish terms.
Poltava was just a meaningless milestone in Swedish history in my opinion. You do in a typically Russian way lie and pretend that Swedens resources was depleted - which they were not. Two more armies was created. Big victories was also won at Gadebusch in 1712 and Helsingborg 1710 after the loss at Poltava.
You forget that the war dragged on for another 12 years - and this despite your Russia had multiple allies at your side Denmark, Saxony, and Poland and later on also Hanover(+England) and Brandenburg.
So no, I am not impressed by the Russian army unlike the "historians" your refer to as experts on this topic.
And even after the loss at Poltava could things have ended very differently for Sweden. The battle at Napue could have been won if the Finnish militia had not been acting like cowards and deserted instead of fighting. Then Finland would have remained in Swedish hands. Had the Swedish King not died in 1718, would Norway likely had fallen into Swedish hands since Fredriksten fortress in Southern Norway was about to surrender - and with that surrender would the door to western Norway lay open for the Swedish army. And in the North was Armfeld's army about to bring the city of Trondheim to its knees. And he was also almost able to capture the city without a fight in the autumn after the pathetic flight of the Norwegian troops from the two redoubts that guarded the road to the town.
And with the fall of Norway, would peace with Denmark be achieved on favorable terms for the Swedes.
And troops could now be freed up to retake lost territories in Germany from the weak Kingdom of Hanover,
and with a little military pressure would this be an easy win for the larger, stronger and better Swedish army.
And with diplomacy and economic pressures would England, break ties with their Hanoverian Kings foreign policy.
And without Englands backing would Hanover be forced to surrender to the Swedes.
Diplomacy had successfully played Swedens enemies out against each other. Saxony had grown suspicious of Russia and it wanted to sign a peace before Denmark, Russia, and Brandenburg left the war so it could get more favorable peace terms. At this late point of the war it was happy to surrender to the Swedes in exchange for a guarantee than Stanislaus Leczinsky should not be supported to retake the throne in Poland from Augustus the Strong. Saxony had heard rumours that the Swedish-Russian peace talks were going well, and a fear existed that Russia could agree to supporting Stanislaous.
Brandenburg had been pretty much pro-Swedish for much of the war, and could accept changing sides in the conflict - it even proposed that it would get Stettin from Sweden and inexchange would Brandenburgian troops help Sweden fight against Denmark and Hanover to get territories at those countries expense as compensation. But the stubborn Swedish King refused the idea.
So with Denmark and Hanover out of the way, would peace deals with Saxony and Brandenburg be easy.
And against Russia did Sweden have many cards to play also after Poltava. The Swedish deepwater navy remained the most powerful navy in the Baltic sea, and surprise attacks over shallow waters that deepgoing ships could not reach was all that the Russians got. Russian galleys made out of low quality junk timber were ships with no long life span.
Thanks to Görtz diplomacy of delaying peace talks that led to nowhere and only gave Sweden more time to recruit more soldiers and playing out Swedens enemies against each other had largely been succesful 1714-1718.
Enemy countries had grown suspicious of each other. Denmark and Russia could for example not come to an agreement of a combined Danish-Russian invasion of Sweden in 1716.
And England and Russia was succesfully played out against each other. No one of those countries wanted to be the last sucker to not come into a peace agreement with Sweden. So concessions had to be made. Peter could accept an alliance with Brandenburg and Sweden - but Carolus Rex could not accept any peace that included any loss of land. So the plans of Russia helping Sweden to take territories on Denmarks expense could not come into being because of the stubborness of the Swedish King.
But none of this was known to the Russians during the peace talks. The talks just led to nowhere. And the secret peace talks Russia made with Sweden made Russias military allies suspicious and hostile towards her. Just the same way as Russia became suspicious of England and her will to not let the Russians grow too powerful.
And the Swedish support for the Jacobines was used as a diplomatic tool to pressure England into surrender and joining the Swedes. If Sweden agreed to not support the Jacobines then it would be a big plus for Britain in the peace negotiations. And the fight between Tsar Peter the Great and his son Alexei was also used by Swedish diplomacy, but it acted too late to get his son to Sweden, and play him out as a card against Russia. Instead he went to Russia to see his father - which was not happy with him and his ties with the Swedes so he tortured and murdered him.
Russia was very eager to come to peace fast since the war had dragged on for a very long time, and the Russians feared a British intervention on Swedens side and that Russias allies would abandon her.
So if Denmark and Germany gave up and left Russia alone - then would Russia also have to give up pretty soon and moderate their demands, and not just give back Finland but also the Baltic provinces except St. Petersburg and parts of Ingria.
Perhaps the dogmatic Carolus Rex could not even accept those peace terms... but even if the story would end here would the Swedish empire remained almost untarnished in terms of lost territory.
But I see that Sweden had a pretty good chance of winning in the east after the conquest of Norway. The plan of Carolus rex was to ship his troops from Norway over to the Baltics and retake the harbors there in this place which was almost left unguarded by Russian troops.
And without the harbors would the Russian army be forced to leave Finland. Because Finland was a poor country that could not produce enough food to feed a Russian army of over 20,000 men. And roads on land was in poor condition, indeed almost no roads at all existed in Finland before the mid-1700s so there was no way that enough horse carriages could carry food from Russia into Finland that way.
So the Russian army would now either have to starve to death or leave Finland.
So in this way would both Finland and the Baltics go back to Sweden. And everything Sweden had lost would be as good as retaken by now. And if the Tsar was wise and realistic, then he would sue for peace by now, and accept a peace that returned to the pre-year 1700 borders.
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Wars is about handeling limited resources in the best, most effiecent way.
And for a long time have the west been fighting wars with overwhelming amounts of resources, so much so that we could afford to be lazy and wasteful and still win a war. The war in Ukraine has been a wake up call in this regard. Ukraine does not have the luxury of taking out an enemy with air support and wasteing 10 times more artillery shells than their enemy. One can say that the opposite has been the case. Here can we see how we must fight to win a war when we lack air superiority and have to rely on artillery instead. And a war when we do not have control over the skies but have to rely on SAMs, manpads and AA guns to keep enemy planes away.
As sound technician I think that human creativity works best with limited resources, when you have to be as creative as possible with the little tools that you have. If you only have a limited number of synth sounds in your music program you quickly think out ways you can use those and create music pieces.
Same goes for warfare. Necessity is the mother of invention, as the saying goes. It have a very few good artillery pieces which it needs to use effectivly to win against a stronger foe. And attacking the logistical system with HIMARS turned out to be a very effective way of doing just that. They have managed to find a chink in the armor of their much stronger foe and ruthlessly exploit it.
And the Ukrainians have inflicted higher losses on their enemy than they have suffered themselves. How much larger is hard to tell.
But even if they would be close to even, is it still a job well done by Ukraine as Russia have launched a surprise attack, they are stronger in the air, and they have much more tanks and artillery... and access to artillery shells and spare parts for russian made weapons is much less critical.
Ukraine have been clumsy in the propaganda war, and one could say that Russia allowed Ukraine to win it by walk over. Zelensky have been visiting his frontline troops and begging the west for weapons and help saying about the Russians: "they are killing my people".. which they have done at Bucha, Irpin and with all terror bombing. All the daily videos of destroyed Russian tanks, drone attacks on soldiers, exploding ammunition dumps and such have also managed to convince public opinion that Ukraine is doing well on the ground and that Russia suck. All those huge losses on paper that Russia have suffered do have some video evidence to back it up.
The daily unseen and Warthog, are like the modern day version of die Wochenschau.
I think Putin expected his net trolls to be more effective, but it turns out that there are lots of even bigger trolls on the internet - like myself - that can fight back. So their attempts to manipulate western public opinion have largely been unsuccesful. And meanwhile are Ukraine winning the meme war. Comment sections are like a self-playing piano now unlike the first weeks of the war. Now people do not need any encouragement to make jokes on Russias expense.. about "smoking accidents", "vodka related foolishness" and Kremlin hypocrisy. People do that job all by themselves and have fun reading each others jokes. And it does of course feel good to give each other a pat on the back.
For the Ukrainians it have also been important for fighting morale to feel like the world cares about them, and that they are not alone and left out to be eaten by the sharks. They know that the entire free world is behind them. All of Europe and North America. Even Switzerland and Hungary are sanctioning Russia. Iceland with its extremely tiny population send warm clothes this winter. Japan and Korea send military uniforms, hospital equipment. Taiwan send drones. Jordan sends military equipment, and Morocco sends spare parts from their best T-72 tanks to Ukraine. Also Australia and New Zeeland send lots of help.
The war in Ukraine have in many ways picked up the best parts of the world community. And Ukraine is in the worlds spotlight for the moment. And meanwhile are Russias allies getting tired of her brutality, her disrespect for law and the international order, and her clumsy disruptive behaviour. So even Serbia refuses to recognize Russias annexation of the stolen Ukrainian provinces. And also Kazaksthan, Mongolia and Armenia are beginning to speak up against Putin and publicly humiliate him.
And China is less and less interested in backing Russia
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They were the first standing army. That gave Spain an advantage over other countries, and is perhaps the main reason why Spain turned into the mightiest empire of the world. The tercios were trained in Italy and the men trained togheter and their experience were maintained over time - unlike other countries armies which were dissolved as soon as a war was over.
But the tercios learned from their combat experience and passed their knowledge on to new troops.
Spain became a country for inspiration for other countries and many spanish words have become standard use in other armies.. I don't access to Jan Glete's book so I type from my own fallible memory now, but I think he said that the word spanish word regimiento from that time was copied by other countries and came into use all over Europe.
So Spain became an empire that included America, Italy, the Benelux countries and Portugal thanks to royal marriages and exploration.
Its army was super modern for its day. But the empire itself was a relic of the past. It was a feudal medieval Kingdom.
All those small places were members of the Spanish empire but they paid nearly no taxes and the Spanish state had limited power over those areas. And the push for more centralization, more catholicism and more taxes angered the Netherlands who declared independence. Italy and Portugal did not want to pay taxes either. And the Spanish state did for a while let them get away with it.
The Spanish army was good. Too good for Spains own good. The Spanish Kings stopped caring about longwinded and difficult diplomatic negotiations with other countries to get what they want. But instead did they take the faster and more easy solution to use the worlds most powerful army to ram through their will. And it first it did work well. But soon did all dreams and imperial ambitions and use of force become too much for Spain.
They got involved in war after war. They fought against the Netherlands who sought independence. They fought against North African pirates. They fought against the muslim Ottomans. They sent their Spanish armada towards England. They involved themselves in the 30 years war and fought against Swedish and French troops. Portugal had enough of all wars that had costed them their colonies so they also started a war with Spain.
And all those wars did cost money. But the decentralized Spanish state could not afford it - especially not since it only was Castile who paid taxes, while Italy, Belgium and Portugal did not. The Spanish state were in desperate times, and the many provinces finally agreed to paying a little taxes to the Spanish state - but only if they got more local independence.
So the once strong and centralized Spanish state which had been ahead of the rest of the world did not become more decentralized and weak compared to other countries. Its economy was in decline while other countries were on the rise
with more centralized and effiecent buraucracies.
England, Netherlands, Sweden and France was on the rise. And Spain never really retook its once dominant role in Europe.
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@erikakurosaka3734 Your ignorance is mind-blowing. Sweden have made world class weapon system in area after area: submarines, AA guns, tanks, IFVs, SPGs, fighter jets, motorcycles, anti tank weapons, combat boats... you name it.
But how come that Sweden have not had an export success in proportion to the quality of their products?
-The answer is that Sweden is not a Nato member.
Nato countries prefer to buy products from other Nato countries. There do you have the reason why F16 have been sold to so many countries in Europe, despite that plane was not superior to non-Nato aircraft's like Viggen or French Mirage F1E (France was not a Nato member back then). Belgium would have preferred to buy the Mirage because of its cultural ties to France and because it was a better plane than F16, and they also preferred Viggen over F16. Denmark's favorite choice was to buy the Viggen, but they ended up buying F-16 instead. So countries prefer to buy inferior products to support other Nato members arms industries.
USA have also actively worked to sabotage arms sales for other countries with unfair play. Like for example when India was interested in buying Viggen from Sweden, and the Americans responded with forbidding the sale of components for the engine in order to block this arms deal from taking place.
For producing weapons in such a small number (and thereby with high unit costs, since there are no export market that can help reduce the cost of production) I would say that Sweden's arms industry is the most impressive in the world. It have punched above its own weight in area after area.
Gripen, Gotlands class submarines, archer artillery, Combat vehicle 90 are all playing in the top of the list of the league of the best weapons systems in the world.
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@wzjzkldjskd
They won back terrain with their victory at Kyiv, they won it back near Sumy. They took back a large piece of land with their Charkiv offensive, they won back the strategically and symbolically important snake island, and they retook Khersun.
Right now have they punched a hole in the russian line. And while it is true that the frontline isn't moving, is it also true that russia is suffering disproportionatly heavy losses. You often see 40 artillery pieces per day getting destroyed. And without artillery will russia be unable to win this war in the long run. If things continue down this path, then will russia lose all their artillery (at least locally) and then will the remaining russian troops quickly get knocked out and their defence falls apart.
When that day come I will not be surprised to see large Ukrainian land gains.
It will be a severe blow to russian morale. And then it will be a question if russia will retreat or make a stubborn Stalinist "not a step backwards" policy. Either way is it not good for russia.
I also think that a bunch of long range missiles will severely reduce russias logistical effiency like the arrival of HIMARS did last year, altough in a less dramatic fashion. Russias stupid bumbling mass artillery doctrine needs massive stockpiles of centrally located artillery shells to work effectivly. But when a single missile can hit those ammunition depots that are sitting far behind the frontline, then will russias artillery get starved from lack of artillery shells.
And the little russia fires is not very effective compared to Ukrainian artillery because russian gunners have little training, they lack high precision ammunition, they lack counter-battery radars, their guns are more inaccurate, have shorter range, takes a longer time to reload and more often malfunction and fail to explode.
So Ukraine therefore have the upper hand.
It also have more tanks.
And without tanks and artillery support will infantry not fight very well. Especially not if they lack willingness to fight, lacks training, and are badly equipped. Making attacks under such circumstances is suicidal. But I expect Putin to waste his next wave of mobilized in this stupid manner like he did with the mobiks lives he gathered in autumn last year and threw away in a poorly handled winter offensive with little gains to show for it. Or his idiotic offensive towards Bakhmut that costed 100.000 russian soldiers their lives.
This meatwave attacks without support from artillery and tanks reminds me of russias attacks in world war1, or the attacks in world war 2 that resemble that in the movie enemy at the gates.
So I guess that russia never changes...
Well this idiocy did not work out well in russias wars the last 170 years. And I doubt it will work out well in this war either. So far it have only led to gigantic humiliating defeats.
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"Не понимаю осуждающего тона, по поводу празднования военных побед"
There is nothing wrong in celebrating military victories.
"прошу заметить, что во время северной войны в Беларуси были разрушены все православные церкви и крепости, а в некоторых регионах были убиты 2/3 населения, поэтому вспоминать Полтаву принято с теплотой. А преступления шведов они не признали и не признают, и существование этого видоса бессмысленно"
Russian troops were committing massacres, plunders and rapes against civilians in both Finland and the Baltics - which then was a part of the Swedish empire. And that led to an unnecessarily nasty war.
The troops under Charles XII could behave well if they wanted to. When Swedish troops marched into Saxony they didn’t even steal apples from gardens of rich burgers. And this do I think says a lot about the discipline in the Swedish army, in a time when most armies had to rely on plundering the civilian population to feed their troops. There was no trucks or railroads back then to transport food and supplies for tens of thousands of men.
Russian troops showed no mercy on Swedish prisoners of war, and they could therefore not expect any mercy in return. Saxon troops could keep their lives after a battle, but the Russian troops were often killed with swords and bayonets to save bullets.
After Poltava did Russian troops commit massacre after massacre in Finland and on the north-eastern coast of Sweden. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Pillage_of_1719%E2%80%9321
Personally do I think that war should be conducted with out killing prisoners of war or torturing them as solidiers are just men sent out to fight on someone elses behalf, so there is no reason to feel any personal hatred towards them. And civilian casualties should be avoided if it can be avoided. And I also think it is cruel and barbaric to let solidiers spend many dozens of years away from home in a prisoner of war camp and waste their youthful years away from home. Only 25% of the Swedish troops captured at Poltava would come home to Sweden after the war was over... and the rest of them died or people don't know what happened to them.
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The army was under-sized for a country like Germany to begin with, and it was also always secretly planned that the army would expand one day - which it did. Germany had large amounts of men in paramilitary formations before the army began its expansion in 1935.
But the fast expansion was not easy, not even in peace time. The industry could not deliver all tanks the führer wanted so many of the new divisions lacked equipment. The theft of Czech weapons did help a little bit, but much problems remained.
And while the leadership and doctrine of the new army was excellent, so was there still much to wish for in other aspects. A large part of the German army's soldiers had no more than 2 months training when the war on Poland began.
This fast growth of an army would normally be unsustainable. Hitler wanted to grow his army and he was prepared to throw the German economy under the bus to do so. The costs were rising at unsustainable rates. All foreign currency reserves was being used up as Hitler used all dollars, pounds, krona, zlotys and what have you to pay for importing rare raw materials from other countries.... and when he would run out of money he would be unable to import anything.. not even oil to fuel tractors and machines, so of course was economists very worried.
And the industry wanted to increase exports to other countries, but Hitler said no to that, because he wanted all steel to be made for German tanks and battleships instead. So German trade balance was put on an unsustainable course.
Hitlers rapid expansion of the army created resource shortages everywhere, which caused prices to go up, so inflation became more and more of a problem. And meanwhile did Germany produce less things of economic value - so more money chased fewer goods - which is the definition of inflation.
But Hitler managed to conquer Europe before his country got high inflation and went bankrupt.
And he could steal oil supplies from other countries.
Hitler was also in an unique position when he got into power that allowed him to do his crazy military expansionism without pissing off the public opinion with his wasteful military spending.
When he took power in 1933, had Germany suffered hard from the hyperinflation in 1924 and the economic crash of the Great Depression 1930. So unemployment was high and people were starving and standard of living was low.
So there was large amounts of people that were unemployed and now could become soldiers or industrial workers for the industry. The German government did have it easy. If the German government would try to make the same huge expansion of its army today, then people would protest.
People would not want to leave their well paid jobs in the private sector to work for the military, and if you would want people to do so voluntarily, then you have to increase wages. And that means higher costs for the government and higher taxes - which would be unpopular.
The German population in 1933 did not have any jobs, so they were happy for every kind of job they could get, so they did instead become very happy when the army grew and needed manpower.
And the starving German people became happy that Hitler gave them a job with a wage that could allow them to feed themselves and their family, even if it wasn't the best well paid job in the world - People did not have high standards after all economic crashes.
But if Germany in year 2021 would try to expand its army and raise taxes, cut standards of living to allow an expansion of the army then it would make many persons very unhappy instead. And rationing would not be met with the same understanding by a people who is used to living a life in plenty.
So without the Great depression would Hitlers expansion of the army had been impossible. And without Hitlers conquests he would not have been able to expand his army so fast and keep it as large as he did.
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"The Wehrmacht was made up of some of the best equipped, trained fighthing men in the world."
The German army was not the best equiped. The British, American and French Armies had much more trucks, while the Heer had to use horses. And many weapons experts would say that the Americans had the best rifle of the war while the German 98k had multiple flaws. And overall did the French have better tanks than Germany in 1940, which had tanks with weak armour, sluggish underpowered engines, and tiny guns.
So no, the person who says that the German Army was better equiped just doesn't know what he is talking about.
And not was the German army the best trained army in the world when the war began either.
The overwhelming majority of the German troops only had undergone a pair of months military training when the war begun. So the German army was hardly consisting of any supersolidiers with superweapons.
It was rather the contrary.
It was an army which relied on horses and conscripts and weapons from the 1930s. That might dissapoint some wehraboos, but personaly that only makes me more impressed by the German achievements since it shows the superiority of the German doctrine and tactics - of auftragstaktik, of close co-operation and coordination with the air force, of the kampfgruppe tactics, of the deep defence tactics, of the idea of the kesselschlacht... plus all the superb education videos that can be found on youtube on various topics from sniping, to how to make counterattacks, or how infantry can knock out tanks.
The German army was the best in world war1, and it improved throughout that war and past on much of its knowledge to the Wehrmacht.
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German "education" is mostly only about world war II and the holocaust. Two important topics, but German history is much more than only that.
You got the germanic tribes fighting against Rome, you got Charlemagne, an the Baltic crusades, and the Hanseatic league, the reformation, the 30 years war, the silesian wars, Frederick the great, the industrial revolution in Germany and the scientific exploration, the cultural greatness of Germany and its many musicians and castles, and then of course Bismarck and the creation of Germany + its colonial empire...
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"Sweden tried several times to take Norway by military force every time it went wrong"
In 1716 and 1718. Aside from that was only half-assed attempts made. The struggle with Denmark over Skåne (Scania) was a much more important front. Norway was not as important. Not strategically, not economically, and it did not have a large manpower pool either. To this day its still the Nordic country with the smallest population.
In the early 1700s its main incomes came from timber and fish, so it was not that economically important. Trondheim had 2000 inhabitants - which doesn't make this town much larger than an average sized village today.
Norways importance rather came from being a diplomatic pond in a game with Denmark. If Norway was taken, then would Denmark be forced to be making peace with Sweden on generous terms. And territorial gains was just a bonus. And it would of course be nice if Norway did not threaten Göteborg - Swedens window towards the west. A harbor which could not be blocked by the Danes or the sound toll.
Otherwise did the Norwegian military not pose a great threat to Sweden. At least not its army.
Its captain Tordenskiold however, does however deserve respect for his bold raids that did cause much problems for Swedish shipping. A true naval hero. But even his large contributions to the war effort was not enough to change the larger strategic situation, except for one occasion - when his victory at Dynekilen ended all hopes of a Swedish conquest of Norway in 1716 when all supply ships were sunk so the Swedish army was forced to go back home to Sweden again.
"Sweden never managed to occupy Norway."
It had a union with Norway. And the 1718 was about to succed bringing down Norway to its knees. Fredrikstens fortress was only 1 week away from surrendering. And when that happened, then the road to Kristiania laid open, and the door to western Norway laid open for the numerically and qualitative superior Swedish army.
Also in the north had tides changed. Trondheims was under siege and running out of supplies, while the Swedish army began to get supplies as the weather finally had changed and turning the tides on the northern front.
If you would give me a time machine, and let me gamble over 1000 Euros, then I would say that Norway's defences would likely fail both in the north and south if the Swedish King had not died and the invasion of Norway had been aborted.
"During attacks on Norway, Sweden was drained of soldiers and resources."
The 1716 invasion did not cause any losses at all. And the 1718 invasion was not important either from a Swedish perspective. The Swedes nearly captured Trondheim in the autumn, but rain and floods prevented the Swedish army from crossing a river and going into the city. The Norwegian army was in a pathetic shape. They lost two fortresses along the way from Jemtland to Trondheim. The Norwegian troops fled and gave up almost without a fight, and the Swedish victory came at the price of only 1 man dead. While Norwegian losses was far higher.
Norway was as always a relativly peaceful country, while the Swedish army consisted of battle hardned veterans from fighting all over Europe the last 20 years. So unsurprisingly was the Swedish army better, and the Norwegians gave their enemy much respect for that reason. Perhaps even too much respect and caution, since they did not even put up a fight when they had excellent defensive positions.
Not much fighting happened in the north. But half of the Swedish army had to return home because the men became undernourished and sick. And when the war was over did the troops try to return home, but got caught in a snow storm that killed 3000 men. More men died from snow and cold than from all fighting with Norwegian troops. A perhaps a tragic fate for Jemtland which lost all its young male population. But it was not a big deal for the country as a whole.
The battle of Lund in 1676 killed almost twice as much Swedish troops as a comparison. Sweden lost nearly 50.000 men and women, soldiers and civilians at Poltava and Perevolotjna. So the losses against Norway was tiny by comparison.
"Charles XII of Sweden died in Norway"
Pure luck or misfortune depending on how you look at it.
It could just as well have happened earlier or later.
He was a man who was leading his men in the frontline. He was shot in the foot in Ukraine. And before that he was also under fire multiple times. He spent his 18th birthday on board a ship that sailed away to invade Denmark. And as soon as he landed on the Danish beach at Humlebæk he came under enemy fire.
He asked a major general what the whistling sounds around him was, and got the reply that it was enemy soldiers firing.
And Charles responded: "Good, this will hencefourth become my music". And just as he had said that, then a bullet flied past just next to his shoulder and hit one Lieutenant who died instantly.
Now Charles happened to die in Norway. Probably because of random Norwegian artillery shot that was fired in the dark and the Norwegian troops probably had no idea that they had managed to kill the Swedish King.
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@serhio250381 "После разгрома от России Швеция стала одной из самых бедных стран Европы"
Sweden was a poor country even before Russia invaded Sweden in 1700. The country had been in almost constant war since the start of the 1600s, and the many war taxes and calls for manpower had brought the economy to its knees when farmers lacked money to do investments as all money was going to pay for all the wars.
And then in the late 1600s a famine broke out and killed a third of Finland’s population and a 5th of Sweden’s, and this famine could be blamed on the bad shape the agriculture was after all the wars.
The bad climate, the long distances and the small population also gave Sweden the same economic problems as Russia had before the age of the railroads. Both Russia and Sweden mostly relied on selling iron in the 1700s, and together did Sweden and Russia control more than 90% of the European iron market.
It was a profitable export, until Britain started to mass produce cheap iron during the industrial revolution and crushing all foreign competitors. This was very bad news for Sweden which became poorer because of this.
"А свое нынешнее благоденствие Швейция получили в начале 20 века"
Sweden and Switzerland are not the same place.
"А взлет Швеции основан на не участии в 2х мировых войнах и торговлей и торговлей со всеми сторонами конфликта."
Sweden became rich in the 1870s when the country started to build railroads so it could start to transport timber from the inland to the coasts and then export it to other countries. The newly invented steam engine also made it possible to cut timber during the winter - something which previously not been possible as water power did not work when water was frozen into ice.
The newly invented Martin process had also made it possible to use iron ore rich in phosphorus content - and that meant that the large iron mine in Kiruna could be started.
And the large increase exports in iron, and especially in timber started the industrial revolution. Sweden was the fastest growing economy in the world (measured in GDP-per-work hour) in the years 1890-1914. And the country also produced many great innovators like Alfred Nobel - which would also help Russia to develop its petroleum industry.
"А взлет Швеции основан на не участии в 2х мировых войнах и торговлей и торговлей со всеми сторонами конфликта."
As I said earlier. The country got rich before the war. And Sweden did not make much money from exporting iron to nazi Germany since the nazis did not pay very well, and the nazis also lacked goods to trade away for Swedish iron.
Things were very different in World war 1 compared to world war 2. When World War 1 started was Sweden in a massive debt to Germany. For 60 years had Sweden bought more stuff than it sold to Germany, and Sweden had run up a huge trade deficit more than the entire GDP of the country.
So what the German Kaiser did was to collect all debts German businesses had and ask the Swedes to give them iron in return for paying off the debts. Germany's demand for iron was huge and Sweden’s industry more than doubled in size during the war to keep up with the German demand for Swedish exports. So in just 4 years could Sweden get rid of all its debts to Germany and also earn a small sum of money on top of that.
But when the war was over did the Swedish economy go into depression when Germany no longer wanted iron and when stupid monetary policy gave the country deflation.
In world war 2 were things different. Germany was poor after the Versaille peace. And Sweden had no debts that was needed to be repaid.
"Т.е. не разоренная и разрушенная страна и развитая промышленность, которая одной из первых освоила глобализацию."
Sweden had been through hard times in the 1920 and 1930s and inefficient companies had been destroyed in the process of structural rationalization - so the country was strong and fit for fight when the 1940s started.
The country had systematically built up new industries. First it started with forestry, and then it began making paper from the trees. And then a chemical industry was created to make all chemicals needed to make paper. And when World war 2 happened was it impossible for Sweden to import medicines, so the chemical industry also had to start making medicines.
Sweden had also began making mass produced steel from its iron during the late 1800s. And for making steel it became more practical to use electricity, so the government began building hydroelectric power plants.
Sweden also began making mechanical tools and machines with its steel. And when world war 2 came was Sweden forced to start building its own tanks and planes, because countries were no longer willing to sell them to Sweden and Italy even took the military aircrafts it had promised to sell to Sweden before the war.
So when the war ended did Sweden have knowledge how to build tanks, planes, submarines, guns, and weapons of all kinds. And it built cars like volvo and trucks like Scania.
And the country even became leading in nuclear power in the world during the 1960s.
And then Sweden’s knowledge in electricity and mechanical devices also led Sweden into making telephones, and later on also mobile phones.
As you see Sweden could do more than just sell iron. And the Swedish economy was also rolling before world war 2. And the country was also ranked among one of the richest in the late 1960s. And the country also had the 4th large air force in the world during the cold war. Not bad for a small country with less than 10 million people.
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I believe USA over-estimated Soviet russia enormously throughout the Cold War. In 1947 did USA have 400 nuclear bombs and russia had none so it could basically have nuked all of russia and won the cold war with no losses of their own. And the mighty russian army that had won WW2, had done so with american ammunition and radios.
And by 1945 did half of russias GDP lay in ruins. More than half of all men born in some age groups of the 1920s had died in the battlefield against Hitler. Russia was much weaker and did not have much military muscles left. The country was too exhausted to win WW2 on its own, and was helped to get pushed through the finish line with American oil, lend lease, food, trucks and direct military assistence by the allies that tie up German troops in France and Italy.
Russias "victories" in the space race also needs some nuance as DeadKennedyInSpace shows in his video. Throughout this space race was USA always the country that made more long lasting victories in the space race and from the 1970s onwards it came to totally dominate it. While russian space exploration was mostly done with many failures, meager results, and many lies about their actual gains in the space race.
The economic performance between the east and west are also enormous. Russia never had a post-war economic miracle like other severly destroyed countries such as Italy, Germany and Italy.
Russias military equipment also performed poorly in Israels wars, and indeed in most wars fought did the russian backed side suffer much heavier losses than their opponent. And even in the failure that is Vietnam did the American probably achieve a positive kill ratio... despite Vietnam was fighting on their home turf, knew the terrain, could lay mines and booby traps, and choose where and when to fight and only fight ambushes and always getting the first shot on their enemy.
American military doctrines sucked. And it still do.
But American military equipment was good, and the motivation of the soldiers were pretty good.
I think the idea of stirring oneself blind on kill ratios and body counts made Americans lose focus on what is war is all about. And the only way they knew how to get their hands on the Vietcong was to have their infantry walk into enemy ambushes and then hope that superior american fire power from artillery and fighter jets would blow up all enemies so America could get its desired body count.
It was a criminal to throw teenage boys to walk into ambushes like that in my opinion. Its of course much of a lesser crime than throwing men in human wave attacks without artillery and tank support like the russians in Ukraine. But still...
However in more conventional wars have USA proven unbeatable. Saddams army in 1991 was considered a powerful military force with much men with combat experience and much tanks and an air force and air defence with stuff from both eastern and western countries. And in many ways one could argue that it was a military more technologically equal to USA in 1991, than what russia is compared to USA today. I mean a T-72 tanks that Iraq used in 1991 was less outdated back then, than it is today 32 years later.
However despite being a powerful enemy on paper, did Saddams military get wiped out pretty fast and with extremely few American losses.
And regardless what one thinks of USAs criminal war against Iraq in 2003, is there no doubt that the victory against Saddams big army was pretty easy and happened fast and with few losses. And this was in a country where USA had to fight an enemy on the other side of the planet.
Compare that to russia today which have massive logistical problems with even fighting a neighbouring country. As soon as the invasion goes far away from a railway line does everything falls apart. The russian military is so pathethic that it cannot penetrate deeper than 100km into enemy lands before it have massivly over-extended itself and ran out of fuel - like they did north of Kyiv in 2022.
The american military have many flaws - like its doctrine and lack of auftragstaktik.
But it is the worlds undisputed no.1 in logistics. Its technological dominance is unquestioned. And other armies around the world quickly copies everything USA comes up with... like insecure teenagers buys the same clothes as the cool guy in school the day after they see him wear something new.
Both civilian and military hospitals have copied the methodology of treating a sick or wounded person from the US military.
And the idea of using white t-shirts in vietnam was abandoned in Vietnam because they made a soldier easy to spot for the enemy, so therefore did the US military begin to use green clothes instead. And other armies quickly followed the american example.
For much of the Cold war did USA have the technological dominance. It had the F4 Phantom that on paper outperformed anything Europe and russia had. It had the nukes before anyone else. It was an early user of attack helicopters, it began using precision bombing already in the Vietnam war against the Dragon jaw bridge to keep its own losses of planes low, it built stealth bombers, GPS and internet and much else.
And the russian military today is primitive by comparison. Some said it is of the same technological level as the American military was when it fought the Vietnam war. I think that is a fair comparison. Its a military that still lacks body armor, nightvision, and use steel helmets instead of kevlar. Its medical aid is much worse than the americans in Vietnam, despite enormous gains in knowdledge in medical care has been done the last 20-30 years.
And russia does not have any tank equal to M1 Abrams. And even if we ignore F-22 and F35... would the US airforce still probably easily win over russias best fighter - the SU35. Mostly because it have better pilots, but F15 - and especially the later variants are still among the best planes in the world and will outperform SU35 in much.
Add to that how much russias SAMs have underperformed in this war. One would expect that they at least could keep Engels air force base, their flagship Moskva and their meetings with the 30 highest officers of the russian black sea fleet safe - but nope.
Russian air defence can still not shot down american tech from the early 1990s like the HIMARS rockets. And the best of the best russian missiles - the kinzhal missile is being shot down by the old patriot air defence.
And russian artillery in general have proven to be inferior in everything.. precision, range, reload time, and takes more time to move and make ready. And despite russian enormous superiority in numbers have they not been able to win this war yet after 2 years.
Much is of course thanks to the superiority of western artillery and superior ammunition, one Excalibur round can do the same job as 80 normal rounds in modern warfare. And russia does not have anything equal to that.
If one wanna be generous one can say that they have a bad copy of the old copperhead rounds which USA have begun to replace with modern better precision ammunition such as excalibur and BONUS.
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Russia deploys small groups of men because they did know that Ukraine had a severe artillery ammunition shortage so they would not shot on russian soldiers unless there was a high chance of inflicting heavy losses. But by deploying few men that are spread out would Ukraine face a dilemma of using up their ammunition to stop russian assaults for very small gains. And that would leave Ukraine without ammunition and become very vulnerable in the future.
Ukraine also made attacks against the russian military with small groups of men to avoid getting easily seen by enemy drones and getting crushed by massive enemy artillery.
Its hard to tell what the solution would be. Outflanking the enemy defensive lines is one possibility - like the Germans did in France 1940.
Another solution would perhaps be superiority in firepower and using brute force to punch through enemy lines. Sure did this solution not work well back in the battle of Somme in 1916. But on the other hand was there no way that troops in the frontline back then could communicate with artillery and coordinate artillery fire with radio ask for reinforcements and request changes to orders. Today do we got artillery with much better range and precision. Counter-battery radars can slaughter enemy artillery, and drones can drop grenades vertically into enemy trenches and fly into underground tunnels where artillery cannot reach.
Drone technology is also just in its own infancy. Future generations will perhaps laugh at those primitive drones used in Ukraine like we do at the primitive WW1 aircrafts. With purpose built drone weapons instead of using surplus Soviet hand grenades and RPG-7 warheads and american cluster bombs, or artillery grenades... could the drones launch much deadlier explosives and also reduce weight.
Artillery shells have a thick metal wall that allows it to survive the brutal forces of being kicked out from an artillery tube many hundreds of meters per second. But if you are just going to fly a drone and drop a grenade from the air or slowly fly into a target with a drone you no longer need a thick metallic casing for your explosive. You can save that weight, and use that weight for carrying extra much explosives instead - like airplanes do with flying bombs. And that is the reason why flying bombs are so much more powerful than artillery fire.
I also expect AI and better sensors to revolutionize drone warfare even further and make it more deadly.
And then might drones replace helicopters to some extent. And instead of having an air cavalry division with hundreds of helicopters carrying supplies, could troops get their supplies delievered to them by drones that comes with packages of food, medicine, ammo, and fuel. And those supplies will be less vulnerable to enemy fire than a helicopter. A cheap drone could easily be replaced, while a helicopter can't. America with its economic and industrial force could afford to lose thousands of drones, while its not so willing to lose manpower.
Drones will probably also be used at rescue operations at sea with its powerful sensors that could easily detect a human body more easily than a human eye ever would.. heat seaking, optical sensors and other types of sensors could be built much more superior to the human eye. This could also be a powerful tool to help people in other emergencies like finding a human body out in the snow.
Sea drones is another chapter in itself, and they will revolutionize warfare at sea just as much as the invention of the torpedo and cruise missile have.
Drones will lay mines or work with mine clearance. They can fly behind enemy troop concentrations that are retreating, and block their retreat by dropping land mines. And then will the enemy be trapped and fall victim to enemy artillery or be forced to surrender.
Indeed the uses of drones are enormous.
Maybe drones could also be used to carry daisy cutter bombs to make landing zones for helicopters in the middle of forests. And perhaps they could carry mine clearing snakes to create passages through enemy lines.
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@trollingizlife2298 The Swedish empire did cut off russias access to the Baltic sea for only something like 100 years (1617-1721) so I do not think this is much relevant. Sweden was however poor like russia, but it was always a relativly free country while russia was the opposite. Both countries had the same problems with cold winters and low population density that prevented industrialization, like what happened in Britain and the Netherlands and their textile industries for example. And both russia and Sweden had raw materials as their main exports and togheter they controlled more than 90% of the iron market in Europe by the 1700s.
However as I said, Sweden was always a country where the people were free. Vikings were equals. Even the women had a pretty high status compared to other cultures back then. Sweden was a country filled with rivers and forests that made it hard for elite troops like mercenaries or medieval knights to control it. Yes, those troops could easily destroy a peasant army in the open. But in the forests they could suffer terrible losses in ambushes and they could never control the supply lines of food in a big country filled with dark forests. And those elite troops were expensive, and that exhausted the resources of a medieval state that could not afford to fight a long war. Denmark which was a super power back during the middle ages tried to conquer Sweden with German mercenaries failed to do so.
So the peasants were strong force, and also the first Swedish King Gustav had great problems with beating down protests from angry farmers in a civil war caused by a rebel leader called Nils Dacke. The civil war nearly brought Gustavs reign to an end. And the lesson he learned was that it would be best to try to keep the farmers on his side in the future to never again having to fight such a war. And he also realized the enormous military potential in those angry farmers that had beaten many of the German troops he had bought.
So with all this did government start listening to the Swedish people, in a way more democratic than any other part of Europe at that time.
Sweden was a poor country, so even the richest people were not any rich. Swedish noblemen did not want foreigners to visit Sweden because they were embaressed because how poor they were. So Sweden had much economic equality. And the nobility was weak and could not opress the people that much. They surely wanted to. But unlike nobles in Russia, Poland, Denmark, Austria, France and the Ottoman empire were they not that succesful. Partly because they did not have much economic power to build their own powerbase and buy their own troops.
But also because they realized that it was more economically profitable for them to cooperate with the King and the government, than it was to competing against it. In Poland was the situation very different. Their nobles were strong, and they could therefore succesfully prevent the Polish state from growing stronger at their own expense.
But for russia was the development very different. Russian serfs were treated worse than slaves. And russian nobles were free to do almost whatever they liked to their peasants. And peasants forced to serve in the russian army, saw it as a death sentence as soldiers were expected to serve in it for their lifetime. So either they did win a war, or died in the army while trying to do so.
This did of course create a strong sense of friendship among the poor souls that had to serve in Peter the Greats army - and perhaps also because of that was it also the only army in the world that had enough fighting spirit to take on the Swedish army without easily getting knocked out.
Sweden stood for freedom, while Russia was based on coercion.
Some attempts of reform was done in the late 1800s, the nobility in russia fought long and hard to preserve all their priviligies to opress their peasants. And the conservative backward monarchs were slow to catch up with the western powers. But progress were still made. And perhaps could russia had become a rich modern country if it had not participated in military adventures like World war 1. Russia dominated much of Europe, and countries like for example Finland saw an economic self-interest in keeping its ties with russia so it could continue to sell its paper and gain food stuff in return. And russia was a country with a larger population than USA. And it had large resources so the future laid ahead of it.
But Communism meant more opression, and the wars destroyed russian demographics. The old opressive nobility, was just replaced by a new communist nobility that opressed the majority population just like in the old russian tradition of the past.
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Swedens past is unknown. Much of the documented history of the middle ages was probably lost forver when the Royal castle three crowns burned down in 1697.
It is believed that Eric the Victorious was Swedens first King when he took the throne in 970AD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_the_Victorious
Later on would he be follwed by a bunch over other Kings and Finland was settled around 1000-1100 AD. It was a weak state with much nobles that held most of the power. Civil wars happened because some nobles lusted for more power.
And the country fell under Danish rule with the Kalmar Union.
Denmark was richer and more densly populated than Sweden and modern ideas from Europe had a closer reach to Denmark than to backwards Sweden, so it became natural for the Danish-Swedish-Norwegian King to have his seat in Denmark and not in Sweden.
That made the Swedish nobles feel like the Danish Kings took no interest in Sweden and that they constantly favored Denmark at Swedens expense. And when the Danish King tried to centralize the rule of the Kingdom and take away Swedens independence it did cause much anger within the Swedish nobility. And when Danish noblemen did know the Danish King better and had his trust, then they were much more likely to get the top jobs of ruling over Swedish provinces.
And that angered the Swedish nobility so much that war with Denmark was started. But then Christian II of Denmark settled peace with Sweden. He came to Sweden to Stockholm to celebrate that he had become King, and all former enemies was invited and forgiven he said. So they had a meal inside a castle. And almost the entire Swedish nobility was there.
But then suddenly the doors were locked and guards arrested all the nobles. And the entire nobility was led outdoors and had their heads cut off one by one...
This event is known as "Stockholm's bloodbath" because so many people died that day that the streets were covered in blood from hundreds of people that the Danish had killed.
One Swedish nobleman never trusted the Danish King so never came to his party. That was Gustav Eriksson Vasa.
His father was one of those noblemen that Christian had killed.
Gustav realized that also his life was in danger so he tried to flee up into northern Sweden where the Danes would have it difficult to find him. And he managed to get some Swedish miners on his side in an uprising against the Danes. And more people joined the uprising when they heard the news of what the Danish King had done. And soon it became impossible for the Danes to keep control over the country. Only a few castles could still be defended, while the countryside was impossible to control. Gustav Vasa now became the first King of the modern day Sweden.
He only had one problem. And that was that he could not conquer the key cities of Sweden because he lacked artillery and mercenary troops. So he talked with the German Hanseatic league, who happily helped him making their enemy the Danish King weaker.
Gustav Vasa could now finally get all of Sweden under his control. The war was won.
But the economy was bad. He now had huge debts to the Hansa. And if he could not pay them, then his Kingdoms days would soon be numbered.
So what did the Swedish King do?
- He plundered the churches. Gustav was a greedy person who lacked morals and he had no religious conviction.
He made his country protestant only so he could get control over the church and being able to steal all silver, church bells and other valuable stuff the church had. And now he could pay off his debts to the Hansa.
The problem was now solved.
He was a totalitarian dictator who ruled the country with an ironfist. And taking control over the church was all about increasing his own power. He now had control over the news that was spread in churches and used it for his own propaganda.
For the first time did Sweden now get a system where the King did inherit his throne from his father after he died.
His oldest son Eric the 14th became the 2nd King of Sweden when Gustav died. And after him did John III take over after his brother had become mentally insane, John was also a son of Gustav. And Gustav also had another young son, Charles which I soon will mention...
John's son Sigismund was supposed to take over the country after the John III. But his uncle Charles did not accept that. He felt like it was his turn to become King, so over the span of a few years he made a smear campaign of Sigismund and said all kinds of bad things about him...
And then finally a day he started an uprising with a few nobles on his side to remove Sigismund as the King of Sweden.
The uprising was succesful and Charles became the new King of Sweden, and now became known as Charles the 9th (or Charles IX, aka "Duke Charles").
To lock out Sigismund and any other of his sons or polish noblemen from the Swedish throne, did Charles make a law that only a protestant could become King of Sweden. And being a Catholic was now a crime in Sweden that could give you the death penelty.
So as you see, Swedens hard stance on religious issues had very little to do with religion. And very much to do with the Swedish Kings power struggles and need to secure their own power and stealing money.
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Stalingrad was the last nail in the coffin for the Axis hope to win the war.
Midway, Guadacanal, El-Alamein, USAs entry into the war, the Allied victories at sea in the western theather, the bombing of German cities... and then came Stalingrad.
All that was won in 1942 had been lost. Germany had lost her best Army. The reputation of the invincible German military was from now on shattered. The Axis had lost momentum, and now the allies rolled forward in Asia, in Africa, over the skies, and on the Eastern front where the south was about to fall apart.
Everyone, including Hitler, now realized that the war on the eastern front was impossible to win rapidly.
And things didn't look good. The Axis was fighting against the largest country on earth (UK), and the country with the largest Army in the world (USSR) and at the same time they were also fighting against the largest economy on the planet (USA).
And on top of that had the Axis now had loss after loss.
The invincible Afrika Korps had been rolled back. The japanease had been stopped and lost unreplaceable amounts of skilled pilots, and the Navy had lost so many ships that Japan would never again have an upper hand in the pacific. And Germany had compensated lack of military and economic strenght, with having superior tactics and better troops. But much of that advantage had been lost when the 6th Army was destroyed. And the Russian airforce simply copied the German tactics and used it against them, and bit by bit did the Russians get better and better, while Germany lost more and more of their battlehardened troops.
It was no coincidence that Hitlers friends were starting to lose hope about the war after Stalingrad. His Axis partners started negotiations with the Allies to disengage from the war. And Spain started to take home their troops from the eastern front in 1943.
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The western allies had 50% larger forces and 4 times larger industrial production and they were generally more technologically advanced. The superior allied Air force would probably have bombed the Russian railroad network into ruins - and the only way to fix this problem for the Russians would have been to import locomotives from America.
And without supplies and reinforcements the Russian forces would have been an easy prey for allied troops.
America also had nearly 900 atomic bombs in stockpile in 1949, and their bombers could reach basicly every city in the Soviet empire and turn into ruins.
During the late war was the Soviets very much relying upon American imports. Of trucks, of tanks, of planes, of locomotives, on uniforms, machinery, explosives, food rations and so on. And without this help the Soviets would have been forced into a dilemma - should they decrase the army to increase the production of the economy? or should they increase the army with the economic output falling as a consequence?
America was the richest country on the planet and never had such a problem during the war. It put 16 million men in uniform, and expanded both the industrial and agricultural production during the war. And its war economy wasn't even running at 100% of its full potential. Already in late 1943 decisions were made to cut back war production.
Meanwhile Russia was fighting for her life in a life and death struggle, and she never had the privilegie to have an ocean protecting her land - so 13.000 villages and hundreds of towns fell into German hands and much of the industry got destroyed during the war and millions were killed.
Russia would never have a postwar economic boom like Italy, Germany, UK and USA because her industrial base was weaker than before the war - unlike the other countries mentioned.
Russia would probably also soon run out of explosives in a war with the west. Not because she didn't make any of it herself during the war. But most of it was done with US made machinery made by US blueprints, and the chemicals in the production process was imported from America. And in addition so was much explosives imported from America direcly.
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"One could argue that, if Germany had developed a fully functioning wartime economy they would have a lot more to work with in the field in '41 and '42."
Germany was not a peacetime economy in 1939-42, it was in the greyzone between a wartime economy and a peacetime economy in that period. And it was only in late 1940 that Hitler choose not to use the full industrial capacity of the military industry when he decided to cut back on ammunitions production after the fall of France.
So a total war in 1941 would just have a marginal effect because Germany didn't have the extra factories to produce the extra tanks that you dream about. It was only in the late war years Germany was able to catch up with the Americans in massproduction thanks to the new larger factories and a higly trained labourforce that gained skill throughout the war.
So would the path of history have changed with a German wartime economy in 1939? No. My impression by reading "The Economics of World War. II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison" is that Germany couldn't get their war economy started for real until 1942-43. Maybe Germany could have waited to attack USSR 2 years, but then things would be very different on the other hand...USSR would recover a bit from the purges and the army would probably be better equiped, while Japan probably would have stayed out of a the war against America.
"With regards to Hitler as a military commander I am baffled why you would defend him."
I would flip the question, and saying why should we blindly believe in self-serving biographies of military commanders? (Especially when they are blaming a dead person who can't defend himself).
It was true that Germany had geniuses such as Manstein, Kesselring, Halder and Guderian. But not all German generals were that great, and Hitler didn't always make bad decisions. It was he who gave Guderian and Manstein a chance to make a career, while the old school retards in the Army did not want anything of it. It was Hitler who saved the Ostheer in 1941, and it was he who made the decision to go for the oil.
He wasn't perfect, but neighter was his Generals. Manstein never admitted that he never understood the economic importance of Ukrain, and Rommel constantly exhausted his supplies and wasted his forces and then demanded reinforcements, while Germany was needing every man they could spare on other more important fronts.
Wehrmacht wasn't all super competent through and through, as Von Paulus is a good example of, and neighter was the Waffen-SS only led by complete idiots, as Paul Hausser is recognized by many as a very talented leader.
Things aren't black and white, competence and incompetence. And Germanys resources was very limited, and her allies industry were weak.
"With regards to Dunkirk...Hitler could have easily overturned the decision of one of his generals."
So now of a sudden you blame him for not micromanage things after you said (to pharaphrase) that his micromanagement costed Germany the victory?
It was Hitler military who convinced him to support the decision that Küchler made, and the battlereports over the losses confirmed his decision. People who blame Hitler makes it very easy for themselves.
This thing of blaming Hitler for the loss in WW2 and the popular opinion and politicians for the loss in Vietnam is just history repeating itself with stab-in-the-back myths.
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I for my thing don't want to be a part of a union where France and Germany got 100% of all power, and dictating everything to my country how we should rule it.
I don't wanna share my natural resources. I am not willing to permanently destroy the drinking water and nature of Jämtland only because European industry wants cheap uranium for their nuclear industry for a few years.
And having the convergence pact is objectivly stupid, and all countries aren't winners like you say, but rather the opposite because a country cannot stimulate the economy during an economic downturn. Instead its getting caught in a deflationary deathtrap with falling demand for goods, which makes factories laying people off which causes even more falling demand...and the destructionary circle keeps rolling on and destroying the economy.
EU also prevents rational planning of healthcare, since citizens in country A can go to country B for healthcare. So a scumbag country which refuses to pay high taxes can get healthcare for their citizens just by sending them to another country.
I am not saying this is a thing yet in EU, but that is how courts have ruled.
Which is both morally wrong, and fucks up the healthcare systems since they aren't designed to deal with populations larger than their own country.
And I for my thing wants protectionism, because thats what have been working historically. And EU prevents thats. Just like the four freedoms and the rules of the common market forbids a member country from nationalizing the railroads, even if most people in a country wants it - simply because that would be socialism instead of a market economy.
And this neoliberal bias makes all leftwing economic policies impossible to implement. And since I am a leftwinger, I see this as a reason why the EU must die. Swedens railroads are a national embarrassment, even Indian tourists wonder what fucking country this is when there is leaking toilet water on the floor of every passanger wagon, and why most trains gets deleyd. Often times with hours.
And local authorities are also restricted in this failed EU project. A school in Sweden wanted extra high standards of the welfare of the pigs that became meat after wishes from students and parents. But EU rules prevented this from happening, because demanding such standards would be "unfair competition". Because price is the only thing that should be measured according to EU. And animal welfare can fuck off.
And likewise can't you tag your meat you sell in a grocery store with a sign that tells the consumers that the animals hasn't been tortured in a factory farm (like most animals are nowadays). Why? Because that would be "unfair competition". So having a free market where consumers can make the best choices with all information available is anti-free market according to EU - which seems to defend mighty economic interest rather than the interests of small producers, consumers and the welfare of animals.
- And to that I say, fuck you EU with a trillion demon dicks from hell.
And as I said earlier, some protectionism can be good the economy. Historically has the world economy grown faster in periods of protectionism and regulations than during periods of free trade.
And not only that, individual countries need it from time to time to develop their industries.
Southern Europe has suffered hard when cheap industrial goods from Northern Europe have stolen jobs and economic growth from them. And without their own currency to inflating their national debts down and to push wages downwards, their economies have gone into hard economic troubles thanks to the open inflows of goods.
And if Southern Europe goes down, then Northern Europe will suffer as well.
So free trade isn't the answer. We have to look for other ways. EU has just created hate between north and south with their stupid policies, and those tensions you talked about, well they are stronger now than ever. When they didn't exist 20 years ago.
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Wars are basicly the same as in the past. An encircled army is doomed unless it breaks out, and this is as true today as thousand of years ago, because an army still needs food and supplies to survive regardless of how many super-tanks it got. And the principle of concentration of force and "getrennt marschieren vereint schlagen" is as true today as in the past. And attacks on the flanks is as big of a threat today as in the past.
And deception may have taken new forms today with stealth aircrafts and dummy tanks, but it still plays just the same important role as in the past, since it can confuse an enemy to misalocate its forces and abondon their strong defences and getting lured into ambushes and getting entire armies destroyed.
On a general level one can say that all the good commanders in history have applied the same recipies behind their successes. They have first of all commited themselves to achieving a clearcut goal - instead of acting confused in trying to achieve a multiple number of changing goals.
Most of them have been skilled in the art of the element of surprise, and constantly taken the advantage over their confused enemies, and acting with such speed and aggressivness that the enemy does not have any time to make any well organized counter-measures.
They have been good at playing the game of taking calculated risks. And they have been good at concentrating their own forces so they can fight the enemy with a superior force.
They have been masters of co-ordinating armies so they close enough to support each other if the enemy starts an attack, but still they move independently enough to not clog up the roads with long supply trains so troop movements gets slowed down. And when a good oppurtunity of fighting the enemy appears, then multiple armies can attack him simultanuously and inflict huge losses on the enemy - something that was as true in Cannae 216 BC as in Königgrätz in 1866 two-thousand years later.
I don't consider military history a waste of time, because I think there are lot to learn from the past. And even if some things do change over time, I still think there are lots of things that can be learned from recent wars. Tomorrows wars will not be much different from the wars of today, and the wars of today will have much in common with wars recently fought yesterday.
Studying Vietnam, the Balkan wars, Chechenya, Iraq, Afghanistan can tell us a lot about the effectiveness of different modern weaponsystems - from tanks, to planes, and helicopters.
Just as the armies in World war 1 that learned from the history lessons of the past wars (Manchuria, the Boer war, the American civil war etc) did better than those armies who didn't. The Brits and Germans understood the importance of digging trenches and using uniforms with colours that blended in with the enviroment - while the French didn't, and they therefore suffered enormous losses thanks to their colourful red-blue uniforms and their lack of training to use a spade, and their proportionaly low amount of engineer troops compared to the German army.
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SJW is a new term, but its a great term I wish I had in the 1990s, because it stands for a cluster of things, its a mixture of things like identity politics, a "special snowflake mentality" combined with constant silly virtue signaling, and political tribalism and group identity is more important than focusing on political issues in themselves.
So do I think this is all just a red menace tactic? No. For me a compromise is impossible. The left can have the absolutly best political manifest ever written, but when this poison is added to to this wonderful cake I no longer want it.
I believe in meritocracy, and not in "diversity". I believe in equality, and not in female privileges, I believe freedom of speech and not in hate speech laws and forbidding fake news, I believe in restriced immigration and not open borders, I believe in secularism and equality under the law, I feel no white guilt, and I don't think people are bigotted for not feeling attracted to transwomen or other races..... yes the list is endless.
You can think that I am a rightwing scum for not siding with the SJW.
Thats okay, However, I am going my own ways. I think there are more important issues for helping men and women gaining equality than manspreading. And my definition of "equality" is obviously also radically different from SJW.
Furthermore isn't my focus simply one sided on race and gender and all that, but I would also like to fight on other fronts - such as economic and the role of the state.
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The problem is that no energy source got a better EROEI than oil. All energy transitions in the past have been from low-quality energy sources to a more powerful energy source... but now ALL the alternatives are crappy compared to fossile fuels. They are more expensive, they can't produce the energy on the scale needed to replace fossile fuels, they cost much energy to produce but produce little energy to gain, the energy can't be stored and is too inflexible to work when theres is no wind for turbines, no sun for the panels or too hot water for a nuclear plant to boil. And all liquid fuels alternatives are crappy compared to fossile fuels, they are more expensive, they can't be produced on a suffiecent scale unless you are prepared to use the land mass of America to feed the airplanes biofuel, the alternatives also got too low energy density, which means you will need larger fueltanks that will add more weight to the airplanes, you will also need a fuel that could deal with extreme heat and cold related to flying, and changes in pressure.
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Germany UK and France are the first rate powers in Europe. Italy should also belong to this club, but currently the country is like a boxer punching below his weight, and play only a small role despite its size.
The second rate powers I list according to importance first: Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and finally Poland. Poland is country with a GDP slightly smaller than Sweden and Switzerland, but its population is much larger than those countries and they seem to get much more influence over EU decisions than Sweden does.
Ireland, Portugal, Scandinavia, and the balkans, and the rest of eastern Europe are third rate powers who have little say about how things are handled in the EU, and have to listen to the decisions the big guys make.
And when the big guys have made their decision, their only influence in Europe becomes to bend those decisions slightly more in favour of their won country. And besides from that they got no say.
Big fish eats small fish. And small countries are just seen as toys for big countries to play around with. UK blackmails Iceland. Germany strangle Greece. Sweden blackmails Latvia.
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A good example of an organizational reform, was the germans decision to hand over more decision making from the high level to the NCOs. That improved decision making by taking the burden of analyzing information for the high level, and people on the lower level got more freedom to act upon first hand information.
Chiefs at the higher level would simply be unable to have a good overview upon EVERYTHING happening on the battlefield... The fighting morale of his men, the combat strenght of the enemy, having knowledge of if a logistics transport have been halted by a mine... all those small details that make up a greater whole of a military operation.
By this model information can be faster interpreted, and transformed into action.
Having a centralized organization can work in a factory, but in far you have a time factor for your decision making, and not everything works as anticipated. And your enemy makes everything he can to mislead you, and whenever he can he will also surprise you.. and sometimes he will also probably succed. And other factors aren't known as well, you don't know how well your untested weaponsystems will perform. You don't know how fighting morale will be affected by the unique circumstances at the moment.
So therefore you can't plan everything into the smallest detail, so some flexibility and improvisation is needed. But of course you also need to set up a larger strategic goal in your war, but there must be some flexibility to act upon the circumstances to fullfill your plan.
This flexibility gave the germans a great advantage in both the world wars. And the NCOs felt a greater personal repsonsability when he was not just a cog a in a machinery, but a man with responsability for his own unit.. to make sure that his assault is succesful and that objective is captured, that the logistics runs smoothly, and that coordination functions properly.
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Britain was a European champion of protectionism in late 1700s and early 1800 and became the first industrialized country in the world.
USA was the country with the highest tariffs in the western world troughout most of the 1800s, and still was the fastest growing economy in the world in that period.
Sweden was the world record holder in tariffs 1890-1914 and became the fastest growing economy in the world during that period if one measure GDP per workhour.
(Source Ha Joon Chang - Kicking away the ladder)
So the person who makes the claim that protectionism has historically failed have to explain why countries with so bad policies could get rich, and bring themselves out of poverty and misery.
And to take more modern examples, why are Japan, Korea and China so rich despite they used so much mercantilism during the years they transitioned from poor to rich?
And Japan is one of the most equal countries in the world despite its history as a protectionist. While Scandinavia was both the richest and most equal societies in the world in the 1960-70s despite protectionism.
In my opinion it seem like protectionism havn't failed at all. And if we are to help Asia, Africa and Latin America we should allow them have their own economic models instead of bullying them into the Washington consensus. Only then can we have true democracy and equality. And only then will they have a chance of lifting themselves out of poverty the same way as the rich countries did it. I understand that the rich countries doesn't want more competition, and that they prefer using the 3rd world as pool of cheap raw material inputs for their own industry. But I think it is disgustingly immoral to let millions die out of poverty just so we can make a shortterm buck.
Let Africa industrialize. If they can export goods they will not export their economic refugees to us. And if the standard of living increases, they will stop having so many babies.
Instead of trade sanctions against Africa, we should let them have protectionism. And IPR can be abolished in that part of the world like you say. They should be able to export to us, but we shouldn't be able to export out heavily subsidised cotton or food them, and their infant industry shouldn't have to be knocked out established western firms.
This will cost the west some money, but on the other hand the GDP of the entire Africa is less than that of France so I think the west could bear it for a short period of time.
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T-34 was a great tank. But as Blah said, it did have many flaws as well and it wasn't designed for long lasting peacetime or a comfertable space for the crew. Not only were they crampy, and the gun had a hard recoil that the crewmen had to avoid, it was also the loudest tank in world war 2. For good and bad of course, not so good for surprise attacks but better for psychological warfare.
T-34 was a tank that was built to be powerful in combat. It was built for being each to produce for unskilled labor, and at low cost, and at short period of time.
An average life expectancy for a Soviet tank in the hard fights on the easternfront was just 6 months, so russian engineers considered it waste to use expensive and time consuming components if they lasted much longer than 6 months. It was more important for the russians to replace the huge losses in tanks in 1941, and to outproduce the germans with numerical superiority. And for training tank crewmen with tanks that did needed to last longer and didn't have to see combat, the soviets used allied tanks such as the valentine.
And the tank was indeed excellent in combat. It had no problems with crossing terrain that most german tanks without wide tracks couldn't. Its protection was excellent compared to most tanks in its days. And in 1941 it also had the most powerful gun of any medium tank of its day. And it was mobile as well. And it was reliable in that sense that the crews could fix the tracks and most other stuff in the field. But of course, when it took a penetrating hit it was game over. I think that about 80% of the russian tank men died in the war, and there was a 80% chance of dying in the tank if it took a hit compared to a 80% chance of not dying if the same happened to a german or west-allied tank.
In my opinion was it without doubt the best tank in world war 2. A poor country had outproduced a mighty industrial nation with occupied Europe's industrial capacity at its disposal. They have built a tank that outclassed most of the tanks that Germany had. It was the tank that more than any other allied tank won the war.
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Both sides posted shit in Brexit, and regressives are usally the worst in baseless claims. But even if I despise fraudsters who post made up shit like the wage gap, I would never think about censoring it by put a half a million fine on them.
Fake news can cause problems, yes, few people deny that. The problem is that most people can't agree upon what's fake and what's not, just like people cannot agree upon when a kid becomes an adult.
If we should ban nationalists, we should atleast be fair and judge them by our own standards. Ban all feminist propaganda, ban all religions based on unproven stories, ban all war movies ever made since they aren't historically correct, ban all vegan propaganda..........yes, why not ban some proffessions all together? all weather mans on tv, all lawyers, priests, politicians, journalists.... they do nothing else than lying all day long.
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I guess it all depends on what objectives you have with a job. Some people want a job with a safe future - and then electricians, nurses and solidiers are needed in the economy of the future, regardless on how hard robotization and globalization kills jobs in the future.
Other people want to make money, accomplish shit, compete, and make a career and might take a higher education. Some people enjoy having much freetime, and therefore become teachers. Some people just love to work with something they love and therefore become soundtechnicians or historians, even if it is shitty paid.
I guess military life got its ups and downsides like all other jobs. Someone fix your meals, you get your comrades, you can maybe drive cool expensive machines, see the world, fight for a just cause and serve a country that you love, keep your body in good shape so you can live long and healthy, impress chicks and rip the eyes out of thug that tries to attack you on a street.
I haven't served in the military so I am not qualified to speak of the ups and downs really. But I guess they are many. And that there are many different types of jobs in the military for different people.
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SJWs are welcome to my party that day when they fight for equality instead of privilegies. Because priviligies is anti-equality, anti-left and anti meritocracy.
I never heard a SJW calling the high suicide rate among males a problem. I never heard them advocating equally hard punishment for crimes for men and women. I never heard them defending mens right to custody over their own children. I never heard them speak out against islam - which is the most hateful ideology against gays and women. And if their identity politics opinion should hold any merit at all, then they should also recognize hate crimes against whites, such as attack on a white man in Chicago.
And they should also denounce antifa as a terrorist group, and speak out against Black Lives Matter when they kill cops, block ambulances, block airports, block roads, disrupt gay pride parades and Bernie Sanders meetings and put peoples homes on fire.
A person should admit all those flaws in the identity politics community, and speak up against all those problems. Until then, they are my enemy number 1. If this is the left, then I hope the left will die. Soon.
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It is the right thing to do. And all countries can atleast do a little to make this world a better place. Of course those things you mentioned needs to be taken into consideration as well, if immigration politics should be able to have any support from the public.
There are immature arguments for immigration, such as lying and trying to mislead the public, like activists have tried to do when they make exaggerations and calling refugee camps concentration camps, or confusing immigration of high skilled workers with taking refugees and pretending they are the same thing and then say "Look immigration is profitable, therefore we should take in immigrants".
And here in Sweden we got a classic historical argument for immigration when Sweden took Belgian Walloon immigrants in the 1600.. and say that brought great economic benifit to us.
But the argument is silly, the wallon immigration was about 2000 people coming to Sweden during a 50 year period, and not like 300.000 people per year as recently!
Furthermore did they have European cultural values, and they came from what would considered a 1st would country of the 1600, and came to a poor 2nd world country. And today things are the opposite, now we are the technologically developed, and people seriously think 3rd world migrants will bring us high tech. Give me a break.
All I want is a clear debate. No lying. No personal attacks. Just arguments based on facts. No activist lies, no media cover ups of crime like in Cologne, no police cover up like in Rotherham, no bullshit from politicians talking about the right to asylum while they make deals with Erdogan, so he would keep people away from getting their asylums.
And good arguments should be weight against our ethical considerations.
Towards our own citizens, but also towards people who wanna get here.
And then I think people should vote and decide a number of people getting here, and if vetting is working well, we will see less crimes and terrorism, which would save us suffering, and immigration would have a stronger public support, and immigrants would have higher status among the citizens since the group called "immigrants" don't have to get their name tarnished by migrants who behave like assholes.
So you can call me immature if you want, and lump me togheter with idealistic leftists. But unlike them I atleast see that there is a roof and a maximum amount of people a country can take, and we can of course argue where that number is.. a high number or a lower number. But I don't think there is much point in denial of the existence of a roof itself.
When too many gets in, you will also have immigration problems. And native population will get it tough economically on top of that. And fabric of society is getting torned. Which is not healthy.
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I have nothing against trade. I am just not a dogmatic believer in free trade.
Most countries rich in the world have started with protectionism while they industrialized their country. And after the infant industry had grown strong and competative all protection was dropped because it was no longer needed.
What free trade fanboys say is simply unhistorical. Besides the Netherlands and Switzerland are there hardly any country that have gone from economic freedom to becoming rich. In fact, there are much more examples on how free trade have fucked up countries economies.
What the IMF have done to the Eastbloc, Latin America and Africa are genocides caused by dogmatic disasterCapitalism. Yeltsin killed more Russians than Hitler with his economic reforms.
If protectionism is always so bad, then I wonder why England become the first industrialized country in the world when they had much higher tariffs than most European countries 1780-1820. And I also wonder how America could be the fastest growing economy in the world during the 1800s, despite having the highest average tariffs in the world. And why Sweden was the fastest growing economy in the world 1890-1914 measured in GDP per workhour, despite having the highest tariffs in the world.
(Source: Kicking away the ladder, by proffessor Ha-Joon Chang)
Just because rich countries have free trade today, doesn't mean that they always had free trade. Moreover, does not even the great exporters like Japan, China and Germany want 100% free trade. They want it just as little as they want 100% protectionism.
All countries want free trade in industries they are strong and competative in, and in those industries that they haven't yet fully built up their industrial capacity to being fully competative they want protectionism in instead.
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If you look at most of the metrics that matter you will see that Africa as a whole has slowly become a force to be reckoned with on the international arena.
Even if you put all Subsahran African countries togheter you still got a GDP smaller than that of France. And people in Africa are 15-20 times poorer than an American or European. According to Piketty.
And as mentioned earlier, Cambridge professor Ha-Joon Chang have data that shows that subsahran Africa actully declined during 20 years of free trade and neoliberalism. Even according to the numbers of the World Bank themselves did Subsahran Africas GDP fall by 0,7% between 1989 and 1999.
And worst of all, is the destruction of Africas emerging industries that started to grow strongly during the 1960s and 70s.
And without industries you cannot get a country to become rich. So now Africa mostly depends on exporting raw materials to the west - which doesn't pay as well and doesn't contribute to a knowledge economy and high productivity that enables high wages.
Show me one country that have industrialized with out strong state support. You can't. And if you really think Africas future lies in exporting raw materials, then I ask where is this country that have gotten rich by selling broccoli?
I for my part think natural resources is a blessing for a country, and it helped USA and Sweden a lot when those countries tried to industrialize. But if USA and Sweden just never tried to build their own steel industry, paper industry, chemical industry, mechanical tool industry and so fourth.. but instead just selling wood, iron ore and coal, then USA and Sweden would still be poor countries today.
Oil can run out. Fish stocks can be depleted. Top soil can be exhausted. And not only is it dangerous to only rely on exporting raw materials because they can run out. People can also invent ways of replacing them. In the 1800s producing dye from insects was a profitable buisness, but then chemists started to invent synthetic dye and the entire insect dye industry in America just died off.
And today Africa is suffering from the same dangers as America, as food companies as starting to replace sugar and vanilla with synthetic substitutes, and the imports from Africa and the prices on their products are falling which causes balance of payments problems and a trade deficit and growing national debts. And if 200% debt to GDP ratios are considered unpayble for rich countries, then 300% for poor African countries is even worse.
And its not only vanilla and sugar we in the west import less of. Western companies now begin to try to use replacements for palm oil and cacao as well. And we no longer have any need for enormous amounts of copper anymore when we in the rich countries are switching over to communication by a fibre and wireless telecommunication.
So some countries are digging up their old copper net cables and dump the copper on the world market so copper prices are falling like a rock due to increased supply.
No thanks to protectionism or backward ideologies.
The idea of the self-regulating market was considered junk science only 30 years ago, since it lost all its credibility during the stockmarket crash in 1929 and the great depression. But when this shitty ideology was about to die off and Hayek was about to die as a forgotten man, then some rightwingers like Thatcher brushed the dust off those old free market ideas that was rusting on the scrapheap of history and presented them as the most recent scientific discovery.
I am a pragmatic person. I look what have worked in the past and say we can use those ideas. And when I see that some ideas didn't workout well in the past or in the present, I suggest that we abandon them.
Protectionism have worked many times, while Free trade has rarely ever made a developing country rich.
I'm sure you already know about him, but you should take a page out of Hans Rosling's book and be a little bit more optimistic.
Hans Rosling is an intellectually dishonest pro-refugee aslicker who calls the Sweden Democrats racist, and then later on admits that they were right all along and supports their policies.
Furthermore is he a believer in the idea that everyone on the planet can have the same standard of living as we in the western world - which is just a silly thought, since there are not enought resources to build all those cars, stereos and hula hoops for everyone.
He also says that everyone can afford them in the future because innovation will make prices fall and each phone will consume less resources to build. Which just shows that the guy was totally ignorant of the concept of Jevons paradox - which says that energy/resource consumption will increase when more energy effiecent things are invented.
The very opposite is so to say true of what this muppet says.
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shakka mannaka Good to know that what most people call exploiting and raping desperate people, you call "a mutually beneficial, voluntary exchange". I think that says it all about what concept of freedom means in neoliberalism.
When it comes to the bus driver example you make a strawman and instead talk about median wage in India and Sweden, instead of the wage of a certain proffession [a bus driver].
Anyways, Immigration gives an increase in the supply of labour, which in turn gives the employers more power, since the competition for the jobs increase. That puts a downward pressure on wages and working conditions, while the profit rates for the capitalist goes up. So the protectionist policies of the labour market are the reason why we who live in the west earn more than people in India, despite many of them work harder and got more talents than we do. 3rd World people might work harder, but they are less productive. Swedish workers are more productive because the economy in their country is more developed. And when the income per head is high people, can afford a welfare state and to buy consumer goods.
However, I can agree with you that immigration is benefiticial to the country if foreigners do the jobs native labour lack skills or willingness to do.
If thats not the case, the GDP might well go up, while the GDP per capita goes down, as when a country accept refugees from the 3rd world.
* True. Which is why you can have free trade between the US and say China, without it having a negative effect on wages in either country. But this piece of trivia really doesn't touch on the discussion at hand. *
Free trade can affect the wages for good and bad. The key to playing this game well, is to produce stuff that no one else can produce as well as your own country. By doing things no other can do, you can take out high prices and make big profits. It matters if you sell woodchips, potato chips or microchips.
If a foreign country knocks out your high-tech industry your wage level will fall, since you know have to rely on other types of goods that doesn't pay that well. Likewise have countries like Finland and Korea gone from being dirt poor, to being among the richest in the world by building industries aimed for the comperative advantages of the future rather than doing what is best at the present time.
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Ok. You atleast seem to have a heart unlike Milton Friedman, but that probably makes you too good for this faith that is based on his foundations. Just as I think that most muslims are too good for Islam.
Hardcore free markets have so far only been implemented in undemocratic places. Because people dont vote away their democratic rights and basic needs. So free markets in a pure form seems to be impossible to impement without controlling the guns that control the people.
But you dont support that, and thats good. But the question then becomes, is a free market the best way to achieve this bigger pie so everyone can be better off? I remain doubtful for historical reasons.
We tried free trade 1870-1914 and 1990-2016, but the economic growth is weak compared to the heavily regulated protectionist period 1945-75. I know, comparisons like this cant get perfect, but anyways, many countries in Africa was richer then than now, and had higher growth, and had a better national health performance. The Asian tigers took themselves out of poverty, despite being even poorer than Africa. The greatest economic miracle the last decades is China, and that country is not a follower of free market economics.
The variable that has the largest impact on wages in every country is the average labor-productivity in a given country, which relies on the capital-intensity in that country. Wage-competition from immigration only constitutes a small, and short-term, imbalance in the equilibrium.
Immigration (or rather the lack there of) plays a huge role for the wage level. You can easily replace 80-95% of the workforce with foreign workers willing to work for much less. Not just guys who clean floors and flipping hamburgers, but also economists, chemists and engineers as well. China alone train 200.000 engineers per year.
facepalm. That was just a stupid rant. If a country's industry goes bankrupt because of foreign competition that's a good thing because it leads to lower prices for consumers and better products than before.
I apologize for a long text, anyways...
Doing what is most profitable in 2016, doesnt have to be the same thing as the most profitable thing to do in 2036. Should Sweden have stayed with timber instead of mobile phones, this country would have been much poorer. Just as America industrialized by shielding themselves from English cheap goods until they had their army of skilled workers and enough modern machines to take on the Britishs in a trade war. America is no longer a country of farmers as Jackson wanted, but a country where industries playes a much larger role, thanks to the protectionist Alexander Hamilton.
As I said earlier, South Koreas main exports after world war 2 was tungsten, wigs made by human hair and fish. And they was the poorest country in the world back then. Is there any person today who believes that they should have stayed with free trade and keept on selling those stuff instead of building up an industry with protectionism and government planning? I dont think so.
But back then people would have called it madness. Saying that a 3rd world country with any natural resources should try to build a steel industry (POSCO), when it lacks the knowledge and skills and have to import all their iron and coal from South America. People would have called it madness when they made a textile industry firm go into electronics, like LG. And trying to produce mobile phones.
Comparative advantage works, Germany can sell their cars and buy American computers. But if they clash and one is about losing one of their key industries, they need to put in protectionism in that sector if it is of strategic importance. For the sake of national interest, keeping the knowledge within the country. Sometimes of course an industry must die, like analog cameras,
Government should also try to steer companies into new directions to serve the national interest, even if they in the short run would like to keep on doing the most profitable, like LG. Because what is the comparative advantage today, isnt necessarily the comparative advantage of tomorrow. Selling typewriters in the 1950s was profitable, but that industry is dead now. The government should help bring about new industries, just like the government helped to create the computer industry by tax dollars from the rest of the economy.
The question really is, should we go for the comparative advantage in the short run, or in the long run?
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I'm with Trump here. Kyle, the Government isnt like a buisness for fuck sake noob. The first one got an unlimited ability to pay all its debts nominated in its own currency, while a buisness doesnt. The latter is driven for the sake of profit maximization, while the government is driven in the interest of society.
And not only that. YOU MUST HAVE DEBT. Because without debt you dont have any assets. So if the government doesnt go into debt, then the private sector doesnt have any assets/money. And that will make the economy shrink. But maybe you rather have a low national debt number, than a strong economy, full employment, low indebtness among the people and American comanies? I would rather have a high national debt, than a high private debt, because thats what is fiscally responsible.
And finallly, going bankrupth with a buisness like Trump isnt uncommonly incompetent in fact 80% of American small buisnesses have to close down just the first years.
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The vikings discovered America before Columbus and took over England and Northern France. And Swedish vikings founded Russia and traded with the Byzantine empire. And Sweden became a strong military power and the mighty holy roman emperor got defeated Gustavus Adolphus and Swedish armies reached as far as Bavaria and plundered Prague. Also Moscow were conquered by Gustavus Adolphus. And the King Karl X walked towards Copenhagen with his army, and the Danish King got panic and gave away half of his large Kingdom to Sweden in just a week in 1658.
The Swedish army was not the largest, but it was considered the best. And the country was seen as a powerful military force and feared by many... and also hated by many.
Both the Polish and Norwegian national anthems mentions Sweden in a negative way, and probably because of Swedens warlike past. Especially Swedens war in Poland was devestating and was remembered as the worst time in Polish history before the nazi-German invasion. 1 out of 5 Poles died in the war and mass murder the Swedish troops commited, in an episode known as the deluge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluge_(history)
Sweden was however not so aggressive as foreigners perhaps believe. Swedens limited resources forced the country to act aggressivly since it did not have large enough resources to win long wars against its neigbouring countries. Making big armies was expensive and giving solidiers food and wages was problematic. So Sweden solved the problem by plundering and doing the war on foreign territory. Because Sweden did not have much money to pay for troops out of its own pockets.
Sweden got involved in wars it didn't want to have. Especially the wars against Poland was done out of fear rather than dreams of new conquests. King Sigismund was the problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigismund_III_Vasa
He was king of both Sweden and Poland, before he got kicked out from Sweden during a civil war. And since Sigismund still wanted to be king of Sweden, and since he had an enormously powerful empire - he therefore was a huge threat to Swedens independence during the early 1600s. Poland was therefore a much bigger threat to Sweden than Russia or Denmark during the early 1600s. And many wars between Poland and Sweden was fought, even wars inside Russia were having this Polish-Swedish power struggle in the background.
So to solve this problem once and for all did the Swedish King Karl X launch a new war in 1655 where he planned to lay the country in ruins so it would never be able to threaten Sweden anymore. It was a genocide as I said earlier. And the saddest part is that the new Polish King was not even interested in the Swedish throne and would probably have negotiatied it away if he had been asked.
All of Poland was taken by Swedish troops. But the end of the war never came. And it became a guerilla war like Vietnam or Afghanistan. And Sweden failed to conquer Poland. But the war had destroy Poland so greatly that it became so badly weakened that if would later on be easily taken over by Prussia, Russia and Austria. And Sweden had also suffered badly from all wars that it was not in a strong shape to fight back against Russia and Peter the Great.
By the end of the 1600s did the Swedish empire include Sweden, Finland, the Baltic states, northern Germany, and a piece of the Netherlands. And also a piece of Norway and Pennsylvania for a short time.
Sweden had expanded greatly. But the country was exhausted after being at war for 70 years during the 1600s.
And many angry neighbouring countries wanted revenge. Swedens military was however still powerful and feared and no country wanted to fight against it alone.
The army was seen as Europe's best. So it became of course a boost in the international status of a country to win a battle against Sweden. Brandenburg started to be recognized as a great power after it defeated small Swedish army at Fehrbellin in 1675, and this became a triumphant propaganda victory for this small German state. And a new great power was born.
And after Russia's victory at Poltava in 1709 was Russia for the first time seen as a new great power in Europe.
The war kept going on and the Swedish army would continue to win great victories even after the defeat - like in Helsingborg 1710, Gadebusch 1712, and Stäket 1719. And the Swedish navy would plunder merchant ships in the baltic sea at a gigantic scale, with over 150 pirate ships in Swedish service and negotiations were also made with the worlds largest pirate nest at Madagascar to get their 60 pirate ships into Swedish service. But the war soon came to an end. And the days of Sweden as the dominating power over the baltic sea was over.
Today Sweden is more of a country of scientists, innovators, succesful companies, musicians, ice hockey players and such.
Pewdiepie, the pirate bay, spotify, IKEA, Ericsson, Astra, Volvo, Alfred Nobel, ABBA, Europe, Roxette, Carl von Linné, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Paradox interactive, Battlefield 1942, Minecraft, Avicii, Max Martin, Absolut vodka etc
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"who largely wiped corruption from public offices"
The contrary was true. He did welcome corruption. He liked that other governments paid bribed to his clerks and officials to spy on their behalf, because that only meant that he could keep on paying low wages for his workers and hand over the cost of living upon other governments.
"who lived almost like a commoner"
He was a very fat man who later on would die from obesity related causes.
"Sure he was a tyrant, but he didn´t delight in inflicting pain to others"
Of all the untrue things said about this man, this does remain the most untrue of all.
It seems like you have gotten your untrue opinion from a nazi propaganda movie called "Der Alte und der Junge König".
Fact is that he loved to humiliate and bully others - and especially his own son. He did beat up his officials and he loved to make joke at their expense in the Tobacco Cabinet. He did beat up Frederick the Great's teacher for the crime of learning his own son latin language.
He was not a caring father. He wanted his son dead, and even went as far as trying to get him to commit suicide with his bullying. He forced him to marry a girl he thought unattractive, instead of getting the prestigious honor of marrying the princess of England who's beauty Frederick greatly admired.
opportunity
The diplomatic pressure simply became too high to make his will go through.
But in the end did he want to kill Frederick. He despised everything which were different from himself: Fredrick William was a christian fundamentalist, a militarist, he was a simple man that he loved hunting. While Frederick was open minded in religious issues and he was not a simple man since he had deep intellectual hobbies - he could read foreign languages, he was an excellent flute player, he read lots of books and he could discuss philosophical works.
Just like the rest of Frederick Williams family did he think that his fathers hunting trips were boring.
Frederick loved military life, but he was not as obsessed about it as his own father. And that made his father despise him. He thought that speaking french, intellectual interests and flute playing was useless feminine hobbies.
The only thing this primitive brute was right about when it came to his own son, was that Frederick in his young years liked to waste much money on foreign luxury garbage: perfume, tonnes of rings on his fingers, and buying tonnes of books in secrecy.
But this also a little bit shows the corrupt culture in Prussia under Frederick William, as his son in secrecy waste money on junk behind his fathers back.
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The free world is stronger togheter. If USA just sits idle and let russia take over the Baltics, then Finland, then Georgia, Moldavia, Belarus and Ukraine, and then Poland, Scandinavia, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia and then rest of Europe...
And China is allowed to swallow Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea and then Phillipines, Japan and then northern India.
Then will USA have fewer allies on its side against much more powerful enemies. Enemies that are dictatorship and who does not have US interest at heart. Unlike friendly democratic nations who give USA support in return for support from USA - for the benefit for both sides.
Just because you forgets about the danger, does not mean that the danger forgets about you.
Stopping Hitler is easier before he have taken over a large number of countries which resources he can exploit.
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In world war two did Russia invade Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, Denmark and Norway.
All our neighbouring countries.
It invaded neutral Ukraine last year. And it have behaved aggressive ever since Putin been in power - Russia attacked Chechenya, It did shut down gas supplies to eastern Europe at multiple occasions, it poisoned Ukraines former president, it invaded Georgia, it poisoned an agent in britain a few years ago, it blew up a Czech arms depot a few years ago, it invaded and stole Crimea from Ukraine, and later on it shot down a civilian Malaysian passanger plane.
It is a country that is being cozy to north korea and 3rd world dictators. And now it threatens to nuke the free world.
It is a country that cannot be trusted. It lies on a daily basis and don't respect international law, or even agreements which it have signed.
So russia have always been a potential latent threat.
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Jagdpanther was more than 6 decimeters taller than Stridsvagn-103, Hetzer, StuGIII and Jagdpanzer IV. So it was not as sneaky as the typical ambush tank sitting in a bush trying to get the first shot. Jagdpanther was very large. It was impressive in many ways with good armor, firepower, and mobility. The only disadvatages was the lack of a turret, the high siluette and the reliability problem with panther chassi.
Otherwise was this machine a beast. The allies probably made a wise choice in prioritizing the bombing of the parts of the economy that built this machine, because had the Germans had many more of these machines then would the conquest of Europe have been slow, difficult and costly.
I think the Stridsvagn-103 is more of a cleaver engineering than the jagdpanther. The S-tank got many more special features and it could be driver by only 1-2 men if needed. Its easier to hide. And it is a smarter tank overall.
While Jagdpanther was not a revolutionary tank like the S-tank. It was more the result of evolution. The Germans picked the best parts of other tanks and put it on this tank destroyer. It got the best tank gun from the King Tiger and Nashorn. It got the excellent panther chassi with good mobility, low ground pressure and stabilization. And it got the excellent armor protection from the German cats, and the sloping of its armor reminds of that on TigerII, Panther, SU85 and Jpz4.
And with all those best things got combined, then Germany got the best German tank of the war. A tank with mobility of a panther and the fire power and armor better than a Tiger I.
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Everything is relative I guess.
Its a plane cheaper than F35, F18, F16, Eurofighter, Rafale.
And it beats all those planes with lowest wing-loading that allow it to make the sharpest turns. It have the longest range. It can carry both the best European and American weapons. It have an electronic warfare suite of a Growler while being able to fight as well as a F16 Viper while carrying meteor missiles. Its radar cross section is as low as 0,1-0,5 square meters which would qualify it as a stealth plane. F35 have a lower radar signature, but Gripen is stealthier with its superior electronic warfare which offers Gripen a better chance of surviving Russian SAMs. Gripen is also visually more stealthy than F35. Its heat signature might also be lower than that of F35B as it uses a smaller engine. And F35B removed its half tonnes apparatus that blend hot air gases with cold to save weight.
And while F35 is a hangar queen, is Gripen the King of dispersed air bases.
No other plane can fly so many sorties in a single day thanks to its enormously superior ability to be rearmed and refueled in less than 15 minutes on the ground before it can get up into the air and fight again.
Gripen only needs 5 hours on the ground for maintenance while the 2nd best plane on this list F16 needs more than twice as much time on the ground - indeed there are squadrons in the US military that needs 27 hours of ground maintenance on average for their F16s.
Gripen is cheap to fly, which enables you to fly it often, and pilots that often get a chance to fly tend to get better.
But if you fly a plane that costs 8 times as much per flight hour like F35 or 4 times as much as Eurofighter - then you might not get as much training - and your pilots will not become as good as a result.
Gripen is cheap so it is no disaster if a plane is lost. Even a small country can easily afford to buy a new one.
While losing an overly hyped stealth plane would be an enormous propaganda victory for the enemy if they can show a burning wreck. So Gripen is a plane that you can afford to lose. While other planes are a much more painful loss.
Gripen gives you more than the other planes while it is cheaper than all the others.
So either you don't know what you are talking about. Or either are you just a paid propagandist that will try to smear Gripen no matter what and ignore facts because you have another inferior plane you try to sell.
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The deal also benefitted Russia. Ukraine could ship out its food to sell and get some cash. But Russia could also do the same and also get some well needed money in the same way by this deal. Furthermore did it get some of the economic sanctions lifted by lifting the blockade of Ukraines wheat.
Russia had also lost the grip of southern Ukraine when this deal was struck. The arrival of Nato anti-ship missiles to this area such as Harpoon, Robot 17, Brimstone and others also made it impossible for Russia to keep up the naval blockade in the western black sea. Ukraines land forces also held the momentum in this area, and the loss of the cruiser Moscow, and the painful pyrrhic victory of taking snake island and the shaky control of the western black sea coast made life very dangerous for the Russian marine.
The original plan of occupying the east and south of Ukraine, blockading all the ports and thereby strangle Ukraines economy had failed. Ukraine got money from the west to stay alive. The landmass was contested, the control over the western black sea would probably have been impossible to upheld in the long run without danger of suffering heavy losses due to new anti-ship missiles and drones.
And the west was angry on Russia. Blocking the ports and cutting off 800 million people from their food source would have caused riots, revoultions, chaos and gigantic refugee waves around the world. This shows what a terrorist nation Russia is, that is prepared to deliberatly starve 800 million innocent people to death. Putin is prepared then to kill more people than Hitler, Stalin and Mao combined. But that is another topic for itself, so lets go back to the grain deal...
A refugee wave of a tens of millions of north africans coming to Europe would create large problems for the EU and thereby the war effort in Ukraine. This destabilization of Africa, the middle east and the EU made governments worried and angry. So much so that the west even considered direct military intervention into the black sea if the Russians continued to try to sabotage the grain shipments and cause global starvation.
Those problems were avoided with the grain deal. Russia and Ukraine was allowed to ship their grain. The Russian terrorist state gained concessions by some lifted sanctions by the EU - which for example provided them with some spare parts for all those 500 passanger planes that Russia had stolen from western countries.
Global starvation was avoided and Ukraine got some cash. Russian terrorists had won a small victory. But Putin had probably hoped for much more sanctions to be lifted, but to his dissapointment was there not much change.
As the typical liars and terrorists russians are did they fire missiles on Ukrainian ships the day after the deal was struck.
The purpose was probably to drive up insurance premiums for western ships that transported Ukraines grain to make it economically unprofitable to ship all that grain from Ukraine and to ruin the country.
Had the war turned in Russia's favor again, and the control of southern Ukraine been taken back by Russia, then do I not feel any doubts that Russia would break all its promises - like it always done in the past - and started to attack Ukrainian ships again to try to strangle Ukraines economy to death again.
But now since Russias navy is weakened and the Russian army is losing, do Russia not yet dare to do anything about this Black sea shipping deal. If Russia moves to the west of the Crimea with their ships they will get in range of Ukrainian anti-ship missiles and get wiped out. So they are therefore unable to effectivly make a naval blockade as I sees it.
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I think that attack aircrafts are harder to hit and better protected, and thus they are less likely to suffer hard losses from ground fire. The decision to use attack helicopters instead of attack aircrafts for ground support led to catastrophically high helicopter losses during the invasion of Laos in 1970.
Often did helicopters also need escort from attack aircrafts to supress enemy ground fire. And attack aircrafts can also carry more payload than what helicopters can so I can see the argument why you can have attack aircrafts without attack helicopters, but not why you could be able to have attack helicopters with attack aircrafts.
However the playing field have changed since Vietnam where machine guns and small cannons was the main ground fire threats to planes and helicopters. Today are manpads and missiles of all kinds a bigger threat.
A-10 would have done excellent in Vietnam where it could survive hits from AK47, maxim machine guns and 57mm anti-aircraft guns. But today I think it would have a harder time to survive trying to survive hits from manpads that either can destroy the plane of take it out for months of repairs.
Helicopters in Vietnam had two survival strategies. Either to fly very high where rifle bullets couldn't reach them. Or they could fly extremely low and fast above the tree lines so it was difficult for the enemy to see where they were and hear the sound from them. And if they accidentally flow over the enemy soldiers heads where they were hiding in the jungle, would they be surprised and only have a few seconds to aim and fire before the helicopters had flown past them and were gone.
However helicopters in Vietnam were vulnerable things. Just 1 single hit from rifle bullet hitting them could be enough to make a helicopter crash. Helicopters were light and the engines too weak to carry much weight - for example for armor. Helicopter pilots were sitting behind their glass, the engines could be hid, the rotarblades could be shot off. A door gunner of a Chinook helicopter did once accidentally shoot off the helicopters own rotorblades which caused the helicopter to crash and killed 11 men on board. And then there was the hydralics system that was needed to manouver the helicopter, and a hit from a single enemy rifle bullet here could easily make the helicopter to crash.
Furthermore do machines not scream from pain like we humans do when they take damage. So often were helicopter pilots unaware that they were under enemy fire and machine gun fire turned the helicopters into swiss cheese because there were no warning system computers that could tell them that. So it was usually other helicopter pilots that first saw if a helicopter was starting to take hits from enemy fire.
The Vietnam war was a long time ago. And I guess many improvements of helicopters have been done since. But fact still remains that helicopters are light machines that cannot carry much armor and therefore are they vulnerable to enemy fire. And perhaps more so than during the vietnam war when the enemy now also can use stingers, strelas, thunderstreak, robot-70, Piorun etc. So flying high is no longer any protection like it was in Vietnam.
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Not just USA are giving weapons to Ukraine. Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Britain, Germany, Finland, Japan, Norway, Denmark, Turkey, Taiwan, Canada, Australia and many others are sending weapons too.
And as a Swedish tax payer I am happy for every Russian vehicle which gets destroyed with Swedish anti-tank missiles.
Every Russian vehicle that gets destroyed is one vehicle less that Russia can use to threaten Sweden and other neighbours in the free world. Every Russian soldier killed is one soldier less that we have to kill on our own.
I fully support Ukraines right to defend their own country and their right to independence.
The Ukranian army is small and untrained and badly equipped. And yet it have managed to beat the big well equipped Russian army with the simplest cheapest weapons.
I see burning Russian tank wrecks every day, and that makes me happy. Every little coin spent on help to Ukraine has been worth it. My gift to the Ukrainian people does not need to be repaid. I have already been repaid with enough nice images of burning helicopters and tanks with their turrets blown off.
Ukraine helped Sweden in our war against Russia, so now we are helping them in their fight to defend their country from Russian aggression like they helped us.
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Europe was very backward compared to the rest of the world during the early middle ages. The Song dynasty in China led the country into prosperity. And Arabia was having a golden age when it collected knowledge from east and west and exchanged plants and technologies from Spain in west to Pakistan in the east.
Europe was a backwards place.
But things Changed. The Mongols crushed the Song dynasty in China, and slaughtered millions of arabs and destroyed irrigation and caused so deep harm on Iran that its agriculture would never recover until 600 years later. And the bubonic plague which were spread by the Mongol's did cause more harm in the muslim countries with densely populated big cities than what it did to the underdeveloped European countryside.
So Europe came in better shape from those problems than what the east did. Egypt was an economic superpower during the time of the crusades, but the black death killed more than 7 out of its 8 million inhabitants and wrecked the country.
But despite the crusades, the plague and the Mongols would the Ottomans still have some power left to expand into Europe for some centuries...
Europe did however have something that other cultures lacked: curiosity. The willingness to learn from other cultures.
This was demonstrated by the fact that China had invented gun powder, paper, the compass and the printing press. But it did not use those technologies to any large extent, unlike the Europeans. China used their gunpowder for fireworks instead of war, while Japan banned all use of fire arms. And book printing was not very useful in a language that uses pictograms to write things down. And the use of the compass stopped when the new rulers in China stopped all maritime trade and exploration, because they thought it was a useless waste of money and they thought that the rest of the world had nothing interesting to offer. And sea trade and shipbuilding stopped, then did of course the skilled shipbuilders not pass on their skills and technologies to the next generation of Chinese. So the knowledge was lost.
Also the Arabs lost their fantastic shipbuilding skills the same way. Shortage of trees among other things had pressed up production costs of ships and it was cheaper to buy ships from other countries. And the neglect of the navy led to navigational skills and shipbuilding knowledge to being lost. The problems was so large that Ibn Khaldun complained about it in the 14th century, and he said that ships that muslims in the past could build by themselves no longer were possible to build without importing foreign experts with the know-how.
India was never interested in the printing press and never took it to use. While the muslim world never got interested in doing so either. It was not until 1729 that the first muslim country adopted it - the Ottoman empire. However, it was quickly banned again after a few years. Religious leaders hated the innovation because they thought it undermined the written word, and the oral tradition of transferring the Quran was seen as holy.
So to conclude was India, China and the MENA-countries unwilling to use the innovations they themselves had created. While the Europeans did put all of them to great use. Gun powder weapons were perfected. The compass came into great use as Europeans explored, conquered, traded and settled the world. And the paper allowed Europeans to store information over generations, and reducing the cost of producing books down to a fraction. Knowledge became available to more groups of people, and literacy rates improved greatly in Western Europe.
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I think this discussion already have become too far-fetched and urealistic.
Napoleon happened because of the French revolution, and the French revolution happened because of France's shitty economy, and France shitty economy happened because of war debts it gained by the Seven years war.
And Prussia, Austria, and Russia could solve their debt problems by improving their economy's by stealing Polish land.
And with Sweden into the Seven years war things would have been very different (if it would ever happened at all). - There would be no participation of Poland since Charles had turned it into a vassal puppet state, and Sweden would have refused to share it with other countries.
- And Frederick the Great's kingdom was only saved from destruction from the new Russian monarch, Peter III of Russia, who was a huge fanboy of Frederick the Great and made an immidieate peace treaty with him, and even planned to let Russian troops side with Prussia in the Seven years war.
And if Russia never existed. Then this event would never have happened either. And had France won the Seven years war against Prussia and England, then would have never been any loss of North America and huge war debts, which means that the French revolution would never have happened, and therefore there would not be any Napoleon Bonaparte as the ruler of France, and much less the ruler of Europe.
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The thing is that time was not on Japans side so a deleying war could never be won. We all know the enormous industrial superiority America had over Japan with all carriers and planes it produced. But there was also a large technological advatage it had over Japan.
Japan only had a good Navy in 1941-42 while the A6M Zero still was the best fighter plane in the world and its pilots was were battle hardened veterans. And all this was lost, all the carriers, all the skilled pilots and planes just a few months after the war had started with the battles of Midway and Guadacanal.
But I don't think that Japan could have won a long war even if it had won at Midway and Guadacanal. Simply because it never had the ability to replace its losses of pilots and the aircraft production was so small that the Zeros could never be replaced with something better to combat the best American planes such as Corsair and P51H. Japan could simply not produce anything compareable in the numbers needed.
Winning early victories in the pacific against an oponent with outdated planes (such as the Buffalo) and which had prioritzed the best resources to fight the nazis instead does not say much of Japans combat capabilities.
The real test would come once America had started to gear up for war for real.
Japans industry was not up to western standards once the war began. It could conquer much lands, but it lacked the transport ships needed to move all plundered resources (oil, sugar, coal, copper, rice, cotton etc) to Japan.
The empire was overstretched and it didn't have the transport ships needed to supply all garrisons it had put out everyware. The war in China was also meatgrinder without any victory at near sight, or at sight at all.
And fighting China, USSR, USA and Britain was not something Japan win in the long run.
It build tanks in extremely small numbers, and the few they made were shitty and getting outdated more and more for each year - just like its fighter planes which were getting outclassed by western planes so much that kamikaze attacks finally became the most effiecent way of using their old junk.
Had Japan been more victorious, then America would not have started to demobilize its economy by 1944. The Montana class battleship would not be canceled for example, and in a real national crisis America could still mobilize its economy for war much more than it actully did. It was in fact the only major allied power that never full-heartedly commited everything it had to this conflict.
And Americas most battlehardened best equiped troops from Europe would be transfered to this less prioritized front. And if that wouldn't end Japan, then some nukes would.
Japan was overstreched in 1942, and it didn't have any tranport ships for a large land invasion of the USA. And grabbing India was also very unrealistic. So where could Japan deliever a knockout punch?
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@cv990a4
"Some posit that its a way to use up Javelins - $250K weapon against a cheap tank (with sacrificial mobik crew)."
Using up 4 crewmen in a suicidal move and a waste of manpower so stupid that the Russians might actually think its a good idea.
And Russia is now sending 800 such tanks to Ukraine. And I believe that Ukraine easily can afford to spend 800 javelins for that. But I don't think they will use 800 javelins for them. Many hundreds of them will fall victim to mines, artillery, drones, Stugna-P, NLAWs, and cheap weapons like RPG7 and AT4.
So in a cost benifit analysis will it be the Russians who suffers more, unless those tanks can do much useful stuff on the battlefield - which I doubt.
Not only because Ukraine are a dangerous enemy with its wide range of anti-tank weapons. But also because of the sad pathethic shape of the Russian military. Had the Israeli army used T-55 and upgraded it, and put skilled, highly motivated crews inside and used good tactics with excellent support and teamwork from infantry, artillery and so on then I would fear this as a powerful force that I would treat with much respect.
But now are we talking about the Russian army of 2023. The Russian army of last year was incompetent. But the army of this year have almost no skilled troops left, and consists of newly mobilized, very poorly trained, and low motivated troops. Those troops are not good for offensive operations. And after a few weeks of training they barely know how to handle their weapons, and they don't know much about combat tactics. And they know even less how to fight along side tanks and combined arms teamwork.
So combine that. And combine that with bad tanks, and infantry with rusty AK47 and World war 2 rifles and I think that the combat power of those units is a bad joke on a battlefield of 2023. Indeed I think it would be considered a very crappy kampfgruppe even back in the 1980s if we sent the Russian army back in a time machine to that time.
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Most of those lessons are not new in any way.
Countries underestimate consumption of artillery shells
- No shit Sherlock, havn't that been the case ever since World war 1? The great powers ran out of artillery shells early 1915. And Germany ran out of bombs during the invasion of the Soviet union. And USA had to buy back World war 2 bombs that it had sold off to scrapping, because it had begun running low on bombs during the Vietnam war.
Staffs and ammunition depots needs to be dispersed
Once again nothing new. This is what the Vietnamese did to counter the American air power. They did disperse their fuel and ammunition dumps. And they did it so much that it because economically unsubstainable for the Americans to send up a plane to drop many bombs to hit a very tiny target of for example a small diesel tank.
You must have training capacity
Well captain obvious, we all already knew this. But the politicians just wanted to slash the military budgets after the Cold War and no one forced them to take responsability for their reckless decisions. So now have we all got what we deserve. We have too few conscripts to fight forest fires, too little hospital equipment to deal with a mild pandemic, and our anorectic armies have nearly nothing - and not even basic supplies that they can spare to help Ukraine now once a real war has started.
Indeed the entire idea of running the military according to neoliberalism is stupid.
The military is not like a car company that you run for profit. A car company just wants to make money. And it can make money by for example minimize storage costs for spare parts and products that it rarely uses. Lean production, and slimming down the organization to the bare minimum and having as few workers as possible is a way to cut down waste and maximize the profits for a company.
But for a military would it be a stupid thing to do that way.
A military needs a gigantic ammount of supply in storage. If a big war happens you might need hundreds of thousands extra uniforms and gas masks. And you might need a million artillery shells in storage, so that your troops do not need to die because your guns have runned out of ammunition. But instead will you have enough ammunion in storage that you military can keep on fighting til your industry have managed to gear up for war and increased the production of ammunition so it can fill the monthly demand at the frontline.
So a military should be runned at an economic loss if need be. A military is fighting in a very competative enviroment called a battlefield which puts much higher demands on an organisation, than a little economic competition on a market place.
There is little surprise that the military have created so many innovations and new products, as the military is a very highly competative enviroment that is not obsessed about profits, keeping down costs and other economic constraints like the private sector.
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Its kill ratio was however terrible with 240 planes shot down by MIG21 in all wars it have fought, while 501 MIG-21 jets have been lost in air combat. Not entirely the fault of the plane perhaps. But still... I guess that I'm not impressed. Despite all Vietnam myths did the F-4 Phantom do well in the fighter role and had a positive kill ratio with 41 Phantoms lost and 151 enemies shot down. While 95 MIG21 were lost in the Vietnam war while they only managed to shot down 78 enemy planes.
And in almost every metrics was Phantom the better plane. It was ahead of its time. It was super fast, it had superior climb rate, it did set many world records in flighing at high altitudes, it had a radar superior to that of Draken and even more to that of MIG-21, It had twice as many hardpoints as MIG-21 and could carry twice as much payload, its range with external fuel tanks made it able to fly further than nearly all other fighters of the 1960s. It was not just a one-trick pony like MIG-21.
Instead was the Phantom used as a fighter, an attack aircraft, recon aircraft and an electronic warfare aircraft. It was used by a large number of airforces around the world and is still even used today by Turkey. It was used by the US airforce, Marine corps, and Navy which shows what a flexible and powerful aircraft it was. It came into service just one and half decade after world war 2 ended and was capable of flying at Mach2 and nearly fly up into space.
The plane itself was good. And when a plane fligh high, then the air is thinner and the missiles can also glide a further distance to a target which gives them superior range to an enemy that cannot fly as high. So it was superior in that regard and its radar had a range of 160km compared to 70km for MIG-21.
So flying low to blend in with the enviroment so the superior radar could not spot the MIGs was probably the only tactics that could be used. The superior turn rate of MIG21 was one of the only few strengths the MIGs had. And fortunatly for them were they not bound by any rules of engagment unlike the Phantoms where the pilots first had to see the enemy planes with their own eyes before they were allowed to fire on them. So much of Phantoms superiority at long range combat was thereby lost.
The large smoke trail from the Phantom engines also made them easy to spot.
Furthermore was F-4 Phantoms much more common over the skies over Vietnam that they were therefore more likely to get shot down than the MIG-21s which were rare. So those factors considered should the loss statistics for the MIG-21 look even more terrible than what it already are, while the F-4 Phantoms kill ratio should look even better.
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@Roger williams
The "left" today is pro globalist, pro open borders, pro multiculturalism, pro EU, pro status quo, pro establishment, and so on. And the Clintons its allied with is also pro-imperialism, wars, pro censorship, and pro oppressive trade policies that harms the 3rd world.
Here you do a classic neo leftist comment where you attack a person instead of their argument:
" Also, political "correctness" only frustrates people who want to use disturbing language and gender & racial stereotypes with no accountability."
It is not racism or sexism to hold people to the same standards as oneself. I never tell a black person to go back to his hut and stop appropriating white culture as he uses technologies and culture that white people have invented. So then I expect that blacks shouldn't cry about cultural appropriation either.
And I never call it "womensplaining" when a woman tries to learn me a thing, so then the stupid term "mansplaining" needs to die as well.
And the left is too brainless, dishonest and ignorant to see a difference between racism on one hand, and justified criticism of religion and immigration on the other hand.
If you are against homophobia, sexism, and hatred towards non-muslims then you get called an "islamophobe" - which is basicly the same thing as a "racist" according to the left.
So the left tries to silence the debate with political correctness. And now we see the backlash against the left come, as people all over the world is leaving this rotten sinking ship. And people join the nationalist right because they know that they are the only ones that dare to stand up to the muslim bullies that harass other immigrants for being to "westernized" and women that are having too much fun and go out and not weaing an ugly beekeeper suit.
Indeed. You lefttards simply doesn't understand how other people think. You see racism everyware - even in places where there is none. And its not usally the immigrants that feels offended when someone waves the national flag.
Nope.
Instead it is usally white leftwingers that feels offended on other peoples behalf. The left makes claims to represent other people and speak for their views.
But my mother thinks modern feminists are retarded and says that they don't speak for her views. More immigrants votes for the nationalist party in my country, than there are immigrants voting for the left.
So it is simply just nonsense to think that "feminism" and womens opinions are the same thing. They are not.
And many (if not even most) LBTQ community members does not share the leftwing pro-censorship views. Indeed, many LBTQ activists like Diana Davidson defends the typical white cis-males that the left loves to throw shit at, and says that they are in fact more tolerant towards LBTQ than most people inside the LBTQ community...
you see many homosexuals are for example intolerant towards bisexuals and calls them "gender traitors" and being mean to them when they flirt with a person of another gender.
So the modern left needs to die. And political correctness is something they can shove up into their ass.
I am not a rude person irl, but I do however think that people needs to grow some thicker skin. I see no reason why people who claim to have been offended always should
take precedence in the leftwing world view.
People feel offended all the time for the most stupid shit, and people needs to learn to live with getting their feelings hurt and move on.
I do for example think it would be a very bad idea to censor jokes or criticism of religion because a few religious fanatics feels offended. You can no longer call prophet Muhammed a pedophile in Austria eventhough he was one.
So where should one now draw the line in the sand about what people can joke about?
Shouldn't christians now also demand censorship towards people who are rude towards their ideology? And what about feminists, shouldn't they also be able to silence offensive comments they disagree with?
Where do you draw the line in the sand?
I say fuck them all. Everyone should have the right to mock and criticise every ideology even if some people will get angry and sad.
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Not a single German solidier will be able to land his feet on British soil, since the US navy is stronger than all navies in the world combined - the US navy got more aircrafts than most all other navies combined. And only 1 aircraft carrier have more planes than most countrys airforces.
And EUs economy will self-destruct. Simply because the ECB is wrongly designed and cannot print money like the Federal reserve - which will result in deflationary crashes.
Furthermore is the EU banking system a ticking time bomb with its huge banks and reckless risktaking, non-existant regulation and non-transparancy.
And retarded rules like the convergence pact, the ban on capital controls, the 4 freedoms have made the EU economy unflexible, vulnerable to economic crashes, and it harms economic growth.
USA doesn't have any of those problems. The banking sector is however problematic, but US banks are much smaller, less risk taking and more regulated so the damages of an economic crash would be less severe to society.
EU on the other hand have no upsides at all compared to USA. EU doesn't have any oil, while USA is one of the largest oil producers. EUs economy have an ageing population, while USA is younger and the population in the anglosphere is larger so that the market of the English speaking world will be more important in the future than the EU.
USA is also self-substaining with fertilizer for its agriculture and it can get the phosphorus it needs from Florida. While none of the EU countries have anything of that, so that the EU needs to lick the ass of dictators (like Morocco) to get the resources it needs.
America also have more Fortune 500 companies than Europe. And those huge companies are key for technological leadership in the world.
And EU have nothing like DARPA, NASA, Silicon Valley, or Seattle.
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Battleships ruled the seas. Then came the torpedos and ruined everything, and having ships with big guns and thick armor was no longer fun. Battleships like Repulse, Prince of Wales, Yamato, Bismarck, Tirpitz, USS Arizona, USS Oklahoma were sunk by submarines and airplanes. By 1945 was no country interested in building any more battleships because torpedos on planes and submarines have made them worthless. Instead did countries build smaller ships instead like motor torpedo boats, destroyers and light cruisers.
And if the torpedos had not yet killed all dreams of big warships, would the next disaster soon come to them that would cause their final extinction: The cruise missile.
From now on would no navy in their right mind keep on wasting money on building new battleships or even upkeep old ones. The battleship was a dinosaur that was going extinct.
The Soviet union was first out with mass producing 200 new small fast boats equipped with nothing but anti-ship missiles. And thus had a new class of warships been born: The missile boat.
And since the 1960s have that meant the end of all big warships like Battleships, and Cruisers. At least when it comes to try to gaining naval dominance in the small Baltic Sea.
Now it seems like stealth and a clever use of the terrain are more important for the survival of a warship than what thick armor is.
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"No mention of Swedish small population compared to other European Great powers it was competing with thus dooming it from beginning?"
Portugal with 1 million people created the first global empire in history. The Dutch became the financial centre around the world and colonized America and the pacific and did beat back invasions by Spain and France that had nearly 10 times larger population.
"Sweden just had and still has too small population and thus it lacked economy and even army to sustain such large empire"
That is a very ignorant view of history. You apply your worldview based on the conditions 2021 and the 1900s back to the 1600s and 1700s.
Fact is that small countries could punch greatly above their own weight - as England, the Netherlands and Sweden show. While many large countries were very badly managed (France, Spain, Austria, Poland and the Ottoman empire).
The Netherlands could mobilize an almost equally large army as France despite only having 10% as large population. England built a more powerful navy than France, despite her neighbour had a 5 times larger population and the best farmland in Europe.
Sweden was the most well managed of all the countries in the early 1600's. Its economic administration was superior to all other countries of its day, and both Finland and Sweden is to this day much formed by the reforms of Axel Oxenstierna. And its army was also the best in Europe - and it conquered Moscow, Warsaw, Prague, Munich and threatened Copenhagen so the Danes were forced to hand over half their land to Sweden in 1658.
Sweden was the largest exporter in the world of copper and iron. It controlled the trade between Western Europe and Russia. It was the only country in Europe which could produce all the materials needed for shipbuilding - iron, tar, oak trees, rope, copper and so on.
While almost all other countries in Europe was dependent on vulnerable imports of weapons, did Sweden have its own iron industry and military industrial complex that could supply a large army. Most other countries had junk quality troops, while Sweden had a standing army that creating more cohesion, better training and better fighting on the battlefield.
Sweden did also have one of the largest navies in the world. And in some time periods (like the 1580s) did it have the strongest navy in Europe. And also its merchant navy was among the largest in Europe. And when other countries fought each other (like France, England and the Netherlands in the late 1600s) then did foreign ships choose to sail under the neutral Swedish flag instead to avoid getting plundered by enemy nations. Swedens navy was strong and the countries at war would think twice before attacking neutral Swedish ships.
"and most of Swedish empire was even less populated and less developed than Sweden itself thus burdening it instead of helping it"
Wrong again.
Pomerania gave Sweden an excellent base of military operations against Denmark and Germany. It was also often here that foreign merchant ships came to enter Swedish service. It was a very sofisticated province that provided the country with many men like the chemist Scheele and General Blücher.
Ownership of the province also guaranteed that Sweden would have a voice in the German parliament and therefore a say in how Germany would be runned. The province was also a source of oak tree for the navy.
Livonia and Estonia was the bread basket of the Swedish empire. They controlled the important Baltic trade with Russia and Reval was also the largest city in the Swedish empire. And they gave Sweden and important base of operations against Poland - which was extremely important since Sweden was Swedens most dangerous enemy in the first half of the 1600s.
Ingria was important since it created a land bridge Between Finland and the Baltic provinces. So now it was possible to transport troops on land towards Poland if there was a need for it. And this landmass did also cut off Russias access to the Baltic sea, and thus eliminated a dangerous military and economical competitor.
And the Polish and German cities along the Baltic sea controlled the rivers and allowed Sweden to get taxes and benefit its own traders in the Baltic sea region
Finland was perhaps the only part of the empire that could be described as poor and not so populated. But never the less did Finland play an important role in the Swedish empire. For 700 years it was Swedens shield against Russia. Finland protected Sweden and took the blows from the wars with Russia. It was usually Finland that got burned and plundered by Russian troops, while Sweden more often was spared.
But on the other hand did Sweden give Finland protection from Russian aggression. So without Sweden there would be no Finland today. Had Russia taken Finland and kept it for centuries, then they would probably have forced the population to learn Russian and assimilate and Finnish culture and language woult have been wiped out.
Finland did provide Sweden with a 3rd of the empires military manpower. And many of its elite units. From time to time did it provide Sweden with shipbuilding capacity and exports of tar.
"Their position as a Great power was fluke due Thirty years war and consequent weakening and fatigue of most of European powers"
As I said earlier, the Netherlands, England, and Sweden succeded well thanks to good organisation of their state machinery that allowed them to mobilize economic resources much more effiecent than other countries.
And their military was more modern. England and the Netherlands was naval powers, while Sweden was more of land based empire.
Back in the 1400s I don't think anyone would expect that Sweden would ever would build the strongest navy in the Baltic sea. The country totally lacked anything resemebling a naval tradition. It did not have any warships, or any merchant ships either for that matter. It did not have any experiences sailors and seamen at all. A few fishermen in a handful of villages along the Baltic sea coast that was all.
And meanwhile did Denmark and Norway have a strong naval tradition. Germany (Lübeck) had an increadibly strong naval tradition and many flourishing cities along the coast with a lively trade on the seas. And also Poland had a strong maritime link.
But 250 years later would Sweden dominate the Baltic sea and have built the most powerful warships in the world - like Kronan and Vasa.
Not bad for a country which had to start from scratch and create a navy out from nothing. That the country managed to create any own navy at all in itself is perhaps the largest miracle at all.
Had you told a German, a Dane or a Pole back in the 1300s or the 1400s that Sweden would have the strongest navy in Northern Europe one day, then they would have laughed at you.
"Geography and demography is the key and Swedish one just isnt suited for imperial ambitions"
And yet Sweden nearly won the Great Northern war despite the country with its 2 million people had to fight alone against Russia with 14 million people, Poland with 14 million people, and Saxony and Denmark.
For 20 years it fought this war. Frederick the Great fought the seven years war against a mighty enemy coalition, but his odds were better than those Sweden had and yet his Kingdom was nearly lost.
So the Swedish war machine can therefore to be said to have been much more ahead of its time, than the military of Frederick.
Prussia would however survive and become a great power. And today is Germany the most powerful country in Europe.
So from that perspective do I not think it would have been strange if Sweden could have remained a great power if it had managed to win the Great Northern war, and then conquer Norway (an easy task), and then would the country avoid military adventures and behead its worthless nobility. And then would the country do fine.
It could focus on colonialism now when peace had been established. A defensive military pact with the Ottomans and Persia could check Russian military aggression by unifying against this common enemy. And the bad economic mismanagement of the 1700s could have been avoided by avoiding costly wars
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Russia won the war but at a great cost. Half their economy had been destroyed in the war. Cities had been turned into rubble. Villages had been burned. Bridges and factories had been blown up by retreating armies. Germany destroyed railway tracks as they retreated.
So you can say that the western half of Russia's economy had stopped existing because of the war. Now everything left of Russia's industrial base laid east of the zone that Germany had occupied. Particular in the Ural mountains did you have much factories - because as you perhaps already know, did Russia take down many of their factories and industrial plants and transported them by rail to the east so they would not fall into German hands.
So this changed the entire structure of the Soviet economy.
Now the industrial base had moved from west to east. Instead of small factories, did Russia put up all big factories in a few cities. And instead of making civilian products did those factories now specialize in making military equipment - rifles, tanks and such.
Now would all parts of the production process happen in one and the same town when all factories were concentrated into one place. You dug up the metals from the ground, you processed it into steel, then you turned that steel into tanks.
Every part of the production process now could be done in the same town. So you could say that the cities in the Ural turned into huge military towns.
The war changed Russia. The military industrial complex got a firmer grip of power in the country, because it represented a higher proportion of the economy than before. And it had won much status and prestige in the war.
And people were afraid of another world war would happen again, so Russians therefore wanted a strong military.
So Russia remained a militaristic society decades after the war.
But this led to the civilian economy to be neglected. And the standard of living did not improve. The war had destroyed much, and Russia had much money it had to spend on repair on reparing bridges and railroads so it did not have much money over to offer everyday luxuries that we take for granted in the west.
Stalin hoped that plundering east Germany and stealing all large amounts of industrial equipment in Silesia would help the Russian economy to flourish again. But this did not happen. And all he accomplished was to destroy Germany's industrial base.
Russia had won the war. Its military status was great after the victory over Germany. And Russia took control over eastern Europe. But its economy remained weak. It had outproduced Germany during the war despite being a poor country, and Germany occupied all of Europe. But in all other areas was the Russian economy weak.
And that is also the case today. The Russian economy today is mostly just strong in military equipment, avionics, nuclear power, space, and selling raw materials such as coal, natural gas, timber and metals. Half of Russia's GDP comes from oil production. So it is not a very diverse economy that is fragile because it depends too much on a few sectors - and particulary the price of oil.
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Germany did only have short range aircrafts and they lacked heavy bombers. And they didn't have enough transport ships. And their Navy took a heavy blow at Norway, and the air force lost much of its transports while it was trying to take the dutch airfields.
So operation Sealion in 1940 seems totally unrealistic to me.
But Hitler could of course wait until next summer and focus on building warplanes instead, which would probably be a better strategy. But still, he would need some new types of planes because the JU87 was completly worthless against capital ships with its tiny bombload of firecrackers. And the BF-109E didn't have the range to escort the bombers - which would make the bombers an easy prey once they were out of range of their own fighter protection.
And the new Fw-190 fighter would enter service in August 1941 - which would give Germany just one month to defeat England, which seems pretty unlikely to me.
So a long story short, Germany had to remodel its entire airforce which would take time, especially since German aircraft production was running at a very slow rate in 1940. And it is doubtful it could have expanded much more than it was already producing, since the German airforce liked their Messerschmitts and only agreed to start producing the Fw190 after it realized that it didn't have the production capacity to build more Bf109's. The Fw190 proved itself to be superb plane, but at first it was only built as complement to the 109's.
Britain on the other hand only needed to focus on building fighters, and they had the advantage of not getting their pilots become POWs if they had to jump out in a parachute, as well as they could rely on support from AA guns and the British weather for the defence of the island.
And by 1941, Britain would also be more well defended against a German land invasion since obstacles would have been put in places, more men would have been trained and more tanks and guns would have been built to replace the losses at Dunkirk. So even if Germany probably could get more transport ships, it would probably not be enough to compensate for this.
And then of course Britain could call upon their homefleet in Scotland if a German invasion fleet was starting to cross the channel. And even if the Germans somehow managed to land a few divisions by surprise, they would still have the problem of supplying those men when the British fleet would block all the supply ships and starve the invasion force into submission.
And by 1942, the USA entered the war with their huge industry, its huge navy, and its superior airforce.
And while Germany lacked rare earth metals for making fighter jets, and aluminium to make planes... the Allies would not suffer from any such constrains when the resources from America and the British Empire was combined.
More ships could be built than the German uboats could sink, and soon new types of planes was built that could provide allied ships with uboat protection over even the most distant corner of the Atlantic.
Better sonars was being developed, and the enigma code was cracked. And in mid-1942 Germany was suffering heavy uboat losses that could never be replaced, and the battle of the Atlantic was permanently lost.
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@robertmier2217
There is no such thing as Euroland. Sweden fly Gripen. Denmark, Norway, Finland fly F35. France fly Rafale. Hungary and Czechia fly Gripen. Poland and Romania fly F16.
Only a tiny minority of countries fly the Eurofighter, and even they have resorted to other options as Italy bought F16 and Germany and Britain looks at F35.
I apologize for the awful grammar in my previous post that creates confusion. What I mean is that neither Germany or Britain can even take care of their own Eurofighters. So how will they then be able to take care of any Eurofighters for Ukraine?
RAF is cannibalizing parts from some aircrafts so they can keep other planes flying. So desperate are their shortage of spareparts. And now they resort to 3D printing spare parts because there are not enough of them around.
And the situation seems the same in the Luftwaffe. The richest country in Europe with over 80 million people can only keep 4 Eurofighters operational. That is pathethic. To be fair, this newsarticle that says this was written a few years ago. But the main point remain valid. Germany is having some severe maintainance problems with their Eurofighters.
So if neither Britain or Germany cannot even keep their own planes flying, then how should they be able to keep Ukrainian planes flying?
The only scenario where I can see Eurofighters in Ukrainian service would be if a fool was elected in Britain who gave away those planes to Ukraine, and if the Ukrainians would be foolish enough to accept this offer.
The Germans lost interest in a plane after 1989 as they don't really need a fighter that can defend west-germany from an invasion from East-Germany. They have of course tried to modify the plane to better suit their current needs, but lack of funds and interest in their military have probably not helped much.
To me it seems like Germany and Britain bought the wrong plane. In hindsight should Britain have created a naval aircraft with France instead like Rafale instead of having to buy F35B as a last resort.
And Germany should have bought a nuclear capable fighter. And rate of climb would not be so important, while other things like spareparts and easy maintaince should have been more important.
If Ukraine really must have F35, then the simplest solution would probably be to get Germany to give away all their Eurofighters and buy F35 instead.
But I think Germany rather use their money on their Franco-German 6th generation fighter than buying a large fleet of F35 which will also become obsolete.
The best plane for Ukraine is Gripen E. After that F16V. After that Gripen C. And after that F16C. And after that Finlands F18 Hornet capable of dispersed air bases. And after that comes other options... Mirage 2000, Australian F18, F15 Eagle, Rafale and such.
Rafale is a nice plane that can quickly be made ready for combat. But the on the other hand does it have two engines and only carry mostly french made weapons which makes it hard for other countries to provide ammunition.
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Food matters. Not only did the Germans eat more food than they produced and therefore they were forced to prioritize the conquest of the Russian South that was the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. Food still matters today in modern warfare. The modern food industry was actully born out of the Vietnam war. The problem was that Solidiers didn't eat all their rations because they didn't like the taste of the food, so they got too few calories into their bodies and didn't therefore have the energy needed to do hard work such as digging, marching and fighting. So the military asked the private sector for help. And it made some research and invented new methods to make solidiers eat more so they could do more work. And the new discoveries also enabled the food industry to sell more food to consumers than they otherwise would and thereby increasing the profits. And so was the problem of overeating and obesity born in the western world.
The food scientist Howard Moskowitz (and the father of almost all the grocery store foods we eat) was asked for help by the US Military.
* “So I started asking soldiers how frequently they would like to eat this or that, trying to figure out which products they would find boring,” Moskowitz said. The answers he got were inconsistent. “They liked flavorful foods like turkey tetrazzini, but only at first; they quickly grew tired of them. On the other hand, mundane foods like white bread would never get them too excited, but they could eat lots and lots of it without feeling they’d had enough.”*
This contradiction is known as “sensory-specific satiety.” In lay terms, it is the tendency for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which responds by depressing your desire to have more. Sensory-specific satiety also became a guiding principle for the processed-food industry. The biggest hits — be they Coca-Cola or Doritos — owe their success to complex formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop eating.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html
But also other concepts was discovered, such as the concept of the "blisspoint" which is perhaps the most important discovery of all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWh1PSQfdK0
And it have led to the massive use of sugar, fat and salt to increase the allure of foods... since the human brain is developed by evolution to find pleasure in energy rich foods containing much sweat and fat.
And then did Moskowitz all discover the idea of making food that suits one consumer group, instead to try to make a product that suits all. The pasta sauce company was near bankruptcy as it desperatly called Moskowitz for help. And he analyzed their products and said that instead of making one pasta sauce, they should instead make many - one type that suits consumers who like their sauce spicy, another sauce for those who like it chunky, and a third sauce for those who liked it plain.
And Prego tried his idea, and turned losses into record profits in just a year.
https://youtu.be/iIiAAhUeR6Y
The food industry now also uses other new methods to increase its profits by overeating. It uses different kinds of sugars that more easily melts in the mouth and faster reaches the pleasure reflexes in the brain so we immiedtly starts eating more, and therefore pull more food down our bodies before we feel tired of eating.
So far has the easiest way for a food manufacturer to make profits not been to increase sales, but to instead cut costs - by for example replacing expensive ingridients with cheaper ones - such as salt and sugar which are both dirt cheap.
But now things are getting different, for example, have the profits from selling frozen pizza risen dramatically when producers discovered that they can increase the sales by a lot if they make their product more alluring to the consumer by adding extra cheese (because fat is an ingridient that humans are hardwired by evolution to like).
So thank or blame Capitalism for the food we have today. Its cheaper and more well tasting than ever, thanks to guys like Howard Moskowitz. But it is also food that have led to massive health problems around the world for humans as well as pets
It is however interesting that once again the military have provided much of the innovation for this. And the military is a field where food are put under a much harder test than in grocery stores. When grocery store producers cry about falling profits when food becomes uneatable after a few months, military food producers laugh because they have to make food that atleast could be stored for 3-4 years. And it should be made so well tasting that the solidiers are willing to eat their rations.
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@notalecguinness3221
"And Protestant Germany enabled it when they saw Gustav II Adolf as their only possible savior from "restitution" or destruction like at Magdeburg."
After Swedens first victories did more and more German states join the Swedish side and soon had those German states togheter with the Swedes built a huge army no one had ever seen before, an army of 200.000 men. Much of it was just troops in garrisons in big forts scattered all over Germany but still..
Two-thirds of the funding for this army came from Swedens German allies. Either because of friendship or due to fear of threat of violence. However the rulers of Brandenburg and Saxony were the most powerful protestant states, and they wanted peace and as German patriots did they not wanna break all bonds with the German emperor even if he was a catholic Austrian.
The war could quickly have ended here. However as Swedens former allies switched side would the balance of power in the war in Germany change and the enormous protestant army faded away and garrisons fell into catholic hands.
Things did not help as the French from time to time stabbed the Swedes in the back when they feared that they were becoming too powerful. And the French had their own military alliance in south-western Germany they rather wanted to grow, while they hoped that the Swedish military alliance of protestant states would fall apart.
And naturally were the French not that interested in paying for Swedens war. And the Dutch also declined the offer of paying for Swedens war.
So much of the funding of the Swedish war machine had to come from its success on the battlefield. With plunder it could pay its troops, and victories on the battlefield would keep protestant German states willing to pay for the burdensome upkeep of large forces.
The Swedish army did well in Germany, but the sudden change of side of some German protestant states over to the catholic side made it hard for Sweden to win. Austria and Bavaria struggled against the Swedes, while the French did what they could of promoting their own interests instead of letting Sweden win the war.
However, when Spain achieved great military success and started to threaten Paris. Then France stood there with very little troops at their disposal in a dire situation. They now desperatly asked Sweden for help, and now gave in to all the Swedish demands of subsidies - and later on would those subsidies grow and France would join a military alliance with Sweden where none promised to make peace without the other.
And in return did the Swedish army march to south western Germany to take some pressure off the French and the situation could be stabilized.
"Without lot's of cash disposable in one shot, you couldn't undertake an offensive because you couldn't raise new troops or buy and transport large stocks of provisions to or through the devastated war zones where contributions wouldn't bring you much."
Most of the money came from Swedens German allies. A little more than a third of all war costs were paid for by Sweden, while two-thirds were paid for by the German allies. Sweden needed all the money it could get - and it was the number 1 concern. But the French subsidies just played a minor importance in this war.
And Sweden managed to build up a 200.000 strong Swedish-German army before any France funds had arrived.
And once the French subsidies came, they covered about 20% of the war costs.
You say Sweden was dependent on France and protestant Germany. But it is equally true that France and Germany was dependent on Sweden. For years had the Germans struggled and not scored any victories against the catholics. And France needed help against a Spanish invasion, and the newly formed French army was neither effiecent or large enough to be able to defeat the catholic German forces on its own.
" That's what limited the Emperor in the 1640s - he could still defend his home territory but not gain ground because the Spanish subsidies had mostly stopped."
The thirty years war was basically a world war, with Habsburgs against everyone else - the Swedes, the French, the Dutch, the protestant Germany, Swiss, Venice, England, Turks, Portugal... and not even all gold in america could pay for all this. The catholic military setbacks, and with France and Portugal fighting against Spain it became difficult for them to spare any resources to help Austria.
Had the world been ruled by common sense, then this war would have ended 10 years earlier than it did. The Austrians would just have accepted Swedish peace terms of war reparations.
"Although, unfortunately France seemed to have gained much more in the long run by it than Sweden."
Sweden was an exhausted victor in this war. Now afterwards we can conclude that the Swedish priorities at the peace negotiations could probably have better served Swedens long term interests if it just demanded more German land instead of money to pay off all its mercenary troops.
This would have made those troops angry and upset and never again would Sweden be able to hire any mercenary troops after it had scammed them out of their money. And Sweden would likely have had extreme difficulty of finding any extra troops for its future wars. But on the other hand mercenary troops were becoming more a thing of the past for most armies of the early 1700s. Gaining some income from nice German harbors and being able to field some extra German regiments in the Swedish army could have been more helpful in the Great Northern War.
And Brandenburg would become weaker and Sweden would have been stronger if all of Pomerania had been given to Sweden in the peace negotiations instead. And who knows? Maybe then Brandenburg would never could have grown into a great power after that? Would this weak kingdom even have dared going to war against Sweden in the Franco-Dutch war or the Great Northern War?
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The problem with the eastern front was that it simply was too many targets. Germany was never prepared for Barbarossa, they had not replaced their losses after the battle of Britain and they had not stored up enough bombs to a large enough degree since they didn't expect so much fighting on the eastern front.
When Barbarossa began in 1941 German bombers were flying multiple sorties per day and bombing targets at such a high rate that pilots felt exhausted by all the dive bombing. And planes had to sit on the air fields and giving the pilots some needed rest, because they had run out of bombs to drop.
The army was screaming for air support, and there was also troops to bomb behind the frontline, and then there was also buildings and infrastructure behind enemy lines that could be bombed, and there was also industrial targets that could become subjects of strategic bombing.
So there was simply too much targets and too little planes, airfields and bombs to attack them all. So Luftwaffe had to prioritize away many of their targets.
The German army did have very few guns and artillery pieces compared to other armies, so it therefore became extra important that they could get support from the luftwaffe. So their main focus usally laid there, and not on strateig bombings.
But when the eastern front was calm, the luftwaffe could become free to do other things than air support. In late 1942 it even did some strategic bombing of the industrial targets in the Urals.
Germany had by sheer luck managed to destroy the worlds largest airforce in only one week while the Russian planes were sitting on the ground at the airfields, and that enabled them to let their bombers to operate free without impunity. And even old Stukas could come to their right.
One can just wonder what the battle on the eastern front would have looked like if Luftwaffe had not been able to win the air superiority so fast. Clearly would the ground troops have a much tougher time since they did have relativly little artillery.
So when Germany was beginning to lose air superiority in the east with the battle of Kursk, then the ground troops discovered that things were getting really tough. Not only were they attacked by enemy planes, but they did also often lack the ability to soften up enemy resistance with artillery or air support.
So Germany had to rely more on artillery for the rest of the war. And the supplies for those guns were not the best with all the wartime shortages.
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To me it seems like T-14 will become the better tank. Most tanks got their humble beginnings before design flaws has been corrected and armour, firepower and mobility has improved. Abrams is an old design and it cannot stay competative forever by constant upgrading.
And I don't see combat proves anything or disproves anything. A good tank can have shitty killratios, not because its a bad tank, but because it has been used in a bad way... by for example bad crews, bad doctrines, bad leadership and lack of support from infantry, artillery, bombers, engineers, scouts, etc.
Saying t-34 was a bad tank like internet experts sitting in their boysroom says, is simply ignorant. It was a good tank, and certainly more powerful than a PzIII that people loves to point out that it could kill a t-34/76.
And likewise would it be stupid to say that the Elephant was the best tank in World war II because it had the best killratio of any tank of the war. Because how much do we know about the circumstances those kills were made? Were those circumstances ideal, and the enemy was retarded? or were circumstances harder than on other battlefronts? Is it even possible to compare?
I for my part do not consider Ferdinand Elephant the best tank, because it had many flaws - it was too heavy, it lacked a rotatable turret, its armour was not angled, it was expensive to produce and demanded much rare raw materials that Germany lacked, it was not mechanically reliable etc etc....
Despite all killratios I would say that many tanks were more powerful than the Elephant... ISU152, Tiger II, IS3. And when one takes in tank manufacturing aspects and the overall multi-role uses for tanks on the battlefield, I would say most people would consider Centurion, Panther G, Sherman, T-34 and T-44 to be much better tanks for that time period.
Neighter the Churchill or the T-34 had any glamourous beginnings when they first entered battle. And neighter had the Panther or Tiger. But later on they all became know as good tanks.
So I wouldn't judge a tank simply by looking on its combat record.
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Sweden's fleet was not the most powerful, but it is impressive that it actually could get a navy to begin with since other countries in the same situation failed to do so. Both Poland and Germany came out from the middle ages with a much larger naval tradition than Sweden. They had the Hanseatic league, all trade in their rivers and fishing. While Sweden totally lacked all that and only had a small scale local fishing at most.
But Sweden did however have an early state formation and an efficient state apparatus and rulers determined to build a strong navy to protect he country. Poland and Germany did not have an efficient central government, so their navies quickly got wiped out by the Danish and Swedish fleets. And that also gave the Swedish army a huge advantage that their enemies lacked. Troops could now faster be transported than what they could by land, while Sweden's enemies did not have that luxury. Cities under siege could be supplied from ships. Ships could provide supporting fire to the ground troops, and the enemy was forced to station troops to protect cities against amphibious landings.
Sweden became a naval empire. Stockholm became a Capital city in the middle of this Baltic Sea empire with German, Baltic, Finlandic and Swedish provinces surrounding it. And the only thing that could tie together all those spread out provinces was a strong navy. Sweden's main enemy: Denmark knew this, so they too also put resources into a strong navy to cut Swedens supply lines and to make it impossible for Sweden to get troops transported from Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Germany and Russia to help the Swedish motherland in the case of Danish troops launching an invasion on Swedish soil.
Denmark-Norway (and Iceland, Greenland) also had provinces spread out which needed protection the same way Sweden needed to protect their own. So the Swedish navy could also be an offensive tool, to cut of a Danish province from help from the rest of Denmark.
So much was at stake in winning dominance over the Baltic sea.
Over half of Denmark's state income came from the Sound toll (Øresundstolden) which foreign ships had to pay every time they wanted to get in or out from the Baltic sea.
The Swedish navy became unique for this time period. The Spanish, British, French, Portuguese and Dutch fleets all had to import their naval supplies to build their own ships. But Sweden didn't. Sweden was the only country in Europe with huge access to all of those resources needed. It got iron and copper from Sweden. It got oak trees from German Pommerania, or the Baltics which were all part of Sweden back then. It got tar from Finland and rope from the Baltics.
Sweden did not have as much experienced crews as the Dutch or English. But to compensate did this country already in the 1500s go for technological superiority of their ships instead and relied on gun powder "before it was cool".
The Baltic naval battlefield had some unique challenges. You needed big warships and a deep water fleet if you wanted to fight Denmark, Poland or Germany in the Baltic or in the North sea.
But in the shallow waters around Finland or outside Stockholm they were unpractical, because they could get stuck in the shallow waters or sink, and it was difficult to maneuver in such terrain. Therefore did Sweden also have to invest resources into building a galley fleet - since this small ship type was much better in navigating in the shallow waters along FInland's coast and they could become very practical when fighting against the Russians.
When Sweden stood at the height of its power in the early 1700's was the Swedish navy a superior force that dominated the Baltic. But the problem was that it was all based around the big battleships. So when the Russian's began mass producing galleys and spamming them out, there was no real effective counter-measured that the Swedish navy had to retake control over the seas in the shallow waters of the eastern Baltic.
The Russian navy spammed out ships out of low quality timber and the ships quickly became unworthy of sailing within just a few years, and the Russian sailors were just peasants with no naval experience. But they built so many ships that the balance of power in the Baltic sea quickly changed. The Swedish navy had no problem with crushing the Russians in open sea, but in the shallow waters there was not much that could be done.
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USA only have one culture - and that is American culture. And I don't think it is much multi-ethnic either since everyone speaks the same language and have the same values, traditions and follow the same laws - with the Spanish-speaking minority as an exception, because for some strange reason do they seem unable to learn another language like everyone else..
People might be blacks, asians, caucasian, or native americans. But they are all english speakers and consider themselves to be Americans first and foremost.
Problems will always be involved with multi-culturalism as I sees it. Should torturing animals, marrying children, mutilating kids, and stoning gays, jews and atheists be legal?
If two groups in a society have very strong different view on those issues regarding moral values, laws and traditions you will be unable to make a compromise that make both sides happy. So you get a cultural clash, and mutual hatred between the two groups.
Dividing up the country could be a good idea so each half of the country can have the laws that they wish. But if you have to share your country with a people you despise, then you will have a cultural clash and perhaps even a civil war.
So multiculturalism is never a good thing.
Multiculturalism is much more than just eating pizza, noodles, fish&chips, hamburgers, and falafel.
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I have heard that the USA threatened Finland to not treat them gently if the assisted the Germans too much and helping them take Leningrad. So as a small country, Finland needed to act carefully to not upset major powers.
Finlands goal with this war was to retake the land it had lost in the winter war. Of course did most countries that sided with Hitler probably also dream about conquering land from Russia when Stalins armies had been defeated.
But Finland was quite moderate in their demands compared to other axis nations.
Finlands careful diplomatic attitude towards Russia in combination with its great little army saved the country from Soviet occupation in 1944. Stalin no longer saw them as threat. And getting peace with Finland would save many Russian lives, so Russia would be able to send more men towards Berlin. The war in 1944 was still a life and death struggle for both Germany and Russia, and losses had been heavy on both sides.
So securing peace with the finns was important. Finland was the poorest country in Europe, but its army that consisted of poorly equipped finnish conscripts and Swedish volunteers still proved to be a formidble opponent that time and time again punched above its own weight. Russian tank losses were high despite the finns only had panzerfausts and 1 armour division consisting of a few stuGs and captured russian tanks (KV1, T34, T26 etc).
Russia could probably have taken Finland in 1944. But the price would have been extremely high. Thousands and thousands of tanks and men would have died... and all what Russia would gain from its victory would have been the conquest of the poorest country in Europe filled with not much else than mosquitos, lakes and trees.
The war was going into a critical end phase in july 1944, and operation Bagration had not happened yet. So German army group middle still posed a great threat to Russia, and removing that threat would be more important than conquering Finland. And if Stalin changed his mind, then he could just crush nazi-Germany first, and then instead take over Finland in the post-war period during the cold war.
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For the first time do Ukraine have an equal number of tanks to their enemies. Russias losses have been heavy. 4 Russian tanks lost for every Ukrainian according to Oryx. Losing 800 tanks is very painfull to any army and such losses cannot be easily replaced and losing an extra 2000 vehicles are simply losses that cannot be replaced anytime soon. Russia have been severly weakned. It have lost a third of its men and a third of its Generals.
Furthermore Russias advantage was more heavy equipment than the Ukrainians that allowed them to compensate for the numerical superiority of the Ukrainians. But with more weapons coming in from all over the world are this advantage being taken away from the Russians.
And as soon as the Ukrainian army get their new weapons ready for action, Russia will likely have its ass kicked. Deadly artillery fire from MLRS, Zuzana, Panzerhaubitze, Caesar, RM70, Paladin, 777 plus Ukrainian guns will smash Russian troop concentrations into pieces. Drones of all kinds will make their fire extra deadly and those drones will leave the Russians nowhere to hide as deadly fire falls from the sky.
T-72 tanks from Europe and maybe also some Leopard2 will roll in and destroy what is left of the Russians in the area.
And troops in BMP-1, M113 and vehicles from UK and Australia will follow the tanks in their advance.
The useless Russian airforce will be able to do less than it already does today, as long range SAM missiles can begin to shot down planes at high altitudes and far away. And Ukrainian fighter jets have become more plentiful and pose a potential threat everytime a Russian plane goes up into the sky.
More drones and anti-ship missiles will forever ban the Russian navy from coming close to the coastline.
Russia will continue to have logistical problems. Meanwhile will Ukraine have no problems at all feeding its troops as it can get rations from military depots from USA and Europe until forever. Ukraine does not have use their own mechanics to fix vehicles as a Czech company will to it for them, so another burden if off-loaded from the Ukrainian war effort.
Meanwhile is Russia unable to fix its broken tanks as only 1 tank factory can do that when all the rest are closed as they cannot get any components and assistance from Germany as in the past. Russia tank production of T-90 and T14 Armata have closed down completly as Russia cannot get the things they need to produce those tanks anymore after all sanctions imposed on Russia. Russia also lacks smart bombs and missiles for their planes. And without western machinery and components have the production been nearly shut down.
The economic war is also another area where the war is going badly for Russia and the country have already defaulted on many on its non-ruble nominated debts. And sanctions will become more and more painful for each month.
The media war and the propaganda war is also areas where Ukraine holds total domination.
And diplomatically have Russia failed to keep Germany, France and Italy passive. And even Switzerland have joined the sanctions. And Finland and Sweden have sent weapons to Ukraine despite their non-Nato membership. Also many Asian countries have assisted Ukraine. And also Canada and Australia have dumped weapons into the hands of Ukraine.
And with the genocide couldn't the public opinion of Russia in western countries be worse.
And whatever trust Russia had as a serious economic trading partner of fossile fuels are now gone.
It seems like Russia have bullied the wrong guy this time and got his ass kicked.
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@pax6833
1. This comment shows a total lack of understanding of battlefield realities. Of course does it matter if the troops are trained or not. If an NCO shouts out orders speaking military lingo, and his troops does not understand what he means... then they will ignore his orders and do nothing, or take action and act in a wrong way. Eitherway will this bad decisions on the battlefield and men will get killed as a result.
So not providing enough training has been a failure of western part.
2. One can always debate what was the best choice. But I take notice that russia lost many of their finest troops there, such as VDV and attacking in a city is diffuclt and costly and buildings reduced the effectiviness of russias artillery.
So Ukraine walked out from this battle with many enemies killed and a succesful delaying action had been performed.
3. Once again utter ignorance of the Ukrainian army. The shell hunger have forced their artillery to act like sniper fire and take out targets with one or two hits. And sometimes do their artillery run out of ammunition and cannot help the infantry fight off meat wave attacks, and that results in more orcs surviving the rush over to Ukrainian trenches and more Ukrainian infantrty men will die in close combat as a result. So just a 1000 shells more per day would make a huge difference.
Just because russian artillery sucks at their precision and cannot hit things with the first shot, does not mean that other armies are the same.
Ukraines artillery is better. Better crew. Better artillery with better range, precision, shorter reloading time and easier to move the guns around. And Ukraine also got special high precision ammunition, drones and counter-battery radars unlike russia that struggles in those areas.
Russia use lots of shells but gets very little bang for the buck.
4. Once again an ignorant comment. The real damage with that strike on the helicopter base was not the loss of a big number of helicopters - even if it was a painful event for russia - nope, the biggest damage to russia was that they were forced to move their helicopters further away from the frontline to not have the rest of all their helicopters destroyed by ATACMS as well. This forces russia to spend much more time traveling in the air before they can reach the frontline, and this will spend more fuel, which means that russian helicopters can now only stay at the frontline at shorter time than before before their base is more far away and it take more fuel to get there.
5. I was just trying to make a point that Ukraines offensive was of course not very likely to successed partly because of the reason that they not yet had any air planes supporting it at a significatant scale.
6. Much weapons had been promised Ukraine, but the polish T-72 came to Ukraine very late. And no Ukraine did not have much tanks. The only gift equipment they been promised in large numbers of are old Leopard1. But I do not consider Leo1 or AMX10 to be good and modern enough to be considered much survivable or useful on a modern battlefield.
7. Ukraine did not tell that direction. It was rather Generals in other western countries who told the media where Ukraine would likely attack. But unless we assume that the russian General staff are complete idiots, it would make sense for them to figure out where Ukraine would focus their attack. Anders Pugh have already made a video on that mentioning the reasons for why an attack there was the most likely.
I have made my criticism of the Ukrainian military for overly hyping up their counter-offensive and creating unrealistic expectations from Ukrainian civilians, and people in the western world. And when their offensive was launched and failed to live up to those expectations.. then did some backlash come.
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1939-1940 I would say Bf-109 was better than most allied planes and equal to the rare spitfire. The Germans did however get more out of their machines since they made surprise attacks on other countries. They had experienced pilots. And they had better tactics and doctrines. In 1941 would those advantages make Germany able to destroy the worlds largest air force - the soviet one - in only 2 weeks. The Russians had some good planes, but bad pilots, logistics and the idea of lining up planes nicely on formation close to the border with Germany made them easy targets for German planes attacking the airfields. And in 1941 Germany finally brought the excellent FW190 into service which was probably the best plane in the world at that time. And Japan had the excellent Zero fighter as its naval based carrier, while USA had deployed mostly their outdated planes in the pacific while Japan attacked.
In 1942 things began to change. America had the resources to produce more planes than anyone else and they also knew the art of mass production. America had access to aluminium while other countries were starved of it. And America also had high quality oil in large amounts so they didn't need to sacrifice the performance of their airplanes like the Germans because unlike them did they have excellent aviation fuel.
But America also had many good aircraft designs early on in the war - P51, P47, P38. And P39, P40 and Wildcat was only slightly inferior to the axis planes and could still be quite competative.
And by the mid-1942 - only half a year after the war between Japan and USA had begun, did USA start to dominate skies totally and completly after the battle of Midway. And Japan would never recover from her loss. Her best pilots were now dead. And many planes had been lost. And things would only become worse for Japan since American planes would only become better and better technologically.
And Japan would also get less and less oil stolen from other countries transported to her homeland, so japanese pilot training would be very bad for the rest of the war. And while Japan would be able to compete with wildcats and hellcats... it would be very hard for them to take on later designs such as the Corsair and Bearcat and all landbased planes.
In 1943 did Germany begin to lose the dominance over the skies in the east. And the Germans had given the american P38 pilots in North Africa some beatings in the first round. And the daylight bombing raids the Americans did during their early involvement in the war generated catastrophic losses for themselves. And the German airforce would be able to put up a good fight in italy even in mid-1943.
But from here on would things go downhill.
And better versions of earlier allied planes came into being and La5, La7 and Yak9 would become superior to the old German planes and equals to their better ones - as FW190. And the P51D became one of the best planes of the war along with her successors like the P51H version. And the P47 and spitfire also got improved and remained a force to be reckon with.
The German He163 and me262 were for a short time the planes of the war. But not much with a wide margin, since since the American ace Chuck Yeger was able to shot down two such planes himself. And he was not alone in killing those rare birds.
At this late stage of the war did USA have the best propeller planes, and Britain was using their meteor which was a worthy opponent of the German jets.
So overall do I think that the Axis had better planes upto late 1941. And then the allies started to overtake the axis pretty quickly as America joined the war, the battle of Midway and Guadacanal meant the end of the japanese control over the skies.
And Germany did suprisingly well in their airwar considering the numerical superiority the allies had and their access to resources... while the Germans needed to build aircraft components of suitable materials and lacked the same good fuel the americans had.
They improved their Me109K so it could last to the end of the war. And old and failed planes like Bf110 found their role as nightfighters.
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@kamilszadkowski8864
"The tax burden was in fact much higher in France"
Wrong. The French farmer only paid more taxes because the rich paid no taxes at all.
If half the country only pay taxes, then of course you have to pay twice as much. Which country got into economic problems? France or England?
- France.
You can read more in "The Rise of Fiscal States: A Global History, 1500-1914"
"France was also far more centralised at the time and would become one of the most powerful kingdoms in Europe."
No wrong again. It was a weak decentralized state where the nobles had too much say. They paid no taxes. So the country could not get a permanent standing army until very late (around the 1650s). Spain had been created a standing army in their tercio 150 years or so earlier.
And France was only powerful because it had the largest population in Europe. It had 20 million people in year 1600. While the Netherlands only had 1.5 million. But France did not accomplish 10 times as much as the Netherlands.
So France performed very badly considering the large size and resources it had. The Netherlands could mobilize an army of 170.000 men while France had an army of 200.000 in the late 1600s. I think that says a lot how much more effiecent the state apparauses of some other countries were.
France did have a 4 times larger population than England, but England could still build a more powerful navy.
So France was a very ineffiecent decentralized state. It had tolls along the rivers within its countrys borders and had militarized armed police (gendarmes) to guard such borders within the country to extraxt tollbooths from the peasants.
And here is one reason why we have this conversation today in English and not in French.
"What you describe is tyranny."
You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Countries were generally better runned and more free under a strong King that made sure that the nobility did not opress the peasantry. And when the land was owned by the state or the farmers then it could be taxed - which provided the state with the resources it needed for a strong army and good finances.
But if you let noblemen run things, then you got opression of the peasants and a weak mismanaged state, and economic problems for the government as the nobles did not pay any taxes. So if the nobles owned 80% of all lands in a country and all the farmers on that land paid no taxes at all.
Then would it be very difficult to find money for the government to pay off debts or having a well equipped army.
Swedens mistake after 1721 was it stopped its tradition of killing nobles.
"Sweden was never even close to achieving the population and territorial span of at least two of those countires."
Sweden was the largest country in Europe. Only perhaps Russia could be said to been larger.
"Poland grew several times in size"
The problem with royal marriages as I sees it is that they are associated with a very backward fedual order. Spain and Austria did expand to large empires thanks to skilled diplomacy. But those empires was very decentralized. Even in the late 1700's did the Austrian King complain that he had nearly no control over his own country since it was the nobles in the different provinces that did run the country.
So the resource extraction was very ineffiecent because the nobles owned much of the land. And the country was military weak for that reason. And since the nobles in Bohemia, Hungary and other places were strong would concessions be made to them. They had their own units and their own defence budgets.
So coordinating the large Austrian army became more difficult. There was no standardized equipment or standardized training.
Hungary made up a third of the population and land of the Austrian empire under Maria Theresa, and yet did they pay less than 10% of all taxes the Austrian state got.
"Ironically the Swedish social unattractiveness was one of the reasons why almost none of its territorial gains were permanent."
Once again are you going in the 180 degrees wrong direction.
The reason why Sweden never held on to its lands was because the lack of opression. The provinces which were opressed the most are Swedish today. The former Danish provinces Scania, Halland, Gotland and Jämtland were opressed. I myself live in such a province and consider myself to be a 100% Swede and 0% Norwegian or Danish.
Books in Danish were burned. Walking over the border to Denmark to visit relatives on the other side was crime. Churches began preaching in Swedish while Danish was banned.
Swedish troops were placed in the former Danish provinces to marry the locals in order to turn those areas more Swedish. And meanwhile was the men in those provinces pressed into military service and sent far away.
And the result was that after 20-30 years or so had those provinces become culturally Swedish.
Sweden never did that to other parts of the empire. And that is the reason why Finland, Norway, the Baltics and Northern Germany are not speaking Swedish today.
So in hindsight maybe too little opression was a mistake seen from a Swedish perspective 😉
In Latvian and Estonian history is the 150 years of rule under the Swedish known as the good time in their history. A time of freedom after the Teutonic overlords that had opressed their peasants. The Swedish empire allowed the Estonians to keep their laws and traditions and language. The East European serfdom was reduced so farmers got less opressed. So most people therefore loved Swedish rule. While a few nobles and traitors (like Patkul) got upset.
But he should have been careful for what he wished for. Russian occupation of the Baltics did not mean more independence for the people in the Baltics - It meant much less. And serfdom became more opressive than ever.
And the country was once again thrown into a dark age.
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Maybe I should add that the Swedish empire not treated all provinces the same.
Just like the Roman empire did not treat all provinces the same. Provinces that was conquered in war could be playground for a Roman emperor to do what ever he want - Including murdering people, introducing new laws, taxing people, demand that people do military service, force a new language upon the subjects and whatever else he seemed fit.
Rome did this to North Africa after they had conquered Carthage. And Sweden treated Scania the same after it had been taken from Denmark.
Romes eastern provinces was never conquered through military means. Most of them choose to join the Roman empire because their rulers asked Rome if they were allowed to join their empire. Rhodes joined the empire, and since they choose to do so out of their own free will was they allowed to keep their own laws, traditions, and not having to pay much taxes or having to provide the empire with troops.
Those provinces could not be treated how the emperor liked because they had rights. And the same was true in the Swedish empire. Estonia choose to join the Swedish empire out of their own free will, which meant that they could keep their own laws and did not have to provide the King with troops like other provinces in the empire.
Finland was considered a part of Sweden. So it had the same rights and duties as all other Swedish provinces.
Finland did pay taxes and provide troops and in return were they allowed to send politicians to the Swedish parliament to vote on different issues. Finland had the same laws, the same King, same currency, same religion and the same everything as all other parts of Sweden.
So it was never opressed. In fact, they have kept most of their Swedish heritage to this day. Today they have the same school system, same laws, same traditions and so on. Only the language is and was different.
And that is probably the reason that the country choose to become independent instead of rejoining Sweden after being the same country for 700 years.
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@mikaelpetersen3331
Sweden have owned Finland for 800 years. There are a large Swedish speaking minority there. Finland have only existed since 1917, but that does not make it a fake country. Because finnish speaking people have existed for thousands of years.
Just like Ukraine is a young country, but its people have existed for a thousand of years.
And just because we used to own Finland does not give us the right to take over that land by force, if they should be a part of sweden again it must be done with the support from the people who live in Finland.
Just like Russia cannot just grab Crimea which voted to leave russia and join Ukraine in 1991.
Russia claims so much bullcrap. They claim to be the protector of the russian speaking minority in Ukraine. But most russian speakers do not want their help. They don't want their cities destroyed by the russian army and see their neighbours murdered by russian troops.
Russian speaking cities in Ukraine such as
Charkiv, Odessa, Dnipro, Zaporizjzja and Mariupol are not grateful for russia invading their country - on the contrary are they filled with hatred towards russia for murdering so many of their countrymen, and all the torture, rapes, looting, kidnappings of children and destruction.
Russia fired rocket artillery on Mariupol and 200.000 civilians died as a result. That is how russia treats a russian speaking city.
So I can totally understand that nobody wants anything to do with russia. Crimea will be retaken, and ukrianians who had fled can return back. And the russians living on stolen land better just return home to where they came from.
Putins home on Crimea will of course be stolen, and it will be interesting to see what happens to it. If it becomes a shelter for homeless ukrainians or something else.
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@nian60 Youtube shadow bans my comment from time to time.
But some channels do also remove comments because the channel owners do not like them... warthog, scruffy tales, professor Gerdes, and suchomimus have me on a block list despite I am pro-ukraine and do not break any rules and mostly just stick to facts and arguments and make jokes.
But meanwhile are russian bots allowed to comment as much as they want.
For this reason do I prefer channels like Jake Broe and operator starsky instead of hypocrites who preach freedom of speech but deletes comments non-stop.
I guess my comment to a rusbot under this article was deleted because I called russia for nut see russia..
Personally do I not see anything incorrect in describing russia that way, when they behave in exactly the same way with their own wars of aggression, intelligenzaktion, lebensborn program, mass shootings of civilians, torture cells, ethno nationalism, jailing people for wrong think, terror bombing cities, ethnic cleansing and so on.
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In the first half year of Russias invasion did France with its 70 million people send half as much military aid to Ukraine than Estonia with 1 million people. This is how much France cares about Europes common security and solidarity with Eastern Europe who for years have felt threatened.
Macron seems more concerned about not humiliating Putin than what he is concerned with Russia starting one war of aggression after another, Russias bombings of kindergartens and 800 hospitals, or how russia have kindpapped and stolen 200.000 children from their parents, how they have destroyed cities like Mariupol and Bakhmut. How russia have made hitlists on people they planned to kill in order to get rid of Ukraines intelligentia and russify the country. France have no problem with massacres like Bucha and Irpin or the deliberate murder of 600 children in a bomb shelter... or the plunder and destruction of museums, or the theft of 600 airliners from western countries russia have done, or the fact that russia have built torture centrals - including torture cells for children, and they have regulary ignored the geneva convention...
France is okay with all that.
This is the kind of friend France is. Its siding more with Russia than with western countries like Poland, Estonia or Sweden.
So to hell with all pro-russian french politicians. And since all major names in French politics is pro-russian, I guess I have to say to hell with France.
Where is the freedom, brotherhood and equality in Putins russia that you love so much?
Where is the brotherhood to help Ukraine? Why shouldnt Ukrainians be free and not having to live under russian opression?
Who have decided that russia have the right to play the masterrace and rule over all countries in Eastern Europe? Why should the consent of Ukrainians, Georgians, Poles, Balts and such be ignored?
France should feel ashamed of itself for its russophile stance. And there is a long list of French companies that needs to be boycotted for helping Putin pay for his war and murder of civilians.
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What about the Japanese though ? Could they have achieved any semblence of parity with the allies?
Nope. The average income per head was much lower in Japan than in Britan or USA, which meant that Japan could afford fewer tools and machines and tractors, which in turn meant that the amount of stuff a normal worker could produce was much less.
So Japan needed more farmers to feed their people when they had less tractors, and they needed more men in industry just to produce the same amount of tanks as their enemies since their production was much less effiecient. And the lower effectivity in turn meant that it was harder for Japan to both increase the army and production at the same time. Meanwhile did the worlds richest country - USA - not have any problems of massproducing weapons, increasing food production an buildng an enormous military all at the same time. And all this was simply possible because of Americas effective production methods and her ability to rely more of machines and tractors and mechanized agriculture than doing all work by hand.
Also, let's presume here if the Americans do not get involved in the war, how would it have panned out then?
Japan did not have the resources to win against China either, and much less so to take on USSR and GB at the same time. And the US sanctions on Japan would have doomed the country and its war effort in China. Japan needed to attack the western powers in Asia in order to get all resources it needed - oil. rubber, rice, sugar, cotton, copper, aluminium etc.
How was british industrial capability in the homeland and the colonies compared with the axis capabilities?
Britain could easily have crushed Italy and Japan. And it was also slightly richer country than Germany in average income per head. And the empire also had great natural resources.
Germany could have outproduced UK, but Japan would never ever even be close at doing that.
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Operation Barbarossa could not have been more luckier than it already was. Germany won on the lottery wheel, and yet do "internet experts" complain and think it was highly likely and even probable that this war could have started in a better way.
I see that as extremely unlikely.
It was just random chance that the Luftwaffe managed to destroy most of the Russian airforce in the first two days of the war, and all what remained of it within two weeks. If destroying the largest airforce in the world while it war standing on the ground lined up, wasn't extreme luck then I don't know what more people expect? Winning the lottery 10 times in a row?
Destroying the Russian airforce the first days of the war saved Germany from disaster, as the German artillery was hopelessly undersized compared to other great powers. But with total air superiority could Stuka bombers replace the role of the artillery to soften up enemy resistence and wreck havoc on Russian infrastructure and lines of communication so the Russians could not coordinate effiecent counter-attacks to stop the German advance into Russia.
The Russian army had also been taken completly by surpise. Units had not yet been mobilized when the war began and half of all tanks were unusable due to lack of maintance. Stalin had also forbidden his troops to fire back at the Germans the first few days of the war so the confusion at the frontline was total, as no one knew what to do, and the higher ups offered no leadership at all.
And Stalins idiotic "not a step back" policy only made things worse. And all those things contributed to giving Germany some big wins in the beginning of the war.
I don't think Germany could realisticly have been more lucky at the start of this war.
Sure might Germany perhaps have two months extra to move into the Russian interior. But that would have not compensated for the lack of total air superiority. The mud season in april could have given Russia time to mobilize its troops, and move them to the front and given defenders more time to dig in. While the German armor spearheads would have their speed severly reduced.
And the German advance towards Moscow in 1941 was pretty much obvious that it would fail by mid october, as most tanks that the Germans had started the war with had either been destroyed in battle or rendered unusable due to wear and tear by all long distances of travel on the Russian steppe, and all dust that the Russian summer threw into the sand filters.
The infantry units had also taken much losses. And the German logistics systems could not keep up, if the Germans would push beyond Smolensk and towards Moscow. Germany simply was exhausted and needed to build wider railroad tracks and hoping for taking Moscow the next summer instead of pushing forward. It turned out that the German logistical system worked very poorly as the distance to Berlin grew.
The amount of railway cars that could reach the German troops were limited. And it became clear that the troops could not get everything they wanted. They needed fuel, ammo, food, spareparts and winter uniforms. The German Generals believed that the troops needed more ammunition so they could make the last push and take Moscow and end the war.
But their priorities were wrong.
The lack of winter uniforms would soon kill thousands of German troops and injure even more.
And many German units had already taken heavy losses even before the winter began. Some of Germanys best troops had already been lost and could never be replaced - such as the disproportionally high losses among NCOs and dead soldiers in Gross Deutschland regiment and Totenkopf Division. And then came the winter. And then came the final Russian counter-attack.
The attack on Moscow was doomed to fail even before it had started.
In hindsight would Germany probably been better off if they had made a strategic time out by October. And given troops a rest.
Trenches would be dug out. The frontline would be straighten up and good positions for the next summer offensive would be taken.
Bunkers and new railway tracks and railroad stations would be built.
By doing this would Germany not only have been better prepared to face Stalins counter-offensive with bunkers, mines and trenches. But it would also have shorter supply lines that would have made it easier for the Germans to fight and harder for the Russians as their supply lines would be more stretched out.
The catastrophic retreat in the winter in 1941 that led to gigantic losses of abandoned equipment such as heavy artillery and transport planes would thereby been avoided. And troops lost to freezing and fighting outside Moscow would also never have happened. Which would have left Germany much better prepared for the offensive in 1942.
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"Germany, the UK, and France do nothing and pass the buck to the US"
Both France and Germany have been ramping up its weapon shipments to Ukraine lately and their shipments is quite huge.
"I have no desire for a war with Russia over a non-NATO country"
Ukraine was invaded and it have the right to defend itself according to the UN charter and international law. NATO is not at war. It is only assisting Ukraine. Russia have over and over again started imperialist wars with its neighbours only the last 20 years, so it is good that EU finally say that enough is enough. East European countries have complained in the past when Russia invaded Chechenya, Dagestan, Georgia, Crimea and Russia have poisoned foreign presidents, poisoned people in England, blown up arms depots in Czechia, shot down a Malaysian passanger plane, harmed western democracies with funding politicial extremists to create hatred and division in our societies and undermine our democracy and quality of life, they have wages cyber attacks on western companies... and the list goes on and on.
It is therefore about time that we strike back at Russia so they stop their aggressions towards the free world. If Russia refuses to leave us alone, then it must be taught how to do so the hard way. And the only language primitive barbarians understand is brute force. We have tried everything else now, and it was useless. Now we kill Russian invaders/genocidal child rapists / toilet thieves. We wreck their pathetic 3rd world economy. We diplomatically isolate them. And the Russians themselves do the rest of the job themselves for us to humiliate their own country to the entire world by showing how pathetic and useless their military is, and one can only laugh at their claim to be a superpower with their tiny economy and useless military.
"a non-NATO country that has spent most of its existence as part of Russia"
A total non-argument. Finland have belonged to Sweden for 800 years. They have only been an independent country for 100 years. I guess that this means that Sweden can just invade that country and you will say nothing.
Not even if we torture, mutilate and kill entire villages of people and throw them into mass graves. You will say nothing about a war of aggression either. And you will say nothing if we decide to deliberatly kill 600 children in bomb shelter, and when we decide to deliberatly target hospitals with artillery fire and white phosporus that burns through concrete and steel. And if we choose to also do all those things Russia do in Ukraine as well as targeting ambulances that helps people injured by our bombs...
then I guess a normal person would sympatize with Ukraine (or Finland in this case).
But not you. Your moral compass is broken.
Only a psychopath country are okay with those things. Those are the things that Russia stands for today.
Indeed, Russia has always been evil and barbaric. Its no wonder that the former Eastern bloc countries decided to join the EU and Nato. Holodomor, forceful deportations of balts, Prague 1968, Hungary 1956, the Chernobyl disaster is all what Russian rule gave them. So no wonder that they had enough.
As long as Russia does not respect borders I see no reason why I should respect Russia. I am happy that this warmongering terrorist state now is bleeding. It deserves it.
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@kotkamrade1292 Нет никаких доказательств того, что в Донецке кто-то убивает русских. Напомню, что сам Зеленский вырос в русскоязычной семье, поэтому мне трудно поверить, что он захотел убивать других русскоязычных украинцев. Зеленский тоже еврей, поэтому все разговоры о том, что Украина является нацистским государством, — это просто ерунда. Используйте логику. Подумайте сами. Российская государственная пропаганда ошибается.
Независимо от того, верна ваша теория заговора или нет, одно можно сказать наверняка: Россия, разрушающая и убивающая русскоязычные города, такие как Харьков, Одесса, Днепр, Запорожье и Мариуполь, не спасает русскоязычных людей.
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@kotkamrade1292
Такое ощущение, что мы ускользнули от темы, не получив ответа на вопрос. Я до сих пор задаюсь вопросом, как убийства и разрушения русскоязычных городов российской армией помогут русскоязычному меньшинству в Украине. Только в русскоязычном городе Мариуполе в результате российских террористических взрывов могло погибнуть 200 000 мирных жителей. Таким образом, создается впечатление, что российская армия приносит больше вреда, чем пользы, защищая русскоязычных на Украине. Я слышал недоказанную теорию заговора о том, что в боях на Донбассе погибло 6000 русскоязычных. Просто ради обсуждения, давайте теперь представим, что это правда. Затем Украина убила 6000 русских для сравнения с 200 000 русскоязычных людей, убитых Россией.
Таким образом, Россия представляет большую опасность для русскоязычных, чем Украина.
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Charles had 3 armies - the army in Finland, the corps of Courland, and his majesties own army. And the finnish army was supposed to push into Russia near st Petersburg, but the army was led by a coward so it just turned around instead of tieing up Russia forces from other fronts.
The army of Courland got confused what direction to take, so it got isolated and outnumbered by Russian forces and took heavy losses.
And Charles was a bit unwise about his campaign about Russia, but he nevertheless he almost won. He intended to go northwards, but paniced when the Russians had burned all food so he made the irrational decision to go to Ukraine. He also decided to move his army fast instead of just wasting a single day of waiting for the Courland corps to link up with him, which in turn caused unnecessary losses of Swedish men as the corps was too small to fight on its own.
And at Poltava there was this conflict between Rehnskiöld (the commander over the cavalry) and Lewenhaupt (the commander over the infantry). Where Rehnskiöld behaved like an asshole and bullied Lewenhaupt before the battle. But the day after the siege of Poltava turned into a battle after orders from King Charles.
And Swedish forces moved forward and came into disseray because the infantry was moving too fast, in 2 hours before schedule. And therefore attacked the Russian without much support, so the losses piled up. But the infantry nevertheless crushed the Russian on the rightwing so they started to flee. And Peter the Great afterwards said that he considered the battle to be lost at this point, and he started to prepare his retreat.
And despite all blunders Sweden had done under this battle and before it, it seemed like the Swedish Army was about to win again. All that had to be done was to pursue the fleeing enemy with all horsemen and foorsolidiers the Swedes had and throw them into the fleeing Russians. But then the unthinkable happened.
Rehnskiölds horsemen was nowhere to be seen. And when Löwenhaupt got his new orders he couldn't believe his own eyes, as he was now ordered to halt his attack now when victory seemed certain.
And all this because a small portion of the Swedish infantry on the left was tied up on the left flank togheter with Rehnskiöld's horsemen in a totally unimportant fight in nowhere.
So the Russians got some rest and grabbed the oppurtionity to launch a might counterattack that crushed the scattered Swedish forces. And King Charles had foolishly never moved his artillery to the battlefield only because he thought it would be unnessary, because in none of his previous battles had artillery played any important role. But in this battle it could have played the difference between victory and defeat. Since the Russians had extremely much artillery at the disposal that caused huge losses on the Swedish army. And the Swedish artillery could have done the same if it had been deployed, and it could have played a key role in the last Swedish massassult that failed if it could have softening up the enemy resistance.
All in all, one could say that the Swedes came very close to defeating Peter the Great despite all blunders and all suffering during the winter. And had the Swedes won the battle, one could have seen many interesting events coming to take place.... maybe the Turks would feel like joining the war against Russia, maybe the Cossacks and Ukrainians would finally join forces against Russia, and maybe the Russian people would rebel against Peter Great for all bloodshed he brought upon his own country. And many Russians also hated Peter because of his many unpopular western reforms, so if the Swedish army had weaken Peter, then many Russians could have seized the oppurtunity to rebel.
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@SunRaIV Here is an idea, how about Greece and Turkey give say 35 vehicles each?
I mean it does not even have to be modern tanks. It can just be old garbage. M60 Sabra is old and is in a dead end, its probably cheaper and better to buy a new tank instead of trying to upgrade that old American tank with an absurdly high siluette. Sabra is inferior to the latest variants of Abrams, Leopard, Merkava, K2, Challanger, and Altay.
It just costs money to upkeep and it must sooner or late be replaced one day by a better tank. So why then not just give away some tanks to Ukraine? Those M60 Sabras would probably be awesome on the Ukrainian battlefield vs old Russian T72 garbage tanks.
And if Greece and Turkey can give away some tanks each, then you can cut down the arms race a bit, and ease tensions and save money. You will still have hundreds of tanks and be armed like Sparta even if you would give away as much as a hundred... so sure could a few dozen vehicles be spared. Cmon, let go of your russophilia.
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I believe that M-55S would at best be equal to a western MBT of the 1990's. Perhaps equal to a Leopard1 or Leopard2A4.
While I believe that the un-upgraded T-55 tanks in Russian service would at best be roughly equal to a M48 Patton or a Centurion.
The skills of the tank crews will however be very bad on the Russian side, and given the total incompetence regarding tactics will I not be surprised if the 800 or so Russian T-55 tanks gets eaten up very fast without accomplishing anything - just like how the Russians wasting their tanks attacking Vuhledar and getting destroyed by mines and artillery before they even came into direct contact with their enemy.
And getting close to the enemy would not be fun for the russians as it would be extremely dangerous to them. The Ukrainians got large amounts of anti-tank weapons, and even old and relativly weak weapons like AT-4 and RPG-7 could easily wreck such machines.
And the Russians are sending in their T55 tanks without explosive reactive armor, but even if they had ERA I don't think it would help them much given the enormous amounts of anti-tank weapons in Ukrainian hands... at least 20.000 AT4 from the Swedish army alone, plus all thousands of RPG7, and strange exotic weapons like PV1110, to more familiar names like TOW, Carl-Gustaf, Stugna-P, Panzerfaust-3, Matador, MILAN, NLAW, Javelin, and so on.
So getting into close contact with enemy infantry will be dangerous. And given the long range of Javelin and Stugna-P that can reach 3000-4000 meters, I don't think that lobbing long range shots of direct fire would be risk free either. Just about any anti-tank weapon could kill that crap, and only long range between the tank and the enemy can prevent the enemy from using their RPGs and AT4s against it.
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I think the continuation war between Finland and Russia in the summer of 1944 is even more impressive by the Finns.
Russia was a great industrial power that was pumping out thousands of IS-2 tanks, 152mm artillery pieces and military planes. Finland on the other hand was the poorest country in Europe and its army lacked everything except uniform buttons . Its industry was non-existent. And even with Swedish help and captured Soviet equipment did their military lack heavy artillery, and it extremely few aircrafts (and most of them were old and outdated) and they had almost no tanks, aside from a handful of StugIII and some captured Soviet junk that was little more than soapbox cars with a machine gun. By 1944 was all captured T-26 tanks and BT-7 hopelessly obsolete if they were to face thousands of T-34/85 and IS2 tanks Russia had put along the border.
The Finns still inflicted gigantic losses on the Russians. But the artillery fire, air bombs and big tanks proved too much even for the brave and skilled finns. The situation was desperate. Hitler thought that he could not afford another diplomatic blow by losing another member of the axis so he did decide to help the finns quickly.
JU87 stuka bombers, StuGIII and thousands of panzerfausts and panzershrecks were sent. And Russian tank losses quickly went sky high. The Finns had no armor of their own, but they were good at using their forests to hide and surprise the russian tanks and using the terrain for taking cover. And the russian military was incompetent and it often got drunk.
So its attacks were not that effective despite gigantic numerical superiority and enormous amounts of heavy weapons.
The climax of the campaign happened when the russians advanved through a narrow corridor. They did not know that the finns had prepared a big surprise for them. Every artillery piece in the finnish army had been massed around the area.
And calculations had been made so all the hundreds of guns would fire in an order so that all shells landed at extactly the same moment to reach maximum surprise.
A finnish officer told a Swedish soldier: "come and see here"... and he handed over some oculars to him and pointed in a certain direction to show him where to look. And then he said: "Now you will see how you will cause much harm and pain".
And a gigantic thunder came. And in the glass he saw things being thrown up into the air... trees, soldiers, horses tanks, trucks everything was randomly thrown around in a gigantic pile of smoke.
Probably many thousands of russians died that moment. And their last push to break through the finnish defences had been crushed.
In the long run did Finland realize that they could not win, so they started to negotiate peace with Stalin.
And Stalin was very eager to make peace with the finns. The country did not have much to offer Stalin if it were conquered.
And its military was good, so it would be good if Stalin could get that army out of the war as quickly as possible so he could focus on the Germans instead. He had learned to respect the finns. And he feared that a war with them would cost him too many losses that he could not afford. The German army was still strong and Operation Bagration which destroyed 100 German divisions had still not yet happened, so the outcome on the eastern front was far from certain. And Stalin was a 100 times more afraid of Germany than of the finns. So making peace with the Finns was a no brainer from Stalins point of view. Stalin quickly agreed to a peace with Finland so he could take his massive army and throw it towards the Germans.
So ironically did Hitlers panzerfausts to Finland probably do more to keep Finland out of the war, than in it.
Without his help would Finlands defensive lines probably been broken, and the Russians would have pushed through and would probably tried to follow through on their success and try to conquer the entire country as a result.
So one can feel a bit pity for the Germans for how ungrateful they were treated.
Stalin also demanded in his peace terms that all German troops on Finlands territory must be kicked out. So the Germans had to flee the country, and those who didn't were fired at by the finns. Stalin now finally feel some relief for Leningrad, and he could not unleash gigantic forces towards the Germans instead.
Once again had the Russian army proven itself to be large and mighty, but also utterly incompetent and careless in how it wasted thousands of men and equipment.
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I agree Anthony. Japans problem in the pre-war period was that her industry wasn't large enough for large scale military production. So Japan had to import tools and machines from western countries in order to become a real industrial nation and a military great power.
But in order to get those machines, Japan first had to export stuff to the west (things like cheap textiles) so that she could get her hands on foreign currency that she could use to buy those American machines. But in order to get any clothes to export, then Japan first had to import cotton and such which put a strain on the currency reserves. And things didn't become easier by having to fight a war in China at the same time as the country is trying to increase the exports so it can buy more imports so the country can indsutrialize.
So Japans Soviet inspired 5 year plan to industrialize a country in just 5 years failed and got deleyd because she didn't really get the cash needed to buy all machines, and buying all coal and steel needed to build a huge modern military.
So Japans limitation was cash in period before the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. And after the attack things started to change pretty suddenly, and Japan made some blitzkriegs in the pacifc and took control over the most resource rich areas in the world in record time.
And Japan now had more warbooty than her industry could consume. Cash was no longer a problem. Japan had all the resources she needed, but her problem was more about shipping them to Japan from Indonesia, Vietnam, Korea, the Phillipines and other places.
Japans merchant navy was large, but it wasn't large enough for this huge task, and the occupied countries economies declined when they couldn't export or import as much as before, when the Japanease merchant navy was unable to fill the ship transport gap that the old colonial masters had left when they surrendered their islands.
Prices on export commodities in the occupied lands started to fall, and the lack of imports made prices to go up and cause inflation in the occupied territories.
And things gradually got worse and worse, when the Japanease military wanted ships for troop transports and supplying the troops. And when the war started to go bad, and merchant ships was getting slaugthered by US submarines things became even more desperete. And only the most valuable commodies became shipped to Japan. But in the end of the war didn't even that come to Japan in suffient amounts, and the colonies economies got starved and wrecked and inflation was high.
And even if the Japanease war economy got impressivly mobilized for a not very industrialized or rich country (80% of the GDP was spent on the war effort), the war production was still not even near close enough to beat America. America for example produced more warplanes in a single year, than all planes Japan made throughout the entire war!
And when the war ended it was clear that Japans mobilization for total war was unsubstainable. 80% of the merchant navy had been sunk in the war. 80% of the infrastructure in Japan had been destroyed. Many towns laid in ruins. Many young men had been wasted.
And yet, was Japan never even close of defeating the allies.
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If I remember my Keynes correctly he said that he prefered spending on "useful things", but if that wasn't possible, spending on less useful things like the military could get the job done as well, when it comes to pumping out money into the economy.
I'm not a fan of Keynes, but I think that you are taking Keynes ideas out ideas out of context. When your country is in a destructive deflationary spiral you need to break that trend. Being a fiscal conservative in hard times would just bad worse. Balancing the budget by tax increases and firing workers in the public sector will just make the deflationary crash worse, since even less money will then float around in the private sector.
One way of looking at it is to see the economy as two swimming pools, one pool is the private sector, and the other is the government, and the water represents money. So what a fiscal conservative wants to do is to suck more resources out of the troubled private sector (taking water from the private sector pool) and put it in the government..
What Keynes wants to do is the opposite. When theres too little floating around in the private sector pool, he wants the government to spend more and he wants to tax less. The point is to get private sector going for full capactity.
The real problem isn't meaningless numbers on a scoreboard. The real problem is when machines sit unused and rust, when people lose their skills because they are out of work, when we don't get bridges built and work done that increases our standard of living. That is the real harm to future generations.
The national debt is taken by the American people, and it is spent on the American people. Every debt is someone elses asset. So if you get rid of all debts, you also get rid of all assets. Paying back the national debt would simply be pointless. Worrying about this shit is pointless. What should be the worry is to let the economy use its full capacity, to let every American get a job and that aggregate demand is full.
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People take more risks when the consquences aren't too harsh. Its true that it can lead to some "moral hazard problems", like the same problems as limit liability companies.
Welfare states get less lost days to strikes, less resitance to change and less demand for protectionism when people fear losing their livelyhood.
And its true that European immigration has failed, for two reasons. 1. too many low qualified people coming at the same time.
2. Not enough education. Rather than trying to make everything low wage jobs the government should try adapt the workers instead, so they could take other jobs and provide training. Matching supply and demand on the labour market.
And get a smart tax system so the housing market works well, and infrastucture, so people can take empety jobs.
High wages is the key, not low wage shit jobs.
High wages makes it more profitable to replace humans with robots. And with welfare the workers dont strike when it happens but retrains and take another job.
Your country gets rich by selling high tech products that few others are good at, thereby you can take very well paid.
woodchips, potato chips or microchips is the question.
If no safety net at all doesnt seem smart. Korea was forced to adopt free market policies to get IMF loans after the asian crisis. And since then the brightest minds have becoming doctors...so much so that they are about 5 times more common than before. Why is that? Why not becoming scientists or engineers? Because those are high risk jobs, so before even taking an education like that you try to get an education which will guarantee you an income no matter what, so if you get out of work you can open your own clinic.
This is just waste of peoples time, talent and money. And with a good social safety net resource allocation (the big brains so to say) would have been much more rational and better.
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+Dave Snipes America was more succesful under the rule of communists leaders as Truman and Eisenhower with a 97% tax on the rich, than America today. And America become rich thanks to protectionism and not free trade, since it was the world champion of high tolls in the 1800s.
And its nothing wrong that the citizens get their share of the pie, since productivity is more based on the society and institituions than the individual. Even the richest guy on earth, Warren Buffet himself admitted this when he said that he would have been very poor if he had been born in a poor country instead, since he claim to be a very poor farmer.
The taxpayers have funded the research behind the internet, SIRI, GPS, semiconductors and touch screens which apple uses, and most of the drugs big pharma collects profits from, so its not unfair to share the pie instead of having a bunch of company owners taking everything and give nothing back to those who enabled their products in the first place.
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Extreme equality is bad. In Eastern Europe economic inequality just got replaced by other types of inequalities, like your rank in the communist party and your family ties, friends and connections.
However, I would argue for a high degree of equality. Since equal societies performs best on all health indicators.. average life expectancy (for all classes), mental health, drug addiction, obeasity, prison population, highschool dropout rate, suicides, teenage pregnancies, sense of community and so forth.
So equality has a value in itself. Its about creating a good society. And I guess that most people wanna live longer. Its important for democracy and meritocracy. And you need it for having a productive workforce.
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Its not just the output that is interesting. Its also interesting know how high the GDP per capita (income per head is). Because that determines how much a country can mobilize its economy for war (most poor countries can't use 80% of their GDP for a war effort like Germany in World war 2).
And it also determines how much manpower the industry can spare. If two countries are equal in everything, but one country got higher productivity and every worker can produce twice as much goods per workhour as the worker in the other country, then the country with more effective productive methods can send half of its workers in industry to the frontline instead, since the country can produce the same output as the other country with less amount of workers.
This means that poor countries have it much harder to get both enough men to fight at the front, and men to produce weapons in the factories at the same time, because they need more workers to build a tank than a rich country does.
The size of the country is also important for the industry, since a large country usally have more natural resources and therefore have a much more self-suffiecent economy. Large territories also give the option of sacrifice some terrain to the enemy without heavy economic costs for the decision, and a large landmass gives the ability to manouver.
Another factor is of course how suited the industrial policies are to the needs of the military. The Russians handled world war II pretty nice. Tank engines was only built to last 8 months or so, and any effort in making the engine more durable by wasting more money, materials and workhours was forbidden because the Russian leadership correctly saw it as an unecessary useless sacrifice of Russias limited resources to build a good tank engine that could last for many years, when most t-34 tanks was destroyed by the Germans within 8 months.
So a poor 2nd world country could outproduce the Germans with their smart industrial policy.
Russian industry was smart in other ways as well. The moving of factories from the west to Siberia, plus all transports of civilians, and all troop transports and logistics made the railroad network overloaded in 1941 and 1942. So it became an highly prioritzed issue to take the burden off the railway system so it wouldn't collapse in midst of all the critical battles for the survival of the country.
So Russia created new industrial cities, around mining areas. So iron could go directly to the steel works and then becoming a tank without having raw materials moved around back and fourth as much on the railway lines.
So with the war Russias military production became heavily concentrated around a few cities, and decline with the civilian sector during the war and the expansion of the military complex would change the face of Soviet economy forever. It was an excellent system for the war, but not for the peace.
Germanys industrial production was a bit of the opposite. Their tank designs war overly complex, and therefore expensive to build and demanding much workers and the monthly production output was low. The German Army put too high demands on minor unimportant details, that became costly and wasteful - I mean why build a component that can last for decades when German tank losses happens at the same phase as new tanks are being built??
And with all those complex designs, the German tanks often broke down because there was always some of the piece of the many components that wanted to mess things up. So impressive as the Panther tanks were, they were rarely on the battlefield but spent half of the time in repairshops. While Shermans and T-34 tanks were active for service for more than 80% of the time.
Germany also choosed to build a twin engined jet fighter instead of a single engined.. which is just another example of bad priorities - especiall for a counrt lacking rare earth metals for building durable engines.
The bad decisions are endless, and some of Speer's criticizm of Göring and SS was justified. The wasteful V-2 project should have been scrapped immiedtly for example, when Germanys needs were defensive weapons - like the surface to air missles project schmettelrng - and not militarily ineffective and uneconomic offensive weapons.
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You don't have to be a leading historian to see the parallels.
You can make an endless amount of shallow interpretations of history. Hitler wanted a stronger army and a better infrastructure, and Trump wants the same. Obama attacked countries and liked big government, and Hitler wanted the same.
But to what use are those parallels? I cannot see deathcamps, martial law, elimination of the political opposition the coming years.. so I guess you are like the leftwing version of Alex Jones.
Like establishment conservatives thinking that they can "control" the radical loon that was just voted into office.
There's a German term you guys over in the US might want to learn now and it's called "Ermächtigungsgesetz".*
The rightwing have never had much of a problem if cooperating with all kinds of disgusting people and fascist elements when they have something to gain from it.
But I feel relaxed. Trump doesn't seem worse than the war criminal George W Bush who unproveked attacked other countries, stole their oil and forced privatizations upon their economy, he tortured people, he scrapped his citizens right to privacy, he scrapped the 4th amendment, he silenced free speech by boycotting journalists who critized him and labeled critics as "unpatriotic" if they openly criticized him which in turn could lead to people losing their jobs. He blackmailed other countries into submission with the expression "either you are with us, or you are against us".
So if you think that mainstream Republicans are the good guys, then you are simply ignorant. Trump is no worse than the rightwing tards. In some cases he is even better than them.
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Is it possible for the Japanese to defeat the allied Pacific?
No. The Americans were pissed off, and racist attitudes fueled the anger even further. And one just have to look at the production numbers to see how many much more carriers and other types of warships America built under the war, and then one should also remember that America also canceled many construction projects at the end of the war when victory seemed certain.. like for example the Montana Class battleship that have been mentioned.
America also built more warplanes in just one year than Japan did under the entire war.
And on top of all this was Japan involved in a meatgrinder in China, and at war with USSR, UK, Netherland, and Australia as well. The only advantages japan had was shinto and a little battle experince.
But America had the industrial and technological advantage, and soon also superior quality of the weaponsystems.
Japan managed to conquer the most resource rich area in the world with anything a large industry could ask for, but Japan didn't have any transport capacity to move all resources back to Japan. Their large merchant navy was too small for the task, and when the Army needed to get transported and supplied the strain on the transport capacity increased even further. And as ships got sunked by allied submarines and planes, the situation got unbearable. Japan could only transport the absolutly most important resources for their industry, and she was forced to abandon her imperialist-mercantilist trade policies designed to plunder her conquered provinces and outcompete their industries. Instead was Japan now forced to allow her colonies more independence, and open their own industries since the homeland could no longer supply them by sea, and they had to do their own foodproduction as well since nothing could be imported. And the inflation rose and causing harm.
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The best way to decrease the wealth gap is to help the working class climbing up the ladder by their own efforts. And the only thing needed is to end this pro-rich system that delibratly keeps people poor and unemployed. And I think there is many ways of solving this.
- Make the central bank prioritize growth and employment over price stability
- Free collage for everyone, so people don't have to pay out their own pockets - and thereby locking out people from poor backgrounds and indebting them over their ears.
-Instead of taxcuts for corporations, money should go to programs that train workers so they get the kind of skills demanded on the labour market.
- Let wages go up. Let labour get a larger slize of the pie at the expense of the capitalists. And this can be done by regulations that strengthening the power of the unions, and a full employment policy by the government, and restriction of immigration.
- Make sure that housing is affordable and transportation is good, so people apply for jobs instead of having to saying no to them because they can't a place to live where the jobs are, or it takes too long time to get to work, or it being too costly. This thing can be solved by investments in infrastructure and housing, and taxes and regulations.
- Cut taxes on labour and increase taxes on land and rents.
- I would kick out private contractors and end the lean production model aka "New Public Managment". That would improve the healthcare, the education, the military, the police and the prison system. And it would save taxpayers money, and create good well paying jobs, and more workers will be in demand - which would decrease unemployment.
- Hire more auxalliary nurses and teachers, and guarantee both the good quality of both education and healthcare as well strenghtening labour by decreasing unemployment and pushing up wages.
- The military should have their manpower secured and their wage costs under control by going over to a conscription army. Which would also decrease unemployment and provide skills.
- More people should be involved in building railroads, broadband, green energy powerplants, and affordable housing.
- A strong social safety net should be in place so people dare taking risks without losing everything. Furthermore, the system should also give people some income while the retrain for a new job after losing their old job. A good safety net also makes society a better place to live, and besides more public sector jobs, people in more equal societies also sees a higher life expectancy, fewer teenage pregnancies, less droputs in school, lower drugabuse, less obeasity, lower crime levels, higher level of happiness and a sense of belonging to a community, better results in school, lower rates of infant mortality.. yada, yada
-Interest rate deductions should be scrapped.
-Subsidies for low wage jobs and housing subsidies should be phased out, since it is policies supporting a system of keeping people in poverty.
-Tax negative externalities, make a tobin tax to kill off the useless flashtrading parasites, make it costly to study useless genderstudies programs and use the money to make STEM-studies more affordable. That would serve both the national interest, and it will discourage immature young people from taking a useless degree in sports, media or genderstudies that can't give them a job after they have piled up tonnes of student debt. Having dreams is cute, but when 199 out of 200 people never get a job after studying this shit, it would be a diservice to let them harm themselves by studying this shit.
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It depends on what type of Division (mountain troops, tanks, mechanized, infantry, motorized). And then it also depends on what year you talk about, since the German Army decided to make their Divisions smaller throughout the war. And also, Germany usally lost so many men between 1941 and the end of the war that most Divisions didn't have all manpower they were supposed to have.
Anyways, in 1939 did a German Division have 16.800 men. And in the later war years 12-14000 something I think.
So the size of a Division is often varied. In the late 1960s could an American Divison have more than 18.000 men while a Soviet had 13.000. Usally the number of men is between 10.000 and 20.000. And the firepower can be different between Divisions as well. An italian world war 2 divisons did not have much big guns and automatic weapons at all, while a German could be pretty powerful, and a french Division was something inbetween.
And to further confuse you more, so was not all men in a unit a man with a rifle in his hand.
For example, only 3000 out of the more than 10.000 men serving in the 173rd American Brigade in Vietnam was ready for combat, while the rest of the division was working in steakhouses and pizza huts, clubs headquarters, The Generals mess, artillery, engineers,
And when you also exclude people not directly assigned to combat roles such as guys who toted with radios, men who stayed back and typed, those who worked with the supplies of a company, or daily helicopter supply lifts... then you could only field about 800 men if you put all your five Battalions out to fight. So only about 6% of the men in Vietnam were combat personnel.
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Not at all. The corruption in Vietnam was immense, and Vietcong had no problems of buying all kinds of American weapons from the corrupt South Vietnamease ruling class, including M16 rifles, grenades, food rations, clothes, trucks, jeeps and even tanks and helicopters.
But even if huge amounts of M16 rifles was stockpiled, the Vietnamease prefered to not use them. Partially because they wanted as few ammo types as possible to carry along the Ho-Chi Minh trail for logistical reasons, and partially also because the M16 sucked compared to the AK47.
When your M16 starts to jam in the middle of a fire fight you don't wanna to have to take it apart and clean it, simply because you often don't have the time to. Shell casing overexpanded when fired and did not eject to clear the chamber for the next round. Marine Tim Holmes said: "One of our dudes got hurt. His rifle fired a round and then it didn't eject it. The shell expanded and then it pushed another one right in there and it blew up. He was all bloody; that was our first casualty. You see, M16's jam a lot. You're firing maybe two magazines real fast so it's hot as hell."
Some soliders wrote their congressmen and senators " ´We left with 250 men in our company and came back with 107. Practically every one of our dead was found with a rifle torn down next to him."
A marine wrote to Senator Gaylord Nelson " The weapon has failed us at crucial moments when we needed fire power most. In each case, it left Marines naked against their enemy. Often, and this is no exaggeration, we take counts after each fight, as many as 50% of the rifles fail to work. I know atleast two Marines who died within 10 feet of the enemy with jammed rifles."
Conclution: M16 was a weapon for the benifit of the weapons manufacturer Colt, and the Army officers who lobbied to approve it. They didn't have to deal with this malfunctioning weapon in combat unlike, hundreds or even thousands of American and South Vietnamease troops who lost their lives because of it. It was a weapon for the economic interests not the soliders.
Congressman Richard Ichord's committee discovered that the army knowingly let Colt Firearms test the weapons and pass army design criteria using ammo specified by designer George Stoner rather than ammo the army procured in Vietnam.
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how effective are military helicopters in general
Everything is relative I guess. In a military budget I would give them a pretty low priority on my wish list compared to other weapon systems, I don't think they are the most bang for the buch even if I think ambulance helicopters could be valuble.
The problems with helicopters in Vietnam were many. They couldn't carry a heavy load, and because of that their armour protection was crap and a single rifle bullet in the hydralics system could make this expensive machine go down along with men inside, they wasn't too suited to Vietnams weather and terrain, and when they landed their winds blow up wood and rocks and that shortened the lifespan if the propeller significantly.
And even if the idea of putting a force behind the enemy and smash him in an encirclement sounds great in theory, it seems like not much was done in Vietnam. And helicopters aren't much flexible as one might think either, they can't just put down men and supplies everyware but they need landing zones. And then you often want it to be close enough to your own artillery.
And when you found a spot, it could be dangerous to get there. Because the enemy aren't idiots, they know that there is only a very limited number of places where you are likely to land your helicopters. And as I said, it doesn't take much to shot down a helicopter. So therefore the Americans started using attack helicopters and prop planes to protect the landing and helicopters. But the Vietcong also learn the standardized procedures used by America in the video above.
And when you finally put down some troops, its likely that it is a limited operation since the carrying capacity of the helicopters are limited.
So what do I think about helicopters nowadys? I guess daisycutters have helped creating landing zones easier, I guess new technologies doesn't limit operations to daylight and good weather as much as before, and that helicopters are a bit stronger now so they could carry more. And instead of huey gunships, there are real attack helicopters nowadays. So helicopters have certainly improved.
But on the other hand, fact remains that they are expensive and weak and could be easily shot down by cheap weapons. And the ability to carry heavy equipment is severly limited. So I don't think they are a war winning weapon.
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Trump has changed his position on a hundred issues the last years. If one is so insecure in his 60s, then his unfit to rule.. yes, even too unfit to take seriously at all.
When you are 60 you should be at your peak of your intellect, you should have enough experience behind you, and you have consumed your books talked with lots of interesting people. And you haven't become a senile, lonely oldie with eyes that are too crappy for reading.
But Trump is anything like that. He is just nothing. He isn't against money in politics, he is not against the establishment, he isn't againt political correctness, he isn't against screwing the little guy, he isn't against wars, he isn't an alpha male, he isn't honest, he got no principles. He is just a worthless human being.
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Japan had 0% chance of win a war against USA. And Germany had their odds stacked against them. Maybe theres a slim chance that they could have won if they had taken Caucausus so Russia would have lost both 90% of their oil production as well as their black sea fleet and industrial capacity, while the Germans would have gained oil, self-suffiency in food production, plus secure a safe traderoute for their Turkish chrome, and gained other resources as well such as coal and timber and political prestige.
Not only would such a blow be devestating to the Russian economy at the moment in its most critical moment. It would also open up strategic possibilites. Germany could then attack Persia, or launch stratigic bombing against Russian industry in the Ural mountains, or use the Russian weakness to push deeper into Russia, or use the time to push back the western allies so they later could get free hands to deal with the Russians.
The problem with all "what if's" is that you get no line to draw when the scenario becomes too unrealistic. I don't fully believe the situation of a German Stalingrad victory would be fully as optimistic as I written above, but all things said is still possible, and the situation after a German victory would nonetheless be very problematic for the allies.
Furthermore, all "what ifs" are endless and when you add them up you can always get the conclution you want; what if the Germans not only invented SAM-systems, what if Germany had access to more resources so their steel quality didn't turn into shit? what if Germany didn't had wasted men in the battle of Moscow, Rhzev, and evacuated the Afrika Korps, and never launched the Arracourt offensive or the armour offensives at Budapest and the Ardennes, and made an organized retreat in Belorussia instead of having army group Mittle destroyed? Would the Germans been better off if they had taken Malta? What if Hungary, Bulgaria, Spain and Finland had contributed more into the war effort?
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The hunt for oil is getting more and more desperate. First it was just laying like a blanket on top of the ground, and farmers burnt most of it because they didn't know what to do with it. And then came fotogene lamps, and the industry was created and most of the oil was burned, but then they came up with more inventions and more uses. And oil fields was enourmously profitable, and for every barrel of oil used for pumping up oil from the ground another 100 barrels could be gotten. But as oil fields have been pumping out oil for a while and only half of it is left, its getting harder and harder to pump up that oil as it is mixed up with sand. So today you only get about 15-25 barrels of oil for every barrel of oil you spend at the pump... the Energy Return On Energy invested is only 25 so to say. Its a bad number, but its still much better than many renewables like ethanol from sugar which got an EROEI of 15, or ethanol from wood 5, or ethanol from corn 1-2, or maise 0,5.
As you see, some types of ethanol even cost more energy to produce, than the energy you gain.
There is no fix for the peak oil problem as no other energy source can replace it, mainly due to a bad EROEI number, but also for other reasons.
Thats why oil extraction is so important. There are 80.000 oil fields around the world, but they are not all equally large. The biggest 600 produce half of the worlds oil. And most of the largest oil fields that produce more than a million barrels of oil have been pumping for almost 60 years (the latest gigant that was found was Cantarell which was found in 1976), and those gigant are producing 20% of the global oil supply and are probably about to peak.
But there are no new oil fields found that could replace them, and before you can suck oil out of the ground you need to find a field and then get 12 years to finish an oil rig... so the future looks dark. The impression people gets from media is a bit wrong, sure its great when you find an oil field with a 100 million barrels in the North Sea, but when they daily oil consumption in the world is 87million barrels per day, that oil isn't gonna last long. And not all oil in the entire North Sea combined could have replaced the oil from the Ghawar oil field in Saudiarabia.
And oil extraction have moved more and more to places where the oil is hard to get as we have already used up the oil that is easy to get. So now we drill in dangerous places on thousand meter deep oceans like deepwater horizon, or extract oil from warzones, or from places in Dakota with a sensitive enviroment.
And now many countries allows fracking to fix their oil supply, create jobs and tax incomes... but by doing so and create about 3 years of prosperity they destroy the clean drinking water for like 800 years ahead.
Complete stupidity, and the rightwing goes into total denial of the problem, while the left aknowledges the problem but suggest retarded solutions that does more harm than good, such as ethanol fuel.
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If you see your family being driven over by a truck in Nice and you feel life is too painful to continue, fine, I am okay with it. But here we are talking about PREVENTION and not CURING, if we can prevent people from getting sick it would be the best solution for everyone. Both as a society and as individuals.
Don't ships factories oversees so people lose their jobs and their self-esteem. The economic crisis made people losing their jobs, their savings, their homes, their marriage and kids and will to live... and all just for nothing.
A strong society is needed that can help people with the small problems before they escalate, when someone starts unhealty eating when they feel a little bit down and become fat, times are hard and they can't get a good job, they lose self-esteem and don't go out trying to get a partner, and when they are fat lonely and can't get a job their depression gets deeper and more permanent and they might start drinking or taking drugs, becoming less social and losing friends... and they get deeper into the shit, and put their health and happiness more and more at risk.
The society just getting shitty and stagnant for everyone, but mostly for the poor of course.
And if you want a small population, then you might want a population that is well off and highly educated so they don't make enough kids to replace themselves.
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Direct spending on R&D is more effective and better use of tax money than tax cuts. Mariana Mazzucato writes about this in her book when she compares the failed British taxcuts for innovation policy and compare it to state led investments by the US military (DARPA and the US navy) that led to SIRI, GPS, internet, semi-conductors microelectronics, and how American Universities makes the groundbreaking research for the pharmaceutical industry. Germany is now a world leader in solarpower because of strong commitment from the government, while the American governments halfassed take on green energy led to the end of the company Solyndra. China had a similiar situation to America and solyndra with their company Suntech, but instead of letting the company go bust they bailed it out. And now the company is hailed in buisness magazines. And China is now becoming a world leader in windpower thanks to the governments determined push for green energy to meet Chinas growing energy needs.
The private sector are unwilling to do research unless its benificial and they don't like to take risks with big sums of money because that could cause bankruptcy or heavy losses. But the US government doesn't have those constrains, it got huge economic muscles and a reliable flow of cash into its coffers. And research doesn't have to always be bound to immediate economic profits.
The government can make many economically risky experiments, and afford to see them fail. And from the mistakes new knowledge can be aquired. And while scientist think that is great, a buisness economist would be depressed by failed experiments.
So the government has to do the big and groundbreaking research. While the private sector then can use that knowledge, and then use the new technologies such as GPS, internet, touchpad, SIRI, microelectronics and semi-conductors and make a consumer product of it - like an Ipad. That is affordable, convenient and meet consumer demand.
That will give us great products and create jobs. But in order for the US military and other organizations to be able to research products in the future, it is also essential that Apple and the drug companies starts to pay their fair share in taxes. This parasitism by the drug companies needs to stop.
The government paid their research, so they should provide cheap drugs. And they should pay for their fucking shit.
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Fair point, the unit cost is lower (still atleast). But its absurd that a fighter jet cost a trillion to develop regardless... unless you its good as a starcruiser, which this plane is not.
And sure, abrams and panther were crappy tanks when they were new but later on became known as some of the best.
But today its not at all impressive, and its design doesn't allow it to be upgraded into the best plane the world has ever seen. The wings are too small to make it able to turn like the best fighters, its emphasis on stealth forces it to carry the bombload inside the body... which in turn limit the amount of bombs it can carry.
Furthermore does the plane lack armour unlike A10 which its supposed to replace, and the plane can easily be penned by a rifle bullet, which would be enough to brind the enite plane down when the plane is basicly just a long engine surrounded by fuel around it.
Furthermore are the Russians already developing a plane (T-50) that is objectivly superior to F-35 even before this project has gotten any far.
And the idea of saving money by replacing 4 planes (Harrier, A10, F18, F-16) with one, is now at jeopardy since the costs of this project is constantly climbing more and more above budget.
And besides, America already got many good planes in service and have other needs than an ultra expensive aircraft.
A trillion dollars is not peanuts. So if this project should have money, then it must be supported by VERY strong arguments. But I can't see any of those.
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The plane isn't stealthy, but futile attempts to make it so are done anyways which drives up the costs. The plane is heavy and not aerodynamic, which contributed to making it slow and sluggish. The planes engine got a lower power to weight ratio than the old planes we have mentioned, despite the engine got a 20 tonnes thrust. There is a want to have a more powerful enginge, but the airframe can't deal with the increased heat that would mean during a hard flight. The plane is also weakly armoured and easy catches fire, even from small arms .
"such as manouvability" Which aircraft do you want to compare with?
You can compare it with F15 or F18. F16 is also better last I checked. And yes, maneuverability is a good thing to have.
Especially for a plane intended to replace A10 - a plane that have often times survived missions by avoiding getting hit by ground fire by making hard turns and manouvering.
I don't think everything is about electronics.. Otherwise then maybe an AWACS with lots of long-range missles would be a great fighter jet then?
This argument can be made any time, any day. The fact is that you're looking at a aging fleet (not only in US btw), you either replace them with new technology that will cost more to maintain or with new.
The planes are good as they are right now, and the cost argument sounds more and more hollow when it comes to F35. And I didn't say wait until eternity for an upgrade, I said it can wait since the F22's are still great. It would be nice to build a new fighter jet every day, I wish that my own little country could have a B2 bomber program, but the real world says that you cannot build new planes all the time - because of money.
it's a multirole fighter, it's not a pure air superiority fighter, it's more like the f-16.
Exactly what I said earlier. It just have an higher emphasis on ground attack than F22, which is more intended for control over the skies.
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Nato is outdated, and so are the EU - which was an institution created after the old colonial power France hoped to regain a voice on the world scene after her loss of her colonies and the loss of the Suez Canal. And France never liked the idea of remilitarizing Germany (as America wanted), but she could accept the idea if the German industry was put under international control where France had a saying... so the EU was created.
Fear of Russia is alos outdated. Only a clueless idiot think Putin is the same threat to Europe as the USSR. Russias population is declining, and its GDP is smaller than that of Spain, and her control over Eastern Europe is gone, and the military equipment is mostly outdated Soviet stuff.
So.. is there any need for European colonialism in 2017? Is there any risk of a Soviet invasion or a German-French war? I think not. And neighter am I willing to fight for an undemocratic, non-transparent, institution led by corrupt men with legal immunity. EU just wanna be like the USA. But I have zero interest in fighting for big buisness interest of EU prestige.
My country had peace for over 200 years without any EU so I prefer to let my own country build up its military with the purpose of self-defence by a conscripted mass-army, rather than join the EU plan of offensive battlegroups and rapid deployable forces of proffesional soliders... so people wouldn't whine as much over unpopular colonial wars, because its easier to support a pointless war fought with foreign legion troops instead of having your own son sitting in the frontline and fighting for nothing..
The EU needs to die. And each country should handle its own affairs, including its defence. And each country can trade with other countries - which have worked well for many European and Asian countries who havn't been EU members.
Instead of the stupid failed "one-size-fits-all" approach, each country will be free to design policies that actully suits them. So each country will get stronger, and therefore more capable of holding other countries up.
The world economy worked much better in the protectionist period 1945-75... than it have since after 1975 with the introduction of neoliberalism, and with the EU expansion from the 1990s onwards.
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"why logistics would be different of industry?"
Well for me logistics is different for the military and the private sector since they got many different goals and act differently to certain situations. Soliders isn't robots, but human beings that can't be massproduced in a month, and stored on shelf for months without maintance.
And while a car manufacturer wanna have as small inventory as possible to avoid unnessary production costs and avoid waste, a General rather wants as big inventory for a campaign.. just in case things doesn't go as planned. Running out of ammo at the start of a battle would just be the worst imaginable nightmare possible.
And having a slimmed organization might be the optimal for a car factory, in order to produce a car with the fewest number of workers possible.
But having a slimmed organization with the bare minimum of men for supplying and army would be a very bad idea, since even the tinyest problem could throw all timetables overboard for the entire organization since there are no extra manpower to fullfill the tasks that needs to be done in time.
And meanwhile you are losing time, the enemy gets more time to make counter-moves. Dig himself down and laying mines if he is defending... or perhaps he gets some extra time to escape being catched in a pocket, or perhaps he gets a chance to encircle your entire army thanks to all logistical caos.
Lean production/New public Management is a shitty way of organizing things in areas demanding well supplied inventories, a plenty of personel, and a good access to your supplies.
Effectivisations such as "minimal waste" and getting rid of "unecessary workers", would just be counterproductive for the effectiveness of an Army.
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The Germans fought hard in 1945 despite everything was lost. In world war 2 documentaries there are many allied solidiers saying fightning got much harder when the allies started to penetrate German land, and the German solidiers fought much harder when there was no more step back to take, because now the fighting was about protecting the holy German soil - and many solidiers even made suicidal attacks if that could benifit the German cause.
And according to my limited knowledge so was it the same case for Japan. Okinawa was considered holy Japanease land by the defending troops, and the battle became one of the bloodiest for the Americans during the entire war.
The military leadership would probably be ruthless in mobilizing everything for the war. But they would have many disadvantages on their side, since the Americans controlled the sky and sea, and Japan had lost all her imports from once mighty empire, most of her fleet laid at the bottom of the see, and skilled pilots had been lost.
80% of the infrastructure and 80% of the transport ships had been lost. Cities laid in rubble after bombraids even before the atomic bombs, and the firebombing raids killed even more people than the nukes.
China, USSR, Britain and USA stood against a broken Japan. And this was a war that never could have been won anyways, even if Japan had sunk every US ship at the battle of Midway without any own losses.
I usally think people exaggerate the importance of industrial might and numbers in wars - but this war is one exception because the American advantage was so crushingly strong from the start.
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Swedens healthcrisis began with the slashing of the public sector in the early 1990s during the economic crisis - a stupid decision if one asks me. And then healthcare has been increasingly privatized, and the public sector has been pressured to more and more adopt the principles of the market by adopting NPM.
So why do we have so much bureaucracy nowadays? When you privatize things and run things for profit, companies often set aside safety for their patients, overcharge, give misleading information, exploit workers and yada yada.... so to avoid that government creates regulation, so work gets filled with lots of fucking paperwork. Our school are also overloaded by bureaucracy for the same reason.
- So in fact, neoliberals love bureaucracy, since they think this market system we have today is better than the more socialized system we had in the past.
Furthmore do we have this idea that things should run for profit. That we should get the most out of every tax dollar (or "krona" in our case here in Sweden) that we spend on health services.
So how can we do that? We do so by increasing the workload and understaff our healthservices. In our schoolsystem you can for example get twice as much for your tax dollar if you increase classes from 15 children per teacher and instead get 30 chidren per teacher. But that wouldn't be good for our schoolsystem? I don't think so.
Sweden now has 254 hospital beds per 100.000 people. That's less than half of the average for 28 EU countries. And countrymanager proudly speaks of this as an achievement in effectivity.
And with planned understaffing and few hospital beds, the capacity to deal a large accident, a train disaster, a terrorist attack or something that leads to many patients are in desperate need of help is hopelessly unsuffiecent. But what does that matter to the neoliberals? Its more important that we can ship money to tax havens.
To neoliberals everything is measured in money and freedom of choice. But that's not how most other people think. A low cost service isn't the most important thing for old people. They rather get visited by people they know and trust, and who can take time talking to them... than getting a constant flow of new people rushing in and out to them and never have any time to talk and listen to our lonely old people. And for oldies and their relatives its also comfortable to know which person they should contact in case something happens... which is not easy to know with the neoliberal home service system.
Lean production / new public managment always leads to a decline in public health everyware its tried: in Canada , in Sweden, in Germany, in Holland.
To save costs and increase profits workers are slashed, fulltime workers are replaced by non-fulltime workers, cleaning companies wins public procurement contracts by offering services at low costs by unserious practices such as shitty wages and offering to clean the same rooms for half the time - which leads to sloppy cleaning and unhealthy enviroments. And companies tries to replace humans with machines and robot vacuum cleaners to cut costs. Old people are served sloppy shitty meals to increase profits. The old pracatices of cleaning and cooking at hospitals are getting oursourced to be cooked by a central kitchen somewhere far away.
And in Sweden one can see the same tendensies as well.
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As I sees it there are 3 ways to regulate a market: Government ownership of the industry. Private ownership of the industry with regulations. And private ownership with taxes.
The profit motive only is a problem in capitalism, and not in socialism. Do society have any interest in creating 9 times more nuclear bombs than needed for destroying the planet? No.
But for defence contractors, producing as much useless junk as possible for the sake of profit is a thing.
The same thing is true for toxic financial products that the banks create, society have no need in them. So when you run an industry for the sake of society instead of profits you get different results.
Overtreatment and overcharging patients is a problem in capitalistic healthcare, and not in socialist healthcare.
Why isn't Americas capitalistic healthcare system better than Cubas despite GDP per capita is 20 times higher in America, and the country puts a 3rd of its GDP into healthcare? Because capitalism suck at healthcare, and it generates lots of social problems such as higher inequality when jobs are shipped overseas and redistribution programs is slashed. And in general unequal societies performs worse as Richard Wilkinson and Kate Picket points out - they got more teenage pregnancies, more drug abuse and alcohol abuse, higher rates of obesity, more crime, higher frequency of dropouts, more suicides, lower levels of happniess, mental illness problems is more common...and the list goes on and on.
And worst of all do capitalism unlike socialism not have any incentive of its own to prevent people from getting sick in the first place. The only way to get capitalism to take any responsability is either to regulate away the problem, or you punish companies with hard taxes if they are causing harm to society.
So the reason why England became the first country in the world to go through the "demograpic transition" was not thanks to Capitalism, but rather despite it.
People usally died before they reached the age of 30 in England in the early 1800s. But at the late 1800s measures by the sanitation movement to eradicate the things that made people sick, and the labour movement and unions had become strong enough to push through demands for change.
They pushed for government building a sewer in the cities, despite protests from the capitalists who didn't wanna pay taxes for them. They pushed for higher wages so ordinary people could eat better diets. They pushed for better housing. And for a cleaner enviroment.
So thanks to them the average life expectancy had more than doubled between 1880 and 1950, and it became common for people to live beyond their 50s.
Some tries to give capitalism credit, and says a technological revolution is to thank for this achievement.
But effective drugs wasn't even available for most of the time, when this rising improvement took place.
Sulphanilamide drugs only began be available in 1935, penicillin in 1941 and broad-spectrum antibiotics from 1947 onwards.
So disease prevention played the key roll, and not some other nonsense. That's how Europeans stop dying from infectious diseases.
So why is Cuba doing so well despite being 3rd world country. Firstly do they of course see healthcare as a human right for all Cubans, so they have made large spending commitments to healthcare - the regime was simply in need of support of the people for its own existence, so therefore they prioritized healthcare for all as a way to win support.
And secondly do their healthcare system focus more on disease prevention than here in Europe and US. Doctors gets an education on how the body as whole functions, instead of specialize their competence in one field and one bodypart. So that shortens the education time for a doctor, and Cuban doctor can treat 90% of the most common diseases his patients come to show him, so he takes much of the workload off the specialists that only has to deal with the more rare diseases.
The Cuban doctors works and live among the local population, and people don't have to travel far to get help - which is a large problem in many poor countries, where long trips have to made to get treatment or give birth.
The doctors also educate the population in sanitation. And government healthplans are done locally to increase effiecent use of resources... so if your people are in a partical area where some types of dieases are common and people are in a different age group than in other places of the country, you do of course then plan your resources accordingly to deal with the most stressing problem in a certain area.
And health aspects are also taken in all areas of government, and resources from other departments can put under the disposal of the healthcare sector, so for example Cuban military conscripts can drain swamps to kill mosquitos.
And this disease prevention strategy also saves money, because people are spared suffering and they don't have to stay home from work because of sickness. And when people doesn't get sick all the time, you don't need as much doctors and hospital beds - which also saves money.
So in socialism, hospitals isn't were we wanna put our resources. We wanna put them on local disease prevention. But in case everything fails, giving people drugs or sending people to a hospital is necessary as a last line of defence. And that's why the reason why we also want them to be well funded.
So to end this all up. What do I think about private healthcare? It suck. What do I think of regulation? I hate it. It adds bureaucracy. It costs money to enforce laws, and there is a risk an industry can become overregulated or underregulated. And scumbags always tries to find ways around regulations.
So that's the reason I prefer taxes more than regulations if a private market should exist. I would let banks do their buisnesses, and even harmful stuff would be allowed - such as high frequency trading. But I would put a 0.20% tax on each transaction, and that would basicly kill off this destructive parasite behaviour since the protitmargins on each transaction is so small.
So by doing so, I fill the state coffers with tax money, I don't add any burdensome paperwork, society doesn't have to spend much resources in overseeing the system, and ordinary people can trade stocks without any much problems. This extremly low tax is so low that it is almost invisable, and it would probably even save them money when banking parasites don't steal their money with their rigged bullshit game.
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Not only would the quality of their retirement be better, they would have less stressful jobs, less stress related to job security, people could find jobs and feel freedom that comes with it, instead of feeling humiliation and being failure, not being able to move out and find a partner, and start getting depressed, overeating, taking drugs and commit crime.
Its better for health and much cheaper to just do away with the causes that make people sick in the first place, instead not doing so. Disease prevention costs money, but having more people sick and demands more doctors and hospital beds. And poor people cannot afford to treat minor illnesses, which eventually turns into bigger problems. Having people sick, and then try to cure them with 20 different drugs is probably not the best way to go.
The miracle with Cubas extremely efficient, cheap health care is just their larger focuse on disease prevention. And a local focus, where local diseases are reported, and depending on the age of the population, and the geography and climate, certain types of diseases are more common in certain areas, so government resources are allocated accordingly to best matching the needs. The healthcare deparment also co-operates with other government agencies to remove sources of disease, and by using military personel in the projects, the costs can be kept down. Most doctors get a basic understanding of all the organs in the body, unlike their
colleagues in western countries who specialise on only one part of the body. That gives them a better understanding how the human body and society is connected, and they are able to treat 90% of the most common problems people have. And they arent over-educated like western doctors, so they are more cheaper and easier to mass-produce. Cuban health personnel also works a lot with projects of educating people in their local areas about common health risks.
Cuba is a poor third world country, who despite sanctions by USA that blocked medicines and modern equipment, managed to keep their public health at levels equally good to 1st world countries, and in some aspects even better.
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Let me tell you a chocker. All rich countries restrics immigration from poor countries. If they didn't then wages would be 40 times lower. And as low wages are even in Eastern Europe, they are still higher than in many third world countries.
And there is another point as well. People don't like to feel like a stranger in their own country, so regardless if you think countries is just a social construct or not with cultures changing over the centuries, I think you can realize that short term drastical changes in values, customs, beliefs, laws, traditions and such will cause tensions and people will feel unsafe in their own country. The immigrants atleast have the option to go home if they don't like living with other cultures, but that option is closed for the country that have already got millions of foreigners on their own territory.
When countries say we don't want third worlders in, they basicly argue just like people who don't want muslims in. And all countries does that, and have always done so. People say Trump is racist for deporting Mexican illegals and building a wall. But Mexico is just doing the same thing, they got a wall against other Latin American countries that are even poorer than Mexico. And deporting illegals is simply to upheld law an order in a country.
And if your society decides to have a generous immigration policy, you still needs to deport people that have gotten their access denied - for whatever reason, if it is that they aren't in dire needs as refugees, or if they havn't got a job, or if they are criminals and therefore unwelcome in.
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Because companies love to give threats and shifting the blame when they close down factories.
If I was an evil capitalist who wanted to close down a profitable factory and move production to another place, I would pretend its someones elses fault. Instead of telling media "I closed down your factory, because I am a greedy bastard." I would say "Its soooo regretable, I cant keep the jobs here in this wonderful country because of the enviromental overregulation, the high taxes, and the greedy unions :("
And I would misguide the public by saying regulations on my sector is too harsh so I can get consessions.
The truth is that most companies are national, and companies like Nestle are the exception. If governments wanted to stop one of their crown jewels from moving they could easily do so. If I was a dictator of Sweden, and Ericsson (the largest company on the Swedish stock market) wanted too move production to another country I could just rip up one of the government defence contracts and their stock would take a nose dive over night and the company would go bankrupth. I doesn't even have to rip all the contracts up, I just need to threaten to do so in the media to crush a disobediant company like a bug under a boot.
Most companies are dependent on the governmets, and are loyal to their communities for historical reasons. Ericsson has been saved from bankrupthcy a dozen times by the taxpayers. The homemarket is a safe reliable market to go to when the world market is in though times. And if a strategically important company is in bad shape, the government could order some of their products.. drugs, police cars, military equipment and so on.
And in good times the government is also playing an important role, by providing export guarantees, so if Ericsson wins a government contract and should build a telecommunications network in Brazil for a huge order of 40 billion dollars, the Swedish government could make a promise to step in and pay if Ericsson couldnt fullfill this order. And by having the backing of a guarantee by the Swedish taxpayers, Ericsson can loan money at low interest rates and stay competative, and take on big projects it otherwise lacks the economic muscles to do.
The threats of high taxes is also silly, if a country with a 28% corporate tax increase the tax with 2%, rightwingers shout that this would make companies leaving the country. But where should they go? to Germany with 40% corporate tax rate? to Japan with 60%?
And even if another country got a lower tax rate, does it matter? The most important thing is demand for the goods you are selling. If no one is buying the stuff you are selling it doesnt matter if taxes are zero, labour are dirt cheap and interest rates are zero.
And then there is this problem of moving. Money can be easily moved, but not the bricks and machines. You also need to train new workers. You need to find new suppliers, financiers, sellers, manage the logistics and so on.
Now to answer your question shortly: Companies does only leave if you allow them to. Governments arent powerless, they are only powerless if you choose to dont use the power. Its really the companies that are weak and lack power. Disney land got neighter an army or power, but governments do.
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While physics and mathematics is a hard science with objectivly clear answers.
Economics is a soft science.. more like psychology.. without much objective facts. People make up the economy, and unlike atoms they often change their behavior.
Modern mainstream economists love to pretend that they do hard science, since they are obsessed about mathematics. And that makes their modelling and theories seem like rigorous and precise.
But in reality isn't there any "hard numbers" in economics.If you work 1 hour per week you are no longer counted as unemployed by the international labour organization, for example.
But most people would disagree with this definition that governments use of measuring unemployment, since its impossible to make a living by only make 1 hour of work per week. Many people want to work more, but can't find any job.
So what number of hours would be a fair measurement of unemployment? It depends on who you ask and what number they give.
Another controversial topic is when you compare the national wealth between free market economies like USA with mixed economies like Sweden.
Should you only measure the assetts, even if that makes free market countries seem more succesful than they are? Or should you also include the public sector.. even if that creates lots of new problems.. such as there is no market for public sector building so we can't know what price of all government assetts, so we have to guess what things are worth.
And then we got the controversial question what is money? In America you got many types of measurements of the money supply m1, m2,m3, m7 and so on.
Some money only exist as gold, other types of money exist as pieces of paper in your wallet, and most of the dollars in existence are in the forms of digital numbers in a computer or in the form of securities and loans.
They got different properties, some are safer but unflexible, while others are more risky but got the flexibility to expand as the need for credit grows.
So in the end, we should never take the word of an economist as an objective truth. We have to educate ourselves as citizens to know the basic economic facts, and the details we can leave to the economists.
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Germany needed food, oil, steel and aluminium for a pro-longed war, and just sitting and doing nothing would give allies the upper hand as they outproduce Germany.
And falling back and making the front shorter would have saved up German troops for other uses, but on the other hand would the enemy be able to do the same, so no real advantages would have been gained by falling back.
During the first months alone of Operation Barbarossa did the German army crush over 150 Russian Divisions, and yet had intellligence observed that the Russians did possess atleast 150 more Divisions. So the decision to take Southern Russia instead of Moscow did make sense, since crushing the industrial war potential of an enemy could have brought the Russians to their knees just as in World War 1.
It would also provide Germany with raw materials, industrial capacity, food, territory to launch bombers on the Ural mountains, crushing the Black Sea Fleet and thereby securing the Black Sea chrome trade with Turkey... as well as bringing in Political Presitige and threatening the middle east with German troops, air attacks and support for rebel groups.
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A multiple party system is better than the American system. And the system with propotional votes is better than the US system with electoral votes. And I also wish voters could sign a petion with 10k signatures and demand a direct democracy vote on an issue if the people feels that it is needed. And I also think that there should be no dicrimination against small parties if they get less than 2-5% of the votes, but instead should the parliament have representatives in proportion to votes, period.
The American system is bad, and all the money makes it even worse. But I can also say that a multiparty system in itself doesn't solve anything. Here in Sweden we got 8 parties in parliament, and one could basicly merge 6-7 of them into a single party because they are so similiar to HillaryClinton-style politics that the minor nuances are barely noticeable. They all want the same foregin policy, they want the same economic polices, they have the same opinion on immigration, same defence policies, no one wants to be tougher on serious crimes, the leftwing party doesn't want more control over the most privatized railroad system in the world, and the left have no interest in dealing with the privatizations that have made the healthcare and school system to suck. And re-nationalizing companies that just 20 years ago were government owned is just considered as communist crazytalk.
Politics in the west have declined since the liberatarians grabbed power in the 1980s, and there is no longer much of a point to go out and vote anymore. Its in our constitution that we must have balanced budgets, EU forbids us from re-nationalizing the railroads, we can't ban meat from countries that torture animals, we can't even have towns vote on what kind of food kids should be served in schools because its an obstacle to free trade.
Leftwing politics have become illegal, and people have lost their interest in politics.. "why suggest something, when there is nothing that could be done?". Politics have been reduced to be about which politician is best suited for administrating the machinery, rather than policy specifics. And media just makes moral outcries about bullshit stuff, and facts and rational arguments is no longer a part of the left wing.
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German automotive sector was too small in world war I... I have a vague memory that they only built 40k trucks under that war, while the allies made half a million, but I can be wrong. When Germany industrialized under the Kaiserreich, they did so by having cartels and a heavily involved state, and this continued in the Weimar period where some ineffiecent companies were kept alive, and the regime didn't make full use of the structural rationalization in 1920s like in other countries.
And the problem persisted as well with the first years with the nazis in power, because the aim of the nazi regime was job creation and not introduction of laboursaving effiecent production technics... mainly because Germany had 6 million openly unemployed when Hitler took power, and the regime had to get rid of massunemplyement quick if the nazi regime would have any chance to survive even in the short run.
So Germany lagged behind America in productioneffiecency. And the victories in the west in 1940 gave Germany so many dutch and french trucks plus the entire british expeditionary forces park of vehicles that Germany felt no pressing need to fix their low production output.
So besides all foreign trucks the German Army used that they would get problems with finding spare parts to, they would also have the problems with standardization of parts that the trucks german military truck manufacturers used (such as Opel, MAN, Hansa-Llyod Goliath, Phänomen, Henchel, Borgward, Büssing Nag, Ford, Krupp, Daimler).
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Things that annoys me:
-Ridiculus political assumptions in a game... like in Hearts of Iron when you control the entire UK plus a million provinces and the country still refuses to surrender because you havn't taken some bullshit province in far east Asia where the new capital is located.
And the Soviet Union sooner or later always attacks Germany... which I think is stupid. Since I think a Russian attack was unlikely in real life.
-Too many sci-fic units. When a game like panzer corps adds in some exprimental units to spice up the game it can be fun, but at some time its stop being a real world war 2 game, when most units are Maus, tortoise and IS3 tanks, and amerika bombers are dominating the skies.
- The stupid AIs in hearts of Iron that puts 100 divisions into Washington DC, and then you can wipe them all out with an atom bomb.
- The total lack of logistics which takes away any realism in any game. You cannot form a kettle to starve out an army, or having it suffer attrition by a long march through lands without resources.
- The inability of a game like Hearts of Iron to just make you able to temporarily demobilize your panzer divisions so they don't suck up supplies. It feels pretty dumb and unfair to having to delete your divisions completly and then rebuild them again and train the manpower.
In a realistic world I would just send the men home for a while until they are needed and the unit would be activated again. OR I would just transfer my veteran troops to the infantry so it could keep full combat strenght.
- Another system is production of units, which in itself needs technology, money, production capacity, manhours of work, inputs of resources... and an endless number of other factors.
But I can be satisfied with a simple system of purchasing price only, but when the price system is unbalanced the game play can get messed up. For example, in Panzer General II a german tank on average costed about 400 prestige... while a russian t-34 tank literarly costed 0 credits to buy. So even if you inflicted 10 times higher losses on the enemy, he could still throw endless numbers of tanks against you.
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73tons is food for lots of people when each person only eat 100g per day.
Paulus surrendered his army on the promise that his men would be feed if they surrendered - and the Russians agreed to those terms, but never cared to fullfill their promise so most of the 6th Army died.
So had the German planes delievered food instead of letters, then the German soliders probably would have been better off. Atleast they would enjoy a last meal before their end in Russian hands.
My priority would have been food first, ammo second and letters 3rd, winter cloth 4th, medical supplies and spareparts 5th, fuel 6th, and useless junk (old newspapers, barbed wire, pepper, pocketbooks, false collars, shoe laces) on 7th place on my priority list.
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If he wanna build his utopia on a currency that could shift 500-fold in value over a week, then you cannot have an advanced capitalist industrialized society.
Who the fuck would take a loan in such an enviroment? Who would sign a contract with his workers in such a currency? Whats the point in saving money in such a society?
The guy considers himself to be an economics expert, but this fact alone makes him an idiot.
Furthermore does Bitcoins got no future as a currency, since its a suicide mechanism built into the system. The money supply can only increase if people sacrifice computer power, and that is done when people make "bitcoin mining"... people sacrifice energy and get new bitcoins in reture, like a goldminer sacrifice his energy in a mine and get a goldpiece in return.
Anyhow, there is just a limited amount of bitcoins that can be mined. And most of them has already been mined, and the few ones left are getting harder and harder to get. And the energy costs per bitcoins is rising, and when the cost of energy exceeds the profits of a new bitcoin, the mining operations will stop.
And when the bitcoin mining stops, the system gets no computer power so it can make transactions possible... so it will take more and more and more time to move money from one account to the next. And finally it will get impossible.
I could also list a million other reasons why this system is idiotic, but I think the reasons mentioned is enough.
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"Pro-Leave won with a margin of 2%."
Here in Sweden the we joined the EU with the same slim margin. But the EU-lovers didn't have any problem with that.
"So, the age groups that don't have to build the future, have just decided on the future of the age groups that are supposed to build the future, against the wishes of the latter?."
They built your country, but you don't want them to have any say in what direction it takes. You are basicly saying that you don't like democracy.
"The baby boomers are the most disgusting bunch of impulsive callous selfish short-sighted bastards the Western World has ever seen."
They may have got their flaws, but atleast they aren't anti-democratic and wants their country under foreign occupation.
"And now they want the cash spent on the EU to be diverted to the NHS (National Health Service), of which they are by far the largest group of beneficiaries."
Atleast the money goes to making life better for people who built the country instead of money being wasted on shit like the unecessary moves of the European parliament. The money spent stays in UK and becomes wages for people there.
"Yes, that was their main argument for leaving the EU."
How do you know?
"Granted, the pro-Remain side didn't make much of a case, but that is understandable: they were caught out cold, the initiative wasn't theirs. The initiative was in the hands of the pro-Leave side".
Hmmm, Obama was on the remain side, most of the political establisment was on remain side, most top names in European politics was on remain side as well, and the corporations and the media and the big money.
Bremain had the iniative from day one, so they only got themselves to blame for their loss. Bad arguments, fear mongering, ad honorem attacks on the voters, and false promises simply didn't impress enough of us people who havn't been impressed by EU so far.
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Without oil people die. Its simple as that. The population in the world was only possible thanks to the green revolution, which was possible thanks to oil
Oil is needed for the food industry, for the military, for the police, firefighters and ambulances. We need oil for petrochemical products whether its some plastic tools, roads or medicines.
It took over a hundred years to build an energy grid around fossile fuels. So only an ignoart idiot would think that we could replace all fossile fuels in flip of a switch. We will need atleast 30 years of massive investments on a warlike scale.
Most oil countries have already reached their production peaks, and no new oil has been found in suffiecent amounts to replace it.
So there is good reason to start replacing all coal plants, all combustion engines in cars, trucks, planes and chainsaws
and invent new ways of producing food without fossile fuels for production of fertilizer, pesticides, and using it for waterpumps, tractors, and planes that spray the fields, and radiators for the harvest, and vechicles that transport all the food to consumers.
Only an idiot would think problems like this can be solved in a short period of time. On average it takes 12 years to build a power plant. And before you could build thousands of plants you need construction materials.
So then you will need to open more mines. But that will consume even more time, since it on average will take 12 years to open a new mine and have it entering into production.
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1939 - Crushing Poland so fast that France stop them.
1940 - Secure Swedish Iron shipments by capturing the Ice free harbour at Narvik where the Iron gets shipped to Germany.
- May 1940, capture the Benelux countries and push into France without crossing the Maginot line.
1941 -Put Balkans under Axis control, and then securing Crete in order to deny allied bombers the ability to bomb Romanian oil fields.
Troops are sent to North Africa to save the Italian Army there from collapsing.
-June 1941, The largest military operation in history begin, when Hitler attack Soviet Russia. The objective is to destroy the Russian army as fast as possible, and no army in history have suffered so heavy losses as the Russians did in 1941. But the losses for the Germans were also enormous, even if they were nowhere near as bad as the Russians.
-October 1941, Since Germany now controls huge areas of land and inflicted heavy losses on their enemy, it is decided to end the war in Russia with the capture of Moscow, and the Germans push forward under heavy losses but fail to capture their goals.
1942 Russia have gathered large numbers of men from all over Russia, and decides to throw in everything they got in a winteroffensive all along the Russian front. And the German army was exhausted by the losses from the previous year, many had also frozen to death by the winter, and much of their tanks, guns and planes couldn't be used in the cold... so when the Russians attacked, the German army wasn't strong enough to hold them back so they were pushed back 100km before the Russians could be stopped. The Russian troops had moved forward so hastenly that they didn't know where to go, and the units where spread out and couldn't support each other and couldn't get enough fuel, ammo and food forward to them when they had moved so deep into enemy lands so fast.
So the Germans simply encircled and destroyed each russian unit one by one.
And Stalins winteroffensive ended up as a worse disaster for the Russians than for the Germans. But the German retreat during the winter had also meant that troops had to abandon much of their heavy equipment so they could retreat fast enough without getting caugt by the Russians. So Germany had lost huge number of guns, tanks, trucks and transport planes.
-may 1942, Hitler changes his plans. Moscow is no longer a target.. its too well defended and can't guarantee an end to the war.
Hitler understands that this war will probably last for years and to win he needs recources. So he decides to take Southern Russia instead. And if he succedes he could solve Germanys problems of consuming more food and oil than they produce.
And losing Southern Russia would also mean a heavy blow to Russia, even losing those resources in the shortrun would be devestating.
So Hitler starts Operation Blue, with the best Divisions of his army and support them with his best air units.
The heavy losses Germany had simply didn't allow for any attack into Russia on all fronts like in 1941.
And Hitler captures Kiev, he takes Crimea, Kharkov and Rostov.. and he almost takes Stalingrad..........................
But then Russia makes a huge counterattack on the entire eastern front like in 1941. Outside Moscow a huge German army is under threat of getting encircled and crushed, and is fighting for their lives in the battle of Rzhev.
And at the same time is an equally epic battle going on in Stalingrad, where the Russians succesfully have encirled the German 6th Army.. which is now fighting for their lives to get out of the ring the Russians have formed around them. But the Russian forces is too strong, and the German troops is starving, and lacking medicines, ammunition and fuel to fight effectivly. And finally gets forced to surrender.
Which is a disaster for Germany, who needed that 6th Army more than ever to fight a war that has grown even larger when USA joined it. And the loss of it, created a big open hole in the German frontline at the south.
And 1942 was not a good year for the navy either. And the war went to shit for japan as well after unrepairable losses at Midway and Guadacanal.
The battle in Europe and North Africa in 1942 was supposed to be the year when the Axis powers should have used the time to deal a big punch to the Allies so they couldn't recover until the war in Russia was over.
It was important to punch hard in 1942, because America wasn't still ready for war. Their industry hadn't geared up yet, and millions of new troops had to be equiped, trained and then sent to Europe.... and that would take a year before they could get strong enough to become a real threat to Germany.
So what did Germany do on the western front in 1942?
Nothing.
They thought about capturing Malta with paratroopers, to stop allied planes and ships from harassing supply ships. But the operation was canceled at the last moment, because it was wrongly considered that the operation was unnessary when Rommels Afrika Korps had inflicted a devestating defeat on the allies with the capture of Tobruk.
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Atleast the American government respects the voting results of its people, while the EU ignored the fact that people have downvoted the new constitution in France, Netherlands and Ireland. And because it was likely that more countries would vote it down as well, the political establishment decided to sign the Lisbon treaty (the renamed constitution) without consent of the people.
And neighter does the EU care about following its own constitution (laws only apply to peasants) just 2 months after it was put into effect, EU ignored it so they could make an illegal bailout of Greece. And neighter did a single membership country succesfully follow the convergence pact requirements during the Euro crisis. And nor is the Schengen agreement followed today.
So there are not much upsides, but many downsides of being an EU member. And I just wish my country back because I wanna have my laws written in my own country. I wanna have economic policies suitable for my country, and not for a monetary union which is doomed to fail. And I don't want have my country prohibited from making any economic policies that goes against neoliberal dogma. For example do I want a nationalization of the railroads, but rules in the Maastrich treaty forbids that. So even if I get 100% popular support for this reform, my country is in theory forbidden to implement this policy.
And most people in my country doesn't want the Euro, and have voted against joining the EMU. But according to the rules of the Maastricht treaty, that doesn't matter. So all what it takes is an asshole politician to push us into the union, and then we are forbidden from taken back our decision.
Little wonder then that people gets fed up and vote to Brexit.
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Political ideas change along with the world we live in, but ideology never changes. We humans are like trees, and when the world is storming around us we are looking back at our roots for stability.
I am more of an old school socialdemocrat, than a fan of the ideas of the Frankfurt school left.
And as I said earlier, I think the differences are immense. So the best solution I think would be to have two leftwing parties instead of just one. Then the SJWs can have their party, and us old school socialdemocrats can have our own. And when on an issue we can cooperate, And when we don't agree, we can try to find a compromise.. and if that fails, so no big deal.
The worst thing in my opinion would be to share one leftwing party with the other faction, since one group would just take control, and then the other group have no party to vote for anymore. Just like I can't vote for the Swedish left anymore. SJWs aren't much principaled, so they wouldn't be as upset as me if the wrong faction took over the party. But even they would one day lose their passion for the left and vote for a libertarian party instead or something.
So I don't believe in a broad party for everyone. Not because I think rightwingers are bad people, but rather because I want a party that represents what I believe in. I want something where I can support atleast 85% of the ideas that the party puts forward. And I think this thing is essential if people should be passionate and active in politics.
We need a party that we like, and not some half-ass shit we disagrees with almost half of the times.
I think of Howard Moskowitz, instead of making the best pasta sauce for everyone, we should try to make a pasta sauce for every group of people instead, one thin, one spicy and one chunky......and skip all compromises in making just one sauce that will just end up making everyone less satisfied.
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John Smith, I have realized my own ignorace about the American political system.. and I reluctantly admit that you are right that the IDPol people is probably necessary to have in order to defeat GOP.
But just because we anti-SJWs agree to co-operation with the IDPol, it doesn't mean that we will accept to subjugate ourselves. If things go too far with this SJW thingy, then I guess people like me will leave. I don't accuse you of having said SJWs should take over the ship and the rest of us should shut up. I am just saying that SJWs must not be permitted to hijack the movement - something that worries me much, when we allying ourselves with such people.
I am just saying this as a warning. If SJW things are taken to the extreme, then I cannot support it. Donna Hylton and antifa in my eyes are just as terrible people we should distance ourselves from, and not taking selfies with like Van Jones.
I am are for helping black, women and gays, but not because of their skincolour or sex. But rather I wanna do it because they are poor and sometimes discriminated against. So let do away with poverty and regulate discrimination. But giving groups privileges is nothing I am generally in favour of, but that seems what IDPol is all about. And the end goal for me is that every human should free to be the person they wanna be like, and their gender, race, and should be as a small obstacle as possible to be that person.
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I cannot take any person seriously who thinks White Supremacists are less problematic than the so-called SJW or BLM movement.
How many institutions do white supremacists control? None. How many members do KKK have? about 6000 if remember correctly, and that is in a country with 320 million people.
Compare that to SJWs and BLM that exist in many countries. Justin Trudau is president in Canada. Donna Hylton and BLM is openly walking around with the American political elite. The mainstream media all over the western world gives them positive media coverage, while even EU-skepticism is considered racism nowadays. Universities are also infected by this nonsense. And BLM have done things that KKK havn't, for example blocking airports, blocking gay pride parades, and disrupt political speeches by Bernie Sanders.
And they refuse to accept democratic voting results by the people, which means that they don't believe in democracy. Brexit is one example. And all idiots here in Europe protesting Trump is another brilliant example.
Antifa is using violance for political gains and is therefore a terrorist organization. And not calling that out from the leftwing establishment is pathetically pitful. And any leftwing leader speaking on behalf of such protesters have automatically lost all my respect.
Kyle have posted a video about a policeman killing a black guy. And of course should that policeman spend life in prison for his disgusting crime (which probably had some racist motives). But what you SJW never condemn is the violance from our side. The police shootings by black lives matter. The kidnapping and torture of a white guy in Chicago. You never speak out against muslim crimes. You never says a word against Donna Hylton who kidnapped, raped, and murdered a man after she had squeezed the victim's testicles with a pair of pliers and burned him.
You NEVER FUCKING CONDEMN RACISM AGAINST WHITES. You are just hypocrites. You are racists. You are hatefilled zealots, just like the anti-black pepe community.
You never condemn sexism against males, you have nothing to say about the high male suicide rates, the unfair custody laws, and the SJW community even dares to call prostate cancer a "white male privilegie".
So no, the SJW community is a much larger problem than a few rednecks. Its just a hatefilled community, without any real solutions to anything. Its all about virtue signaling and grabbing undeserved privilegies for ones own community.
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How can I know that white supremacists doesn't control the world? My answer is Barack Obama could become president. Not only for 1 term, but 2.
But White supremacists have always existed and have had support or tolerated from feeble minded majorities such as yourself.
I am not a white supremachist. I am just a non-idiot. And SJWs doesn't solve any problems, instead they just create new problems. There are overrepresentations of certain groups in some fields of society, while the same group can be underrepresented in other places in society. And sometimes that could have natural causes, such as women in general aren't as interested in programming as men, or that socioeconomic factors limits the social mobility for some minorities. And then we got racism and direct discrimination - which SJWs attribute more importance than it deserves.
So my solution isn't gender quotas or forcing women into fields they have little interest in. My solution is to create jobs, eliminate poverty, and reducing inequality so every child no matter background have the chance to rise up from poverty. Meritocracy will become more important than background.
People should be judged for their caracter and not their skincolour or sex. And if someone commits a crime they deserve the same punishment for it as anyone else - because its not the person we punish, but the illegal action commited. So if blacks commit more crimes, its also just fair that more goes to jail. And the unfair thing would be to set criminals free in the name of racial equality. So if a black guy commits murder he should go to jail, just like a white guy. Releasing guilty prisoners because of skin colour is not an acceptable solution.
Most institutions of power are run by White men, many of them conservatives
This might be a problem, but its not a White Supremacists problem like you claim. You haven't proved that the white people in power are white supremacists. If they were supremacasist then it would be hard to explain why a black man became president.
For me the problem is rather of another nature: Nepotism.
The rich guys have grown up togheter, they have studied togheter at the same universities. They have the same friends. So of course rich people rather listen to a phone call from an old friend and a rich buddy than some average Joe, and of course they try to scratch their friends back whenever possible in return for that friend scratching his. They are also more likely to accept the perspectives and mentality rich people have, because they doesn't know much about the life for Joe average.
Rich white men like to hang around people like themselves, because they best understand people of their own kind and can best relate to them. And I bet most other people are guilty of this as well.
So what is my solution to the problem of nepotism in the private sector and government? More meritocracy. More democracy. More economic equality. More laws against revolving doors - especially between private banks and the government.
If society becomes more equal, then people will have it easier to hang around with each other since the differences aren't that great. Personality becomes more important than class. And with more blacks with higher education, its also more likely they will be accepted into the elite when they hang around the white people that become leaders of government and industry.
I doesn't rule out the use of abmysal gender quotas, since I think many CEOs prefer to pick friends for high positions rather than giving people the job on meritocratic merits. IKEA's founder Ingvar Kamprad is a typical example of this, since he hired underqualified men from his own village for high positions, while talented experienced women rarely ever got any promotions.
But unlike SJW so do I not consider gender quotas as the most important issue in the world. A few hundred women becoming CEOs wouldn't change much for 160 million American women. And neighter would it help to stop the destructive forces of profitmaximization, It wouldn't in fact do a shit. So I prefer putting my focus on helping average women, than trying to give a tiny, tiny few women some luxury positions.
White Supremacists are just happy having White men controlling everything. It's tribal mentality.
Look, I got nothing in common with George Soros, the Koch brothers, or Lloyd Blankfein and neighter do I have any common interest with them in preserving their powerbase. I actully hate those people.
I have more in common with migrants, homosexuals, women and other of the 99% than with the oligarchy.
If Black men had the same attitude they would have been blowing things up worse than terrorists or what the Irish did in England
Some of the social justice warriors actully are terrorists. Punching Richard Spencer is using violance for a political goal. Beating up Trump supporters on multiple occasions is to use political violance to reach a political goal.
Shooting police men, blocking ambulances and blocking airports is actions that are a threat to society, and should be treated as such. Black lives matter can fuck off. And I wish antifa supporters gets every bone in their body crushed.
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After world war 2 and the great depression the western world tried demandside economics, and in the early 1980s Reagan and Thatcher started to implement supplyside economics. The idea was to increase investments by lowering the wages, and thereby increasing the economic growth.
But the problem was that buisnesses found no reason to invest in new machines when the workers was too poor to buy the they sold. So instead buisnesses pushed the money into banks or into the stock market. And the banks could loan out much money to the people who tried to keep up with their expenses when their wages was insuffiecent.
So people stated to getting over-indebted by car-loans, mortages, credit card loans...and stocks and housing prices became pressed up to high unsubstainable levels, and then the bubbles burst and shit like the dotcom bubble and subprime crisis happened.
As a contrast, the period 1945-75 had zero national debtcrises, while the period afterwards had over 200 debtcrises and currency crises (According to Kenneth Rogoff). This was the era of strict currency controls where you couldnt invest in foreign countries without permission of your central bank, and era with high tolls, high wages, high growth and much protectionism.
The supply side economics is a time of failure. Real wages has fallen in America, while companies make record profits. The same story is true of my own country, Sweden, where wages share of total profits was 78% in 1978, and today it has fallen to 66%. But have this lead to an increase in investments? Nope. It has fallen from 25% to 18%, since theres no point to invest if people dont buy more.
The low wages have also made Germany and Sweden able to steal jobs and economic growth from southern Europe, and the flow of money from speculators have contributed to the bubbles.
There is all reason to let the wages go up, its probably more important than taxing the rich.
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shakka mannaka *"Anecdotal and thus invalid"* ... "If a person decides to offer to give a blowjob in exchange for food, it's because they believe it'll make them better off than before."
Exploiting poor peoples desperation is what the system is much about. The example of a blowjob is extreme yes, but it is taken to take home the point about Milton Friedmans idea of freedom. Hayek talked about the "freedom to starve".
Then we have this talk about the non-existance of Involuntary unemployment, and people only doing things if it could gain their economic self-interest, and that it exist no free lunches and so on.
I think most people would agree with me that those ideas are based on a grotesque, heartless and ridiculous world view, which is also very arrogant towards the 'have nots'.
People want a system with a basic level of human decency and fairness, and thats also why the "chock doctrine" has been necessary for the elite in order to implement their economic policies. Because people just dont like them, and would never under normal circumstances accept them.
"Bus drivers are in the poorest quintile in both countries. Median means the person in the middle. Average wage for the poorest quintile means the average wage for the poorest 20% of income earners."
Firstly, I was talking about bus drivers who earns 40 times more in Sweden. And secondly, when I talked about median wage I talked the median for the poorest quintile, captain obvious.
"Like, I said, there is more than one fucking variable at work"
True there are many variables, and protectionism of the labour market is usally the one with the largest impact of the wage level for a 1st world country.
"You almost had it. ALL countries benefits from free trade, because of the concept of comparative advantages. However, some countries benefit more because of the concept of exchange-rates."
All countries benefit if they have comparative advantages, but free trade can be harmful in the short run for some countries (like you said, but in another context). Having one your high-tech industries destroyed or overtaken is a disaster for a country. Not only for the company, but also when suppliers, the big brains, and infrastructure that leaves the country. It takes like 30 years to industrialize a country and build it up with strategicly important industries, having it destroyed for a temporary weakness will undo 30 years of progress. The government sometimes need to go back to protectionism to protect a certain industry, until its fit for fight again.
"You've misunderstood the concept of comparative advantage. It isn't something you develop."
It is something you develop. Its true that I cant grow bananas here in Sweden and are better off by selling timber, and the opposite might be true for another country. Thats is the old Ricardian view about free trade.
However, we live in a modern industrial era. And you can have industries in every country, because brainpower exists in all countries, and people can invent new products, and new ways of making those products.
And if your country lacks a natural resource it needs in order to make a product, you can invent a substitute or import the stuff from other countries. And then you can sell your finished product at a high price.
Its in the industry and chemistry where the large productivity gains are possible. And with higher productivity you can pay better wages and higher taxes.
Its harder to get high productivity in agriculture, services and exporting raw materials. Furthermore, relying on exports of raw materials also possess a risk that you run out of your resource (like oil, fish, timber), or a fungus kill of your plants (like Gros Michel bananas), or people invent a substitute of your natural resource, such as what happened to dye.
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Spain, Ireland, Latvia, Greece.. yeah great economy. And quality of life with austarity, a neoliberal constitution, unretricted immigration that cause crime, housing shortages, terrorist attacks and an overload social services system. Plus all attacks on our civil liberties in the name of fighting copyright infringement, fake news, hate speech, childporn and terrorism and other bad excuses.
EU is a monster that needs to die.
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To that problem I would shift the taxburden onto land, rents, capital gains and have an inheritance tax... while I lower the income taxes for average Joe.
I would also put regulation on how much interest financial companies can charge on mortages, carloans, student loans and credit card debts... so financial parasites get a small slize of the pie. So instead of wallstreet fraudsters sucking up all economic growth, you will see money going to companies and their workers and people can afford to buy stuff as the banksters don't steal a third of their paycheck.
If I had my European country I would also nationalize many government services, and if I was president in murica I probably would try to regulate downwards the cost for essentical services, and provide cheap energy, education, healthcare, and transportation. So the cost of living could go down, and people could live well with small amounts of money so companies dont have to pay large wages but stay competative on the world market, and my heavy industry is competative with cheap energy.
And when you create strong consumer demand, you creat an attractive market that foreigners wants to profit from.. so companies wouldn't move away, but rather they wanna come and make huge profits.
So my government would have a pretty strong hand in trade negotiations with other countries.
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Sure. I don't like people that are hateful and feel threatening and I wouldn't miss their voice if it dissapeared.
But the problem is that a retarded judge should decide when to apply the law. And laws aren't an effective weapon, that always lands on target and knocks it out with 100% precision. Its rather a shitty tool that usally hits innocent civilians than evil scumbags. Its no surgical precision, its rather like a rusty Mora knife... and it will kill free speech rather than save it.
If that law should be legitimate it must also be applied equally across the board, and if christians get away with hate speech against gays, then nazis should have the same right. If muslims in Germany can salute Hitler, then white people should also get away with it. And when the leader of the swedish green party called all white heterosexual middle aged men for non-humans... and got away with it, it just shows that our legal system makes mockery of real justice when you would get to pay expensive fines for saying that black homosexual young women are not humans.
And then I think that factully correct statments also shouldn't be punished by law. Here in Sweden a man got fined for 3.200 Euro's for calling islam a rapeculture, which I actully consider to be partially factully correct, atleast in the context when it was said.
In short, the law easily becomes hypocritical. And either it becomes toothless or firing blindly. And I don't want people to be afraid of harsh punishment for an unlucky formulation of a controversial statement. And giving peoples fines for hate speech in this country that are higher than those rapists have to pay, just shows that the Swedish legal system is rotten to the core and should throw all law books into the fire and get some common law here.
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Originally it was against USSR, but when America boycoted Germany in 1936 and started to give lend-lease to Hitlers enemies he tought that America could go to hell. But Hitler himself lacked a large Navy to take on the Americans, so he was happy to get Japan on his side. And some historians say that the push against Moscow in 1941 was a desperate attempt to make it seem like the war in Russia would be over soon, so Japan would feel comfy to start a war with America.
From a Japanease perspective was the Attack on America only foolish and totally lacking rationality since Japan had 0% chance of winning a war against the American gigiant. The reasons were only feelings. Japan had free trade forced upon them in 1853 by western powers. They felt inferior back then to the westerners with superior weapns innovations and industry, and firstly bought into the racist rethoric that only the white man could have a modern state, and that made the Japanease depressed. But they were determined to try to get a modern army, so imported technologies and tried to finance all expenditures by industrialization. So they became one industrial power, not the greatest one in the global league, but the greatest one in the Asian league. So then they started to imitate western powers in other ways and started to colonize their neighbours such as Korea and they got involved in a conflict with China. But despite all great achievements and western admiration of Japans progress, the Asian race was still looked down upon, and America had restricted their immigration, and western countries refused to treat them like an equal as with western countries.
So all this frustration, in combination with shinto warrior ideals and crazy imperalistic nationalism, plus militarism and Americas trade boycot of Japan triggered a Japanease reaction that became the attack on Pearl Harbour.
The hope was to destroy the American navy completly, and then go south and take Indoneasia and grab some of the most resource rich areas in the world. And instead currency reserves for buying raw material imports being the limiting factor for the industrial production, the only limiting factor would become the amount of plundered resources the transport ships could carry.
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Panzer III was a shitty tank in 1939, with only a 37mm gun.
When Panzer III entered service in 1935 it was intended to be the main tank of the German army, and it was planned that this machine - which was considered as powerful tank back then - should one day replace all weak pz1 and pzII tanks in service with the army. But the World War began before that dream could come true.
And in 1939 only a few of these tanks had been produced. So the German army had to use old PzI and PzII tanks to crush the Poles instead. And in 1940 in the Battle of France, the same story was still true, since German tank production was still unimpressive. And the few panzer III tanks that fought, showed the German army that this tank was shit compared to French tanks, it had crappier firepower, armour and horsepower per tonne ratio. So the German army decided to give the tank a better 50mm gun and give it some extra armour so it would be able to better against a future enemy than what it had done against French tanks.
And in Russia in 1941, the Panzer III was finally deployed in large numbers. But because of the lazyness of the German industry, which had choosen to not listen to Hitlers orders, most of the panzer III tanks still carried the old 37mm gun. And that gun was okay when fighting most Russian tanks such as T-26 and BT7.
But against the best Russian tanks (KV-1 and T-34) with thick armour it was completly useless. And some historians even claim this to be the reason why Hitler lost the battle of Moscow in 1941.
Panzer III got upgraded and did an okayish performance in 1942. But by 1943 it started to getting a bit outdated, and not being able to fight against allied tanks (ie M4 sherman and T34/76) on equal terms. But it wasn't enough panzer IV and Panther tanks available to the German army to take this old crappy machine out of service.
So it had to continue it service within the German army, but now as a reconnaissance tank. And since the gun was useless against armour, it was instead given a 75mm gun to fire High-Explosives on soft targets. And this PanzerIIIN variant was also given some extra thick armour and was used for infantry support.
So by 1943 the roles had changed. Panzer III had earlier been intentended to fight tanks, while Panzer IV should be attacking the infantry and bunkers with its short fat gun. But now the roles was the opposite. Panzer III had to fight the enemy foot solidiers while Panzer IV dealt with the enemy tanks.
And in 1943 production of Panzer III had stopped, since the tank was outdated. Instead Germany used all panzer III chassis to build the Sturmgeshütze III. Because Stug had both better armour and firepower than panzer III (since it didn't have a turret), and it also had some of the best optics of any German tank. And it was also much cheaper to produce and days needed for production was also cut down, since Stug didn't need a turret like other tanks.
All in all, Panzer III looks impressive on paper with its big gun and high numbers of tanks produced. But it was only after 1942 that the tank really got some substantial improvements. And it was not until 1941 that the tank was availale in large numbers.
So I would call this tank a little bit of a failure. But its excellent traverse speed enabled the tank chassi to become the most succesful tank destroyer in history.
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Some of these problems have its roots in the ideas of the 1800's:
The nationalist movement in Germany was democratic as its upside, but its downside was that it was intolerant towards those who didn't wanna fit in into the German nation state like poles and jews.
The Conservative movement was tolerant about ethnic minorities and didn't bother hating on them as they did not see a unified Germany as a pressing issue, but on the other hand did they see the loyalty to the monarch as important.
The best solution would have been to combine the best out of those two movements and get democracy from the nationalists and tolerance from the Conservatives. But Hitler did the opposite and took the worst from both instead - the hatred of jews and poles and dictatorship.
When world war 1 ended was many disastsfied. Germans were not impressed by democracy. The hyperinflation 1923, the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 and the street violance that followed and the risk of a revolution was not fun, and to that did Germany have a great depression in 1930. So just like russia associate post-Soviet capitalist russia with chaos and the hyperinflation in 1997.. did many Germans regard the Weimar republic as a failure.
Ludendorff screwed up and lost the war with his failed 1918 offensive and invented the stab in the back myth afterwards to save his own ass from public criticism - as his own dairy notes shows that he did not believe in the stab in the back myth in 1918. Hitler however did swallow Ludendorffs lies, and blamed the jews and communists for the lost and sincerly believed that Germany was about to win.
There were some overlap between conservative patriots and the nazis, but there were also differences. They did both oppose democracy and they liked militarism. But Hitler did not wanna return Germany to monarchism. And he also seems to been a believer in Gobineau and Socialdarwinism - which was not as popular among the conservatives.
It was also a widespread belief in Germany at the time that the country was at a huge disadvantage towards getting rich and powerful, because USA and Britain which was richer had much more land. And many Germans believed that the only way to aquire the same status would be to aquire land somehow - which would not be easy after the war when she had lost all her colonies. Hitler was determined to back eastern Europe Germanys future colony, and starving millions of natives would be the solution to pave way for German settlers.
Many conservative Generals in WW1 could be said to have originated this idea, as the German victories in WW1 allowed the Germans to occupy much of russia, Romania and Serbia and plunder those areas. And the plan was to plunder these areas and kill off people so Germany could get more food for the war effort by stealing more food from the east and killing off people in eastern europe that competed with the Germans for food.
It should also be mentioned that it was rightwing parties in Germany that helped Hitler to push through the enabling act and helped him forbid other parties in parliament. It was all fun and good as long as the Communists and socialdemocrats were banned and Hitler was made dictator, but after that did Hitler use his power to also crack down on the liberal and conservative parties and then it was no longer so fun for the rightwing parties. But I guess they have themselves to blame.
However, the nazi movement did have a few influential left-wing figues. The most important one was probably Joseph Goebbles, who was a very hateful anti-semite and probably pushed the other nazis to be harder and more cruel against the jews
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@RussianThunderrr Its not an oxymoron. It was a good tank. The problem was that it was not the type of tank Germany needed for the war they were fighting in 1944-45. It was too expensive to build, which resulted in low production numbers, which in turn made the problem of maintance worse... I mean if your tank needs to go often to repairs it doesn't matter that much if you got many thousands of tanks in reserve like the allies. But if you like the Germans only have 500 tanks (or less) spread out on three fronts that are ready for combat. And then you will of course have huge problems when your small number of local tanks have to be inactive because of maintance.
It was a good tank but in 1945 did Germany not have any fuel for them. And they did not have enough crews for them these machines that were too precious to be allowed to be lost. Nor could these tanks use their full potential because of the sad state of the army in 1945. They could not get air support because Luftwaffe had been trashed, they didn't have recon units that could warn them of enemy units and traps, their artillery was short on ammunition, the supporting infantry had been decimated and so on..
So of course could these tanks not be used properly most of the time. But when they was used properly they were invincable and not a single Tiger II was lost due to a frontal hit during the entire war.
"Well, you kinda over-glorify those AFV(aka SPG) that have serious limitation, that is why tanks are preferred as AFV then SPG, it was true during war, its still true into present day"
Not at all. The infantry loved the StuGs and they served Germany well throughout the war and produced a nice killratio. And their cost effectivess made them the most produced tank of the Wehrmacht.
I bet that the Germans would have loved to have many more Ferdinand tanks as well since they had the best killratio of any Axis or Allied tank used during the war. Turretless tanks have their advantages in protection, firepower and production cost.
The only reason why you would want a turret is if you do offensive combat and doesn't know which direction the enemy will come from, and then a turret gives you an advantage to fastly respond to the situation.
But the Germans was from 1943 and onwards fighting mostly a defensive war, and they kind of knew what direction their enemies would come from so they could prepare their defensive positions and set up ambushes and use their superior optics and low silhouette and prepared defensive positions to their advantage.
Also, remember that this was also a time before gyro-stabilizers and such, so a tank needed to stop before it would start firing. So not having a turret was not a big problem - the S-tank for example was one of the best tanks when it entered service.
And should Germany have need a few medium tanks for launching counter-attacks then they could just have used old Panzer IV tanks instead of VK30D.
From what I have read on the internet, did Guderian not want any new panther or VK30D line at all. He wanted as few production lines as possible, and thought it would be a better idea to give panzer IV a better gun and some sloped armour.
Something akin to the Panzer IV Ausf. K
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@SpacePatrollerLaser I feel nothing as I was born in the mid-1980s and my memory from the cold war is very short. What I remember from that time period is what I saw from Swedish state tv: Russian military parades in front of boring dudes with big glasses, the bolshoi theater, boring and poorly made childrens cartoons from czechoslovakia.
And some boring language courses on tv, where some Swedish words were translated into Russian.
Even before I became interested in military music I could still oddly enough recognize many military tunes from DDR and Russia... and probably because I heard them in the late 1980s.. such as Slawianka, Sacred war, Yorksher Marsch, Margarethen Marsch, marsch der Elisabether.
The little I knew from Russian military planes came later in the 1990s with the
movie Top Gun. But from that movie I got the impression that MIGs were not anything particular, just an ordinary plane almost as good as the American ones.
And the movie Iron eagle gave the same impression.
But I believe that people had a genuine fear of the Soviet union during the Cold war. The Russians won some early victory in the space race with Sputnik and all that.
And when I as a teen read in dads magazine Arménytt ("What's new in the Swedish army?") There I saw that the Warsaw pact heavily outnumbered the west in every category of weapons. And I remember that I saw that the Soviet union alone had 30.000 fighter jets in the middle of the Cold war (I think it was in the late 1960s). I don't remember how many planes the west had but maybe it was somewhere like 2000 or 6000.
So if an air war would have happened, then I believed that things did not look good for the west.
I have also read that the East block had somehting like 100.000 or even 200.000 tanks. And I believed that such a large number would probably be hard to knock out even with superior tactics, training and small technological superiority.
The last decade or so have changed my mind very much on Russia. If they had good weapons, then I don't think they would cling on to old garbage such as T-90 tanks (which are basically just modernized T-72 tanks) and that they would use kevlar helmets instead of old WW2 style steel helmets. But Russia was clearly too poor to make that transition.
And when I saw youtube videos how drastically Russia have reduced numbers from their gigantic tank fleet from 100K down to 10K I no longer feared their military.
And when I learned what a great plane Gripen is, I feel no fear at all. As this plane can kick not just all Russian planes in the butt but also all western planes, including planes like F35 and F22 which probably was going to be superior to the SU57 when it entered service.
But it did turn out that the SU57 will probably never come into being. The plane is delayed, and its still not finished, and only a few prototypes exist of it. The plane relied on India helping Russia with the funding of the project. But since India got tired of all delays and pulled out, I doubt that the Russian midget economy is capable of finish this plane on its own.
And even if it could, it would still be an irrelevant plane once its ready for service. Because soon will western 6th generation fighters come into being, and Russia will be behind the curve once again. And even if SU57 would somehow turn into decent stealth plane and a master in acrobatics I still doubt it could be an equal to the 6th generation fighters of the west.
And I do not even think it would have much of a chance against Gripen anyhow because of the superior electronics, radars and sensors in that Swedish plane which would make the Russian stealth plane inferior anyways.
Gripen is faster at turning, and it is dirt cheap so it can be mass produced, and it is so low maintanence that it could probably fly 10 times more sorties than that Russian "super plane". And its low operating cost will allow pilots 10 x times more hours of training up in the sky than their Russian counterparts.
So I believe that an airforce with Gripen E would kick Russias ass.
However this is just hypotetical specualtion from my part. As it is doubtful if the Russian economy and Russian air force can survive this war lol
And I will also add that not just Gripen will kick the Russian air force in the butt. I consider all modern western planes to be superior to their russian counterparts as it is now: Eurofigher, Rafale, F22, F35 and Super hornet are all superior. F15 Silent Eagle and F16 Viper are also very good.
I don't think MIG31, MIG35 and SU35 stands a chance. Their pilots have too crappy training. And I don't think Russia have the economic muscles of turning those planes into upgraded modernized, semi-stealth plane equal to F15 Silent Eagle.
Indeed, after the death of the Soviet union did much of industrial base and know-how dissapear in how to make modern military planes. Many argue that if Russia lose some of its old Soviet AWACS planes, then it will never be able to replace them because they no longer have the knowledge how to build them.
So with the Russian industry in such a bad shape, I think it is doubtful that it can compete with the west ever again. Especially not without precision tools and industrial robots from say Germany and Japan, which the 3rd world country Russia is incapable of constructing on their own.
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This war is not like the American Civil War. Both there are a few similiarities. The problem for the North was that its biggest force - the Potomac army - was unlucky and did get bad leaders for most of the war: Irwin McDowell, George B. McClellan,
Ambrose Burnside and Joseph Hooker. One incompetent leader replaced another and the north could not get anything done despite this army had such a large number that the south had nothing to put against it.
The South was not any professional force either, and it did not have any military geniouses. Albert Sidney Johnston was probably the best commander they had, but he died already in 1862. Souths strategy should have been a defensive war where the long distances and strained logistics easily could have over-extended the northern armies and made them vulnerable to raids against their rear and supply train, and the forested terrain would have offered oppurtunities for ambushes that would have inflicted high losses on the north and few for the south.
But fighting such a low-intensive war was unpopular and not in the taste of any southern General aside from the realistic Albert who realized that this was the only way that the south could win. Glorious offensive dashes on northern territory was just foolish and dangerous. The stakes were high and the south lost its army that way. It could not replace its losses while the north could.
Ukraine however have not been fools like the Confederates. The Russian thrusts went deep into Ukraine. But Russian tanks quickly ran out of fuel, and in the forests behind enemy lines did Ukrainian troops jump out and destroyed russian military trucks carrying fuel and ammunition. And without those things did Russian tanks become worthless and the crews have to abandon them - so they later on could be towed away by Ukrainian tractors.
Stupid frontal attacks, tanks and infantry that did not support each other, Generals who were killed by enemy fire and all kinds of other problems drained russian resources and soon it become unrealistic and unsubstainable to try to take over the entire country. So Russia lowered its ambitions for this war, and now instead hoped to take over a few provinces instead of trying to take over the entire country.
And now is Russia even unable to achieve that goal.
Russia is also making a copy of the extremely stupid Confederate war economy. The south decided to burn up all cotton so that Europe would run out of cotton - and the souther hoped Europe would scream loud about the cotton shortage, and the death of British industry, so Britain would be forced to enter the war on the side of the South.
But that never happened.
Instead did destroying the cotton only make the south losing money, instead of gaining money from exporting it.
And likewise have russia lost money by its stupid blockade of Europe instead of trying to export as much as possible to it while it still could and thereby keeping some countries on the hook for russian energy. But now it only made Europes strive from independence from russia even easier and speeded up.
The south was also unwilling to transition to a war economy and raise war taxes - which led to loans and money printing, inflation and an underfunded military and a dissatisfied population and a harmed economy as a result. And Putin has been very reluctant to make the Russian people suffer because of his unpopular war. He raised war taxes but only half a year passed, and he waited with mobilization of the reserves for months - and it all proved to be too little too late.
Just like with the Souths war efforts.
The professional russian military has already been destroyed. The best russian tanks and best troops are now dead and destroyed. And the mobilized troops are thrown into battle without training because there has been too little left of the old army to train them. So the troops are a desperate attempt of winning the war by gathering badly equipped, badly trained troops that is not willing to fight.
Just like how the south tried to mobilize anyone at the end of the war to fight for them, and even black slaves were pushed into service. But all those efforts were too little too late. And the this stupid poorly planned economic mobilization for war harmed the economy. In Russias case have there been a brain drain, and highly educated young men that have costed russian tax payers large sums of money to educate are wasted and killed after only a few weeks of fighting in Ukraine.
And now is russia running out of resources because of the blockade - just like how the south suffered because of the naval blockade.
Russia can no longer mass produce tanks and more advanced weapons. Its monthly production of cruise missiles have become extremely tiny and almost insignificant. Its daily consumption of artillery shells is much larger than what russia produce so the country is quickly running out of shells.
And most of russias best tanks has been destroyed so it have to push old junk like T-62 and T-55 into service.
If Russia was in good shape and the 2nd largest military in the world, then it would not have to import weapons from 3rd world countries like Iran, Belarus and North Korea. Why would any country to import old rusty artillery shells from North Korea unless they are desperate? Why would Russia import tanks from Belarus unless they had a shortage of tanks?
"The United States is losing influence catastrophically by underestimating Russia. It doesn’t have the industrial capacity to provide artillery ammunition to Ukraine."
You are wrong. Read what I said in my text above. Russia does not have the industrial capactity to continue fighting this war. And meanwhile are Ukraine getting better and better weapons. And with 1 million artillery shells guaranteed by the EU is Ukraine not running out of artillery ammunition any time soon. And add to that they also get artillery ammunition from USA, Australia, South Korea, and Pakistan.
So nope. Ukraine will never run out of artillery ammunition.
The only side in this war that can run out of it is Russia. Russia is losing the war. And that will a disasterous loss for Russia.
People laugh at its military. Its economy is severly shaken by the braindrain, by the sanctions, by the war, and by its negative demographic trend.
The country is seen as a rogue state, as an evil rotten backhole. And its military needs decades before it can be rebuilt back to its prewar strength. It will be obvious to the world that russian military equipment is junk and does not stand a chance against western stuff, so russias arms exports and stance around the world will decline.
And USA and Nato will be unified more than ever and getting a huge prestige boost. Self-confidence is higher than ever.
Putin fanboys in the west will be despised and mocked, and lose their grip on power, so that the west can get rid of that toxic poison to our democracies and get healthy and strong again. The west will grow its military power again. And it will not get caught off guard like it was with Ukraine.
And Ukraines large natural resources will benifit Europe. The Russo-Chinese alliance have been weakened as Russia is being reduced to nothingness militarily as economically.
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Europe and the EU are NOT the same thing. Many European countries are not part of the EU: Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Ukraine, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Liechtenstein, Andorra, Monaco, San Marino, Vatican City, Montenegro.
Stop being so ignorant.
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I think this video is nonsense. First of all by 1942 and 1943 could the allied bombers not fly far enough and reach the death camps, and by the end of 1942 had already 80% of the jews who died in the holocaust already been killed.
Secondly flying that far needed fighter escorts or there would have been enormous losses. So realistically would allied bombers only been able to reach them by perhaps 1944. And even then would I argue that I doubt bombing Auschwitz would save much lives. First of all were allied bombers extremely inaccurate - as allied bombers usually only hit with their bombs 2% of the time, and that is the reason why they terror bombed cities instead of trying to target small factories that were hard to hit.
They could maybe have increased chances of hitting targets by flying near the ground at low altitude, but that would certainly have increased allied losses to anti-aircraft fire. And the allied airforce that have already suffered painful losses would see their own losses go up once more.
And for what?
I mean even if they won the lottery and actully managed to hit the railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz it would not have stopped German trains from going to Auschwitz. At most would it take only 2 weeks for the Germans to repair the tracks, and probably much less than that time. The reason why Ukraine is not destroying russian railroads in the war we see today, is because it will only take 1-2 days to repair a destroyed track (unless it is a destroyed bridge). So even if it would hurt russia enormously to not be able to transport all their ammunition be railroad is it harder said than done to destroy russian railroad connections.
And even if the Germans somehow had their gas chambers at Auschwitz destroyed it would not change anything either, as other death camps easily could have taken over Auschwitz role. 950.000 people died at Treblinka, which is almost as many as the 1.2 million that died at Auschwitz. So it would not been hard for the germans to kill people in the other camps instead. The only reason why they all were closed down already by late 1943 was because they were so effective that they had already killed so many people that there simply was no polish jews left to be killed. And with no people left to murder was there no point in keeping the death camps Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka, Chelmno and Belzec.
The Germans also had plenty of gas chambers at many other camps that were not death camps, like for example Stutthof.
So bombing Auschwitz would probably not have saved many jews, while it might have costed many bombers and bomber crews.
In the end would it have made nearly no difference at all to the number of victims that died in the holocaust. Because as I said earlier the deadliest year of the holocaust was in 1942 when Germany stood at the hight of its power and covered more land in Europe than ever before.
And when allied bombers finally would have been able to reach the death camps in Poland was it already too late to save 80% of all victims of the holocaust. Most of them had died in mass shootings done by the Einsatzgruppen in eastern europe and russia. While another many millions had been murdered by poison gas in Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, Belzec and Majdanek.
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They built the panther-line, and then they built "fortified cities" and created the flak towers at Berlin. But they proved themselves to not be enough to stop the Russians.
The nazis made many incorrect priorities on where they should put their limited resources the last years of the war, and maybe a better handled defensive policy on the eastern front could have halted the Russians for some years.
Many special interests wanted the same steel and concrete as the defensive projects in the east used... steel which could be used for tanks, guns, warships, and concrete which could be used for building factories, and bunkers on the western front.
And manpower was needed to build all the fortification and dig all the tank ditches and trenches... but the industry also wanted workers, and the Hitlerjugend and volksturm units needed manpower, and all anti-aircraft guns in the German cities also needed manpower, so there was always this issue of limited resources.
And giving MG42 and panzerfausts to untrained useless infantry in Volksturm and Luftwaffe felddivision units were perhaps not the smartest thing to do when veteran Wehrmacht units often lacked the most modern equipment.
So could a great wall on the eastern front have been of a great use to the Germans?
I say probably. The distances on the eastern front are huge, so a Russian offensive would quickly run into supply as the attacker overextended themselves. And then the Russian troops would become very vulnerable to German counter-attacks and entire armies would become encirled and destroyed-
Landmines would inflict losses on the Russian troops without any sacrifice of German blood. And Russian offensives would be slowed down so Germany would have time to concentrate their forces and punch back the Russian attacks on one front after another.
And soon would the Russian military have suffered so big losses that they realize that they could not keep on attacking the German, because if the war was kept going this way then they would run out of Russian men before the German army had been defeated.
So the war in the east would then turn into a stalemate.
And just like in ww1 would the economiesing of troops of one front enable to free up army units to fight on another front. When you have barbed wirse, trenches, minefields, and bunkers prepared then you will need less men to defend one front, so then you could afford to send your solidiers away to fight on another front.
THe German army could send troops from the western front to fight on the east in 1914. And had the Wehrmacht done the same thing then they would have been able to do the same thing. And after the Russians had been tamed the Germans could have afforded to send more units away to fight on the western front.
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@TGTexan
I think a recent post by Swedens largest military blogger is worth quoting:
Det mest använda och på många sätt det vapensystem som givit mest utdelning för Ryssland är artilleri. Efter att den första offensiven blev tillbakaslagen så har ryska arméns alla meningsfulla framgångar mer eller mindre gjorts genom lokal överlägsenhet av artillerield, en överlägsenhet som mer eller mindre sprang in i en vägg när HIMARs gjorde sitt intåg.
Estland uppskattade att Ryssland hade 17 miljoner granater vid krigsstarten, en siffra som grovt motsvarar Ukrainska uppskattningar och RUSI Report. Uppskattningsvis avfyrades 10 miljoner granater under 2022, och med nuvarande konsumtion så kommer man att avfyra 7 miljoner under 2023. Ryssland tillverkar mellan 250.000 och 1.000.000 granater per år, beroende på om man frågar Ukraina eller Ryssland.
Det antyder att Ryssland kommer få slut på sin ammunition tidigt 2024 om man fortsätter som man gjort hittills. Ryssland har dock ett extra förråd av artilleri-granater, nämligen Nordkorea. Enligt sprida offentliggjorda statliga rapporter (US primärt) så har Ryssland köpt miljontals granater av Nordkorea. Den bästa uppskattning jag kunnat hitta sätter toppsiffran på 3.000.000 granater.
Om det stämmer och om Ryssland inte kraftigt ökar sin ammunitionsproduktion (osannolikt) så kommer vi att få se en sänkning i intensiteten av rysk artillerield, antingen skarpt Q2 2024, eller gradvis under 2023. Jag har ingen direkt data på det, men anekdotiskt verkar man ha strypt mängden ammunition vid stora delar av fronten redan.
Eldrör är också en vanlig fråga då dessa verkar slitas ut i en hygglig takt, men Ryssland har enligt de källor jag hittat inte haft några problem hittills. De håller sannolikt längre än granater, så mer av det sovjetiska arvet finns sannolikt kvar.
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There were jews christians zorastians muslims and believers of ancient greek gods, and they lived everyware during the late antiquity and early middle ages. Vikings vistited ireland, spain, france, russia, ukraine, and byzantium. Muslim and jewish traders were active in Bohemia. The Khazaks in modern day Russia converted to judaism. And there were jews in Jerusalem and jews in modern day Saudiarabia. There was also jews in Mesopotamia left there after the jewish capitivity in Babylon. Christians also lived in Iraq, Persia, Saudiarabia, North Africa and a few enclaves were even so distant as in India.
The religion tended to get local variants, and the latin christians and the Byzantian christians started to despise each other over minor religious differences. In the 4th century was there a church meeting at Nicea where a bunch of theologians and politicians were assembeled and they designed a standardized version of the Bible and decided to burn all books they didn't deem to fit into the book collection known as the Bible. And everyone who disagreed with them was called a heretic and could suffer a terrible fate.
But Christians who lived in Persia had their own interpretation of christianity, and the intolerant Byzantines would murder those heretics during their military campaigns into Persia. So it was obviously not so that a christian group therefore would prefer a christian ruler, but instead did many welcome the first muslim rulers over the middle east because of their religious tolerance.
But later on would of course muslims start to behave the same way when Muhammed died and a war of succession occured a century later. The muslim world got a divide between shia and sunni muslims and non-muslims became encouraged to convert.
The jews aslo had their fair share of religious intolerance. The jews in Saudiarabia commited genocides against the Christians living there so they would have no competition over winning peoples souls. And the jews in Jerusalem was also happy when the Byzantines lost control over the city over to the Persians.
The jews helped muhammed wage his first wars. But they were also some of his victims, as Muhammed himself behaved like ISIS does today, when he commited a genocide on the jewish tribe Banu Qurayza living in Arabia. 800 people were killed.
Muhammed was basicly just a typical Djinghis Khan type of guy typical for the medieval times. He commited genocide, he plundered, and he thought that it was okay to treat people of a different faith badly. And ISIS today are just doing the same things he did during the 600s - they kill all men in a village, they loot, and Christian and jewish girls are forced to become sex slaves and forced to marry a man who murdered their husband, brothers, father and male friends. Prophet Muhammed himself took a 15 year old girl - Mariyah -as a sex slave for the pervy old man. And Muhammed was also a man who bought, traded and sold black slaves. So he was a typical man of his time.
The jews in Bohemia, the Vikings, and the Genoese christians were more than happy to sell other people as slaves as well. And slavery in the middle east was even more common than in Rome during its peak.
(Source: The silk roads - Peter Frankopan)
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Feels like Russia have bought up much of our western politicians and media and tries to manipulate the public discussion in a pro-Russian way.
Trump, Salvini, Le Pen, AfD, Orban, Tucker Carlson have all proven themselves to be Pro-Russian traitors. They all do the talk about patriotism, and the need for their countries to show muscles - including military muscles. Former rightwing US presidents like Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon were strongly against Soviet-Russian totalitarianism during the Cold war. But the todays so called right do not say a blip when Soviet-Russia tries to annex a free country. They even go as far as strongly vocally supporting Putins Russian dictatorship and his war. Had someone expressed such ideas during the cold war it would have been seen as treason, and especially so in rightwing Thatcherite, Reaganite circles.
One can now say that the bought up fake populist right are basically just Putin-puppets that are anti-western, and anti its own people and always put Russian interest first before its own citizens.
Also on the far left do we see people bought up Putin. Among pro-Russian traitors have we got names like Noam Chomsky, Jimmy Dore, Tulsi Gabbard, Bernie Sanders.... and Gudrun Schyman here in Sweden. Plus some "charitable organizations" such as Amnesty international and Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society
Sometimes one can wonder if some people have been bought up by Putins oil money, or if they are just stupid and act as Putins useful idiots. Jason Unruhe (aka "Maoist rebel news") on youtube for example claims to be a maoist while he at the same time supports Putins rightwing fascism, imperialism and opression.
Much of the social media and TV have also been infiltrated by anti-western pro Kremlin elements. Tucker Carlson is probably the most obvious example. But you also got news channels that spreads Kremlin propaganda on youtube, like for example "The Real News Network". Sargon of Akkad and his gang at the youtube channel "The Lotuseaters" have been pro-russian from the start of this war, and some of the staff of this channel has openly admitted that they been getting a paycheck from Russia Today (which is the Russian state media TV channel).
Steve Turley is a rightwing talkinghead on Youtube which also have taken the very unlogical stance to support Putin, despite that would go against everything else he have said about rightwing ideas.. such as the right of a country to decide its own fate, democracy and nationalism. But that does strangely only apply when a country wants to be independent from the EU, but not when a country wants to be independent from Russia.
Some people have also openly participated on Russia today. And later on also supported Putins aggression on Ukraine.
Like for example economists such as the rightwinger Gonzalo Lira and the leftwing economist Michael Hudson.
And then of course there are a few centrist pro-Russian traitors. Olaf Scholz, the socialdemocratic leader of Germany, and Macron the president of France
The only solution to this problem as I see it is a total 100% boycot of everyone who have proven themselves to be a pro-Russian traitor. One should ignore their youtube channels and refuse to vote for them.
The west should also make large arms shipments to Ukraine as soon as possible to crush Russian imperalism as a force in this world. The monster should lose its teeths so it cannot go from talk to action. And Russias economy should be drained so it cannot afford to waste tonnes of money to try to buy up influencers in the west and infect our societies with their poison.
They also should be called out for what they are - traitors.
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I agree. The left should continue to doubling down on the current road so the socialdemocracy in Europe can continue its Pasok trend and lose their seats in every European parliament as they lose all support.
The old left stood for class struggle and the welfare state, while the new left stands for identity politics and open borders. And the new and the old left stands in opposition to each other. Because of immigration.
Either you have open borders, or either you have a welfare state. Simple as that.
And in 2015 the new left won the struggle and told all old leftist to fuck off and leave the leftwing parties - which they did. And now they have joined "populists" instead because they are tired of all IDPOL bullshit, islamophilia and open borders. The leftwing parties are dying. While the populists gain ground.
And the IDPOL lefts solution is to doubling down of the current road - which makes even more people to abandon this sinking ship.
And now Socialdemocrats in Denmark and Sweden desperatly tries to change course to save themselves from utter destruction. 30 years ago did the Swedish socialdemocrats get 45% of the votes in a normal election, but now their support have fallen like a rock thanks for feminism and open borders - and the Swedish nationalists will probably become the largest political the next election.
Its fun to see the IDPOL movement finally destroying itself. Hopefully that would make it possible for a real leftwing party to grow in the future. A real left without feminism, LBGTQ, mulitculti, pro-EU, blacklivesmatter bullshit.
A real left that instead fights for ordinary men and women and the workers. That wants higher wages, democracy, national souverignty.
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@iteachyou1575 I agree with John Keegan and Marco Smedberg that the fighting morale was in extremely bad shape in 1917 and that a German offensive could have crushed the French army, if they had managed to assemble large amounts of troops at this critical period of time.
After the "solidiers strike" would morale improve somewhat in the French army thanks to a combination of concessions and hard and cruel punishments for striking solidiers to set an example for their comrades that execution would await if they refused to follow orders. And more importantly did the French army agree to not making any more large offensives, and that was a message which the French solidiers wanted to hear.
And now we should discuss the next talking point.
The war in 1918. Personally I think Germany made a mistake.
It could either have launched all its force on the British army and knocked it out of the war, and then when France stood alone they could focus all their men at kicking France out of the war and the end conflict with a German victory.
Another solution of winning the war could have been to destroy the demoralized weak French army first, and the use all the last forces of Germany to throw Britain out of the continent.
But Ludendorff got confused at the last moment before the great battle would take place which would decide the outcome of the war. He launched one offensive against the British and one offensive against the French and his troops got spread out and failed to knock out either nation out of the war.
And then would more and more American troops come over the atlantic to fight the Germans.
If America had not joined the war, then Germany would probably would have won it by this point. But now was Germany too exhausted to keep on fighting after having to do all the fighting for herself (since her allies Turkey and Austria were worthless and lost almost all their troops the first months of the war.)
Germany had crushed Serbia, Russia, Romania, Italy and nearly also done so with Belgium, France and Britain... but in 1918 her power has been depleted and the 200,000 new American troops coming to Europe was too much for a country which had lost so many men and been under a blockade for 4 years.
Ludendorffs offensive is a case what can happen if you do not concentrate your forces to reach on objective.
As Sun Tzu warned us, "If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak".
And that is what always happens when you spread out your troops everyware. You will become weak everyware. And then you will not accomplish anything against your opponents.
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@greggor07 I am not proud about religious opression. On the other hand can one say that this was a time and age when it was hard to say who was the attacker and defender. Sometimes Wendes attacked murdered, plundered and enslaved Danes and Swedes, and other times was the roles switched.
Screw that: we wuz vikings meme
I think the viking age gets too much attention in Swedish history. Personally I am more proud of Swedens military achievements during the 1600s and 1700s (ie a small country like Sweden beating Russia at their own hometurf and conquering Moscow, Prague, Bavaria and Poland), and the scientific progress it have done since the 1700s, and its strong performance in welfare and economic progress.
"it is important to note that the myth of the Norse vikings as especially brutal savages"
The vikings were religiously tolerant, had high levels of gender equality, and viking men had clean hair and showed high levels of bravery in battle - which are things we can all admire.
But on the other hand were they slave traders. DNA analysis show that Icelands population are sprung from Norwegian men and women from Ireland which they stole. And the gigantic slave trade the vikings did in the east turned the word slave into "slav" - as for the slavic people living in eastern Europe which were sold as slaved to the Muhammedans.
So is the viking age something to be proud of? meh, not much I say.
Yule, the enslavement and all the piracy are not things to be proud of.
But on the other hand did the vikings not commit murder and cruelty at the same levels as christians would commit.. when they killed 20 million native Americans, built death camps at Skythopolis, massacred jews, started the inquisition, launched the crusades, or when French protestants got opressed, beaten, raped and murdered by their catholic countrymen only because of their faith.
Who knows how many lives have been lost because of religion? I often wonder how far humanity could have gone if we never had christianity, the fall of Rome and the rise of the dark ages where christians burned down the library at Alexandria, closed down public baths and ruined public health, and destroyed sculptures and antique texts only because religious zealots thought they were incompatible with their stupid religion.
Edward Gibbon may have exxagerated when he said that the christian ruler Justinian was responsible for the death of 100 million people. But fact remains that his wars made the country vulnerable to the pest and his wasteful spending on church building ruined his country.
So just imagine if all this shit had never happened... We could maybe have had high tech healthcare centuries ago, started the industrial revolution centuries earlier and colonized space by now if it wasn't for the existance of a particular stupid religion which have caused so much waste of lives, money time and resources.
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@newtonia-uo4889
"The Crusades are a logical responses to ills against catholic europe"
" the levantine crusade was to respond to the eastern roman empire's call for help and to stop the abuse of christian pilgrims in the holy land"
The muslim rulers of Jerusalem had no interest in denying christians access to the city since those tourists meant large revenues for the muslim rulers. So the muslims had a policy of religious tolerance, while religious minorites got murdered in christian Europe.
The city stayed under muslim rule for some centuries and no one had much problem with it. Problems only started to emerge when Syria in 800 AD - the land north of Jerusalem - got involved in a civil war and the area broke up into 200 minor states fighting each other and plundering and murdering everyone. So it became unsafe for christian pilgrims to travel along the land route from Europe to Jerusalem, and taking a ship was too expensive for European peasants.
So your talking point about christian pilgrims does not make much sense. Why start a crusade in year 1095 a thing that happened in the 9th century?
"Lithuanian crusade was a reponse to the polish king wishing to extend their realm into pagan Lithuania and also to end the border conflict that was happening between orthodox europe and catholic europe"
Some truth to that. But the vikings did not have much idealistic noble goals when they plundered.
And all they did was to re-brand their viking raids as "crusades" to make those projects seem less criminal and barbaric, and instead hide them behind noble pure fasade - eventhough the first crusades they did was no different than classic viking raids. But this time with the approval from christian west.
And as barbaric the vikings were, one cannot say that they was as evil as the crusaders. The vikings only wanted to loot. While the crusaders wanted to permanently occupy land, and they wanted to murder every person guilty of "wrongthink".
The most scary part in all this is that christians murdered people not because they hated them. But rather because they loved people and wanted to prevent them from commiting sin by killing them so that they would not have to spend too much time in hell.
The entire logic is just completly twisted and wicked. And totally evil. The crusaders were psychopaths just the same way as ISIS is today - a movement which also likes to kill disbelievers for the same reason.
"Love your neighbour" and "love your enemy" turned into murder people who do not share the same religious faith. And not even orthodox christians, nestorians, albignese and such were pure enough.
"many contributors to the Scientific Revolution were themselves Christian"
Many scientists like Newton was christians, but the christian faith in itself have no value at all for scientific progress. Ibn Khaldun happened to be a muslim, but that doesn't prove that islam is a religion benificial to science.
Believing in easter bunny does not make me become a better scientist.
But what I can say is that religion have led to iconoclasm, book burning and murders of great thinkers. So the downsides outweight the upsides in my opinion.
"in the totality of the spanish inquisition (400 years) around 5000 people were executed through the inquisition"
Not many people died under Pinotchets dictatorship either, but the number of people who were forced to flee the country and lived in fear was much large. And many people got tortured. So I think the same applies here.
What killed more people was things like the crusades which killed a million people. The conquest of Americas costed 20 million native Americans their lives. The religious wars in France, the Netherlands, and Germany did cost millions of lives. And it can also be debated to what extent Martin Luthers and the church are guilty of providing a German anti-semite thought tradition which led to the holocaust.
Religion also provided justification for the slavery and for western imperialism, and even in modern days have people killed each other on Ireland and on the Balkans over beliefs from a stupid holy book.
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Putin reminds me of his own favorite Tsar Nicholas who started the Crimean war despite Russias backwardness and despite England and France was the richest high technological industrial superpowers of their age.
And the reason why Tsar Nicholas and Tsar Putin believed in victory was the same. The west was decadent, materialistic, lazy, too comfortable, individualistic, unwilling to sacrifice blood and sweat, and unmanly. While Russia was manly, stubborn, brave, they were used to hardships, they were patriotic and understood the meaning of self-sacrifice for the greater good.
It was believed that those virtues would compensate for russias technological, economical and manpower disadvantage.
But Putin despite his love for history have failed to see that he is not the first one to have this faulty belief that wars could be won only by superior morality.
Tsar Nicholas lost the Crimean war for Russia. Hundreds of thousands of people died for nothing for this childish man that had some silly fantasies about being a succesful conqueror King. Russia lost that war.
Japan in World war 2 thought that the superior Japanese soldier would beat the industrial might of the decadent, comfortable, westerners that were unwilling to die for their country or for anything. But Japan had their asses kicked and lost the war anyways. And this was despite the Japanese undoubtably were fanatical and literarly fought til the last man and never surrendered, and japanese soldiers continued to fight for the emperor even decades after the war had ended on some remote pacific islands. So if not even fanatical Japanese bushido warriors could defeat the industrial might of the west, or German military professionalism. Then do I hold no doubt that russia will lose its future wars against the west. The russian soldier is less willing to fight than his western counterparts and more willing to surrender. And the lack of industrial might is even worse than that Germany had against USA. And nor do russia hold any manpower advantage like it had in previous world wars.
Russias hopes and dreams are unrealistic. Putin just do the same mistake as previous Tsars. And russia will pay a high price for this for many decades to come.
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There is this game that Russia wants to show the 3rd world that it is strong and does not back down and put hard against hard in its struggle against the west. Maybe Russia is afraid to look weak and useless for the third world?
But this is a vanity project a 3rd world country cannot afford. So a Potemkin phasade needs to be created, but this is not a substainable solution in the long run. So what Putin hope to achieve with this move is beyond me, it just seem idiotic like painting oneself into a corner, and then climb up on a branch on a tree and then put out the saw and start to cut down the same branch he is sitting on.
This is just so foolish. A desperate mans wishful thinking. Perhaps is he betting everything on that his boyfriend will become president in USA again. But it seems more likely that Biden will win to me.
And no this war have nothing to do with Nato agression. If that was true that Russia indeed felt threatened by an attack from the west, then why did that SU-57 fighter jet not sit protected inside a thick bomb shelter where it would be safe against drones and missile strikes?
All other countries in eastern Europe got protected hangars everywhere, so why not russia? Its almost like they do not fear any Nato invasion at all.
Vatniks also mock us Europeans that we are so unprepared for this war, with tiny armies, tiny military stockpiles and no artillery ammunition stored for a big war. So if they brag about how much stronger russian artillery is, then why do they feel threatened by their pathetically weak western foe?
And if the west is so dangerous to russia that it starts proxy wars and threatens russia with an invasion at every moment, then why do
the russian military pull out troops from Kaliningrad and send them to Ukraine? Isn't Kaliningrad super-important and needs to be protected at all costs as a top priority for the russian military in a war with Nato? Kaliningrad is enormously important, just as important as Moscow and St Petersburg. Kaliningrad have an important port, but that place is also an excellent starting point for a blitzkrieg against the Baltics, Its a place for missile attacks against the west (perhaps also with nukes).
Its also for defensive reasons enormously important for russia if Nato went to war with russia. It would tie up large Nato forces that could threaten russia elsewhere, and it would protect russias missile shield and help russia control the Baltic sea. So why then would russia ever move all Kaliningrad troops to fight in Ukraine? That just seems enormously reckless and dangerous to me, if Russia truely is under threat from the west.
And after the drone strike at Engels airbase did Russia move all its strategic bombers out of reach of Ukrainian drones. They were moved far north. To an airfield close to the border of Finland, just a few kilometers away and not more.
And I think that would be an extremely reckless move if Russia sincerly feared a western invasion. Would USA ever put all their B-2, B-1 and B-52 bombers in one place just a few kilometres from the Warsaw pact border during the cold war?
- I don't think so because that would be stupid and reckless. The entire nuclear capability of the US airforce could just have been destroyed in just one big air raid that could easily be done cross the border without much warning or time to react. No one would ever position their strategic bombers close to enemy territory unless they felt extremely safe and sure that they would never be attacked from the west.
So for all those reasons do I think Putin never feared any western invasion
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Austria was religious intolerant against the protestants - which was the reason the religious wars in Germany happened. The Habsburg monarchy in Austria and Spain was also seen as a threat to the rest of Europe - which thought that they were trying to take over the entire world.. and the enormous amount of silver from America that flowed into Europe was used to hire mercenaries and build huge armies.
And the rest of Europe came togheter to defend their own freedom which were under threat. The Netherlands hated the heavy taxation and the religious opression of Spain. Sweden felt threatened by Austria which was catholic and had a large population and if Austria had conquered northern Germany then Sweden would have gotten a hostile neighbour with so much new powers and more resources that it would impossible to defeat it. Denmark shared Swedens worries.
England and Spain was religious enemies and rivals in oceanic trade. France was catholic, but it was terrified of a united Germany, and if Austria would manage to get Germany unified then France would get a dangerous neighbour with resources larger than its own.
And the Ottoman empire did have friendly relations with England and it had fought wars against the habsburgs - both against Austria and against Spain. And the Ottoman empire didn't like the trade competition that Spain and Portugal gave it. And the ibrerian peoples arrogance and religious intolerance did not do much to help the relations with the ottomans either.
So the thirty years war 1618-1648 could be seen as a world war where the Habsburgers tried to take over the world - like other crazy Germans in history.
And if Frederick the great would have been defeated a century later the I doubt that Austria would have been a good empire. It was Frederick the Great who was first with religious toleration and freedom of the press, while Austria was just a lame half-assed copy of Prussia. Austria still burned jews to death under the rule of Joseph II.
And multiculturalism was not an easy thing. The Habsburg army proves the point. The Hungrian troops hated to by under the command of a German general and they strongly opposed any such attempts. And the German troops in turn did have the same feelings towards the Hungrians, so there was this feeling of mutual contempt and cooperation was uneasy, even if the Maria Theresia made several visits to Hungary and did her best to get their support.
Hungary was still a feudal barbarian land where the aristocrats plundered the country and opressed the peasants into the harshed form of serfdom. Hungary made up more than a third of Habsburgs population, but it contributed with less than 10% of the tax revenues to the empire. Partly because the Hungarians was selfish and didn't wanted to contribute too much to the Germans, but also partly because the Hungarian aristocrats wanted to steal things from their peasants themselves and they had no intention to share their loot. Hungary was economically backwards and underdeveloped.
The only real thing keeping togheter the Habsburg monarchy and all Hungarians, Croats, Czechs, Italians, Germans, French and Dutch living in it was their love and loyalty to their dictator/monarch. And the social order of the empire was not Prussian meritocracy, but more of aristocratic oppression.
The huge empire had been born out of royal marriage diplomacy which had given the Habsburg large amounts ot lands through inheritance. And many of the balkan states had joined the Habsburg's only because they thought that getting protection from Austria was a less bad choice than taking the risk of being occupied by the Ottoman empire.
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World war 2 was an industrial war done on scale never seen before in history. The mobilization never seen in another war. But the organized murder of civilians also took forms of extreme efficiency and industrial scale.
The entire state machinery was brought into this... the railroads, technicians to build ovens, gas chambers, gas vans and ventilation, and electric fences, the secret police tracked up people, the military provided machine guns for the guard towers and land mines outside the camps.
And the efficiency was brutal. Gas did cost nearly nothing to produce. The camps did not need much personnel.
Millions of people died in just a year. Evidence was hidden by burning the bodies to ashes, and then using the ashes to grow trees. The killers did not have to see their victims, since the dirty work of taking care of dead bodies was done by slaves. And nearly no one successfully able to flee from those horrible places. The chance of survival was literary less than one in 250.000 in one of those. And even less if you were a child, elderly, a mother or disabled and unfit to work - because then you were killed right away. And almost all among those few who were lucky to flee were men who were working outside in the forest as a slave and cutting trees. Otherwise was there nearly no chance at all of surviving, except an armed uprising.
To me the lesson of all this is how powerless the individual is against an evil government.
If the Germans were able to do this with such a brutal efficiency in 1942, then imagine what a modern government would be able to do today...
Back then it was almost impossible to flee from a factory of death. You had to worry about guards with machine guns, electric fences, barbed wire, land mines,
And even if you manage to get out of the camp, then you would have to flee out in the woods starved and with a striped pyjamas and no food or cover against the cold. And meanwhile would trucks with guards and barking dogs come out and looking after you. And people would feel sympaties with you and give you food and a blanket if you were lucky. But they would be too afraid to hide you, because then their entire family could be killed if your enemy would found out.
And today I imagine that chance of surviving a genocide is not 1 in 250.000.... but rather it is 0%.
Today governments can track fleeing prisoners with drones flying around or satellites. Heat seeking sensors can see the heat of a human body hiding in a forest. Microphones, surveillance cameras and sensors can easily track people down. With RFID tags can you track down the movement of cattle on a radar. With coal cameras can you see through walls if someone is hiding on the other side.
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I think this question if it is good or bad is irrelevant for the discussion here. Here is the thing, Putin and Trump try to win support by proclaiming they are the defenders of the Christian faith. You and I as non-religious people might not care about this issue as we are non-religious. However people like us are a tiny minority in many countries, including USA and Russia. To many is this issue relevant because they are religious. However neither Trump or Putin live like Christians and they act contrary to Christian values, so they do not deserve the support from Christian voters. Indeed, Putin is not a Christian at all, and no matter how many homophobic and anti-woke things he say will ever change that fact. He has broken against the basic Christian commandments. And nor does he feel any regret, shame or guilt over it. On the contrary. He will happily start a new war in the future as soon as this war is over and he have rebuilt his military.
Putin is thereby no just non-christian. He is anti-christian. He supports murder, theft, lying, corruption, and opression.
Jesus spoke about love, compassion and forgiveness of past sins.
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"every political factor and military engagement came to an advantage for one side"
France had better rifles and the battle of Gravelotte st.Private was fought against French numerical superiority. Strategically could France have just massed troops along the short Franco-German border and made it hard for German troops to win the war, as they would have been forced to fight a strong enemy with well prepared defensive positions.
Prussia did however have better tactics, better logistics, better overall prepardness for war - and of course von Moltke's genius.
"Sadly for the german history his sucessors Schlieffen and his nephew Moltke the younger did not want to realize this"
Schlieffens plan was a master work. Had not Austria failed so badly at the eastern front and forced Germany to move troops to the east to stop a Russian invasion - then would France have fallen and the war would have been over in 1914 with German easy win in the west. And there after would Russia have fallen in the east, and probably also before 1917.
The Schlieffen plan had to be improved in ways its father never originally intended, and it is surprising how well the plan did work despite its many changes. The schlieffen plan was created when the French army was much weaker. But then a few years before WW1 did France introduce 6 years conscription for all males and it grew its army.
This changed the power-balance so much that Germany had to put hundreds of thousands more men into the fight in France in order to win this fast victory in the west. But such a growth in size of the German invasion army did create new problems this plan was not really suited for.
You could only walk so many men over a bridge at once, over otherwise it will collapse.
A thin road will create ques and road blocs if you try to march too many men, horses and guns over it all at once...
So growing an army and maintaining the speed for a fast invasion of France was two things which did go against each other. Russia would also begin to mobilize its army faster than this plan anticipated - which meant that a German victory over France must happen even faster than planned, before Russia could field a large enough army to become a deadly threat to Germany.
All those factors made it seem nearly impossible for Germany to win in 1914.
But Germany nearly won the war in 1914 despite all those problems - and that says a lot about the high quality this plan originally had. Had this plans originals been badly made to begin with, I think it would have been very unlikely that a fast invasion of France and Belgium would have been possible. Paris would never be under threat, since French forces would have gotten more time to plan their counter-moves to stop the German offensives. Troops could get the time to dig in and put up barbed wire on every kilometer before the Germans came.
But that did not happen. Because Germany kept all the initiative in their hands on the west front battlefield in 1914.
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@ChillDudelD
"Sweden didn’t even occupy half of Poland during the Deluge"
Sweden took most of the land, but it never managed to keep any area under control for long. Had the war continued, then Sweden would certainly have lost with very little if any gains at all.
"During the Deluge Poland was attacked by like 8-9 different enemies"
At the same time Swedens campaign in Poland started to slow down and run into problems with guerilla wars all over the huge country and not enough troops to deal with all rebellions, did Russia go to war with Sweden.
Denmark and Norway also started a war with Sweden, and their ally the Netherlands joined in. And soon also Brandenburg and Austria joined in in the war against Sweden.
A thing quite typical of the Swedish King Charles X Gustav (who was really a German) was that he liked to gamble.
Everything was all or nothing for him. He gambled high and risked the total destruction of his Kingdom. He did gamble in 1658 and won the most total military victory a Swedish King ever won by marching over the Baltic Sea when it was frozen and making a surprise attack on Denmarks capitol Copenhagen, and forced the Danish King to give away half his country in exchange for peace.
But things could have gone bad... the ice cold just as well have melted had it only been a few degrees warmer... and then thousands of men and horses would have drowned. And then would Sweden suddenly have no army, while the country was at war with Russia, Denmark, Netherlands, Poland, Brandenburg and Austria at the same time.
I don't think a Swedish King would ever have been so reckless with Sweden. But this guy was a German so he didn't care.
I think feels strange that I am the only person who seems to have this opinion of this King. He is usually seen as great conqueror. But I see him more as a guy who played Russian roullette.. He ended up lucky once, and then he died young, and that probably saved him from wrecking his own reputation later on. His war with Poland never led anywhere. And the next war with Denmark ended with a minor loss.
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The F22 was great, but it was too costly so they started to look at the F35 as a cheaper substitute. But the F35 have failed that hope in every way, and the project is constantly going more and more over budget.
And seen with facts in hand, we can now be clever in hindsight and say that it have been a failed project. Many might be surprised, but I am not. Stealth is overrated, and I don't think that the time has yet come when one type of plane can fullfill all roles of all planes to a good degree.
The Navy wanted a VSTOL plane so they got a plane with a relativly fat fuselage and small wings. And in order to get more stealthy the plane also had to hide all weapons inside the body of the plane - which in turn made the plane fat. That helped the plane do vertical take offs better, but on the other hand did that also make the plane shitty in air combat since it got too tiny wings to make sharp turns. And the attempts to give the plane fighter capabilities have in turn made the plane too fast to see any targets on the ground, so the plane therefore also suck att giving close air support. And its fuel hungry engine makes the plane expensive to run, and it cannot stay in the air for hours to be ready for giving the troops on the ground support whenever they need it.
So it sucks at aircombat because have the highest wingload of any modern fighter jet. It suck at VSTOL since it cannot carry weapons and the engine heat could melt carrier decks. It suck at close air support because its too fast and fuel hungry. And it is a cost-ineffiecent bombtruck.
And the stealth was compromised away like anything else, when it was decided that no device would be added that could hide the warm exhaust gases coming from the engine.
And the plane crashes just as often, and is just as expensive and maintance demanding as most two-engined planes. Indeed, oftentimes even more.
If the US military could make this stupid decision to build a plane that is "good at everything", then I question their competence. The F35 is to planes what TOGII was to tanks.
Stealth is a good, but is it worth sacrificing everything else good in plane for it? I think not.
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I think the EU is also to blame for much of this third way nonsense.
George W Bush was the worst president in US history and a warmonger and a war criminal. Many were rightfully pissed off with USA in the rest of the western world after its criminal war against Iraq, and the scandals at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the CIA torture cells in Europe, the patriot act, the suspension of habeas corpus and the Geneva convention etc ect.
And in Europhile countries such as Germany was this used as an argument for a stronger EU, that should replace USA and Nato.
They wanted an EU army to replace NATO + USA. And the anti-Americanism wave that came with Trump's presidency increased this rethoric from the EU about the need for an EU army and to cut ties with USA, and to make a big EU that would stand on its own legs.
And in Germany did anti-Americanism flourish. And combined with old nonsense ideas such as the Ostpolitik - which was Germany's flirt with Soviet Russia to build friendship through economic trade, did this silly idea of power bloc between USA and Russia flourish.
And the EU would represent this third way.
But all what this stupid anti-Americanism from EU and Germany have managed to do is to cause division in the western world. Germany and France are often at conflict with USA... over trade, over contributions to Nato, over North Stream, over Franco-German ass kissing of China's dictatorship that throws Uighurs into concentration camps, and over taxing Microsoft yada, yada...
And all these conflicts are exploited by Putin.
Putin sees that the west are busy fighting with each other so it cannot organize a unified front against Russian imperialism.
When Canada and Sweden was bullied by China, did European countries dependent on Chinese trade not lift a finger to support their democratic allies in the west. So one can definatly say that Germany's double loyalties is a problem. It is throwing western countries under the bus because of its economic ties with China and Russia.
And to some extent can France and Germany also be blamed for the war in Ukraine as those countries blocked Ukraine's membership into Nato. And without Nato protection, did Putin see Ukraine as an easy prey for Russian aggression.
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@sasakithesolemnone8108
" What's gonna happen is the grifters you want to hit with higher taxes will evade them anyway using loopholes"
Why are there loopholes to begin with?
- Because rich people lobbyied politicians to add them there in the first place
😉
That's how it works in most cases. And that problem is therefore fixable if the political will exist to deal with this problem for real.
"the same will happen to EU's proposal of universal tax rates"
That proposal is idiotic. Every country have the right to set their own tax rates. If a country wants a corporate tax rate of 0% I got no problem with it, and if another country wants a 100% tax it also their democratic right to do so.
I see this solution as idiotic, as everything the EU does are idiotic. Why is there even a problem of tax evasion in the EU to begin with? Why is tax evasion 2-4% of Europes GDP, and not 1-2% like it was in the 1950s and 1960s?
I think the answer is simple. French socialists wanted its own stupid globalist shitt ideas to be spread to other countries with the help of the EU. So it demanded that all other EU countries also abolished all capital controls in the mid-1980s to create the common market.
And all countries did that. With catastrophic results. This caused economic crashes in England and Sweden in the early 1990s, as the old tool of dealing with currency speculation had now been abolished. And tax evasion was now much more simpler when you easy could move money from one country into another. And from now on would tax havens sprung up, and countries began introducing beggar-thy-neighbour policies that led Europe into a vicious circle of parasitical behaviour on each other.
So what is the solution?
- The solution is to leave the EU. And reintroduce capital controls. Then you will stop tax evasion. You will make it hard to move money into tax havens. And now you are able to raise taxes on the rich and big corporations without them being able to do anything about it - just like in the good old days before EU globalism.
"the middle class and the entrepeneurs who do things the right way get extorted to hell & back by you."
My plan is to lower taxes for ordinary people by making rich people pay more. Right now are the rich not paying the same tax rates as other people. And that is something which needs to be changed.
"Once you tax small businesses to death & investors flee the country"
Like I said. The rich are the ones who are going to pay more. Small buisnesses will not be taxed to death. And nor will they flee the country with their hair saloon, spa, or restaurant. Only a silly remainer would think we live in such a globalised world. The world is still very much nationalist what buisnesses concern.
And yes, I want to tax certain industries to death. Not all lives matter. My tax policy is racist towards low productive declining industries. I want to steal their money and give the resources to highly productive young innovative industries instead.
Old dying industries like newspapers will have to pay a 60% corporate tax rate. While new industries in cutting edge science will pay 0% corporate tax.
This idea is perfectly in line with the Austrian school economist Joseph Schumpeters idea of creative destruction. Old jobs should be killed off so new jobs can grow in their place. When the horse and buggy industry died did the car industry grow. And typewrites got replaced by computers, and telegraphs by telephones.
Unlike certain right-wingers do I not think that every job is worth trying to save at all costs, with lower taxes and wages and what have you. I do simply not think that society have been better off if we never replaced ice harvestors with refrigerators.
"I'm pretty sure all those multinationals your country attracted aren't paying"
Companies are interested in going to places where they can sell lots of stuff, and the tax rates is of a much smaller importance. Even Sweden that isn't exactly a huge market like China would mean billions in profits if they establish themselves here. And yes, even if they pay a high tax they would still earn lots of money so it would be worth coming here.
Its not like USA was a dead country before Trump slashed the corporate tax rate. On the contrary, USA had more Fortune 500 companies than any other country on the planet. More than EU.
And basically every country in Western Europe did flourish during the 1950s and 1960s when USA, UK and Sweden had a 60% corporate tax rate.
Today is Swedens corporate tax rate 20%, and Swedens economic performance is piss poor.
Maybe it is time to go back to the policies of the good old days that seemed to work better 😉
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I once read an MHQ article that claimed that knights usally never made any cavalry charges on their own, but rather they fought alongside the infantry in a mixed formation when they advanced towards the enemy.
And I can agree with you that tanks have punch in open terrain, and could encircle and crush enemies and such. But I think it is important to also remember that tanks aren't any magic breaktrough weapons that just could plow through any enemy formation in any terrain. Because tanks doesn't work well in forests, cities or on narrow roads with bushes, walls and ditches on the sides for infantry men to hide. And in such areas even the mightyiest beasts are easily killed if they are left to their own.
Patton tried to breakout from Normandy with his huge tank army, but despite crushing superiority in men and material he was stopped by a tiny German defensive line skillfully using the excellent Normandy terrain to its maximum potential. Patton failed to breaktrough the German line on the left, and Montgomery suffered equally bad on the right in his Caen offensive and suffered so heavy losses that he was starting to run out of infantry.
A tiny German force of 200.000 men had locked in 1,6 million allied troops on the Normandy beachhead for 2 months simply by using all forrests, bocage, narrow roads, ditches and villages with narrow streets for their own maximum gain, and making ambushes, hiding away from enemy detection and reducing the advantage of allied superior firepower.
The Germans was so succesful in their defense that they could probably have hold out for many more months and the allies would be forced to evacuate when the harbour at Cherbourg wouldn't be able to supply the huge army on the beachhead.
Fortunatly for the allies, did Hitler also believe in the idea that an armour spearhead is unstoppable when he launched his stupid Arracourt counter-offensive. And failed to learn anything from the allied mistake of attacking with tanks in unsuitable terrain, his offensive easily got crushed with heavy losses and had to be abolished. And all losses in turn had weakened the German army so much that they no longer could the defensive line from another allied offensive. So with Arracourt was battle of Normandy finally won for the allies.
But despite all costly mistakes, no one had learned the lesson that tanks aren't invincable breaktrough machines - and especially not so in unsuitable terrain. Montgomery later on repeated his mistake with his Market Garden offensive. Patton repeated his mistakes in the battle of Metz. And Hitler launched his Ardennes offensive, which proved that even the most powerful supertanks like Tigers, King Tigers, Panthers and Jagdtigers didn't guarantee a win. Not even in large numbers.
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"From day one Ukraine never had a chance of winning the real war."
From what military school did you get that knowledge? From Russia Today evening show propaganda?
Look at history. Russia have lost almost every war it have fought the last 170 years. It lost the Crimean war. It lost the Russo-Japanese war. It lost World war 1. It lost the Polish-Bolshevik war. It failed to conquer all of Finland in 1939 and in 1944. It suffered catastrohic defeats against nazi-Germany despite it fought a 1 front war against Germany that had to fight a 5 front war without any lend lease help. And then in the 1980s did russia lose the war in Afghanistan. And it lost the first Chechen war.
"Now that Zelensky and Biden fed a half a million Ukrainians into the meat grinder"
I bet you do not have any credible source for that claim. And clowns like Gonzalo Lira, Scott Ritter, Tucker Carlson, Russia today are all fake news so they don't count.
"Zelensky & Biden supporters ARE STILL promoting the war!"
They did not start the war - it was russia that started the war.
And a peace deal at any cost will not create peace. Putin have broken every promise he have made... the Budapest agreement, the 2003 border deal with Ukraine, The Minsk agreement, the peace deal with Chechenya, the deal with Prigozhin. So I do not think a ceasefire will hold a year longer then when Putin think he have a realistic chance of invading and succesfully take Ukraine again.
So making a peace deal is therefore pointless. It is also morally wrong. Russia should not be given anything.
Ukraine have all the right to defend itself according to international law and the UN charter. They defend themselves against genocide, wars of aggression, russian tyrranny and opression, ruscism and raschism.
Ukraine fights stands for truth, independence, freedom and democracy. Russia only stands for evil, manipulation and lies.
And if rewarding russian terrorists will only send the wrong signal to terrorism sympatizers around the world, and encourage future acts of terrorism also from other states and organisations when they see that russia gets rewarded for bad behaviour.
Appeasement simply doesn't work. Its just a dangerous strategy. The least bad option is therefore to kick russia out of Ukraine by force, as it refuses to leave stolen lands voluntarily.
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"Denmark-Norway had the whole western border of Sweden"
I think he is right since the Norwegian border was for the most wars a not very important front. Scania (today's southern tip of Sweden) was the place of interest for Denmark and Sweden. It was this place the two countries were fighting about.
Denmark-Norway did usually have the superior forces at their hands, so Sweden could usually not afford to spend troops to guard the border towards Norway. But on the other hand was there not much harm in temporarily losing the northern provinces to Norway since those provinces did not have any large population or economic importance.
Norway did conquer Jämtland, Härjedalen plus a few more places here and there in the war of 1658, but these losses were not of any major importance. The war ended with a disaster for Denmark anyways as Copenhagen the capital was under threat.. and the Danish King in desperation for peace once even thought about giving away not just Scania, Bohuslän and Halland.. but also Iceland, and all of Norway to Sweden. But luckily for Denmark could skilled Danish negotiators soften up the harsh peace terms, and the Swedish King also wanted to end the war as soon as possible so he accepted the peace. He thought that he could invade and conquer all of Denmark the next year, so why bother so much about the peace terms now? was his thinking.
Sweden would also not gain much from invading Norway, and it would be a difficult to take because of all difficulties in transporting supplies and the good defensive terrain in the country.
And even if a large part of Norway could be conquered, it would still be difficult to keep what had been taken.
Western Sweden along the southern part of the Norwegian-Swedish border was important for Sweden. But not for the reason that people might think today, since Göteborg was a small an unimportant city back in the 1600s and 1700s.
The place was more of importance since it gave Sweden access to the Atlantic without having to cross the Øresund and paying toll on all Swedish trade which passed there. And having a naval base there also offered some advantages (you could for example easily send out ships to cut off all communications between Denmark and Norway).
Bohuslän province was Sweden's only window towards the Atlantic ocean, so losing that geographical area would mean that Swedish ships was locked inside the Baltic sea.
Sweden did twice lose wars about this place (in 1571 and 1613) and had to large amounts of money to Denmark to get it back.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%84lvsborg_Ransom_(1613)
It was an important place for the reasons mentioned so the Swedish government was eager to get it back.
During the Great Northern war did Norway try to invade Sweden, but Tordenskiolds attempted amphibious raid on Göteborg failed. And Denmark was unable to send troops to Norway and ship supplies to Norway so it could launch a large military invasion of Sweden. And when Norway's lacked all those resources it decided to prospone the invasion.
Which shows that Drachinifel is right - The way to invade Sweden did go from the sea. Because without food and cannon balls from Denmark, could Norway not invade Sweden.
So the Swedish navy and privateers did effectively stop a land invasion.
And the opposite was also true.
Sweden's invasion of Norway in 1716 also failed because the Swedish army could not get supplies shipped at seas, so the army had no other option than to return back to Sweden and give up the attempt to take Norway after Tordensiold had wrecked a Swedish fleet in the battle of Dynekilen in 1716 and thereby denying the Swedish army supplies from the sea.
Sweden would however learn their lesson and try to transport large amount of supplies by road into Norway in 1718. The plan was to conquer Norway and thereby ending the war with Denmark, and perhaps would also Norway's timber and fishing also offer a nice reward for a campaign. And then could the Swedish troops in Norway be shipped to take back the Baltics, and when the badly protected Baltic harbors fell into Swedish hands, then would Russia be unable to get food to their troops in Finland, and have to retreat and give it back to Sweden.
And thereby would Sweden take back all land that had been lost in the war.
But the war did of course end at Fredriksten before that plan could be achieved.
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@TheStugbit I didn't say that the panther was useless, but I don't think the Germans was able to get the full value out of this tank. Had they had better crews, more support, not fought so outnumbered, and made this tank more mechanically reliable then it could have done some wonders in this war. But instead were many machines wasted in the dumbest ways.
And this make me think that the panther was maybe not the right kind of tank for Germany then.
It seems wiser that they would have built a 10 tonnes lighter tank which was more mechanically reliable and easier to mass produce. If they wanted to then they could probably have added the same gun on it, like they did with Jagdpanzer IV.
The panther was a nice tank with good optics, good penetration, good precision, frontal armour, good suspension and great ground pressure thanks to its wide tacks, and the sloped shape also great. So there was much to like about this tank.
But as I said earlier, I don't think the Germans were fully able to capitalize on its strenghts.
The impression you get from watching episodes of great tank battles is that German tankers in the later half of the war often behaved stupid and wasted good tanks. While the Americans on the other hand were able to use their tanks in ways that in a tactically smart way.
They fired smoke grenades to deny the panther tanks the upper hand in long distance gun fights.
And they used sneaky flank attacks to take out the panthers by outflanking them and hit their weak sides.
Or they just used air power to take them out instead of involving themselves into costly frontal assault duels.
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The most important factor for resource mobilization in world war 2 and world war 1 was rather how modern and well developed a society was. You could say that GDP per capita is almost a measurement of that... yeah; I know its not 100% perfect, but lets just go with it for now.
What countries see their economies crash first?
- The poor and under-developed countries. Russia did see her war economy collapse first of all Great Powers in WW1.
Already in 1915 was the weakness of Russian industry so appearant that Russian field guns only could fire about a dozen shots per month - while German and British guns fired almost the same amount in a single day. And Russian soldiers had to attack German machine gun nests without there being enough rifles for everyone - so it was basically an attack à la enemy at the Gates.
Farmers had to go to the cities and work for the industry. And the shortage of food led to higher prices, and war time shortages led to high inflation and people had enough and the economy collapsed.
Opressive Tsarist Russia could no longer keep the country togheter, and Russia surrendered to Germany in 1917.
Next on the line to surrender was the Great Power with the 2nd lowest GDP per capita: Austria-Hungary. Which gave up a year later.
And after her did Germany give up. And the last man standing was Britain which was the richest country in this club.
Another trend one can see is that developed countries with a high GDP per capita are usually better at resource mobilization. Rich countries like USA, Britain and Germany could afford to plow down 80% of their GDP into military spending. But for a poor country like Italy, Japan and Russia this is not really possible - a more realistic number for such poor countries would be 40% or perhaps 60% at most. At least for not a long period of time.
America was probably the best historical example of how a perfect resource mobilization should be made.
Their military expanded from a few thousand men into a gigantic machine with 12 million men in uniform - and they could probably have expanded their military even more if they had wanted too, but since it was quite clear already in late 1943 that the Axis was losing the war did they start to demobilize their military and cut down wartime production already by then!
USA produced more military aircrafts than the rest of the world combined. And it spammed out liberty ships, warships and army weapons, oil and enough food to feed not just its own army and civilian population but also that of USSR.
All this production wonder was possible thanks to much mechanization. Tractors could be used to increase agricultural production while at the same time fewer farmers were needed. American industry used more machines and tools than other countries so the output produced for each worker was therefore much higher than that of other countries.
So once again could they produce more stuff than other countries and with less workers.
German industry was very ineffiecent in this regard... its agriculture both lacked tractors and fertilizer, and it lacked machinery in industry. It did instead rely on skilled workers. While American production had been dumbed down so that unskilled workers - like women easily could do the job of spamming out parts from a machine - parts which later on could be assembled into a tank or airplane.
This was an old American tradition. In the late 1800s did America get many immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe that could not understand English language, so simple jobs done with machines that any idiot could handle was an art the Americans were masters at in the 1940s.
Poor countries could not afford tractors and machines. War was expensive enough and having to use steel to build tractors in the middle of the war would probably have angered many Generals. It was not possible to replace farmers with tractors, so if you did move a farmer away from his farm and put in uniform - then you would get lose food produced, and food shortages would create inflation and starvation.
You could not take a miner and put him in uniform, because then your industry would stop as there would not be enough coal or iron to keep to keep things running. And you could not take an industrial worker and put him in an amy uniform either without it leading to fewer weapons being built or repaired.
So poor countries have fewer options.
It is remarkable that Russia did not collapse in WW2. But that was probably only thanks to the Russian government had stockpiled mountains of resources before the war... but in late 1942 they began to run out. But then did the war start to go badly for Germany and southern Russia could be liberated and lend lease help began to arrive so the strangle hold on the Russian economy could be reliefed.
Japan did also do more impressive than one could expect - it was also like Russia able to spend 80% of its GDP on the war for a short period of time - which is not normal for poor countries like these.
But that was only in 1944 Japan did this in her last fanatical attempt to win the war... but then soon resource shortages put a stop to this insanity.
Japan never really industrialized. Its dilemma of the 1930s was always - produce more military stuff for the war in China? or produce goods to export to America so machinery could be imported so Japan could industrialize?
With the embargo by USA was the policy of exports closed down. And Japan went to war and in record time conquered the most resource rich area in the world in record time - South East Asia had oil, coal, aluminum, copper, rice, cotton, sugar, rubber.. everything. But Japan did not have enough ships to transport all plunder back to Japan. So the cargo was stuck in their home countries and left to rotten to no use to anyone.
And this problem only got worse and worse and American uboats sank ship after ship. So Japan then never got the resources to win an industrial war anyways.
Italy failed in its war effort. Much thanks to its lack of oil. And it Military spending never reached more than 60% of GDP.
Germany was probably the biggest dissapointment in this war. It was only in late 1943 and in 1944 that her spending took off. And very late into the war did she learn some basics in mass production - but it was too little too late.
And murdering jewish workers did probably not help. In 1942 did the Axis powers have a land mass of conquered territory almost equal to that of the allies in numbers of people living under Axis control, and the Axis lands GDP was almost equal to that of the allies.
But the Axis failed to exploit this oppurtunity to win the war. And its ineffiecent war production was one major reason why it lost. Germany did do a bad job of producing weapons. As a rich country it did punch below its own weight. While the same could not be said about Britain and USA. Even poor Russia managed to outproduce Germany.
Most of the blame of Germanys poor performance should probably be blamed on Germanys decision to start a total war in 1941, without being ready for mass production until late 1943. It could not have started mass producing weapons earlier however, since about 25% of the GDP was spent on building new factories and workers, steel and concrete had to go to those projects and could not be used to build guns instead.
And when those factories finally was ready, then the war had already been lost. It was too late to recover from the mistakes done at Midway, Stalingrad, El-Alamein, Tunisia, Guadacanal and the lost battle of the Atlantic. Germany was fighting a 5 front war in west, south, east and land and sea and it was unlikely that it could turn the tide by late 1943.
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I think this movie is overall badly researched, but fact checking was a bit difficult before the internet....
I guess that he confused Frederick with his father, who used other methods to get recruits for his regiment of tall men - which Frederick abolished.
And Prussia had conscription and used mostly their own nationals, eventhough its true that some minorites also served in his army. But overall do I think this movie misrepresent the situation.
And the uniforms that the wear in this movie couldn't be found anyware in the book Die infanterie regimenter friedrich des großen, so everything seems to be fiction. I also have a vague memory that Frederick abolished torture, but it is possible that I am wrong..
And while I would give Kubrick credit for good military music on fifes and drums from that time period, It is also none the less true that the songtext to the Hohenfriedberger Marsch was composed many decades after the Seven years war, so this movie is unhistorical.
I know that I might sound nitpicking, but you add up hundreds of small historical inaccuracies, one after another, this movie gets annyoing. And I think it is also too long and too boring to watch.
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I think not.
Most countries cannot afford any big airborne arm. And even the few who can (USA) I still think that it is hard to see them as units with any heavy strategic impact. They are light units that lacks the ability to fight enemy armour, and the low amounts of supplies makes them vulnerable to other attacks as well - especially in long term isolation.
Airborne units are useful for operations with small duration to capture things like bridges or closing an enriclement of an enemy army. And for the last half of the war did Germany use their paratroops as regular infantry in the frontline, since their excellent elite training have made them superb infantry units.
So I think airborne infantry is still limited in their capacity because helicopters and airplanes cannot carry big cargoes, they can easily be shot down by even a single rifle bullet, and they cannot usally be used in bad weather with snow, rain, and night darkness.
And they also need lots of trained pilots and maintance - which limits the use of the machines even more.
So supplying an entire army from the air is still difficult today... I mean the 6th Army at Stalingrad used 11 railway wagons of rifle bullets each day of fighting. And beside from that they also needed tons of food, fuel, high calibre ammo, medicines, and much else.. So carrying stuff with a tiny helicopter carrying 0.5-2 tonnes or a hercules carrying 20 tonnes will demand many, many (more than a thousand) sorties before an army can get the minimum of supplies it needs.
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I guess 20-30 years. 2300 tanks. 4900 APCs/ IFVs, 3900 trucks are losses that will not be easily replaced. And on top of that you also got all other losses of planes, ships, cannons etc. You will also not be able to rebuild your forces quickly if you have to export some of the tanks you build. You can of course stop exporting tanks, but then will Russia on the other hand not get foreign money that it desperatly needs now.
Russias sales of energy is also declining - and for a product that makes up 60-70% of Russias GDP it is of course a disaster. And with western sanctions will it become difficult or even impossible to build high tech weapons that can compete with the most modern weapons in the world. And rebuilding the Russian forces will become more difficult without super-high quality western components.
The stocks of Soviet ammunition is running low and might also need to be either refilled somehow, or replaced by new guns and new ammunition of other standards. The sanctions and the heavy losses of young men 60k dead and another 120k wounded will mean less workers in the workforce and less babies will be made to compensate for Russias falling birthrates and ageing population. You will also have soldiers injured after the war that costs society money for healthcare.
You will also see more problems of alcolism and crime among all traumatized men.
And with sanctions and unemployment things will only be worse.
And as the economy shrinks in size, will also sales go down. And that in turn will make it less profitable to invest money into expensive machinery and new technologies for mass production. And since the outside world is no longer buying Russian stuff becuase of sanctions... will this mean a downfall of technological progress for Russia, and the result will be the same as the fall of the Roman empire - the country's economy becomes smaller, the country becomes more technologically backwards, there will be fewer industrial robots per worker, so the produtivity per worker will fall. And when a Russian worker produce less stuff per hour on average - then will wages fall as well, and that will probably also mean a fall in standard of living as well.
So the GDP is falling, the GDP per worker is falling, the population is falling... and the combination of all this becomes a hard blow for Russia. The country does not really have the economic muscles for rebuilding its military. Especially not if it also wants to improve the economy by investing in infrastructure, education and building new industries. And on top of that do I also think that Russia badly needs a modernization of its armed forces. Relying on a Soviet WWII style mass conscription army does no longer work for Russia when its population numbers are falling like a rock. It cannot afford to keep all its men in uniform. Instead it needs a smaller army, but with better more modern equipment. But Russia have no such equipment. And nor does it have any such new technology developed.
Other countries have 5th generation fighters - but not Russia. And now are USA, Japan, France-Germany, UK-Sweden already developing their new 6th generation fighters before Russia even have managed to get their SU57 plane to leave the prototype stage.
So I don't think it will be easy for Russia to recover from this war. And the longer Putain the idiot prolongs it, the harder will it get. For every week are hundreds of more vehicles being destroyed and needing replacement. And for every week is it becoming less and less likely that relations with the west can be rebuilt and sanctions can be lifted.
Putins hard stance against the west, is ironically only making the west stronger and stronger compared to Russia for each week that passes. Putin have burned all bridges, painted himself into a corner, and managed to shot himself in the food all at the same time.
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@cosmicviewer477 "Haven't studied the European elections"
If you don't live in a bubble with likeminded people, then you would have noticed by now how the left is dying. Only 2 countries in western Europe got leftwing governments, and even in those (Spain and Portugal) the left have lost about 10% support the last decade.
In France have the socialdemocrats lost 90% of their seats in parliament. In Greece have the leftwing Pasok party gone from 44% support to 5%. Labour in UK managed to lose elections in labour strongholds like Stokes and Copeland that have supported labour for decades.
And the socialdemocrats in Sweden is sinking like a rock from 45% support in 1994 to 28% today. And the trend is similiar in rest of Scandinavia, and the Danish socialdemocrats have become a nationalist anti-immigration party just to stay politically relevant and not drop out of parliament.
And in the elections in 2017 held in Austria, Germany, France and the Netherlands did the left lose support in 94% of all the districts (890 out of 946).
And in France and the Netherlands have the left lost 20% of the votes. And the socialdemocrats are now a completly irrelevant force of just 5% of the votes in parliament.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2017/dec/29/2017-and-the-curious-demise-of-europes-centre-left
And this trend is worldwide. We have also seen landslide victories for the right in Brazil, Argentina, Columbia, Chile and in Peru there even was two rightwing parties competing with each other for power and there was not even a leftwing candidate for the presidential run off.
And in the USA have seen a red wave that led to the Republicans getting Trump as their president, and the right took over control over congress, the senate, the house of representatives, and the supreme court - A total victory so to say.
And then the left tried a counter-offensive in the mid-term elections with the hyped Democratic "bluewave" that was said would sweap in and take over the country. But the bluewave ended in a failure. And everything seens like Trump will get re-elected since his approval ratings are strong, and Americans have historically tended to prefer to keep sitting presidents in office with only president Carter as an exception. Nor do I think Hillary or Pocahontas are strong enough to challange him.
"the so-called Walk-Away Movement which just became another useless hashtag"
You can call the walk away movement a fake fantasy all you want, but the election numbers speak for themselves. The modern left is not popular among ordinary people.
"Finally, this notion that people are pushing back against social justice is no indicator because they are probably just as misguided as you are"
Social justice activists are fighting each other. There are tremendous hypocrisy and doublethink in this movement. And the focus is on the most banal pointless issues like sexist air conditioning and racist-plasters.
So why should I care? You got nothing relevant to say, and there is therefore no reason to listen to you.
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@mikakatzensuper0072 I think a short war would be difficult to win against UK (and a war against USA also would be a clear loss for EU).
First do you need to defeat the royal navy. And when that is done then you need to win in the skies so that your troop transport ships don't get blown up by aircrafts.
And then you need to fight against the coastal artillery. And even hastenly trained conscripts can cause lots of troubles for a beach landing... and you need to deal with bad weather, walking in the water while the enemy is firing upon you from prepared defensive posistions.. and then you got minefields to deal with.
I mean just 1 single German machine gunner managed to kill 2000 Americans in a single day at Omaha beach in 1944.
So amphibous operations are extremely difficult and the defenders have a huge advantage.
And even if the EU would succesfully take over a beach, then it would have the difficult job of trying to break out from the beach and take over more land.
The invasion army needs to take over a town with a big port, otherwise will the army starve to death by lack of food or soon run out of ammunition as they are trying to fight back British counter attacks.
And if EUs troops just sit on the beach with 2 million men like the Allies did in Normandy and have no port in their hands, then they will run the risk of losing the entire army when the winter comes.
Because then will the bad weather make air support much more difficult and supplying the troops on the beach by the sea will get increasingly difficult.
D-Day nearly ended in a disaster for the allies for that reason, because the allies were stuck on the beach for 2 months before they managed to roll up German defensive positions and conquer some French ports so that supplies could be moved in.
Being a defender is simply much more easy when it comes to amphibious landings. You don't need to worry about supplies, you can have prepared defensive positions, and you have somewhere to retreat. And you don't need superiority both on land, sea, and sky. And you will also have it much easier to bring in reinforcements to beat back an invasion force, than what an invasion force can bring in supporting troops for their landing.
And I also assume that the British also have the benifit of better knowing the terrain then their enemy. And that they can figure out what places are likely places for an invasion and prepare defences there - I mean I guess the EU are not complete moron idiots that would land their troops on a unsuitable terrain out in place that is so far away that EUs aircrafts would not have the range to support them.
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If Sweden had such a big army at Poltava it would probably have won the Northern war.
Charles only had about 40.000 men during his Russian campaign. Sweden is not a country like Russia that can sacrifice 200.000 men per year and still win a war at the end.
Charles army was the biggest and most well equiped - and trained army in Swedish history. But even with all efforts of absolutist monarch and a military state and the most effiecent buraucracy in Europe it would be able to field an army even half the size of other great powers like France, Austria, Russia or the Ottoman empire.
It is rather surprising how big and might the Swedish empire could become despite its limited resources (for example did Charles enemies did have 40 times more manpower than he did). And it nearly won at Poltava - and that could have perhaps have encouraged Ukrainian cossacks and Ottomans to join Charles in his war against Russia, while a big military defeat at Poltava could have created further dissatisfaction with Peter unpopular rule.
Peters western reforms was unpopular. And blodshed and war taxes would just encouraged revolts even further to de-throne Peter, and who knows what Russia then would looklike today?
None the less do I think that Swedens imperial glory would have been fading away even with a victory in the Great Northern war. Even with all conquered lands and huge Polish puppet state do I think that Sweden didn't have enough silver and blood to defend this huge empire that many wanted a piece of.
Prussia, and Austria was still powerful enemies. Russia and Denmark was not so serious threats in their own right, but these countries was by no means small compared to Sweden and were therefore threats that couldn't be ignored. They were latent enemies that would join military alliances with Swedens enemies and attack Sweden whenever they saw a weak monarch on the Swedish throne.
Nor did Sweden have much of an overseas empire besides a few plots of land in Africa, west indies and North America. And the GDP per capita was one of the lowest in western Europe. And the Swedish navy was not necessarily bad, but it was always out of luck and would never produce a single great maritime victory before the battle of Svensksund in 1790.
The only major strenghts of this empire was its good buraucracy, modern army and tactics, its mines (Russia and Sweden did togheter produce more than 90% of all iron in Europe) so Sweden had some military advantages thanks to its iron industry. And it had some diplomatic and propagandistic strengts too, as the home of Gustavus - the defender and saint of all protestant nations and the formidable Swedish army.
Sweden was a poor country. It never built any Versaille palaces like France, produced music like Vienna or was a commercial hub with Dutch paintings like Amsterdam. Sweden was a poor country made up of peasants, and the country was only good at two things: melting iron and making Cannons.
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You want to go beyond just selling raw materials, and also sell more advanced stuff. Learn from Sweden development in iron ore and timber.
Sweden have iron ore that it can mine → around that Sweden built a steel industry → from the steel industry did Sweden start to also make machine tools → from the machine tool industry did Sweden begin to also make ships, airplanes, cars, trucks → this led to more demand for steel from the Swedish steel industry so it expanded even more → the ovens in the steel industry needed electricity, so Sweden decided to build hydroelectric power dams and nuclear plants → the know-how in electronics made Sweden a world leader in civilian nuclear power in the 1960s → and from electronic products did Sweden move into making mobile phones from Ericsson
Sweden have timber → But instead of just cutting down a tree and selling the tree to another country, did Sweden decide to make more money from the tree. So Sweden began making paper from trees. And that paper could be sold to other countries for a higher profit → Paper production needs lots of chemical to make, so this led to the creation of a chemical industry in Sweden → During World war 2 was Sweden neutral, but could not import medicine from other countries because the war had cut off all trade, so in a desperate situation was Sweden forced to make its own medicine and the government asked the chemical industry for help - and that led to the birth of Swedens pharmaceutical industry with companies like Astra, Pharmacia and Kabi.
So today as you see have Sweden got a very diverse and knowledge based economy. The demand for medicine is nearly endless. Sweden makes worldclass weapon systems with everything from fighter jets to submarines to tanks. And as a world leader in nuclear energy was Sweden close to making its own atomic bomb. The country was also the largest shipbuilder in the world after World war 2.
Losec made by Astra did become the worlds most sold medicine when it was introduced in the 1990s. Ericsson grew to the largest company on the Swedish stock market surpassing Volvo during the same time. So the country have constantly tried to develop further and further up the value chain instead of just being content with selling timber and iron to other countries.
Sweden export gigantic amounts of iron ore. 90% of all iron in the EU comes from Sweden. Just the mine up in Kiruna alone produce enough iron each day to make 13 Eiffel towers! But despite this do this industry only make up 1% of Swedens economy today.
So if Sweden had not diversified its economy would it certainly have been very much poorer today.
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No. Their attempts only comes across as clumbsy and ridiculous. Only an insecure person without anything to be proud of would try to steal other peoples history.
Modern Greeks are the most pathethic people in Europe. They get butthurt about another naming their own country Macedonia. They get angry when people stay to historical facts and point out that Alexander the Great was a homosexual... I mean, what normal person does fucking care? Alexander lived 2000 years ago, and only an idiot would worship a Hitler of Antiquity that commited genocide after genocide and burned down Thebe and Persepolis.
He murdered Greeks, Persians, Indians, Medes, Pisidians, Cappadocians, Paphlagonians, Mesopotamians, Galatians, Armenians, Bactrians, Sogdians, Arachosians, and even some rare Uxians.
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I think we are very different countries. But I would say that I like and admire Poland in many ways.
They value independence and do not sell out their own country for a bag a peanuts, like Sweden does in the EU. They are not naive when it comes to immigration.
Sweden have been a country under freedom and long times of peace. While Poland have been the doormat of Europe with its hostile neighbours in all directions. The dark history of Poland makes any horror movie looklike a rosy childrens fairytale by comparison, with all the grimdark horrible things during the Holocaust, the Deluge, the Katyn massacre and long list of foreign invasions.
Sweden is unreligious today. While Polands hold Catholicism very dear, perhaps as it was a last thing to cling on to as the country was occupied by neighbours that wished to wipe out the Polish culture and national identity.
Sweden was a country of free farmers and the main exports were shipbuilding materials such as timber, tar and rope and cannons, iron, and copper.
While Poland was a country under serfdom that sold food to England and the Netherlands.
Today is Poland a low wage country with a hardworking population, while Sweden economic policy of the 1900s has been high wages and a strong welfare state. The high wages makes it more profitable to replace expensive workers with machines - which makes the Swedish economy high tech. And the abundance of cheap electricity from hydroelectric powerplants and nuclear plants gave Swedish industry low production costs to help Swedish products compete out in the world and it allowed high wages for Swedish workers.
Poland is a country of pork, potatoes and vodka.
While Sweden is a country that do not drink much alcohol aside from perhaps beer. IKEA meatballs are cheap and delicious, but I would prefer eating wild animals from northern Sweden with its large forrests filled with moose and reeinder.
A French or Italian might prefer their own cuisuine. However when it comes to candy, snacks and sugary drinks is Sweden the best in the world. USA got 33 times more people than Sweden, and yet it does get outclassed in this area.
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I read in one major newspaper (I forgot which one) that Germany have fixed its fossile fuel dependency problem for the next year, and the years to come. So Putins energy blackmail will therefore not likely succeed in the long run as the west can just get their energy from other sources.
This game of shutting of all the energy more looklike a game of desperation by Putin, he is playing out his energy card while it is still worth anything. It will cause harm and pain and scare some people in the west. But after this winter will this game stop having an effect, and things will improve in the EU while Russia suffers more and more pain and see its energy revenues go down and get problems with financing the war.
The Russian people are used to a shitty life and hardships and will tolerate more pain than west Europeans, but I still think Putin greatly overestimate Russias own abilities and underestimate Europe.
To me all this looklike the crappiest and most idiotic economic warfare strategy a country have used since the Confederate States during the American Civil war. The Confederates did then stop all export of cotton and destroying in the hope that lack of cotton and high export prices would make England eager to support the South's struggle for independence.
But the opposite did happen. The South did not get any desperatly needed foreign money to help its struggling economy, and England just started to grow cotton in India, and also Egypt started to grow it, as clothes producers were forced to look for other sources for cotton. And so the South was no longer as important for the world economy as in the past.
It never raised any war taxes and thereby lacked the funding for its military and the war had to be singlehandedly paid for by other means which raised inflation and interest rates, and thereby made the war financing very ineffective.
Russia now do the same thing. It refuses to export energy and food and thereby lose export revenues. And as it isolates itself it is becoming more and more irrelevant for the world economy, until no one any longer cares if they lose all economic ties with them.
Capital controls work. But they only work if you got a strong economy with demand for your currency. Once the energy dependency on Russia goes away.. then it can no longer prop up its failed currency and the house of cards falls apart.
And the law of supply and demand will press down the value of the ruble as there are no foreign demand for that junk currency once people starts to buy their energy from other countries..
So no, I think Putin is only going to lose the long game.
As losses piles up and Russias lack of success becomes more and more appearant will the war lose some of its popularity.
The Russian military lose its best men and equipment, and all that is left are junk. Putin will finally have welded togheter the world against him, as even France, Germany and Italy now their energy from other countries and have no reason to hold back on their support for Ukraine. And traitors like Salvini and Le Pen can no longer camouflage their support for Putin behind fake concerns about the sanctions that they say harms the wallets for ordinary people.
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Everything is possible. Sweden would happily sell a thousand Gripen E to Ukraine. But the problem is that Ukraine needs their planes here and now. And those planes does not exist. And it takes time to build new planes, And there are not enough pilots for them. I highly recommend Ukraine to buy Gripen E, as it is cheap, and designed for the war that Ukraine is fighting now, and it is simply the best fighter jet in the world right now. Better than Super Hornet, rafale, Eurofighter, F35 and F22.
And even if this plane is old, it is still valuable for decades to come. It might perhaps not be an equal in air combat compared to the future 6th generation fighters that are coming.
But it will still be a very cheap plane to fly and use as an attack aircraft, and to do recon missions. Furthermore are they better than any junk Russia has. And since they are so cheap to fly, you could also use them much for pilot training. You can afford to fly 7 hours for the same amount of money as you only can afford to fly 1 hour with F35. So your pilots will get much more time in the air. And this will solve Ukraines huge problems of pilots with very little flight hours becomes of the poor countrys economic constraints.
And as Maverick in Top Gun said "Its not the plane, its the pilot". And that is true, the pilot is usually more important than the plane. A good pilot in an old F16 could probably still have a good chance at shooting down a pilot in a more modern better plane like F22 or a Gripen. So one should still have some respect for some of those older planes. And one should not forget the importance of the training of combat pilots.
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The numbers that you believe in are utter nonsense so I assume that you are a complete newbie to military matters.
First of all the Russian military in Ukraine is at best 200-300.000 thousand strong. It cannot be a larger force than that because Russian logistics suck. Russia is a 3rd world country that has not yet invented the wooden pallet, and its military trucks cannot even handle small amounts of mud without getting its made in China tires from exploding.
Russian troops are fed outdated combat rations, the troops have to buy their own equipment or ask family members for tampoons to use for treating bullet wounds.
Having an army that is 500 million strong will be worthless if you do not have food for the troops, ammunition for the guns or fuel for the tanks. And the Russian economy, and the military transport organisation cannot supply more than 300.000 men in Ukraine.
Even the invasion force Russia threw into Ukraine in February last year which was 200.000 strong and had not yet lost thousands of military trucks and had many months of preparations behind them before this war could not succeed in providing its troops properly, but instead was a gigantic traffic jam created north of Kyiv where the Russian army was in a standstill.
And this is just the beginning of problems Russia have. I have not yet even mentioned all the enormous corruption that have led to army units lacking the equipment they should have because someone have sold stuff off to put profits into their own pockets - like with for example diesel for the military vehicles stationed in Belarus before the invasion of Ukraine. And when the war started was the Russian invasion army short on gas so it had to spend time on plundering Ukrainian civilians instead of fighting an enemy. The entire thing feels like an army of the 1600s which spended more time on plundering potatoes from farmers than preparing for combat with the enemy 🙄
And Russian tanks and IFVs are garbage. Leopard 2 got no Russian equal. Russia have no equal to Combat vehicle 90.
Nor does Russia have any artillery which is as good as Archer, Caesar, or Panzerhaubitze 2000.
Add to that all crappy Russian logistics, crappy (if not non-existent) combined arms tactics, lack of thermal imaging systems, crappy tanker training and you will have a mess...
Russian equipment losses have been catastrophic even if this war have not yet lasted one year. Tank losses have been horrible by western standards. And now is Russia forced to use more and more of their old tanks because their new ones have been destroyed in large numbers.
And to make matters even worse have all Javelins, NLAWs and Stugnas exploded so many Russian tank turrets that there are not many experienced tank crews left inside russia.
The Ukrainians will now get more equipment form the west. A dreamteam of say 100 Leopard 2 tanks, plus 150 IFVs such as Combat vehicle 90 and Bradley... and the older marder of course. And they Ukrainians got a bunch of archer, PZH2000, HIMARS and Caesar that can support them.
So it is indeed a very powerful armored spearhead that can make powerful offensives in any local area where they are being deployed.
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You have not followed the news. If you had you would clearly see that the donations from western countries have been small and usually included older vehicles that are at the end of their life cycle. Had those Paladins, Gepards, M113, Humvees, PV1110, and all Soviet junk from Czechia, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Macedonia been sent to Ukraine would that equipment have been scrapped anyways very soon as it is becoming so old that its not worth keeping.
Why do you think Sweden got rid of their Pansarbandvagn 501 (Swedens version of BMP-1)?
- It is because it is old garbage. As soon as Sweden bought Combat Vehicle 90 it sold their old Soviet junk off to the Czech Republic, and the Czechs have now given away all those vehicles to Ukraine.
There is no point for Sweden to maintain that expensive crappy Soviet garbage. Combat vehicle is a much better vehicle, despite all upgrades Sweden had done to their old BMP-1.
So no Nato is not depleting its resources. Even Swedens tiny military have been a large donor to Ukraine. But despite that has Swedens military spending just been a few billions in aid to Ukraine - which is an extremely small sum of money to Ukraine. Only about 0.5% of our GDP this year.
So we can afford to give much more help to Ukraine if we are wanting to. USA + EU got a 40 times larger economy than Russia. So guess which side will run out of resources first?
- I think it is obvious that Russia will deplete its resources first. And it is already suffering severe shortages now, despite the west have not yet even starting to flex its military muscles even a little bit. The Russian military have proven itself to be not just a paper bear. But also incompetent and completly useless.
The help to Ukraine have been minimal compared to what it could have been. And yet are Russia losing so hard against the poorest country in Europe. A country that mostly uses Soviet military junk that is even older than that used by Russia.
Pathetic.
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@qk-tb2df "as the worlds oil reserves go down (if they actually do)"
First you discover oil. Then you start building oil rigs, and 12-15 years later will the oil field be ready to be used. And then you pump oil. The oil field usally never run out of oil. The problem is rather that when you have pumped out half of the oil of the field, then it will become harder and harder to get oil out from the ground. The oil will be mixed with sand and will be thick and sticky and hard to get out from the ground, and you will need more and more energy to pump the oil from the ground.
And then you need more and more energy to clean your impure oil from sand and other stuff before you can turn your oil into petrol, plastics, asphalt, and other petroleum products.
So the oil will become too expensive and too energy consuming to pump up from the ground at some point. And then the oil field gets closed down even if there are oil left in the ground.
I mean why use 100 barrels of oil to drive a diesel pump if you only pump up 50 barrels of oil from the ground? That would only be idiotic and unsubstainable.
The problem is that we do not discover much new oil fields nowadays. And the few oil fields we find are tiny in size. And the quality of the oil we find is also crappy (ie Canadian tar sands) or it is oil which is not easy and cheap to get - like drilling for oil thousands of meters underneath the water outside the Brazilian coast.
"the supply/demand of electric and other sources will become more and more appealing to markets"
That might be true. But the laws of physics crush the laws of economics.
Unless you of course believe in magic.
"also keep in mind that the world population will eventually start to flatten out as more education is involved"
I guess that is too little too late. We have already depleted much of the freshwater reserves. We have depleted fishstocks. We are using up oil reserves and phosphor mines that provides our agriculture with inputs that allows a highly productive agriculture.
And the population are declining in places with smart people (ie Iran), while the population is increasing in places with dumbass retards (ie Pakistan).
We are seeing a world with more religious fundamentalists and dumbass analphabets in Africa, while civilized westerners and east asians are getting fewer.
The global population is already too large to be substained. And having a few billion more people in the near time will only overstretch the planet even more. Land will turn into deserts as we use up water and cut down trees and use up the top soil with our unsubstainable agriculture. Extinct animals are not coming back. Rainforrests will not come back even if we wait another 1000 years for it to heal. The fresh water reserves under arabia took a thousand years to fill and now most of it has been used up. The aral sea and dead sea will soon be nothing but desert.
Global population will stabilize as you say. But it doesn't seem like it will be through the rational way of stupid people abstaining from having kids they cannot take care of.
Rather the job has to be done by mass starvation.
At this point are countries like India so fucking overpopulated that the next monstous disease, like the bubonic plague 2.0 would not be able to fix the problem even if it manage to kill an astonishing number like 500 million people.
Even if that would happen there would still be a billion people left just in India alone.
I wish that you were right however. I wish that everyone - even the idiots - would have a great standard of living. But that is never going to happen with a planet with 7 billion people. There are simply not enough resources on this planet to go around for everyone, so that we all can live the life of middle class Americans and have
a family with 2 cars, one house, multiple computers, a tv, a fridge, a mixer, a lawn mover, a stereo, a washing machine and so on. And then afford to take a vacation to Spain, Florida, Hawaii or Thailand.
"stop listening to retarded doomsayers and use your brain"
Many doomsayers are wrong. But some of them make good arguments for not believing in a bright future. All I do is to simply just look at the facts. And if someone presents a convincing argument - then I am prepared to change my opinion.
In this case do I really wish that I was wrong, because I don't like the idea that the world is running out of oil, that we are depleting resources and that millions of people will die because of it. And that human civilization has reached its peak, and that every future generation will become poorer than us when energy becomes scarce.
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"America's prosperity was built on free trade and free enterprise."
You are ignorant about history. USA had the worlds highest average tariff rate throughout the 1800s. And it continued to have it up until 1945. And it was between 1776 and 1945 it became an industrial gigant and the richest country in world.
It was only very late in American history that the country started to try free trade. And in 1945 it worked well. There was not much competition around the world. Germany, Japan, Italy, China, England, France and Russia all laid in ruins after the war.
But as soon as those countries recovered, then America quickly lost its dominance it once had.
USA have its weakpoints and strenghts. Some industries do well, while other industries do less well.
I would say that American government state sponsorship (which is a form of protectionism) have helped to create many new industries since 1945 (and also long before that). Nuclear power would not have existed without the Manhattan project. Wall street would not exist without numerous bailouts, Americas dominance in aviation would not exist without the US government support of its aviaton industry and with its bailouts and gigantic purchases of military aircrafts.
The IT industry would not exist if the US government had not invested heavily into creating the internet and computers, and then there would not have been any Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google or Amazon without it. Apple got state support from the government when it was a new start up company. It took technologies that the American tax payers had paid for creating - semiconductors from the US navy, touchscreen technology (created by the British military with its radar programme back in the 1960s), and other stuff developed by DARPA of the US military such as GPS, the internet, SIRI etc.
New infant industries needs government help to grow. Some does need government handouts, while some does and not and are instead better helped by tariffs, import quotas, generous tax exemptions, generous low interest loans from state owned banks, government purchase contracts and so on.
All rich countries does those things. So the world market is not a level playing field where countries all around the world compete with each other on equal terms. Usually do countries want protectionism for their own industries that are weak. And free trade in areas where their own companies are strong and need little government help to be succesful.
Free trade is only fun if your country is the worlds strongest - like America after 1945, or like in England in the 1860s.
But for the rest of the world its not so fun.
Did America want to open up its economy to England in the early 1800s and let cheap and superior British products outcompete and destroy the small American industrial base that existed? No.
America had just fought a war for independence which it nearly had lost because the country lacked industrial manufacturing capacity. It could not produce its own muskets, uniforms, cannon balls and without French help they might probably have been doomed.
So if America wanted to survive a future war with Britain (which still was a big threat after the war of independence), then USA had to create its own industry. Outsourcing all manufacturing to Britain would have been as dangerous as foolish.
So how then would America then be able to industrialize if it could not compete with England? - And the answer is protectionism.
America had the highest tariffs in the world. But statistics does not even tell the full story when you compare USA to other countries in Europe, as the Atlantic with its higher transportation costs created a natural protectionist barrier that European countries did not have. And without it would Americas tariffs perhaps have been even higher.
And after half a century did the hard work pay off. By the late 1800s had the protectionist USA and protectionist Germany begun to outcompete free trading England. And by the 1880s onwards was America the most powerful industrial power in the world thanks to the new industrial revolution based around oil, chemicals, electricity, combustion engines, steel and railroads - which were fields in which America togheter with Germany dominated.
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@seanrobinson2270
"mostly I think they want to enrich themselves"
I think politicians are good at enriching themselves without a pandemic. Nor do I think they do this because they get money from the Pharmaceutical industry or any dumb conspiracy like that. Because most of the industry get harmed by this lockdown. Tourism and the aviation industry would for example happily use their lobbyists to stop this lock down.
"they don't care if people are harmed by the lockdowns and they don't care if people get sick or die, that's for sure"
Politicians of all parties and colors are a rotten kind of people. They do not value truth.
They happily throw people under the bus if they think it could benefit their political cause. They don't mind hypocrisy and unfairness.
Most of them know that face masks don't help against the virus, but yet forces people to wear them.
They don't mind if dozens of people get killed in black lives matter riots, or if freedom of speech gets undermined by political correctness, or if political opponents gets killed by antifa. And moral principles have no value to them, since you and I cannot protest, but Black lives matter can.
My Swedish politicians now wants a harsh lockdown to stop the virus, and they more and more ignore the advice from our institutions of public health. Our prime minister also made an arrogant speech just before
Christmas where he told the Swedish people that they must stay home and not do Christmas shopping or make excuses why just their own Christmas gift had to be bought in a shopping center this year.
- So what did our prime minister Stefan Löfven do?
He did go out and did some Christmas shopping himself in the most crowded large center you can find in Stockholm. And Dan Eliason who is a Socialdemocrat who is the chief of the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency flow to Gran Canaria for a vacation.
So obviously are our politicians hypocrites. They do not even care to follow the rules they themselves have created. And if this virus was as dangerous as they claim, then why would they be foolish enough to dare to air travel or do shopping. If I was the prime minister, I would not buy anything if the bubonic plague version 2.0 killed people left and right. And I would certainly not go to Harrods in London to buy a gift for my wife, I would not even want to send out one of my body guards for such a thing.
So my conclusion is that our politicians do not see this virus as any dangerous at all.
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Ukraine have more than enough Javelins, NLAWs, Stugna-P, MILAN, MATADOR, Panzerfaust-3, RPG-7, AT-4, PV-1110, TOW, Brimstone, Carl-Gustaf, drones, anti-tank mines, tanks, 100mm T-12 anti-tank guns, and artillery with anti-tank ammunition (ie BONUS) and plus much else that can kill Russian tanks.
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Dan said that genocide is not a new thing. He mentioned Djinghis Khan and the Assyrians. And in other episodes he have mentioned Caesars genocide in Gaul.
You also comes across as a person who not read a single book the last 10 years when you pump out fake holocaust denier numbers and talk about Maos and Stalins genocide which you know just as little about. Mao racked up much deaths, but it was not deliberate state policy like in nazi Germany. I am not saying he was a good guy, because I don't think he was. He was just a person who did not care if his own people starved to death during the great leap forward. And yes intent matters. A terrorist driving people over with a truck deliberatly is worse than a person who is careless and reckless but do not kill people deliberatly.
And a person who drives responsibly and tries to pull the breaks and avoid hitting a pedestrian - but the people ends up getting hit and dies anyways, is not the same thing as murder.
Intent do matter.
Mao killed perhaps 80 million people, but that is probably only because China is filled with lots of people. Stalin and Hitler both killed around 60 million people each. Since both of them started the war I hold both of them responsible for it. Stalin did the holodomor, the purge of the red army, the Gulag camps, the Katyn massacre, the mass deportations of poles, balts and people from Caucausus to Siberia did cause millions of deaths.
And Hitlers holocaust killed somewhere between 8 and 14 million people. And 85-90% of the victims were jews (according to Arthur Szulc) so it is fair to say that he holocaust was mainly a jewish event. The exact number is not known. Perhaps because most people died and could not testify after the war. For example did 98% of Polands over 3 million jews die under the war.
And those who saw it early from the beginning of the war did not live long enough to survive the war for the most part - as Dan said did the Germans typically shoot the sonderkommandos, so average life expectancy inside a death camp was just 4 months. And it was extremely difficult to flee from a death camp. Half a million people died at Chelmno, but only 2 people managed to flee and survive from that death camp. And the same was true for Belzec that also only 2 people survived.
So there were not many survivors. The nazis burned documents at the end of the war to hide their crimes so they should not go to jail for their crimes. And bodies were burned into ashes. And the ashes was used as fertilizer to grow pine trees like in places like Sobibor. So when you go there you will see nothing that reminds you of a place where hundreds of thousands of people were tortured and killed in gas chambers. But instead will you just see a forest standing there... and the trees have grown tall by drinking the blood from hundreds of thousands of innocent victims.
Personally I think that the holocaust was barbaric. With all human experiments done without painkillers. All the torture. The nasty way of killing people with gas... its just cruelty and barbarism. If they didn't like the jews they could have just forced them to leave the country. And if they did not want the jews to exist in future generations, then sterilization would been more humane.. or trying to invent gene manipulation to make the jews into aryans. And if they were upset that jews ate up too much food needed for the German war effort, then why not just force them to produce more food and use them as factory workers and let them die in the front as cannon fodder? Why use the barbaric method of killing people with gas?
I rather get shot or die from an injection and an overdose from morphine which is a painfree death when I die in my sleep without fear and scream inside a gas chamber that people are so desperate to get out of that they scratch the walls with their finger nails against the concrete and climb on top of each other.
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Many useless Generals got their job thanks to their connections and aristocratic background (Haig probably only got his job because his daddy was a rich whiskey distiller). And that can be an explanation why British generals also sucked in the Crimean war and why many backward dumbasses still served in WWII.
And France huge losses in 1914 could probably be explained by the high age of most Generals - so most of them were stuck in old thinking from the 1800s and their stamina to actively lead their mean in crucial times was not the best. The average age among French Generals in 1903 was 61 years, while the average German general was 54.
The Generals also lived a life totally detached from all the realities at the front.
Joffre had the habit of eating 2 hour lunches while he refused to let any thing interrupt them, no matter how urgent the situation at the front was. Hindenburg had his 10 uninterrupted hours of sleep per night. Haig had roads near his headquarters sanded so that his horse would not slip during the field marschal's morning canters. And Stavka had their huge Champagne partys.
By contrast did the solidiers at the front had to spend their days in muddy uniforms, wet boots, cold food, destroyed bedplaces and lice and enemy fire.
So I can understand Sassoon, Remarque, and Barbusse's strong criticism. All the common excuses that they needed to stay behind the front to get information (due to the limitations of the communication system of that time) holds no merit to me when Generals in other times in history regularly visited the front and ate the same food as their troops, slept close to them and sometimes even fought along their side, as CharlesXII did in the early 1700s. And Erwin Rommel would also pay many visits to his men and eat their food to get a picture of their situation. And the modern Israelian army would also have a culture of leading men from the front.
So I think that the least one could have expected would be that the Generals would have paid regular visits to the front to get a good first glance of the situation and hear about the solidiers situation of the war and boost their morale.
And prioritizing lunch and sleep over doing their job should have gotten them fired immediately - just as in most other workplaces. If a patient is pressing the alarm button, then a nurse can't just ignore it and have his 2 hour lunch break. Because then the patient could be dead.
And if a nurse cannot do that, then what resonsability would then not be on the shoulders of a field marshal with the fate of hundreds of thousands of men under him? The fate of an entire empire could be doomed by his nonchalant careless behaviour.
And a few of them actully did destroy their own empires - like how Conrad von Hötzendorf destroyed 65-75% the Austro-Hungrian army in just the first 4 months of the war, and he neglected pre-war promises to the German about protecting Prussia from an invasion while the Germans would crush France. So Hötzendorfs incompetence forced the Germans to move troops to the east just when France stood near defeat and the war was almost won.
Hötzendorfs accomplishments in World war 1 can therefore hardly be overstated. He managed to destroy the 640 year old Habsburg empire which was one of the most powerful empires in the history of Europe.
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Its military was difficult to maintain also during the Cold war, it was always the more technologically backwards opponent that built primitive stuff at a low quality and its equipment is therefore ageing less well than that made in the west. At the end of the Cold war did it become difficult to maintain this collossos. Having an army based on quantity meant that the male workforce was dressed in uniform and therefore became economically unproductive.
Also focusing large parts of the economy around military production made the economy unproductive in improving life in general. And wasting what little of what remained of the economy on Lenin statues, space programs, propaganda, parades and such did not help.. and in the long run would it make the east bloc struggle economically.
This obsession of prestige also harmed its military capacity. The country built useless aircraft carriers for prestige reasons when it should have built small ships for coastal warfare instead.
Now with a declining population and aged equipment will russias military situation only get worse. Fewer men will remain in the workforce if the country decides to keep its old Soviet military model. Reforming the army and go from an army of large numbers to a smaller force of more quality will take much money and investments. And now when russia have lost their best military gear in Ukraine do I think it is fair to say that 20 years of progress in has been wiped out.
Much costs of maintaining old Soviet junk has of course been removed, as tanks have become burning wrecks in Ukraine.
But this military is still too large for russia to afford. And losing a few million men to combat deaths, wounds, braindrain do make the current negative trend even worse for russia.
Its population is ageing and needs upkeep, but the young people are becoming fewer, and the military cannot suck up all of them. And there are no Soviet satellite states that can share the cost of burden like back in the cold war.
The country needs to replace old rusty AK-47 and steel helmets with kevlar helmets, and body armor. And Soviet tanks needs to be scrapped and replaced by T-90 tanks and T-14 Armata. And while SU-35 is a good plane by todays standards, do the future not look good for the russian air force as it still haven't built a single 5th generation fighter jet, while other countries are developing their 6th generation fighter.
This is a bad omen for them. And even after billions of Indian money and years spent are their SU-57 still not finished, and it will probably never be. It cannot compete with F22 or F35 in terms of stealth. Indeed, I would argue that even the old Gripen E is superior to it in most things, including stealth, while also being cheaper.
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It was a war and old tanks quickly got obsolete. So building mountains of spare parts would be pointless if the tank would becoming obsolete 2 years ahead if it not would have become a burning tank wreck before then. Why build spare parts for tanks so they can last 100 years, if the war is probably going to be over within 5 years at most? Why create spare parts for a tank that soon has to be taken out of service as it is becoming obsolete?
Even if Germany had mass produced tank, and mass produced spare parts, would the German panzerwaffe and the German industry soon run into problem. What should Germany do when panzer IV and Stug III starts to become inferior to the new allied tank - Centurions, ISU152, IS2, T44, T-34/85, Comet and the late m4 Variants?
Germany need a new flow of tanks since old tanks needed to be replaced (panzer III, pz38t and panzer II) and some super tanks could be good to have just as a pre-cautionary measure so Germany would not have get into more unpleasant surprises, as the summer in 1941 when Germany stood against KV1 and T34 tanks that were nearly hopeless to destroy for everything but the most powerful guns.
It is also possible that German tank designers underestimated the amount of mechanical failures the Panther would have as they quickly tried to press it into service. And if the panther had not spent so much time in the repairshop, then it could have made a much larger impact on the battlefield. A problem with being outnumbered was that Germany's enemies could choose to attack at one place to tie up the German panzers, and then attack with another force upposed and trying to outflank them.
So trying to make more panzers would make sense then to counter this problem, so Germany could have enough forces to beat back the enemy attacks at multiple places at the same time.
Germany did also lack the luxury of the allies to have access to lubricants to extend the lifecycle of different component, or to have access to rubber that made tank tracks to last longer, or to have access to rare earth metals that improved the quality of the steel in tanks or the lifespan of the aircraft engines of me-262.
So Germany could not make things that would easily a long time as the allies could.
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Britain might be divided too, among brexiteers, remainers and scots. But I think the country would unite under the pressure from a common enemy, the same way USA and UK put aside class warfare conflicts and become 'one people' during world war 2.
But the EU on the other hand is a fragile construct with too many internal conflicts - west vs. East on immigration, North vs. South in economic issues and farm subsidies, Federalist Germany and France vs. non-federalist Hungary and Sweden.
And on top of that do you got ethnic nationalism on the rise in Catalonia. And nationalist parties are on the rise everyware in Europe which is threating the very idea of a globalist Europe.
You got Salvini in Italy, Kurz in Austria, AFD in Germany, Orban in Hungary, Vox in Spain, Åkesson in Sweden, nationalists in Estonia and Latvia, Nationalism is also on the rise in France, Belgium, Greece, and the Netherlands. And in Denmark, and Finland.
Countries have had enough of globalism. And a war of aggression can be the last that breaks the camels back.
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@BobSmith-dk8nw
"And no - in Vietnam - you still had to be careful where you dropped your artillery."
My point was just that rocket artillery was unpractical in Vietnam because the Vietnamese loved to hug their enemy. Had USA used nebelwerfers in such situations, then would many American troops have been killed by their own artillery.
"There are MLRS systems today"
Of course there are. Rocket artillery can be very practical in certain situations. Especially in real wars, and not colonialist BS.
"Western powers are in these countries now to kill terrorists who are attacking them"
There are more terrorists in Libya today than it was back when Khadaffi ruled it. Syria under Assad have been fighting ISIS, Al-Qaida and FSA, and yet do USA and EU rather side with the terrorists than Assad. Exported American, Swedish and French weapons have been found in the hands of FSA terrorists, which later on handed them over to ISIS.
The suggested Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Irans links to terrorist that caused 9/11 have all been bullshit.
So no. These wars had very little do to with fighting terrorism.
If you want to fight terrorism, then you can start bombing FSA instead. And bully the terror-state Saudiarabia into submission, since it have been sponsoring foreign terrorism and the preaching of jihadist islam.
"It's much cheaper to just buy the oil from who ever is selling it - than it is to put military force into the area."
The oil company Total and Blackwater do not care about what is best for the tax payers. They care about their own profits only. The French oil company Total could make big profits when it could just steal the Libyan oil production after France had completed its war of aggression.
And Halliburton and Blackwater could make big amounts of money from the Iraq war, so of course they liked that pointless war.
And what the real point of this war was, that is something you have to ask the liar George W. Bush which himself have admitted that the original reason to invade Iraq was a lie. So I guess we now can just execute the man as a war criminal who starts a war of aggression that killed 600.000 people.
Same of course goes for Tony Blair, Hollande and the politicians that in secrecy exported weapons to FSA.
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I don't think Charles XII was as interesting as Frederick the Great. But the Swedish army during the Great Northern war is interesting since it was the peak of Swedish military sophistication. It wasn't the strongest army in the world (like it might have been under Gustavus Adolphus) but it was a high quality force with good organization, tactics and leadership. Sweden faced an enemy coalition which had 40 times more resources, and despite those hopeless odds Sweden nearly won.
Charles was simply a warrior king without any clever intellect like Frederick. Charles was a warrior king and nothing else.. except perhaps immature and a christian fundamentalist. His parents died from disease when he was young, and Charles was having a fever as well, and the doctor told him to urinate in a cup and drop an egg into the urine, and then eat it.
Charles would survive the disease and crazy medicine cures and become king as teenager. And as such he was immature. He wasted money on wine and party. He liked to be drunk and hang out with Frederick of Holstein, and togheter they had "funny" games like trying to chop of the head of cows with just a single blow from a sabre. And at another occation they invited a tame bear into their palace and let it feast on a pile of food left on a dinner table and afterwards did it drink 2.6 litres of wine and got drunk and walked up the stairs and fell out from a window, and broke its back and died 3 days later.
And foreign ambassadors sent home reports about this immature, wasteful, irresponsible King. And with such a fool in power, many thought that Sweden would be easy to defeat.
August the Strong was among Charles enemies. And he was called the "strong" because he was a strong man who could bend horseshoes with his own bare hands. He and Frederick Vilhelm of Prussia (Frederick the Great's father) used to hang out on partys togheter which August arranged. Either they could eat a large cake made with 600 eggs, or listen to gun salutes made with hundreds of guns.
August also had a big harem with over 300 ladies and he was probably a father of atleast a hundred kids.
He wasted lots of money on other stuff too - like bribes to polish noblemen so he could become King of Poland and he waged war against Sweden of course.
Peter the Great was the modernizer of Russia. And he founded sankt petersburg with swedish POWs and made Russia agreat power. And his hobbies was to blow people up with fireworks which he put in peoples mouth. Or he could knock peoples teets out with a pickaxe.
He was a tall man (over 6feet and he always wore boots) and liked to get drunk togheter with August.
And he also founded a colony for dwarfs.
A not so normal person either with todays standards.
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Building 50 and 70 tonnes tanks demand more specialist vehicles and strain the logistical system to an unnecessarily large degree. It would take 3 Famo-trucks just to be able to pull a single Tiger to a repairshop after it had broken down - and all this timestaking work had to be done in wartime condions where the Wehrmacht didn't have many transport trucks to spare to begin with, and even if some would be available it would still not be an easy job to slowly pull away a heavy tank while the enemy is firing in your direction. Furthermore will you need new military bridges, since neighter the standard 20 tonnes or 40 tonnes bridges would be able to carry those machines.
Those heavy tanks will furthermore be more tactically inflexible since they cannot cross normal bridges or most military bridges... and they are also too slow to keep up with the fast changes of the frontline due to their slow speed.
And when you produce something in larger numbers, then it makes more sense to start using specialized tools that makes massproduction easier. And massproduction in turn makes unit-cost to fall, so that a tank would take less and less manhours to build. A Tiger took 200.000 manhours to build while a new Sherman came out of Detroit every 45 minutes.
Producing things in small numbers simply makes it uneconomical and not very practical to switch over to more division of labour and more effiecent production methods.
Building heavy tanks also demands heavy cranes to carry all extra heavy machinery so I guess a car plant would need much modifications before production could be switched towards wartime production of tanks.
The Germans overengineered their tanks, and this is a lesson we can learn from the Russians. The Russians never overengineered their tanks. If the average lifespan of a tank was just 6 months, then it would pointless to build it with components that last much more longer than that. So the Russians could save both expensive and rare building material as well as manhours by not wasting any extra efforts in building a tank that probably just would be destroyed within a certain point of time. But the Germans never did that. They built their tanks with quality that could make them last for decades in peacetime, despite they would likely be destroyed within some month or year. So the Germans simply wasted time and resources, and also got less tanks produced.
And when it comes to the fighting I say that quantatity has a quality of its own. Germany could have relied more upon the StuGIII and a light weight version of the Panther and probably been doing better than what they did with their over-engineered tanks that either killed themselves in engine fires or got blown up by their own crews because they were too heavy to drag to a repairshop.
And those special scenarios with super tigers rarely happen. Firstly because only 1.300 were built compared to 100.000 Shermans and T-34's.. and secondly because only a few of them was in service, and half of the German tankforce was undergoing maintance because they were over-engineered. And thirdly, the allies were not stupid enough to try to make long distance fire duel at 2000 metres most of the time, but rather tried to let air power and battleship guns kill the German tanks, or make close range flanking attacks where they could make masskillings of the German cats - as they did at Arracourt and Korsun.
And here we come to the final point. The German cats was too expensable to afford to lose one of them.
But a Sherman, a T-34, or a StuG could be lost and it wouldn't be much of a big deal.
A weapon system that is "too-big-to-fail" is not every useful when it comes to war, if a carrier just sits in the harbour all the time that a war lasts because it would be too disastrous to risk losing it, then what use does it have? And if a Tiger tank is too dear to being risked of losing, then how useful is it?
To me it seems like Germany should have tried building a good 30 tonnes medium tank instead. It wouldn't have won the war, but it would perhaps allowed the evil empire to last a few more months.
And the German heavy tanks would have been outclassed by new allied medium tanks pretty soon anways, as the Centurion and T-44 was entering into production. And then the Tiger and Panther would have been as outdated as the old panzerIV was. So new tanks would be needed to be developed anyways if Germany should have kept its upper hand in the technological race.
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Other countries preserves their traditions despite their anti-democratic roots. "Royal" airforce does not really sound democraticly and nice as the name "people's liberation army" of the democratic people's republic of China.
But I guess that superficial attributes are more important than what things really are.
Sweden continues the tradition of parading regiments in front of the Royal palace - a tradition with roots from 1523, when the Swedish King wanted protection from his life guard regiments of his life and to protect his undemocratic royalistic rule.
Personally, I think that a country should honour its past. Atleast when it comes to the symbols of the state - such as coins, military traditions and such. And I also think it is more honest to name a government department "the ministroy of war" instead of naming into som lying Orwellian bullshit like warmongering neoliberal politicians do today when they call it the "ministry of defence" while they go to war against country after country... Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria... I don't care about superficial garbage like politically correct idiots.
I only care if things are opressive in the real world - which Iron crosses, palace guards, royal names on regiments, old royalist military flags are not.
And things that sound nice, doesn't have to be nice things - as DPRK and DDR shows.
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You compare apples with oranges. Germany had access to newspapers, radio, and people did knew people that knew other people who did know what was going on. Heck if even my Swedish grandpa who was just in his early teens knew about the holocaust by 1942 then I think the excuses for other people to not knowing as well must be very lame.
Germany had 30.000 concentration camps... and for each one of them you need at least a few guards. So its not strange to assume that at least a hundred thousand SS members were involved in this shit. And when you have that many people involved it is impossible to keep things a secret for a long time.
Furthermore Hitler and Goebbles did openly in their speeches talk about eradicating the jews - something that should have made people very suspecious about their nasty intents. So the German people simply cannot claim that they were not knowing. They knew. Some people were horrified and did not want to know and did look the other way. Some people felt like they had other more important things to do, so that fate of the jews did not interest them that much.
Moreover did tens of thousands of German soldiers become eye witnesses to all the mass killings that the Einsatzgruppen did in Eastern Europe as they were doing mass shootings like Babij Jar all over the occupied east. We are talking about thousands of places where mass shootings occured. And many of those soldiers were horried with what they saw and wrote letters back home about all the mass killings they had observed. And some German soldiers were ordered to assist the SS Einsatzgruppen and helping them shoot women and children... and many wrote home or wrote in their dairys how they felt bad about it. So this was not a secret in Germany.
Thousands of Germans were involved in the killing of the jews - the guards, the railroad workers, the soldiers in the army, the industrialists who used slave labor that worked themselves to death. You could even buy a slave to your own farm or factory openly in Germany back then just as openly people auction furniture and things on ebay today. And people constantly heard screams from some minor concentration camps and mental facilities as mentally ill people were gassed to death.
So no, as much as I wish it was true that the Germans knew nothing that was going on and that they were just victims of an evil man... can I not say that logic and evidence supports this view.
Germany did know about the holocaust, and people did at best only offer very lame resistence towards the evil regime.
And when someone finally did make a radical attempt of killing Hitler and make a regime change - it was already late in the war and the allies had already won it. So I will say that I am deeply unimpressed by German resistance.
Just like I am deeply unimpressed by the Russian people today that are okay with Putins war of aggression and warcrimes.
And just like I am deeply unimpressed by Americans silence towards Bush criminal invasion of Iraq in 2003 and all the warcrimes of his regime.
I guess the conclusion I can draw from history is that people are useless and suck. Evil dictators can walk unopposed and get away with almost anything. In the end are people okay with genocide and doing every goddamn evil crime possible towards another people.
But when a bullshit thing such as hurricane Katerina and high gas prices struck America, then did Bush popularity start to tank. But Americans were totally okay with starting wars of aggression and concentration camps like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. And the Russians seems more upset about foreign firms leaving Russia so they cannot get any burgers at McDonalds, than that their own government is making a genocide in Ukraine and throw people in mass graves at Bucha and Irpin.
Today do 70% of the Russian people still support Putin. All I can say is: F-ck those people. Let them die in the war that their leader started. I have no respect for them. And I do not feel sorry for them as people around the world have started to hate them and denying them access to hamburgers and vacation on beaches in southern Europe. They only deserve my contempt. Maybe they need to suffer like their victims so they can begin to realize that killing and harming innocent people is not okay.
Seems like many people are idiots who cannot see any further than their own nose
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Abrams can stay competative for the moment by using DPU ammo that gives greater peneration, while the Germans are looking for ways to give their Leopard2 a new 130mm gun in order to deal with the new Russian tank. But Merkava have none of the problems of those tanks, since it was designed to be carry new modules and getting upgraded into the future with more armour and a 15cm gun if needed. But since Israels potential enemies surrounding her mostly use outdated junk, would it be overkill to use a huge expensive 150mm shell to kill it.
Abrams is a good tank, but it is getting old. They also got their many flaws. And when the Germans used a tank on 70 tonnes in world war 2, they found out that it was too heavy for many bridges and they were too heavy to tow to a repairshop with most vechles, so they needed big rare machines to drag them away from the battlefield. And I would expect an American tank with the same weight would have some of the same problems as the Germans. Atleast does this monster consume huge amounts of fuel, which in turn makes the operational range quite limited when logistical support is not available.
And the heavier weight of a tank does not necessarily mean better protection (as one can see on Lindybeige's videos about the upsides and downsides of having a small tank turret). And the Abrams can be taken out with cheap rocketlaunchers and roadside bombs, as pictures has shown from Iraq, so it isn't invincible despite its huge weight. And it is hard for me to see that the protection on Abrams is much better than on Leopard2, Armata, Merkava or Challanger2.
And its depleted uranium armour has a property of burning when introduced to intense high temperatures (so its basically not very effective against HEAT).
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Ryssjävlarna ska bara lära sig sin plats och ge fan i att stjäla andras land och mörda oskyldiga. Det tycks som att de endast kan lära sig den hårda vägen, och att hundratusentals ryska män behöver dö först. Må så va då. De har bara sig själva att skylla för den idiotiska blodspilla de utsätter sitt eget land för. Polacker, Ukrainare, Georgier, Tjecker, Slovaker, Ungrare, Tyskar, Finnar, Estländare, Svenskar, Letter, Litauer... har all upplevt ryska massmord, våldtäkter, plundringar, kidnappningar, slaveri, förtryck, etnisk rensning, och försök till att utplåning av deras kultur när de levt under Rysk ockupation.
Så det är lika bra att man drar upp en hård gräns mot öster. Att skydda sin granne är att skydda sig själv.
Så länge Ryssland är en krigshetsande barbarisk ondskefull makt är ingen annan hållning möjlig gentemot dom.
Tycker synd om de 10% ryssar som ej stödjer Putin och hans dumma krig. Men de andra ryssarna är jag faktiskt bara glad över att de sprängs i luften av svenska vapen.
Tycker förövrigt att det är fint när andra länder hjälper Ukraina. Särskilt då länder som inte räknas bland världens 20 största ekonomier. Men naturligtvis är det fint även när ett stukat Storbritannien efter Brexit modigt stod ensamt och stödde Ukraina... lite som de modigt och stöddigt ensamt våga sätta sig upp mot Hitler och Napoleon. Att ha en stor ekonomi med kärnvapen bakom sig som Boris Johnsons England var viktigt 2022. Att Tyskland skänker vapen för att sätta stopp på ett folkmord och anfallskrig är ett viktigt steg för att tvätta Tysklands skadade rykte efter andra världskriget, och deras mäktiga bidrag hjälper Ukraina till seger.
Spanien är ett land på andra sidan Europa som ej egentligen har skäl att oroa sig över Rysslands anfallskrig. Landet är pacifistiskt sedan spanska inbördeskriget och landets ekonomi har väl egentligen inte helt återhämtat sig efter Eurokrisen och Corona pandemin. Men likväl har landet generöst bidragit till Ukraina med tanks, pansarvärn, sjukvårdsutrustning och annat.
Lilla slovenien och Albanien skickar tanks till Ukraina. Marocko skickar reservdelar till T-72 tanks. Sydkorea skickar uniformer. Sverige som ej varit i krig på över 200 år och har världsrekord i neutralitet skickar tanks, tungt artilleri, stridsfordon, pansarskott, sjömålsrobotar, matransoner, hjälmar, artilleri ammunition, och tränar Ukrainska män till att bli tuffa soldater.
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Well bombing cities is of course wrong. But on the other hand do neither Germany and Japan have much right to complain as they started it. I mean if you let japanese bombers do terror bombings and let planes spread bubonic plague on Chinese cities (like Ningbo 1940) you do not really have the right to feel like a victim when other countries do the same to you and turn your cities into rubble. And the same goes with Germany.. I mean they terror bombed Guernica, Warsaw, Rotterdam, London etc.
It is also worth mentioning that these were military targets. The Germans murdered something like 8 or 14 million unarmed civilians only because they were jews, polish intellectuals, gypsies, communists, and such.
So yea, I think the west have the moral high ground over the fascists and over Communists in Russia, China, and Cambodia.
I am still waiting for russia to accept responsability for starting the war with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and apologize to Poland, Finland and the Baltic states.
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@grahamtaylor6883 Guns are more deadly than other weapons, which in turn makes gang violance more deadly. And suicides are more likely to suceed compared to most other methods used. With more weapons will also more people die from accidents, like children playing with dads gun, or someone accidentally fires their gun during a hunting trip and harm themselves.
And even if a person is a sane non-violent gun owner, is there also a possibility that someone breaks into the home and steal the weapons,
Gun deaths are 25 times higher in USA than in other western countries. To me this shows that the 2nd ammendment don't lower violance. It does the opposite.
And as a tax payer am I not interested in providing officers with armoured personnel carriers and such. The policy whould not have to worry about a prevalence of automatic weapons and the risk of being outgunned by civilians who have more powerful weapons than the police.
So guns don't lead to less crime. America have the largest prison population on the planet kinda..
And the romantic dream that they tyrrany is just silly. The person who thinks that civilian fire arms in the hands of the jewish people could have stopped the holocaust are just historically ignorent. The jews did not know that death camps existed back in 1942. And usually people only found that out when the Germans took a trainload of jews and locked them inside a "shower room" and then started to pump in poison gas. And then it was too late for them to fight back against the Germans.
And sure, the Warsaw uprising happened a small number of jews fought back. But a few thousand jews were never going to win against the German army which had just defeated half of all armies in Europe. Undernourished jewish skeletons: Women, elderly and children with no military training, no military weapons, and no ammunition factories but instead an acute shortage of ammo would take on an army of well nourished young men with military training and combat experience. Germans an entire state machinery to provide them with everything they needed, food, ammunition, trucks, tanks, field guns of all sizes, airplanes, and so on.
To think that the jewish people had any chance to win against nazi Germany is extremely naive.
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Well remove the veto and destroy what is holy for every member state. I am sure that it would not have any backlash in EU skepticism at all when you destroy 200 years of Swedish neutrality and world record at being at peace... or when you remove the right to roam, and take away its own currency that has a 1000 year long history behind it, and destroy the Swedish economic model, and everything it means to be Swedish 🙄🙄
Hencefourth can we remove the name Sweden from the map and replace it with "Province number 27". Because that is what the EU is all about. Cultural genocide. Ereasing of history the same way as the talibans and Pol Pot.
Being for the EU is the same as being anti-Swedish. It is the same thing as being a traitor that is more loyal to a hostile foreign power than ones own country and the Swedish constitution which says that the governing power over this power comes from the Swedish people. As it is today that is no longer the case, as 80% of our laws are written by Brussels.
And most decisions about our foreign policy, immigration, economic policy, and so on are decided more by foreign politicians than by Swedes. Less than 3% of the votes in the EU parliament comes from Swedish politicians.
So even if all 21 Swedish members of parliament voted against a proposal that would have catastrophic consequences for Sweden and being equal to a national suicide if one voted for it - then would the Swedish politicians still likely be a small insignificant minority in parliament.
In reality do Germany and France have more power over Sweden, than what Sweden have power over Sweden in the current way which the EU is constructed. Theoretically do only last barrier of national self-defence exist - and that is the veto power a member country has.
You want to remove it. And yes, this veto power has been abused. Greece for example has blocked many foreign policy decisions after taken bribes from China and Russia. But that in my opinion is not a good enough argument for destroying the veto power.. just as removing freedom of speech for everyone just because China and Russia have online trolls that manipulate and destroy our democracies.
You have to not be lazy and come up with another way of fixing this problem. From my perspective however, are things very simple. The EU cannot work well with the veto power. And it cannot work well without it either, since then it turns into a fascist state where the big countries act like an imperialist opressive force over the smaller countries.
Either way is the a bad idea then.
It is a good idea to leave the EU as I love my country and do not want it ereased from history.
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Ignorant comment by OP. PZH2000, HIMARS, Archer, Caesar, Krab, M270 are all the best artillery pieces in the world one can get. Ukraine is also given the worlds best air defence systems in the world from Sweden and Germany and the best counter battery artillery radars. And Ukraine also got things such as Bonus and Excalibur artillery shells with extreme precision. And then we got modern missiles such as brimstone, starstreak, javelin, HARM, NLAW, and powerful anti-tank weapons such as panzerfaust 3 which can penerate 800mm armor which is enough to crack any tank in the world.
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Ohh please, the Wehrmacht were warcriminals... but comparing them to russian federation is an insult they dont deserve.
Wehrmacht was competent at all levels, had good modern equipment, good training, good dicipline, the troops were willing to fight, their command structure was best in the world, and their strategic and tactical thinking had been refined after all campaigns in Europe and the previous world war.
The Russian military by contrast is rotten junk at all levels. Filled with corruption, old poorly maintained rusty equipment and outdated food rations, the men lacks training and williningness to fight, the command structure is one of the crappiest in the world, dicipline is non-existent as soldiers post internet videos of mutiny and russian positions looks like waste dumps with garbage everytwhere and everything is disorder, and the russians military thinking is based around ideas that are as outdated now as they were a century ago.
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@Britannic hayyomatt
""The easiest way to farm it is to have loads of children (5 maybe 8) and get them to work on your farm."*
It was a deliebrate imperial strategy to expand the population so China could then expand its territory so that China then could expand its population even further so it could expand its territory even more.
"However it also means that the individual European had more energy than the Asian or African or American."
...
"Having large families is also not a problem because there's loads of rice to go around."
I think you just contradicted yourself here. Rice produced large yields as you said and that also meant that the Asians also could keep their calorie intake very high - unless they overpopulate and have to share their fixed food supply among a larger population, which would then result in a lower number of calories per head. (source: The great divergence - Kenneth Pommeranz)
As I said earlier so did east Asians have a higher standard of living than Europeans, and their daily average calorie intake was higher than that of Europeans. Europe suffered from deforrestation, and exhaustion of their farmland soil because of its overpopulation in the 1700s while China had much less such problems.
So one can therefore say that China lied ahead of Europe.
And things only changed as Chinas population continued to grow and forrests were cut down and soil got exhausted and lakes dissapeared. And the standard of living began to fall as the population grew faster than the economy, and the country got stuck in a Malthusian trap.
Europe on the other hand got saved in the last moment before it was also about to get stuck in a Malthusian trap. And instead of economic growth leading to more population growth (as in China) so did economic growth instead lead to higher incomes and higher standard of living.
Europe discovered that the could use coal from the ground instead of burning trees to make coal for heating their homes and making steel. So Europe did then not have to exploit the forrests as harshly as in the past.
Furthermore did the East India company also discover the art of forrest preservation when they took control over India, so thanks to this could Europe get more forrests in the 1800s than what they had in the 1700s.
And while Chinas growing population had nowhere to go, so could Europe dump their surplus population on America and Australia.
And while China was struggleing with their land use, so could European settlers in America exploit the huge natural resources there. And the could start to grow wheat in the American mid-west, Sugar in Caribia and Beef in Argentina and send all those calories over to Europe to relief their overpopulation problems, in exchange for European manufacturing goods.
"Play time and relaxing is important in all cultures but it's probably the most important aspect in European cultures. Think, the only "freemen" that existed until the 1900s were Europeans"
The west dominated the world in the year 1900. But things were not always this case in the past. It could very well be argued that China was well ahead of Europe in various time periods.
Europeans and Americans were still miserable places up until the late 1800s (just like the rest of the world).
It was common for men to die before they hit the age of 30. Child labour was still common. Governments were corrupt and aristocrats could buy government offices. Democracy and freedom of the press were not the norm. No social safety net system existed.
Most of those nice things did only come about around the 1900s in most western countries - 100 years after the industrial revolution had begun. So most changes have happened quite recent, since the last 200 years or so.
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@Britannic hayyomatt
"The nutritional value of Asian and European foods was different"
There are many ways of measuring standard of living. And sometime Europe did come on top, and other times it was the Asians (as mentioned in my earlier examples). My main point here would rather be to say that Asia did pretty well compared to Europe every century up until the 1800s. So I therefore think it is reasonable to think Asia could have challenged western domination of the world in the antiquity, in the middle ages, and in the 1500, 1600s and perhaps even up until the 1700s.
"The problem with China... Is that it's huge. China often wins in most categories when we compare to other countries"
There are richer regions and poorer regions in Europe just as there are richer and poorer regions in China.
Not all of Europe was as wealthy as Holland, or as poor as a village on the east european steppe. And China have a huge diversity too.
So that’s why I am comparing China with Europe here, instead of Comparing Shanghai with Albania or the Netherlands with the Gansu province.
However my point about play time still stands. Europeans were more free than other cultures. English people since the 1200s had rights, they had the right to live and be free. Similar customs existed in France, Italy and German states"
The rights of the individual was much a product of the enlightenment. Before then did the idea of the individual didn't even exist. It was simply unthinkable thing that you any own rights or was allowed to have any own beliefs.
Just as you will get killed in muslim clan societies today for being a muslim apostate or homosexual.
I think its quite clear that religion was not a private matter in the German reformation during the 1500s. This entire crisis could probably have been easily solved if people just had let people alone and let them follow what religion they wanted to for themselves.
But instead was your religion an issue for your family, and even for your entire village. Private life didn't simply exist. People would bully and harass each other, and the local government would harass people of a different faith, and protestants would smear saints in shit and urine, and things would later on escalate to a religious war, inquisitions and such.
And people were seen as subjects and serfs rather than citizens.
"But China, India and basically the rest of the world were very oppressive and single minded states."
I can agree upon that there was a difference. But we should overstate the differences either.
"Innovation was so prevalent in the Netherlands and England because individuals had a bigger say"
I think Europe had an advantage or China when it came to printing books because we use a small sum of standardized letters, while China uses pictograms which made printing books much more difficult.
So transferring knowledge was simpler in the west.
I also think that innovation was also benefited much by the division of labour and having a large market which made it more profitable to replace human labour with machinery. And if wages are high, then you have a higher incentive to use machines or robots instead.
Americas shortage of workers and large access to natural resources made it profitable to replace humans with machines, and wasting natural resources wasn't so much of a problem as in Europe. So it was perhaps no coincidence that mass production, standardized parts and such production techniques were invented in America since they are very efficient in using as little labour as possible, but sometimes quite wasteful in their use of resources.
Later on in the late 1800s would science & knowledge change face. The old medieval ways of innovation with trial and error, would get replaced by a more theoretical approach with much measurements and reading books. Because people had already discovered many scientific laws, and science had become so advanced that things had gone beyond simply trying out things with trial and error.
"A country's population is set, overpopulation is almost impossible in natural circumstances. The people "dumped" onto America... Where freemen, they were rich Capitalists that wanted money, land and a greater opportunity. They MIGRATED to America."
To some degree you are right. Many people surely wanted to go to America but they were too poor to afford to pay for a ticket on a ship. So ironically would one million Swedes immigrate to America only after the 1860s when economy in the country got an upswing and mass starvation finally had become a thing of the past.
But on the other hand to my point remain true. All the people who left Europe took pressure off their overpopulated countries, and when they left their jobs and went to America, then other people poor and unemployed could get a job. And when the population fell thanks to immigration, it also became easier for a country to feed its own population.
America benefited from getting their labour shortage solved, and Europe got rid of its oversupply of workers and its pressure on land and limited resources.
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@dvgsun
It punches well above its weight. 1 Archer gun have the same combat power as many many russian guns.
This is because archer got better range, better precision, better reloading time, better crew protection, better target aquisition, better ammunition, better everything
So these 8 guns will togheter with Panzerhaubitze 2000 and Caesar be the best artillery pieces in Ukrainian service.
Many guns are less good, but still useful such as Krab, Suzana, Dana, and M109 of course. Add to that all russian Self-propelled guns Govozdika and all what they are called. And all the gun barrel artillery such as FH77 from Sweden, and M777, and British 105mm light artillery.
Add to that everything from Finnish 120mm mortars, 120 mortars on a M113 chassi from the Baltics, and lots of rocket artillery such as M270, HIMARS, RM-70. So yea Ukraine gots all kinds of artillery for all kinds of needs.
So don't worry about few guns have been sent. They will add up to a large number of gun barrels when you see all the other guns I have listed here. And Ukraine have tons of old Soviet guns I havn't listed here because I have never bothered to learn their names.
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Better thrust to weight ratio than F35, Super Hornet, and Rafale. And that is despite this plane does more rely upon good aerodynamics than engine power to fly fast. F35 got the most powerful engine for a fighter jet ever built, and yet is that big fat bird so slow that it cannot even super cruise.
It have a superior capactity reload on the ground in just 5 or 15 minutes dependeing on the type of mission. And needs a less than a half or a third as much maintainance hours on the ground per flight hour than F16, F35, F22, Rafale, Super Hornet and Eurofighter. And carries twice as much payload as a MIG29 despite being a small single engine plane. And it is not handicapped like F35 that normally only use 4 hardpoints compared to Gripens 9, and Gripen can carry the meteor missile, while F35 cannot because its internal weapons space is too small for that large missile.
I don't know where you have gotten your fake number of range. Gripen E:s ferry range is 4000km which is almost 3 times longer than that of MIG29, twice that of F35 and MIG35, and longer than that of Super Hornet, Eurofighter, Rafale,
And as NiclasEriksson says, this plane is cheaper to operate than any other plane, and its unit cost is also one of the lowest among modern fighter planes.
The aircraft also needs less maintainence than any other modern fighter jet. Or do I even dare to say any fighter jet for that matter? I mean 5 maintainence hours on the ground per 1 flight hour is something no other plane can do. Not even a single engine plane like F-16 that neds 17 hours despite having a 4 times larger ground consisting of skilled mechanics while Gripen relies mosly on conscripts. F14A Tomcat needed 50 hours of maintainance per flight hour. So 1 Gripen then could then theoretically fly 10 missions at the same time as 1 F14 fly 1 mission.
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"Gripen is a 4.5 generation last generation fighter and is therefore dated and vulnerable."
How? I am no aircraft expert, so you tell me.
I read on the internet that Gripen have the same radar cross section as F35, while another video that trashed Russias 5th generation stealth fighter said it had the same radar cross section as Gripen. And never does anyone provide any links for their claims. Does those numbers only cover RCS from the front? or is it the plane overall?
And if Gripen have the same RCS as any of those two planes that people normally call stealth fighters, shouldn't then Gripen also be considered a stealth fighter as well?
Add to that that many military magazines and youtube bloggers say that Gripen have the most powerful electronic warfare suite of any modern plane you can buy. And its radar is powerful enough to see stealth fighters so it therefore have good chances of getting the first in a duel with a stealth fighter I assume. Especially since it is one of the few planes that can carry both American and European long range missiles meteor and AIM-120.
And while the plane cannot make any strange manouvers like SU-57 in the movie Top Gun Maverick, do this plane show its superiority over all russian planes in everything else. And it is better than F35 in basically everything: Better turnrate, better wing-loading, better trust to weight ratio, better top speed, and Gripen is capable of super cruise unlike F35, it have a better combat radius, better ferry range, it needs a shorter start and landing strip, lower unit cost and lower cost per flight hour, it have more hardpoints than F35 (if you don't count its external ones).
So F35 is slow clumsy fat bird that cannot defend itself against an enemy with superior radar and sensors. It have no other trick up its sleeve than its stealth coating that have already become a bit aged, since a new generation of stealth material have begun to replace the materials used to build F35 (source: captain Binkov).
So what is F35 then without its stealth?
- It is worthless.
As you see does any modern plane easily outclass it in anything: acceleration, top speed, the ability to make sharp turns, weaponry.. and so on. For that reason would I probably both prefer Gripen E and Rafale over F35.
The inflexibility of F35 is also a vulnerability. Having planes that are hangar queens are a vulnerability. Having to rely on undispersed airfields is a vulnerability. Being a one trick pony is a vulnerability. And having an air force rely on a plane so expensive that you cannot afford to train more than a tiny number of pilots for your 40 plane strong air force is a vulnerability for your country.
Having a plane that is too inflexible to be able to do the same multirole missions as planes like A10, F16, and Harrier is a vulnerability. F35 flies too fast to be able to see targets on the ground to be a good attack aircraft, its fuel thirsty engine makes it incapable of staying up in the air for hours and wait for the infantry to call for air support. And the plane is too vulnerable to substain hits from ground fire unlike A10.
Its small wings, gives F35 an extremely bad ability to turn - which makes it easy to outmanouver in air combat. And that is a problem, because not all air combats happens beyond visual range - as you often times needs to see and visually confirm that you the plane you see on radar is an enemy aircraft before you can shot it down.
It is a plane with such a hot energy exhaust that it will melt carrier decks and asphalt. So American warships therefore needs to install a special material landing strip on them to be able to carry this plane - and with that do I think F35 have lost the major advantage Harrier had with being able to take off and land almost everywhere.
Gripen on the other hand fulfills the roles of fighter, attack aircraft and reconnaissance just as intended.
F35 is a garbage plane in my view. It is the very definition of a sunk cost fallacy. So much was already plown down into this dissapointing plane that it become too late and too costly for the US military to admit it was a failure, and start some alternative projects instead.
It was a plane built for logistical reasons. To have one plane for all kinds of tasks in order to save money for spare parts and crew training. But this plane never turned out to be a super plane ahead of its time. The F4 Phantom was unique for it was being used by both the Air force, Navy and Marine corps, and a large number of countries bought it.
It was a plane with many different faces, it was a fighter, a fighter-bomber, a reconnaissance plane, an electronic warfare plane and so on. And it was indeed a pretty impressive plane for its time.
But the same cannot be said about F35.
Its a fat, over-priced bird that is mediocre in air combat, and inferior to the planes it is intended to replace.
It have suffered so many delays that the plane is already talked about needing a replacement altough it recently came into service.
Partly because 6th generation planes are planned for the future, and partly because F35 cannot carry the next generation of American long range missiles that are too large to fit inside the plane, and the old stealth materials and unimpressive dog fight abilities are a reason to look for alternatives. And the unreasonbly high operating costs will probably make its ground attack roles being taken over by drones or propeller aircrafts, since it is economically unjustifiable to use this plane for normal ground attack missions that every other plane in the world would be able to make.
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I guess it is a common flaw to appoint people on other grounds than competence. Hitler wanted loyal people in his administration - such as early party members who joined the nazi party before it became popular, and the earlier someone joined the party the more trust did he have for them.
Ingvar Kampfrad (the founder of IKEA) appointed chiefs not according to skill or qualifications, but instead he hired people who were just like himself - white males from the countryside in the little province named Småland - because he felt most trust in those kinds of persons, despite they were lacking in competence and English skills to run such a huge company.
And Napoleon trusted his family members - which he made rulers over the countries he conquered. And everyone kissed his ass, but after 1812 with the defeat in Russia everyone just betrayed him and stabbed him in his back.
Even his own family that he have helped so much.
His empire fell apart. But his legacy is enormous. The metric system, the system of adresses with even and uneven numbers on each side of the street was all thanks to him. He radically modernized the law system across Europe for the better. He helped to destroy serfdom, and thereby laid the foundation for the democratic system in Europe.
He did of course do bad things to like brining back slavery in the west indies (not so much freedom, equality and brotherhood there), but overall did he radically modernize Europe.
And he also ended the Holy Roman empire among other things. He built roads with oaks on the sides, he made a census in Egypt and promoted science.
So despite all bad sides, I still think that this man made more good to humanity than bad.
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The First world war proved that Germany had the best army in the world. The Austro-Hungrian army lost all their core units in 3 lost battles against the Russians the first months of the war, and the Ottomans wasted much of their offensive power with the stupid Armenia winteroffensive.
And after that Germany had to fight the war mostly by herself, since her allies had exhausted almost all their offensive capabilities. But even so, Germany almost got close at winning the war entirely by herself. She knocked out Serbia from the war, and then Russia and Romania, and then Italy, and then also almost Belgium, France and Britain - which were only saved by the arrival by American troops in 1918.
So I would say that the Army of the Kaiser was a much more impressive creation than the Wehrmacht. But in the end it would lose the war anyways because it didn't enough resources to keep on fighting, and the leadership also had some useless full retards in command as in all other armies at that time.
Falkenhayn and his waste of a million men at Verdun is probably the best example. I think that Hitlers anti-monarchist anti-traditionalist attitudes made him an enemy of the old guard within the German army, which led him to fire all the old retards and put new fresh minds in the positions of power.
And without Hitler, there would never had been any great career for Guderian, Manstein, von Paulus and others.
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@тлхит The Russian army is at 1960s technology level with infantry fighting without body armor like the Yankees was fighting in Vietnam. M113 is good and useful. Bradley is perhaps better if you got the logistical organisation for it. In a war I would prefer to have both.
And Ukraine is given a bit of everything: S-300, upgraded T-72 tanks from Czechia, Slovakia and Poland. SPGs from Slovakia. MLRS from Slovakia. And MIG29 also from Slovakia. BMP-1 from Czechia - but these vehicles are probably the best BMP-1s in the world, as they were built in Czechoslovakia, owned by the German army and then bought by the Swedish army and there underwent costly modifications and improvements. They were almost never used, as Sweden only bought those machines as they were cheap and could be a temporary solution of giving armor protection to its infantry before Combat vehicle 90 could start entering service and replace them.
Those BMP1 was rarely used, so they are probably as good as new when they were sold back to Czechia.
And now are they being sent to Ukraine.
And Ukraine also got modern weapons as well. MLRS from Britain. Paladin from USA. Zuzana 2 from Slovakia.
And S-400 missiles from I forgot where... Predator Drones from USA.
EU tanks are probably harder to get. Most countries have so few tanks that if they give away some tanks they will not have any left (f*ck all Europhile traitor politicians who have disarmed my country all those years!). Otherwise maybe Ukraine could have been given a bunch of surplus tanks. Perhaps not as good as Leopard2 and Abrams tanks... but some S-103, Leopard1, AMX30, And M60 Pattons would probably be apprechiated in Ukraine now.
France and Germany got a few tanks.
But France got the scumbag Macron do not wanna harm the economic relations French companies have with Russia (like the Oil company Total and some electric companies). In this election have Putin paid for Le Pens political campaign and the leftwinger Melanchon is also a Putin friend. So if one dislikes Macron, then one would have to conclude that the other candidates have even crappier views on the Ukrainian war.
Germany is a country with history. After Hitler and the war have the country went with pacifism and it was hoped that trade with other countries would prevent wars. Both those ideas are as old as they are stupid.
Germany must realize that it must help defending Europe from Putin so America can focus on protecting the pacific from China. USA cannot do everything on their own. And If Germany loves freedom, then it needs to stand up for it.
The idea of trading with Russian communists is old. West-Germany did this already in the cold war with their "ost-politik" (east politics) as they tried to build friendship and understanding between Germany and Russia, so that Germany could be unified again and a war would never happen again as it would be too economically costly to start a war that would break all economic ties. Germany also joined the EU for the same reason.
But did the trade with Russia prevent wars?
- Not in Georgia. Not in Ukraine.
The politics has been a failure. And German dependency on Russian gas have made Germany the weak link in the chain for the EU. Germany is always slowing down sanctions on Russia.
So here we see a probably reason why Germany do not want to send modern tanks to Ukraine.
Its a pathetic pacifist country that do not wanna get involved in war. Not even in wars between good and evil.
They are afraid of becoming nazis again if they stop being ultra pacifiststs. So selling weapons - even to stop modern day Hitler - is not something they wanna do.
The other problem with Germany is their dependency on Russian energy. Sending the most modern powerful German weapons to Ukraine like Leopard2A7 would be seen as a super aggressive escalation of the conflict. Not only do Germany risk that their enemy Russia steals German technology. It does also risk getting its economy destroyed by Russian sanctions of the sale of gas. And in the worst case can the country get nuked.
So I don't think Ukraine will be given modern tanks.
Britain have too few Challanger2 to give any away, despite all talk about scrapping all tanks in the British army.
And the French army will probably not give away any Leclerk. They are the most expensive tank in the world and giving them away is probably not popular among the dumb French public.
So I think T72, Leopard1 and M60 tanks are probably the best Ukraine can hope for. That is the bad news. The good news is that Russia does not have any great tanks either, so all those old tanks are still competative.
If Ukraine would get a modern tank then my guess would that it would get them from USA or Turkey
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Natural resources can be a great aid of economic growth if they are used correctly - as in the case of USA and Sweden. The problem for russia is that they have never bothered to climb up the ladder of industrialization to make manufactured goods. Simple ones in the beginning like perhaps beer, toys, milk and such. And then make a bit more technologically advanced stuff once they have learned to master the simple levels of industrialization. And then the final step is to become a world champion in making high tech products that few other countries can produce.. like jet engines or nuclear reactors and be a world leader in those fields.
Russia needs to use mercantilism to create those new companies. 144 million consumers is a good start. Paying for importing machinery and new production technologies can be done with fossile fuels, that is a good start. Corruption is a problem, but on the other hand did corruption not stop China from growing into the workshop of the world. But the oil income must be invested for the benifit of the country, and not for the benifit of the corrupt and incompetent ruling elite and wasted on wars and military spending.
Industralization is key in lifting a country out of poverty. Because the industrial sector have much higher productivity levels than agriculture , mining or service sector jobs. During the industrial revolution could the cotton industry increase its output 400 fold. A skilled worker could produce maybe 2000-3000 cigars per a 16 hour workday. Today do we have industrial robots that can spit out 6000 cigarettes per minute.
Such productivity level increases cannot be done in other parts of the economy. If you tell a hairdresser to cut 400 times more people per hour, you would probably not end up with good haircuts. A chef could probably not make 400 times more meals per hour. And a hen could not lay 400 times more eggs in a year, and there is a limit how much you can increase milk production from a cow, or how much wheat you can reap from an acre of land in a single year.
Another benifit with manufacturing goods is that when you make products that people wants but not many got the know how or the ability to produce it - then you have less competition and can charge higher prices for your products. While competition is very hard on the world markets when you try to sell a ton of salmon, coal or copper. But not every country knows how to make a smartphone or a patriot missile.
Russia cannot perhaps compete on world markets today with their inferior products. So increasing exports is hard for now. It is however easier to cut imports of foreign manufactured goods if they learn to make some simple manufacturing goods themselves and sell it to russian consumers and block imports from foreign countries with tariffs. That will help russia improve its balance of trade. And it would help to nurture new companies. And when they have grown large and strong enough to fight conquer shares of world exports, then can the government cut down on its subsidies and tariffs and let the companies stand on their own feet.
And instead can the government focus on creating new high tech sectors.
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And the so called super weapons Armata and SU57 are jokes as well.
Armata is so expensive that it will never be built in large numbers, and it will certainly not replace the large numbers of Soviet junk tanks you see in Ukraine - there are simply not enough money for it. And there are surely good things about this tank. However even the Russians admit that this tank got to turret armor at all. So all you have to do is to destroy its turret to take out its gun and then it will become useless on the battlefield. And having a tank that relies on cameras and sensors instead of the human eye have its benefits, but it also comes with weaknesses like many weakspots and the tank could become useless if you hit it with a high explosive shot that destroy all cameras and sensitive electronics so the tank become blind.
And having weak turret armor is not so good is something all javelin kill videos from Ukraine have tought me.
So I think this tank has been overly hyped. And the new gun on Leopard2A7 will be able to deal with it. M1 Abrams use depleted uranium ammunition with high penetration so the Americans do not even need to upgrade their tank gun to deal with Armatas supposed super thick armor. And the modular construct of Merkava allows it to install a larger 15cm gun on the tank if the need one day arrives, but today it would be overkill to have such a large gun when Israels neighbours mostly use old Soviet junk that can easily be killed with a tiny gun with cheaper ammunition.
The SU57 fighter is also a joke. Russians claims that this plane is better than the F22. And even if I think both F22 and F35 are overrated I do still think they are greatly superior.
I will be controversial and say that SU57 does not even deserve to be called a stealth plane. It does not have any mechanism to hide the hot exhaust gasses from the engine which makes this plane easy to spot from far away with IR sensors. I don't know about its air intakes, but I have heard that they are not optimal at deflecting radar waves.
So this plane could probably be spotted by western planes before this plane could spot a western plane.
In the past I heard that western planes have superior sensors, but this Russian plane had superior stealth. But now I have the opinion that its stealth is crappy and that it doesn't deserve to be called a 5th generation fighter.
Anyhow, why am I even arguing about this plane?
It will probably never be built anyways because its too expensive for Russia to make. Only 6 prototypes have been built if I remember correctly. And it is doubtful any more planes will be built. This project have been expensive and Russia have many times been forced to put it on ice. India agreed to help Russia pay for the project so it could be finished and India pumped in billions into this project. But no plane ever came and India lost patience with paying billions for this project which never become finished, so they have pulled out of the project.
And now Russia alone has to pay for the development, but Russia lacks money so once again have Russia decided to waiting with going further with this project.
And the plane is so delayed that I start to think its doubtful if it ever gonna be built. UK+Sweden, Germany, Japan and USA are all starting to develop 6th generation fighters. So this SU57 is risking becoming outdated before it is even finished.
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@John_Smith_86
"What other country has all these factors? Population, economy, and military"
Glad you asked.
Because russia does not have those things. 8 countries have more people than russia do.
10 Countries do have a higher GDP than Russia. 13 countries have more Fortune 500 companies than Russia.
And I would rank USA, India, South Korea, China as all being stronger than russia militarily due to more men in uniform or more money spent on the military. However if a force mobilization was done, then I would consider Japan, Germany, France and UK also as militarily superior.
Russia do still not have a 5th generation fighter aircraft. Its most modern air defence cannot even deal with American HIMARS missiles from the 1990s.
And comparing Admiral Kutzetzov with a Catobar aircraft carrier, is like comparing F16 fighter with a Mitsubishi Zero in terms of capabilities.
Its artillery is also inferior to its western counterparts in everything - range, precision, reload time, time to set up the system to be read to fire, and inferior because it takes longer time from firing to moving away.
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It is believed that somewhere between 8 and 14 million people died in the holocaust. And while I have a great deal of respect for this channel and the research done and the quality video images... I do here disagree with one statement. And that is that most people died in gas chambers and fewer died from bullets. In reality things are the other way around (I use the book of Artur Szulc as my source here).
Most people were killed in mass shootings like that at Babij jar. And many people were also killed inside gas vans that the Einsatsgruppen brought with them to Eastern Europe. Most people died this way, but it was not an effective killing method from the nazis perspective. The men got psychological problems from seeing their victims they were killing and felt horrible about it. And driving around and kill people did cost fuel and ammunition.
So therefore was it decided that the victims would be transported by rail to top secret places where they could be killed with no eye witnesses around the place to see. And the killers did not have to see women and children in the face when they killed them. And no bullets had to be wasted, but instead could extremely cheap poison gas be used to kill people.
In 1942 did the nazi-state supported mass murder reach its peak. When the year was over had about 80% of all jews that the nazis would kill during the war died. Most of them had died in mass shootings. But many were also killed at Germany's six death camps: Sobibor, Majdanek, Treblinka, Belzec and Chelmno.
The last camp Auschwitz were still under construction so it was not used that much at this point of time.
But by 1944 it had become the largest factory of death in world history, and capable of killing more people than all the 5 other camps combined in a single day. It could kill 6000 people inside its gas chambers all at once. While the other camps could "only" kill 500.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was nazi-Germany's perfection of all the lessons learned in how to kill people. But this monster only really came to be used at a very late stage in the holocaust. And by then had most jews in Poland already been murdered so there was no need to keep all other death camps, so they were closed down while Auschwitz was large enough to replace all those other camps for the remaining goals that the nazis had, such as murdering Hungary's jewish population - which could be done in record time at Auschwitz.
So could the holocaust have been stopped?
- I don't think so. There was no allied bombers with the range to reach all nazi death camps that were located in Poland and far away from any allied airbases in England. And flying without fighter escort would have anyhow been suicidal in 1942 when the German airforce still was strong and powerful.
And finding the targets would have been difficult, and hitting the targets would have been almost impossible.
And even if say a railway track leading to a death camp would have been destroyed, it would likely have been repaired within 2 weeks. And meanwhile could the nazis just transport their victims to some other death camps or sent out an einsatzgruppen to kill off the jews that the allied bombs had saved.
Since 80% of all victims had died by the start of 1943, I don't see how much could have changed. Even if allied leaders like Churchill and Roosevelt could have been conviced that a genocide was going on and that it was super-important to stop it immidietly, I don't think they would have had the power to do so in 1942.
Especially not when the Einsatzgruppen made most of the killings.
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Being pro freedom and democracy means you are against Putin.
Isolanism is a worthless concept if one does not define what you mean. I am a pacifist in that sense that I hate unnecessary wars, but I love wars that are necessary. The war in Ukraine is one such war. If one is too dumb to understand this difference between wests unnecessary imperialist wars in Iraq in 2003 and the necessary war against evil against Nazi-Russia.. then I really don't know what to say. Either one is less intelligent that the wheel on the back of my car, or ones moral compass is so broken that one prefers opression and genocide over freedom, lies over truth, imperialism over peace and independence.
Putin is an ethno-nationalist and an imperialist - just like Hitler and Milosevic. And men like them are the reason why patriotic and nationalist movement got a bad reputation - which is why I as a patriot distance myself from men like these.
I think they are all bribed by Moscow... Trump, Le Pen, Salvini, AfD etc, and therefore are their loyalty not towards your country and not your people. But their main loyalty is mainly towards Moscow. And if they have to pick and chose between your country and russia - then they will side with russia and harm your country.
Like Jimmie Åkesson here in Sweden, who this week said that we should destroy mosques. Why did he says so radical things he have never said before in his 30 years long career in politics? - My guess is that it is because orders from Moscow. He wants to sabotage Swedens chances to join Nato. He wants to break Swedens relations with Turkey, and stir up anger in the muslim world against Sweden.
And there is only one word for that: Treason. He know that this will create a massive terrorist threat to Sweden. And even if he wanted to ban Mosques he could have used a less flammatory language to say so. This statement was only created to create hatred towards our country and harm it - for the benefit of russia.
So Jimmie Åkesson is a traitor and a Quisling. Just like Wilders, Farage, Trump, Tucker, AfD, Le Pen and all other pro-russian fake nationalists and fake populists.
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1. Japan could not get the resources it needed for its own industry. So it needed to steal them from other Asian countries, and Japan did not have enough transport ships to transport all plunder to Japan.
2. Japan was technologically inferior to America and the early victories was won much thanks to outdated equipment the Americans had. But soon things changed and America would get superior aircrafts, and American tanks would outclass all armour the Japanese had. And the Americans had access to the Japanese codes.
Winning in the Philippines against America might be easy when you have the element of surprise and fight a lightly equiped enemy. But fighting without the element of surprise against an enemy with superior tanks is much harder.
3. The Japanese army was involved in wars on multiple fronts against Vietminh, China, Russia, Australia, Britain and the USA. And troops were spread out on so many islands that there was not enough transport ships to supply them - especially not when the industry also wanted the same transport ships so that oil, aluminium, coal, copper, rubber, cotton, sugar, rice and other things could be shipped to Japan.
4. America produced more aircrafts in 1943 than Japan did during the entire war (including the years of war they fought in China). And the American planes were also much better than the old outdated junk the japanese had. And America had plenty of oil and trained pilots, while japan did not.
5. Even if Midway had ended in a total victory for Japan, it would hardly change anything. Japan would never been able to take Australia, India or California in 1942 anyways. Japan was already overextended and could at best only spend their time to consolidate their earlier gains.
But meanwhile would America build up a new fleet in the pacific. And British and American ships would be transfered from the Atlantic and the mediterranean in the meanwhile to stabilize the situation.
6. America realized that the war was won in 1943 so they stepped down military production even before the war ended. Had the Japanese won at Midway, then America would probably have increased military production instead of decreasing it.
And we could have seen Montana class battleships become reality - instead of being disbanded before they could enter service, as what really happened.
7. The co-operation between Japan and the Axis powers were nearly non-existant. While the allies had superior co-operation and huge land masses of resources. Japan might have 5 million men in China. But so what?
Those men were poorly equiped 3rd world infantry. And good fighting morale only go so far when you have to fight against Russian troops with IS2 and ISU152 tank support. Or American troops with superior amounts of artillery and tank support and excellent radios. American troops were better fed, they had more ammo to waste, they had better firearms. And Americas population was much larger than Japans. USA had 12 million men in uniform and they could easily call upon even more millions of manpower if needed to defeat a crappy japanese army.
But I doubt America would even bother. They would just use artillery, airpower and armour instead of wasting their own blood in fighting the japanese. Or give China or Russia some surplus weapons to deal with the japs.
Even junk like M3 Lee and Stuart tanks would outclass most of the armour Japan had in 1944 and 1945. Indeed, Japan did barely have any tank support at all.
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"you spread it through negligence"
A disease you can have and spread without symptoms is impossible to stop. Who is at fault? No one. You could have spread it and killed a bunch of people without knowing it.
"Had enough people been able to, we wouldn't be dealing with subsequent covid strains now."
It will mutate no matter what. Just like all other influenza. You will see a new influenza each year, just like you will see a new Covid variant each year. And trying to stamp out this virus is as realistic as trying to catch a fart and lock it into a cage and paint it green.
The virus is now to stay with us forever. And this is not just me saying this. This is also what Anders Tegnell (the "Dr. Fauci of Sweden") is saying.
So then the question becomes is it reasonable to lockdown society and take away peoples freedoms forever? And the answer is NO. Freedom matters. The economy matters. And I do not want to see people dying from suicides because they have been locked inside their own homes for too long and seen their buisness destroyed.
We do not close down society and take away peoples freedoms in the past because people could die from influenza, or car crashes, heart attacks or cancer.
So therefore I think it is unreasonable that we should go bananas over a disease that got a 1 in 100.000 chance of killing me.
The reasonable approach is to vaccinate those who are vulnerable, and isolate them. And letting us others be free and let life return to normal. I think everything else would be immoral. It is immoral to let Covid get all research funding while diseases like cancer and heart disease kill more people.
I think it is wrong to prioritize Covid patients over people with mental illness, heart problems and cancer.
And I don't think a Covid lockdown is justified when we did not lock down society for other diseases. We did not stop people from buying cigarettes, junk food and alcohol. So why should the British police look into shopping bags to see if people have bought only life essential things?
If I was a dictator and only cared about public health and ignored every freedom argument, then it would make more sense to abolish freedom for the sake of stopping lung cancer, heart infarcations, and strokes by forcing people to eat healthy and not inhale black tar that blocks the blood flow to the heart or causing cancer and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. And alcohol destroy peoples livers and contribute to cancer and heart problems and road accidents.
But despite the gigantic burden of disease junk food, alcohol and cigarettes cause (which makes Covid-19 seems like a small blip by comparison). We do not take away peoples freedom to buy those things. So therefore do I think its absurd to take away peoples freedoms for a health problem which is much smaller by comparison.
And not only that, you also want to take away the freedom and childhood from children who have no risk of dying from this disease.
And if you are okay with forcing people to take injections from needles into their bodies, then you are no better than the doctors of nazi Germany.
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@pawekobylinski4634
I see nobles as a bunch of men who put self-interest before national interest. A class of useless parasites.
When you let nobles opress their farmers and steal all their hard work and underpay them and put all the gains in their own pocket then of course will the economy not prosper. You will have a stagnant economy like in Rome.
For industrialization you need mass consumption in order to get mass production.
And if you plunder all farmers so they cannot afford to buy anything, then of course you will kill all industries like in Rome. The furniture factories close down. Same with textiles for clothes, pottery for storing food, beer and so on.
The only few tiny parts of the economy can prosper when a small group of rich people holds all the money in a country. Like a few stores making luxury products like jewelry and wine. While Romes balance of trade became bad as they imported massive amounts of purple silk.
And the same is true for today. If you let bankers and landlords steal the wages of all the workers in a country, then what money will make your industry survive?
Who will be able to buy home electronics, toys, and food from a resturant? You will kill those jobs. And the government will get less tax revenues and having to feed the poor. I see this as a bad thing.
While the nobles sees this as a good thing. If people get unemployed, then more people compete for the jobs and press down the wages so they can keep even more of the profits and not sharing it with the workers.
You can the give the nobles even more power. The government with its falling tax revenues gets forced to sell out parts of it - to the same people who caused the problem.
Roads gets sold to rich people. And then they put a tollbooth on the road so you now have to pay money every time you drive on it. And those extra costs will make it more and more unprofitable to run a small buisness.
So people give up, workers are fired and become unemployed while the government gets less tax revenues.
So in my point of view is it important for every country to keep this class of rich people in check.
They should never be allowed to get rich on other peoples expense. Had I lived back in the 1700s then would my goal be to keep land rents low at a minimum. And if I live today would my economic policy be to opress bankers, landlords and capitalists. While workers/Consumers are the job creators I wanna help.
Your consumtion is the profit that keeps a buisness alive and makes it possible for it to expand and hire workers.
When Western Europe had the black death was nobles forced allow their workers higher wages or else they would pick to work for someone else. So the wages went up and the profits for landlords went down.
Higher wages led to more consumption. People could now afford to buy furniture and clothes and the industry in the cities began to flourish like never before. Peoples standard of living increased. And as industrialization took place did technological development speed up. Because when you got mass consumption and need to produce massive amounts of stuff, then it can be smart to invest in new modern machines that makes it easier and cheaper to make stuff.
If you are just going to make your own chair you can use your own hammer and saw.
But if you are going to sell tens of thousands of chairs, then maybe it would be smarter to let a windmill or a water wheel cut the timber for you. It would not make sense to buy an expensive windmill to only make one or two chairs, but when you start making large amounts of stuff it makes sense to invest in expensive machinery.
So that is my leftwing view on things. And my explanation why France, Austria, Poland, Spain and Russia underperformed in the 1500s to year 1900. The Ottoman empire also stagnated because of tax farming and such crap that allowed the rich to opress the poor.
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@michaelritzen8138
They would atleast not have fared any worse by not declaring war. I think Hitler made a big mistake even if we would assume that USA would join the war at a later point.
Hitler had units tied up in France which he could have used on the eastern front. And a 20 extra divisions could have been enough to prevent the Stalingrad disaster from happening.
And maybe he then would have been able to win the 1942 campaign then and basicly knocking USSR out of the war.
I also think that Roosevelt would have been very limited in the aid he could have given the USSR. Had USA not been at war with Germany it could have been politically difficult to give away as much aid as they did irl.
So the lend lease help would then have been small and not very significant - just as it was in 1941 and 1942.
It is possible that USSR still would have been able to defeat the Axis, but on the other hand would it also be very possible for Hitler to have defeated Russia.
Losing southern Russia would have been devastating to the Russian war effort, and the economy could have fallen apart like it did in 1917,
And the manpower shortages would become more of a problem for Russia. Germany could to some extent compensate their lost men by better weapons and more firepower. And a high GDP per capita of rich countries allows them to replace male workers with machines and tractors to a larger extent than a poor country like Russia. The Russian economy worked impressingly and surprisingly well during the war, and 80% of the country's GDP was directed towards the war effort - which is an extremely high number which normally only rich countries are able to achieve. Russia managed to achieve this by careful planning before the war, and the country had stored up vital resources before the war so a crash like 1917 due to resource shortages and price inflation would not happen. But this way of doing things could not work forever... and by late 1942 were Russia starting to running low on many vital resources. And if the resourced had runned out, then the industrial output would have fallen down like a rock. And Russia would have been forced into a dilemma - should they put more men in agriculture or mining? or should they put them in industry instead? or should they be put into the military instead?
All 3 branches desperatly needed more manpower at this very important time period during the war. And more men in the economy would have meant less men for the military. And more men in the military would have meant less men in the economy, and weapons lost in battle would become more difficult to replace.
So by 1942 I think it seems like Russia was in a more dire situation than Germany, despite Germany had not even started full rationing and mobilized its women for industrial work.
Without gigantic amounts of lend-lease and the resources from southern Russia it seems like Russia would have been forced to fight a terrible up-hill battle for the rest of the war. And Britain would not have been able to do much to liberate continental Europe on its own.
Russia had lost its entire airforce in 1941 and the army had lost millions of men, and large amounts of manpower reserves and industrial centers had also been lost to the Germans. So the war had already started bad for the Russians. They had lost 80% of their alumnium production to the Germans at the start of the war, and that was a hard blow to Russias ability to make aircrafts.
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Tanks are probably as powerful as before, but if you are going to have bad tanks and extremely bad tactics like the Russians then of course you are going to suffer heavy losses. A tank in itself is not a good weapon. This is not how you use a tank. A tank is best when it works togheter with other troops. You need to have infantry to protect the tank, artillery to soften up enemy resistence, anti-aircraft guns to protect the tank against drones and helicopters, recon troops that spot the terrain so you don't walk into ambushes, engineers that can remove mines and construct bridges, and a well functioning logistics organization of course.
The Russian tanks you see in Ukrainian war movies seems to lack both support from foot soldiers and they also lack fuel and ammunition, and the enemy can listen in to their crappy radio equipment and lay out traps for them.
So no wonder that tank losses are piling up.
If you have good support for your tanks, then your tanks can be good support for your troops. Its frontal armor can take much beating and survive. Its firepower will help your foot soldiers enormously as rifles cannot blow up buildings, and it will be a strong morale boost for your own men while it demoralizes the enemy - especially if they lack proper anti-tank weapons.
Tanks are great, but they also got many weaknesses. The men inside the tank are almost blind to what is going on outside. And the side armor and rear of a tank can often be easily be penetrated even by old crappy rocket launchers or by mediocre anti-tank cannons.
If you fight on open ground with long distances between the tanks and the enemy - then the tank wins.
But if the tanks are going on a road through a forrest and suddenly the enemy opens fire and blow up a tank with a rocket before it realize it has been under attack. Then it is very likely that the enemy wins. Especially if the terrain offers good protection and disguise, and if the ambush site have been prepared with mines or explosives that can be set off with remote control. And if the enemy tanks are moving closely to each other and the enemy suddenly destroy the first and the last tank in the line... then there will be no room for the other tanks to move around so they could fight back and protect themselves.
If you get surprise attacked you want to turn your tank as quickly as possible so you don't show your enemy your weak side armor. But if you don't do that, then your tank could be the next one to being blown up by a rocket. The tanks can of course not go into the forest and hunt down the men who attacked them - but if you got infantry with you, then they can do that and protect the tanks. But once again, land mines could have been placed out so losses for them can pile up.
So the lesson learned here is that tanks are vulnerable to enemy infantry if forests. And also in citys and mountain terrain.
And in open terrain if the enemy got air superiority. And on top of all those problems, are the the supply trucks carrying fuel to the tanks also very vulnerable. And without supplies like fuel and ammunition is a tank worthless.
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Sweden and Russia was also large iron producers and made more than 90% of all iron in Europe in the 1700s. 80% of all export revenues for Sweden came from iron around the 1790s, so when England invented new ways of massproducing cheap steel with the industrial revolution Sweden took a heavy economic blow.
Before railroads and the industrial revolution, you made iron near the iron mines due to the high transportation costs. And coal also had to come from a local source because of the high transportation costs. The Swedish government made laws that forbade farmers from cutting down trees, so that there would be no shortage of wood to make coal. And with low prices of wood, you could have low prices of coal, which in turn could make Swedish iron and steel cheap and competative on the world markets.
But England invented new ways of using coal dug up from the ground instead to make their iron, and the good waterways and railroads made it possible to transport their iron and coal at low costs long distances... and that in turn made it possible for England to begin large scale steel production in huge industrial facilities.
Sweden didn't have that luxury. It rivers were frozen by ice half the year, and sawmills could not be used since they used water to power them - and the water was frozen. And Sweden was a poor country with a small population so it was not profitable for private entreprenours to build any railroads. So transportation had to be done by horses or by foot - which was expensive - and that prevented the transportation of large amounts of iron and coal needed to build the same large steel making plants like in England.
So even if Sweden, Finland and Russia were all covered by trees and had plenty of iron, those resources were useless until someone invented an idea on how to transport all those resources out to the coast at cheap cost, so that they could be loaded onto ships and sold to other countries.
Sweden had 4x times more forrest land than Norway in the early 1800s, but
Norway exported 4 times more timber than Sweden back then because they didn't have any frozen seas like Sweden.
And Finland had almost as much forrest as Sweden, but it could not export any timber at all because all of its forrests were sitting too far away from the coast.
So Sweden only became a rich country in 1870s, when the Swedish government decided to build the railroads. And that brought down the transportation costs so it became profitable to start exporting timber, and coal and iron could now be transported to huge steelworks, so huge amounts of steel could be mass produced at a low cost.
And when the sawmills began using steam engines instead of waterwheels, then frozen rivers would no longer halt production during the winter months.
So Sweden could now massproduce timber on a scale never seen before.
And the newly invented Martin-process made it for the first time possible to use iron ore containing phosphorus - so that the huge iron mine in Kiruna could be opened and start producing all the high quality iron that Hitler and others wanted for their tanks and guns.
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They would probably have a hard time. Industrial countries does have an advantage - like the North had in the American Civil War. And in world war 1 Russia was suffering from a cronic shortage of rifles, guns - and most of all: Ammunition.
Building up an industry is something that takes time. At best it would normally take 15-30 years for a country to industrialize. Not only do you need a factory, you also need to import tools and machinery and modern production technologies in order to be able to build modern tanks, planes, cruise missiles and submarines.... You will also have to solve the problem, that a country that does not do any manufacturing will not get any foreign currency to pay for all imports.
And even if you somehow get some imports and manage to steal a perfect blueprint of the latest fighter jet from the pentagon, you will not be able to copy it unless you got skilled workers and years of technological know-how within the aircraft producers in your country.
Allow me to quote economic proffessor Ha Joon Chang:
"When Germany became as poor as Peru and Mexico right after the Second World War, no one suggested that it should be reclassified as a developing country, because people knew that it still had command over technological, organizational and institutional knowledge that had made it one of the most formidable industrial powers before the war."
So as you see, building up technological know-how, organizatinal skills, and well-functioning institutions takes a long time. And neighter Peru or Mexico have catched and are as rich as Germany today despite their GDP was roughly the same size in 1945.
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Just because your country wants to invade your neighbours does not mean that Sweden wants the same.
Sweden have been at peace for over 200 years. Russia on the other hand have just the last 85 years invaded Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Czechia, Afghanistan, Chechenya, Georgia and Ukraine. Plus that it have mass raped German women, it have kidnapped people from the Baltics and tried to wipe out their culture, stolen land from Finland, Germany, Georgia and Ukraine that it have not given back, it have for 40 years opressed people in Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, East Germany, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Ukraine, and Hungary.
Russia is simply an evil aggressor state. A terrorist maffia state. A country that is a compulsive liar and cannot act honestly and have never dealt with its dark history.
Unsurprisingly is the russian military built for offense. While the Swedish one is built for defense.
And given russias pathethic performance in Ukraine would I not be surprised if little Estonia would be able to kick russian ass by now.
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Angela Merkel (Hitler's daughter) have already said she will leave the role as a leader for Germany and her party. And she does not really have any choice. The national elections in Bavaria and Hessen ended in a crushing defeat for the mainstream parties, so to save herself from further embarrassments she have to resign whether she likes it or not. And now Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer is predicted to inherit Merkel's throne.
And as if this problem was not enought, so do the Merkel's health also cause problems for her to have enough strenght to fight on. And she will need much energy indeed to save her globalist project from falling apart.
She is fighting a war on many front that she cannot win. She is fighting about "solidarity" in the refugee issue in the EU, but Italy and Eastern Europe puts up hard resistance against Merkel's Germany.
Merkel also have to fight enemies at her homefront, such as the populist party AfD which wants to limit immigration. And Merkel's CDU also have sister party named CSU, and that party have started to flirt with anti-immigration opinions... and CSU did put Merkel up to an ultimatum to stop immigration, and that threatened to break apart Merkels coalition government into pieces. Merkel managed to win at the homefront against CSU, but only barely. And she was forced to surrender to Salvini's Italy and the other anti-immigration countries regarding the EU plans to build "concentration camps" (sic!) on the coast of North Africa to stop the flow of boat migrants that are coming to Europe.
But Merkel have even more problems... the last EU election ended in a disasterous loss of votes for her coalition partner the socialdemocrats. And many mainstream political experts predicts that this coalition of Merkel will fall apart even before Merkels last term is over.
And of top of immigration issues, bad health do Merkel also have lots of other problems to deal with. Like Brexit, the trade war with USA, the free riding on Nato that Germany have done that is coming to an end after 50 years.
And Merkel's best friend - Macron is having even more problems than Merkel. Macron is the most unpopular president in French history - which is something that was previously seen as an impossible achievement given the catastrophic polls of populartity that president Hollande had before him. Macron is hated by both left and right, and his Europhile extremists ideas are so crazy that even Merkel think that he is going too far.
The old globalist world order seems to be falling apart. The mainstream parties are doing catastrophic elections not just in France and Germany, but in all over Europe. Indeed, all over the western world.
And nationalist-populist and traditionalist parties are becoming more popular in almost every country worldwide.
Trump, Bolsonaro, and Brexit are only the most popular manifestations. But I don't think we should forget that BJP in India is the largest political party in the world, and it is a rightwing nationalist, populist traditional party as well.
And Salvini in Italy like a new rockstar in Italy. And newly born parites like the Brexit party and Vox in Spain or AfD in Germany have gained votes at rates rarely ever seen historically. And the nationalists also wins local elections everyware - like in Quebec and Andalusia.
So the future does not look pretty for those who dream about globalist fantasies.
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-Nuclear power is unprofitable and needs life support from the government to survive. All of the worlds 200 nuclear plants have been built with government money because the private sector cannot afford to build one plant. And even less can the private sector afford insurance costs without government guarantees for building a plant, so no private sector company could handle building a nuclear plant on its own. The insurance costs in case a disaster happens must always fall on the tax payers because the private sector cannot afford to pay in full.
Furthermore are capitalists interested in big profits and quick profits. A nuclear plant is not much profitable at all. And you will not start to recover all the money that you have spend until 30 years or so after you started a project. And very few companies and rich people have that kind of economic muscles. And few also got the patience to wait so long, and especially when there are so many other more profitable things you can do for say 160 billion dollars than building a nuclear plant.
-Its unclean, and even in a best case scenarior you need to somehow store enriched uranium for more than 4 billion years - which means forever since this planet will likely not last more than 4 billion years.
-Nuclear power does also need ocean water for cooling the hot fuel. And when that water goes back into the ocean will the water be so hot that it creates massive algae bloom in the Baltic sea, and the algae consumes all oxygen in the water so all fish and maritime life dies.
- Nuclear power is also extremely dangerous. Only one nuclear disaster is enough to kill all life on the northern half of the planet. I think that is an unreasonable high price to pay for just a few years of energy. And after no more energy could be get from the uranium, we still need to store that hot nuclear fuel safely for eternity. And future generations will have to live with a dangerous bomb that can potentially kill off everyone of their generation. And they also have to spend money to take care of that fuel that our generation created. And they have to pay for the energy needed to provide that hot fuel with water pumps to cool it down - and that means that they cannot use that solar power or wind energy for their own needs, but instead have to spend it on cooling down hot nuclear fuel, so it doesn't get so hot that it melts through the metal container and leaks into nature and kill all life on earth.
Future generations will hate our generation and see us as selfish bastards. And they are correct.
- Nuclear power is also unsubstainable. There are only a limited amount of uranium on this planet. Just like there is only a limited amount of oil, coal, and natural gas. So we would start to run out of uranium a few decades from now, as peak uranium happens.
So it is just dumb to pain ourselves into a corner and walk into a dead end by investing in nuclear power. And if every country on the planet took the advice of replacing fossile fuels with nuclear power. Then of course would we be using much more uranium than we do now in a single year. So the world would quickly run out of uranium in just 4 years if we somehow managed to replace all coal, oil, and natural gas with nuclear power.
So of all types of energy sources that exist, I would say that nuclear power is the dumbest, dirtiest and most useless.
I even rather stick to fossile fuels. I worry more about another nuclear disaster than I worry about the fake crisis called "Global warming".
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Austria was good at producing waltz music and famous composers. But fighting wars was not one of its talents.
It had huge resources but still it failed to defeat Sweden in the 30 years war, and after the battle of Breitenfeld was all of modern day Germany lost to Swedish hands. The war dragged on, for some years thanks to help from Spain, some diplomacy and large economic wealth... but in the end did Austria lose the war anyways.
Austria also lost all 3 wars over Silesia with Frederick the Great. And it lost the war against Napoleon. And it lost against Prussia in 1866. And in WW1 it managed to wipe out over 60% of its 2 million men strong army in just 4 months. It could not even beat Serbia - a 3rd world country - despite numerical superiority, better weapons, and good access to fresh troops and logistics.
Just as with Habsburg Spain, was Habsburg Austria good at royal marriages diplomacy. So it too did create an empire with totally artificial borders, thanks to monarchs gaining land through marriages. So aside from royal blood was there very little that tied this empire together. And solidarity was never good between the different peoples and provinces.
The Hungarians were excellent horsemen and light infantry during the 1700's, but despite making up a third of the empire it only paid 10% of all taxes in the Kingdom. And its barbarian population was a very proud one, so of course did its soldiers not accept being led by German officers. The Italian provinces were rich highly culturally developed, and the same was true for Belgium. Croatia provided excellent steppe troops, but their discipline was awful and the line between criminal gangs of murders and plunderers and soldiers were non-existent as with the other light troops in the Austrian army.
And the Austrian army itself was very tiny, and the population in Tyrol was very unwarlike, but Austria could still get large army thanks to contributions of troops of all different German states within the Holy Roman empire. And this army was commanded by Austrian officers.
But as with the tax system, was there also nearly no standardization within the Austrian army on how units should be trained, equipped, the size of regiments and so on.
So just like Spain and France did this empire punch below its own weight, despite being a huge empire with millions of people.
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@j.miguelfarinhaalves4926
"Weapons are made for war"
Some weapons have a dual purpuse. Bandvagn 206 is for example popular for artic expeditions, huey helicopters can be used for putting out forest fires, to fly ambulance duty and so on. Motorcycles, snowmobiles, M113 APc can be popular also for civilian use after the military finds no use for them.
"so as long as there are wars it is a good development plan for Sweden, it might be less so for the nations at war"
The military industrial complex have brought about many inventions that we use today in out daily lives: Internet, GPS, mobile phones, computers... the list of technological spinoff effects from military research is endless.
The research done to develop tank armor led to new materials that now are being used for dental plates today. Experiments with shaped charges explosives enabled the development of airbags in cars.
Entire new industries has been developed around all those new revolutionary innovations.
"Big military might be a good solution to give jobs to youth without prospects, and nowhere is there bigger cohesion and comradery than in an army."
I want a conscript army rather than a professional army. Those who wanna make a career will probably take a civilian job as soon as they are done with their military service. And those who like the military life might perhaps seek to do a military career as an NCO and then an officer.
People learn skills that they can then use as a civilian. Using their skills as translator, medic, mechanic, helicopter pilot, team leader or whatever.
"the productive sector will pay for all that"
Yes, but neither have I ever claimed that the military was supposed to be profitable. It should be built for winning wars. That is the opposite of trying to be as economically effiecent as possible.
Complaining about the military is costing money is as dumb as complaining about having to pay for the police firefighters, and healthcare. Those are services that society needs that are not run for the sake of profit. We have them to fulfill certain needs of society.
"So people will need do consume less and export less, who will you think will pay for that."
As I said you pay for things for the sake of fulfilling needs, not for short term economic gains here and now.
Nobody needs a firefighter until it starts burning. Nobody needs doctor until one become sick or injured. No one needs a policeman until a crime happens. And no one needs and army until they do.
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@westnblu By October 1941 did the German High Command conclude that they had neutralized so many Soviet troops that it would be equal to 150 Divisions. This is an impressive number. When Germany planned Operation Barbarossa they did expect opposition from 150 Divisions, and after they wiped out say 100 of them then victory would be theirs they thought. But they were of course wrong.
Even if this operation was succesful, and the German army had managed to destroy even more divisions than expected and at a faster rate than planned, did Operation Barbarossa end as a failure. And the reason was simple - by the same october had Russia built another 150 new Divisions to throw against the Germans and denying them a rest. So thing were a bit worrying for the Germans at that time.
I guess that most German Generals still thought they could win. The Russian army was crappy and would likely suffer the same fate as in World War 1, and there was not much of a two front war going on and USA remained neutral.
But the hurry to take Moscow seems like a dumb decision. Not only does the weather make it unsuitable. So does also the German tank losses and the logistical strain. Many (even perhaps most Generals) argued for a push directly towards Moscow. And Hitler correctly rejected this foolish idea, and he did choose to encircle the pocket at Kyiv and destroy the half a million strong massive troop concentration there. Had Hitler listened to his Generals idiotic advice to take Moscow directly could this large force in Kyiv have outflanked the Germans from the south, and a Russian pincer could have cut off the entire supply line for army group centre as it pushed towards Moscow, and without supplies would that large fighting force be in big problems and suffer catastrophic losses, or even getting encircled and wiped out completly.
So the Germans destroyed the Kyiv pocket. And now should they have realized that they did not have the time to take Moscow in this year (1941). They did not have the time or the manpower or tanks to do so. And even if they took Moscow it would likely not have ended the war (it did not work for Napoleon in 1812). It would just have been a bloody meatgrinder like Stalingrad.
And once the city was taken would the Germans be to weak to defend it against a Russian counter attack.
Or the end result could perhaps be even worse, and end up with a German army encircled inside Moscow which would be wiped out the same way as the 6th Army at Stalingrad.
I am surprised that German Generals even proposed such an idiotic move as to trying to take Moscow.
But I guess they overestimated themselves and looked down on their racially inferior foe and confirmed their contempt for the Russians by their poor military performance. And to some degree was their view valid. Many times in that war did German regiments manage to beat off Russian divisions, and German divisions could beat back entire Russian army corps.
However, the good self-confidence turned over into arrogance and over confidence.
Many Generals did probably also subscribe to the idea of one great big battle that would decisivly determine the outcome of a war. Like the battle of Königgrätz ended the war between Prussia and Austria. So maybe they then saw the battle of Moscow as the final great battle to win. A battle which would finally destroy the Red army and force Russia to surrender to all of Germany's peace terms.
Once again do I think this idea is silly most wars are not determined by one great battle alone. And something that would be obvious by 1941 is that the Soviets had already suffered so many catastrophic defeats, that one could say that they had already fought large decisive battles, but they have all failed to end the war. Not even the biggest defeat in military history - the surrender of 600.000 Russians at Kyiv did end the war.
So it would probably clear to everyone with a braincell that killing off the red army was not going to happen.
So Hitlers decision to focus on stealing food, oil and industrial capacity by stealing southern Russia in 1942 made much more sense.
There might be other reasons than stupid Generals that decided an attack towards Moscow.
It has been said that Hitler wanted to give the Japanese the impression that the war with Russia was soon over and that a final push toward Moscow was on its way. The idea was to not discourage Japan from declaring war on USA and pull Japans big navy into the war against USA and sign an alliance.
Hitlers talk about just kicking in the door and the building would fall apart... did not happen however.
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@westnblu Not really. The Afrika Korps had 3 Divisions. That is rougly 45.000 men. During Operation Barbarossa did the Germans have 2000 men dead per day. So that is only enough to replace 23 days of fighting. That is just a drop in the ocean for all manpower the Germans needed. So in the larger scheme of things did North African front not matter to this war.
And in in 1941-42 was also the Africa Korps mostly using weapons like Panzer II which was considered outgunned and obsolete compared to the Russian tanks.
In the long run did things however become problematic for the Germans. As they were forced to fight a 5 front war - in Russia, in France, in the south (Italy/North Africa), in the Atlantic ocean with uboats and battleships, and the air war over Germany and France.
And Germanys lack of oil and late transition over to a war economy made it even harder to meet all wartime needs.
So that is the problem they had with the western allies.
The problem in the east was rather that they had been unprepared for a long war. The Luftwaffe did run out of bombs during operation Barbarossa. The pilots got exhausted by flying dive bombing missions multiple times per day for a hundred days. And the Germans lost more troops in the battle for Moscow than they did invading all countries in western Europe. And when Stalins winter offensive came they had to retreat and leave heavy equipment behind - so the Germans lost thousands of tanks, trucks, artillery pieces and transport planes.
And the result became that the German army had to start the war of 1942 with a much weaker army than that of 1941. Germany was no longer strong enough to attack Russia in the North, middle and the south at the same time.
So now it had to choose where to attack.
And they went for Caucausus.
But Germany did not really have enough troops for even that as they would have needed an extra army corps if they wanted to take both Stalingrad and Maikop at the same time.
Personally I see this as bad planning for Hitler and his Generals. They could have mobilized more troops in late 1941 so they could have gotten more troops to play with on the eastern front by the late summer of 1942.
Another alternative could have been to have moved some of the 20 divisions located in France in 1942. Hitler was paranoid about operation Torch and did think the Americans would invade France as soon as he started a war with them. But personally do I think that Germany could have sent atleast half of those troops to Russia. Had just a half-dozen or so of their better units located in France in 1942 been deployed in the east, then the disaster at Stalingrad would never have happened.
By 1942 was time crucial for Germany. It could nto win a long war against USA, UK and USSR.
By taking Ukraine/Caucausus/Stalingrad would they be able to take the industry, agriculture and oil from the Russians. Perhaps they could not exploit those resources that effectivly yet. But on the other hand would the loss of those areas be a disaster for the Russian war economy even in the short run.
Their economy had already been shaky with all resource bottle necks and moving all industries by rail from the west to ural. So far had it been able to keep its head above water thanks to huge pre-war stockpiles of strategic resources.
But by late 1942 were those stored stockpiles beginning to running out. And if Russia could not take the pressure off by winning at Stalingrad and liberating Ukraine and Caucausus - then their economy would be strangled to death.
And the lend lease shipments before mid 1943 was relativly tiny and would not save Russia from disaster.
Without oil would the Russian military be severly handicapped as their planes, tanks and trucks could nto move.
It would be hard to replace all industry lost, like their tank factory at Stalingrad.
And losing the breadbasket of Russia: Ukraine - would have meant a disasterous decline in food supplies. In World war did the lack of food from Ukrainian farmers mean that Russias big cities such as Moscow and Leningrad would be starving. The price of bread would rise astronomically and lead to massive inflation. No one could afford to eat anymore and you would get food riots and revolution and people would lose motivation to fight and wanna end the war.
And the war industry would now face problems like in World war 1. It now have to raise wages to be able to attract workers. And this all this would be tied to the inflation problems. And now when you produce too little food, is it really wise to try to get farmers to move to the cities to work in factories to produce ammunition for the red army?
And Russia is a poor country so you cannot do like USA. USA could increase food production without more workers by using more tractors and more fertilizer. But Russia could not afford that.
And America could replace industrial workers with machines, fordism and convayor belts. But Russia could not afford to do the same as they were a poor country that could not buy expensive machines.
So the American workers were more effiecent thanks to all tools and machines and 1 American worker could therefore produce as much stuff as perhaps 4 Russian workers could do combined.
This did allow USA to save manpower and send more men to the frontline in green uniforms.
But Russia could not afford to do that. They needed a larger workforce at home. They needed a higher proportion of their population to work as farmers - or otherwise would all the soldiers and industrial workers starve to death.
So had Germany managed to hold Southern Russia would the result have been disasterous.
Russia would end up with too little food, too little industrial production and too few soldiers to continue fighting the war effectivly. The country would likely have fallen apart like it did in 1917.
If Hitler was not a fool he could then make peace and grab all of Ukraine, Caucausus, Belarus, and the Baltics for himself. Pressing forwards onto the Urals was not necessary. And it could wait atleast until the western allies had been defeated.
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In the western half of the Roman empire people spoke latin. And in the eastern half they spoke Greek instead.
Rome won North Africa, Spain and France by military conquests and could brutally impose their will and force the population to do everything that rulers in Rome wanted. The old culture was destroyed and people learned to speak latin instead.
In the eastern half of the empire things were different. Eastern provinces were gained by inheritance, royal marriages and alliances with friendly minded kingdoms and states. And Rome offered the peoples in the east many benifits if they joined the Roman empire, and they promised that many cities could keep their own laws and old culture and customs if they joined the Roman empire. And the population did not have to pay all the same taxes as the Romans did.
So the eastern half of the empire never became fully Roman. And the Romans never made any efforts to assimilate the Greek speaking population into the latin community. And the Greeks could keep their own Gods and traditions.
One could think of it like the failed integration of a modern day ghetto of immigrants in todays Europe.
If there are no forces that push for the immigrants to follow the law of the land, learn the language and trying to mix with the native population... then of course will the muslim immigrants then prefer to keep their own language, customs and traditions.
Likewise was the Greeks in the eastern half never interested in giving up their own language and use latin instead.
As long as Rome could conquer new rich lands and take enemy solidiers as slaves did the economy of the western half of the empire flourish and exceed the wealth of the Eastern half of the empire. But when Rome started to run out of slaves, then the slave economy in western Europe started to fall apart, and the power balance in the Roman empire swung over and the Eastern half of the empire became more important than the western half.
It now was in the east the big cities and riches were found. And it was in the east the great thinkers and intellectuals were found. While the new provinces the Romans conquered like Britain were more of an economic loss than a benifit to the Roman empire. Britain needed to be defended by 4 Roman legions, but the little island province could not afford to pay for the upkeep for all those units on its own. The land also lacked natural resources - except tin... while other provinces like Spain had plenty of useful natural resources and both France and Spain would provide Rome with more money than what they costed to defend.
And both Spain and France did also provide the Roman empire with philosophers, thinkers, celebrities and emperors. But Roman Britain did not provide a single one such person.
So as you see did the western Roman empire at one point reach its peak.
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@vk1140 Sweden is going to send 6000 anti-tank weapons (The Swedish built m86) , 5.000 helmets, 5.000 sets of body armour, and 135.000 C-rations. And 1.4 billion Euros in economic aid.
As a Swede I of course hope that Ukraine wins this just defensive war fought for freedom, self-determination and democracy. Swedish and Ukrainian troops under Ivan Mazepa fought side by side against the Russians in 1709 when the Swedish empire fell apart after the battle of Poltava. The French have their Waterloo and then their empire fell apart in blaze and glory, the Germans hope of winning the war was crushed at Stalingrad, the CSA was crushed at Gettysburg, the Serbs had their battle of Kosovo-Polje...
and for the Swedes does the battle of Poltava have the same historical importance. Sweden was attacked from all directions by Denmark, Norway, Poland, Saxony and Russia all at once. The Swedish army crushed their enemies one by one, and the Russian army was defeated in battle after battle and chased deep into Russia where it did scorched earth tactics. And the worst winter in many hundred years then came and killed the Swedish invasion army that came to destroy Russia... the same way as the winter did Napoleons army in 1812, and Hitlers armies in 1941.
So the next summer when the battle that would decide the war happened on Ukrainian soil it was a weakened Swedish army that King Charles XII had at his disposal.
The Russians had lost battle after battle despite 4 times larger numerical superiority. And even after those crushing defeats at Narva, Saladen, Fraustadt, Kliszow etc could they still field a much larger army than Sweden at Poltava.
Russia could afford to lose many battles, but Sweden lost one at Poltava and the empire was lost.
An army of 40.000 Swedes were wiped out on Ukrainian soil in some of the bloodiest battles of the 18th century.
It has been said that the Ukrainian blue yellow flag have been inspired by the colors of the Swedish Caroleans uniforms. But I don't know if it is true.
I do however feel sympathy for Ukraine - like the rest of Europe does. Especially eastern Europe of course, but even we Swedes who had peace for over 200 years have still not forgotten that Russia is threat - the memories of the Great Northern war still remains. And every Putin lackey killed in battle on Ukrainian soil is one that we don't have to kill on Swedish ground. So I hope we will continue to pump in weapons into Ukraine.
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The Swedish navy have a bad reputation. And sure, Danes and Dutch were better sailors. But the Swedish navy was better than its reputation. I think it was Herman Lindquist who said that the Swedish navy won a victory until Svensund in 1790. Which is untrue, Sweden did win a few naval battles here and there.
Sweden was a new player in naval warfare in did make some noob mistakes in the first 150 years. And it also had much bad luck and got many of its most powerful ships lost by wind.. so the great military power Sweden had to invest all of its GDP for like 20 years to rebuild all battleships that had been lost in the wars of the 1670s. It was an extremely costly affair.
But on the other hand did Sweden learn a lot from its mistake and built a modern powerful navy and the naval base was moved from Stockholm to Southern Sweden (Karlskrona). Now Sweden had conquered much land in northern Europe and felt comfortable moving its home base for the fleet and it was also expected that all future wars would be fought against the fleets of Denmark, Germany and Poland. So having the new base closer to the weaker enemies did make sense. The war of 1675–1679 had shown great disadvantaged in having the fleet stationed in Stockholm. It took a year before it could do combat. It had to stay in base for months because of bad weather and then it had to spend days before it could go south and do something useful.
But when Sweden finally had learned from all their mistakes and started to do everything right, then all this knowledge had no value at all.
The next war was the Great Northern war. And Sweden alone had to fight against Denmark-Norway, Saxony, Poland and Russia. And the big Swedish battleships together with the Dutch fleet won a fast victory over Denmark and knocked it out of the war. But against the Russian fleet was those big ships not very practical, since they could not maneuver well in the shallow waters along the coast-line outside Stockholm or the coast of Finland and Russia.
Russia did what they always do best: so they mass produced low quality galley ships that could move in shallow waters, and they lost enormous amounts of ships in combat and to wind and bad seamanship - but they did end up becoming the new dominant force in the Baltic sea anyways and won the war.
So the big warships had not been the right kind of ships Sweden needed for its future wars.
And having the naval base in southern Sweden was dumb when the road to Stockholm laid bare for a naval invasion, and the Capital city needed protection from its fleet.
One can say that the Great Northern war ended even with Denmark. Gathenhielm and similar Swedish pirate captains nearly brought Denmark to its knees after it had rejoined the war against Sweden. It was almost like Germany's uboat war against Britain.
But Denmark would get some time to recover when the fleet was ordered by the King to move to northern Germany to try to save the Swedish army there from destruction. But this mission failed, and Denmark got the time it needed to recover from the great harm Swedish privateers had caused Danish and Norwegian shipping.
And soon would revenge be taken, with the Norwegian naval hero Tordenskiold launching one daring raid after another that caused great losses on Swedish shipping and forced the Swedish army to stop its invasion of Norway when its supply ships was burned down.
And in the end was both sides very much exhausted after the huge losses after 20 years of war.
Gathenhielm lived a short life and was a pure criminal in my opinion. A pirate. But Tordenskiold was a more sympathetic man with a more interesting story suitable for movies with his daring raids. He even asked the Danish King for permission to enter Swedish service after the war so he could help Sweden fight off its Russian threat. But that plan would never happen.
All this shows that the life at sea got a very international culture among sailors and captains.
They don't mind entering service with other countries they just have fought a war against, and they feel a strong sense of brotherhood with captains and sailors of other countries.
Tordenskiold is a typical example of this, just like captains from Sweden, England, France, the Netherlands and other places.
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I think stealth is overrated today, and it will probably become even less important in the future when detection technologies improve. Some types of radars can see all kinds of planes and have done so since radar was invented in the 1940s so stealth is just a relative concept. Furthermore does stealth also depend much on from which angle a plane is getting ovserved from. And finally, even if a plane cannot be seen with radar, it could be detected with other types of sensors - such as heat-skeeing detectors - and the Rafale can easily see the F35 from many dozens of kilometres away since the F35 got the most powerful engine in the world and it also lacks any device that cool off the hot air from the engine so it can remain undetected, because F35 doesn't carry a such thing onboard to save weight.
Good stealth might allow your plane live a little bit longer and allow you to get closer to the enemy, so you could get in range to kill him. But one should not overestimate the importance of stealth. Atleast as important is the equipment onboard, and if you can find an enemy plane far away and got good missiles to kill him before he even got a chance to spot you, then you got a huge advantage even if you fly the shittiest most unstealthy plane in the world.
I also think that auto-cannons on planes are a bit outdated and that we live in a new age of missiles, but I wouldn't want a plane to be without a little cannon just in case.
The Russian planes looks best on paper since they are super-manouverble and can engage targets 400km away, while F22 and F15 are less manouvarble only can attack targets 160km away. And with stealth on top of all that, I think that the Pak Fa will punch the crap out of any F35 coming its way. PAK FA is the best plane. But Gripen is the best plane one could get in relation to price. In a computer game I would only have Pak Fa's in my air force, but in the real world with money constrains I would go for the Gripen, and perhaps also get a few Su35, F22 or Eagles to get this Hi/low mix.
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I disagree. Britain could have gotten a much better deal if the negotiations had been done by a non-remainer and if traitor media didn't try to sabotage Brexit.
Britain had a strong hand at the negotiating table, since the EU is in economic trouble and the UK would leave a big black hole in the EU budget when leaving - which needs to be filled somehow by somebody. And when the EU is already having a popularity crisis and all strong Europhile leaders are handcuffed (Macron is super-unpopular, and Merkel is about to resign after catastrophic elections) then the EU would have to offer Britain something in return for British cash.
We now see what would happen if taxes would have to increase in EU countries like France to make up for all billions that EU loses with Brexit. The left have made catastrophic elections all over Europe while the populist right is winning everyware.
So if you wanna hold this EU shit togheter, then its necessary to solve this fiscal problem smoothly.
Another thing is that Britain can cause great harm to the EU economy a lot if the EU choose to play unfair - as they have. Trade wars are nearly always won by countries which are running a trade deficit (as Britain) while big exporters (like Germany) get severly harmed while the importer nations suffers nearly no harm to themselves at all.
USA and Japan during the 1930 illustrate this phenonemom.
Britain does not need Germany, as much as Germany needs Britain. Britain can always choose to buy cars from Japan, Korea, USA and other places instead of Germany - and other countries are happy to make hundreds of billions in profits from car sales to Britain if the Germans don't want to sell cars. And while hundreds of thousands of German workers lose their jobs, lots of jobs are created in another country.
So a skilled negotatior which doesn't betray her own country would use this fact to her advantage during the negotiations with the EU.
Britain is also a unique country. It does have good relations and historical ties with America and other places, and president Trump is very friendly with UK and wants allies in his trade wars. And this is also another thing that should give UK some leverage in the negotiations with the EU.
And even a worst case scenario of crashing out of the EU would not mean the end of the world. Trade will still happen with the rest of the world, even without a trade deal. Just like China and the EU could trade with each other for years without any trade deal in place. All that would happen would be that Britain then will trade according to WTO-rules. And that will not be the end of the world. Australia also only trade on WTO rules and that country is not poor like a failed state.
Transitioning away from the EU can be a little painful, but that is not the fault of Brexit but rather the fault of the EU. And staying within the EU will not end well for the economy since the economic policies of the EU are fundamentally flawed - as the Eurocrash in 2008 has shown.
Personally I hope that Brexit will mean the start of a new era of import-substitution, and that British manufacturing can make a comeback by Britain buy more British goods instead of importing similiar products from other countries. And that is the short term solution.
Exporting more stuff to other countries and dealing with hard international competion should be more of a longterm goal for Britain and that thing will need more time to achieve now when British manufacturing have been neglected so much for so long.
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Nationalists exists in all countries. They exaggerate their own countrys importance and turn a blind eye to embaressing set backs.
Russian nationalists do this however to an extreme degree not seen in any other country in Europe - which is why I regard every russian "history book" as worthless sci-fiction. They ignore all genocide and opression. They do not call World war 2 for World war 2 in Russia. For russians did world war two not start in 1939 with Germany and Russia invading Poland, the Baltics and Finland.
But instead do Russians use the term "The Great Patriotic war" and say that world war two began in 1941, and they ignore everything that happened before that year and pretend that Russia somehow was the defender and victim in this war, and not the aggressor that criminally helped to start this war.
Nor have Russia apologized for the wars and occupation of Finland. No attempts have been done to deal with the crimes of the Soviet union like Germany did with their Nazi past.
And russian history ignores military failures. For them did nothing happen during the Great Northern War until the battle of Poltava in 1709 which they won. And they try to pretend that they did not lose 19 out 20 battles for the rest of that war despite having 4 times numerical superiority against a country with limited manpower reserves that was fighting a two front war against an enemy coalition with a population 40 times larger.
Russian nationalists refuse to talk about the war with Finland, and even less about all battles. But instead they narrow everything down to the peace settlement in their attempt to make the russian military look competent, while everyone in the world knows that they got themselves completely humiliated against Finland in 1939 and in 1944.
Russian nationalists produce fake statistics in an attempt to make their own combat losses against Nazi-Germany seem less humiliating for Russia. And they try to pretend that lend lease played no role at all for Russias victory. But fact is that Russia suffered the worst military defeats in history in humiliating military disasters like the battle of Kiev in 1941, where 600.000 troops were captured by the Germans in just a single battle. Any other army in history would have lost the war after suffering such hard losses.
But the russians have not performed impressivly in other wars either. They lost the Crimean war. They suffered a humiliating loss in the russo-japanese war. World war 1 was a catastrophic defeat for russia. Russia failed to conquer Poland in the 1920s. They lost the war in Afghanistan. They failed in Chechenya. The Georgian army did do well against the russian forces, but a small country with 3.8 million people with no western help stood no chance against Russia. So not so much of a victory to brag about for Russia.
Indeed defeating Finland when it was the poorest country in Europe, and now doing so badly against Ukraine today (the country with the lowest GDP per capita in Europe) is not that impressive either.
Its a country that has always brought stone age equipment to war. During the Great Northern War (1700-1721) was Russia and Sweden the two most oldest equipped armies in Europe, and the only ones still using pikemen and big heavy muskets with bayonets built for close combat with bayonets rather than lighter muskets for firing that was easier to carry. During the Crimean war in the mid 1800s, did Russia not have any industrial base so its troops were often equipped with muskets from the early and mid-1700s as they lacked modern muskets to fight against Britain and France.
During World war 1, did the Russian artillery quickly run out of ammunition after the first months of the war. And for the rest of the war could russian industry only produce a tiny number of shells each month. A German artillery piece on average fired more shells in 2-3 days than what a russian one did in a month. And so few rifles were made that many russian units often had to share 1 rifles for 2 men, and do attacks in the same style as in the movie "enemy at the gates".
And such meatwave attacks are still common in later wars, such as World war 2 and in the war in Ukraine.
Not only have russia lost most wars it have fought the last 200 years. It have usually been beaten further back in history, and its few victories were usually won when it fought in coalitions with other countries - like against Poland, Sweden and Napoleon. Russian nationalists loves to call russia for "the destroyer of great armies" but Charles XII still had a good chance of winning the Great Northern War even as late as 1718. The performance of the Russian army against Frederick the Great was rather one of humiliation in my opinion. The battle of Zorndorf have falsely been remembered as a russian victory, while in reality did Russia lose that battle.
Kunersdorf was a great defeat for Frederick, but what russian nationalists forgets to mention is that Frederick did crush the Russian army in that battle and forced it into a wild retreat and demoralized it for months to come. The Prussians did run behind the russian army and chasing it, and then did the Austrian army under Laudon see an opportunity for a counter-attack against the scattered and exhausted prussian troops and inflicted a painful defeat on Frederick. So did Russia win a great victory in this fight? Nope. They suffered a humiliating defeat, but could participate in the victory parade after the battle anyways.
Also Gross-Jägersdorf was really just non-victory for Russia in the seven years war. So they had nothing positive to show for their participation in this war.
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The dumbest GOP is without doubt George W Bush.
But I cannot say im impressed by the intelligence of Palin, Santorum, Herman Cain, Rush Limbaugh,
Bill O'reilly, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ann Coulter, Prager University, Market fundamentalists like Peter Schiff, Conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, and right-wing christian fundamentalists like Pat Robertson and Rick Santorum, and the right-wing propaganda by
Fox News in general...
And even more scary than dumb people are the outright evil people like Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Hank Paulson and Tucker Carlson.
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I don't think that robots will come as far as to replace humans the coming decades, but I guess that the infantry will rely more and more on sensors, drones and such. But I still also think that old weapons will continue to be useful in some areas of the frontline / or against low tech enemies.
And I also think that IT-security is a pretty safe bet, if I would buy stocks in area of the economy which I think will grow in the future. If you fail on cyber security, then your best weapons can be copied by the enemy, all your battleplans could be stolen, and your electronic weapons can stop functioning. Furthermore can the banking system stop working, the electric grid can be knocked out, and the transportation and healtcare sector will be hard hit as well.
So the importance of better IT-security cannot be understated in a world which is starting to doing everything digital nowadays.. everything from self-driving cars to shopping at the grocery store, and not to mention all the internet shopping.
On a more general level, I think that the ideal would be to let the country become self-suffiecent in food, energy and do some manufacturing before going to war. And then I think that information and co-ordination among infantry, attack helicopters, tanks, artillery, recon and other types of troops will become increasingly more important. And the individual solidier will get more and more firepower in his hands.
Some say that teams of snipers is the future, while the historical trend the last 200 years have rather been the opposite; and more about putting up as much lead in the air as possible to win battles. And ammunition consumtion and the cost of killing an enemy solidier have risen.
And I would say that I am impressed by weapons like TOS-1 Buratino, and I think they could be very handy in a world war when keeping losses low is having a low priority compared to victory. But the old conventional wars seems rare nowadays so there might be better ways of dealing with junk armies of the middle east than having a rocket artillery piece capable of flattening an entire town.
Drones is the western solution since it can deliever firepower without any risk to the lives of our own solidiers. But there is of course a risk that they can be hacked, and used against us. And having the police using them to fight terrorism, could lead to a slippery slope where they then are used to fight violant crime, and then minor crimes... and the police force becomes less interested in negotating and de-escalating situations and become trigger happy instead. And then will personal integrity be totally destroyed by drones, mass surveillance and data gathering. And we can get a 1984 society, like China today with their internet scorepoint system.
And this time around there would be no succesful escape attempts from the Gulags, since now there would be drones with heat seeking cameras to seak up fleeing prisoners. And there would be nowhere to escape, since every train ticket and purchase of food will be done electronically and could be traced. And passports contains biometric data and RFID-tags so that the government can track you with a radar.
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Logistics is about transporting fuel, ammunition, food, medicines, spareparts for vehicles, cigarettes, winter clothes and other things to the troops sitting in the frontline so they can keep on fighting.
If your troops cannot get those things then their ability to fight will fall.
Lack of food can make your troops starve to death or easily fall victim to diseases when they are undernourished.
Lack of winter clothes can lead to solidiers freezing to death or men having to amputate frozen legs. Lack of spareparts will make tanks useless if they cannot move when there are no tracks or parts to fix their engines, or when their gun is not working. Lack of medicines can increase mortality rates and human suffering. Lack of ammunition can turn even the most powerful tank and the best machine gun into useless pieces of junk. And the lack of fuel will make tanks into useless bunkers, and without fuel to your supply trucks you cannot transport food and ammunition and other things so that your combat effiecency will fall.
So as you see are logistics important things that needs to work if you are going to lead millions of men into war.
Even the best solidier or tank are useless without food, ammunition and fuel.
And if you can cut off your enemies ability to provide those things to his troops, then victory can become relativly easy and not so costly in human lives. This is why encirclements can be so catastrophic for armies. When all supplies are cut off, then hunger and ammunition shortages fastly appears. Because modern amries needs gigantic amounts of supplies. An American Division in World War II needed 800 tonnes of supplies per day. And a German division on average used 400 tonnes.
So if you have an American army of 20 Divisions then you would need 8000 tonnes of supplies per day. Think about the gigantic amounts of supplies that is.
When the German 6th Army was fighting at Stalingrad it needed 13 railway wagons of ammunition per day for all for machine guns, pistols, rifles and other sall arms. And on top of that you needed to also give that army food and fuel and other supplies - including ammunition for mortars, howitzers and cannons of all kinds of sizes.
Modern war needs gigantic amounts of planning and coordination to get all things at the right place, at the right amunt and at the right time.
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@Freeliner75
"am I willing to lose, say, a third of my well-being and income to achieve the victory in Ukraine"
You are taking numbers out of your ass.
Swedens economic and military aid to ukraine have been large, and indeed I don't think any country have donated such a large portion of modern military equipment as Sweden (CV90, Leopard2, Archer, Robot70) and yet have this aid only amounted to 20 billion kronor in military aid and 20 billion in economic aid.
All in all 40 billion over two years, or 20 billion per year.
So 20 billion out of our GDP of 6000. That is not much. Its not a third of your income unless you analphabet in mathematics. Its more like 1 Swedish crown per 300 - or 0.3%.
"to achieve the victory in Ukraine"
If you do allow russia to win now, you will only have to pay more money in the future as dictators will only start new wars after they have seen that they can get away with crime unpunished.
Russia will continue with unprovoced wars of aggression and genocide like they have done previously in Chechenya and Georgia. And grabbing Crimea didn't end their lust for stealing even more Ukrainian lands. If Ukraine falls, will there be a genocide and opression of the people of Ukraine. Lists of people that the russians planned to kill had their invasion of ukraine been succesful would have meant a murder of thousands of influential Ukrainians, in an attempt by russia to try to russify the area and extreminate ukrainian culture and national identitity.
Would you be okay with accepting genocide?
Furthermore russia have already attacked Georgia in the past with the same silly arguments they used to attack Ukraine - that Georgia is ruled by nazis, that the russian minority in Georgia must be protected from genocide, and that russia have all right to take back historical lands.
So of course will russia attack Moldavia with the same arguments and Georgia.
And China might feel inspiration to attack Taiwan if they see that people in the west are like you and do not defend what is right or what is wrong.
And defend truth over lies. And defend freedom and democracy against russo-fascist opression.
If every goddamn dictator in the world wants to invade their neighbour like russia - then I think we are creating a much bigger problem in the future and walk a dangerous path towards a potential world war or nuclear war.
But by supporting Ukraine we are setting an example to dictators what happens if they try to redraw borders with military force.
We will get more law and order and stability in the world after an Ukrainian victory.
And economic development of the world will be helped.
Cheap ukrainian food, oil, coal, nuclear power, iron, and natural gas will compete with russian resources and drive down prices and make life less expensive for westerners.
I think that would be a better thing than letting those resources fall into the hands of a dictator that have time and time again proven that he is willing to use energy blackmail against the west and surely like to get more energy resources into the hands of russia so his ability to charge high monopoly prices against the west will increase, and his ability to energy blackmail us will increase even more.
Russia is a criminal terrorist state that cannot be trusted. We have already given Ukraine lots of help and they have done half the job of kicking the russkies out. So we might just as well help them to do the remaining job to finish them off.
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"Now do a video explaining why Vietnam had NO chance in the Vietnam war"
While I agree that economic power in itself cannot determine the outcome of a war, I do however think that it can say a lot about the likelyhood of a certain outcome.
Usally does an industrial country defeat an unindustrial economy - as with for example the American civil war.
In the case of Japan vs USA I would say that USA had such a crushing superior industrial strenght that it more likely to win on the lottery than seeing Japan winning a war against USA while simultanously fighting wars against China, Russia and the British empire.
The reason why the Vietnam war ended in a failure for America was because they failed to create any realistic war goals. The thought that body counts was a goal in itself to win the war - but that is just a stupid idea of economifying warfare.
War is not about killing enemies in a faster rate than they can be replaced. Only idiots think that.
Both the American military and political leadership lacked basic understanding what war is. And they also thought that winning wars by economic means would be enough - because WWII was much won that way, as they saw it.
But Vietnam was not some stupid economic game, and nor could the enemy be understood by game theory. Ho Chi-Minh was not a typical Communist, even if the CIA and the political leadership of America thought so.
Ho Chi-Minh was most of all a nationalist. And after that he was a democrat. And after that he was a leftwinger. Indeed, he even got support from the CIA when Vietminh fought a guerilla war against Japan and was seen as a close friend to America.
But when the war with Japan ended things changed, because France wanted their colony back while Ho Chi Minh wanted independence for Vietnam. And USA had to pick side, and choosed to support France over some unimportant unknown farmer in Vietnam. So when America refused to sell him arms, he had to turn to the Chinease communists instead to get weapons - and after that he was begun to be seen as a Communist by America, despite all what he really wanted was a unified independent Vietnam with democratic rule. And only after the west had turned against him did he go into the Communist camp.
The next big mistake by America was to back the unpopular, despotic and corrupt regime in South Vietnam after the French indo-China war had ended.
This South-Vietnamese regime was hated by almost everyone for many different reasons. But once again did America have this ignorant view that it was simply a battle between Communism and liberal-democratic capitalism.
So America had no understanding for their enemy and how they could win over the people to their side.
The people in Vietnam fought for many other reasons than to promote communism. Poor farmers hated rich landlords that stole 80% of their incomes and treated them like medieval serfs. Some people hated the corruption and the power abuse of the rich landlord class that ruled South Vietnam. Some people hate the south Vietnamease regime because it was ruled by a catholic leadership (Ngo Dinh Diem). And some people were just nationalists that wanted to unify both Vietnams into a single country. And some minority people had been mistreated by the South Vietnamase government and therefore took up arms against it.
So the perhaps easiest way for America to win the Vietnam war would have been to throw the corrupt South-Vietnamease government under the bus and force the ruling class in Vietnam to agree to a landreform so all poor Vietnamese farmers could get their own piece of land to farm so they wouldn't have to be treated as slaves by some landowner.
But America could not agree to this. If they twisted the arms of their allies they could become accused of US-imperialism, and that would look very bad to the world. America needed allies in the Cold war, so they rather kept the impopular South Vietnamease regime in place and fought a long war to try to keep it in power.
But America lacked any ideas how to win this war. They thought that "body counts" would be the way to go. But the American solidiers didn't fail to see the insanity of this stupid doctrine that the military leadership promoted.
Hamburger hill was captured from Vietnamease troops after heavy casualties, but as soon as the hill was captured the Americans abandoned this hill - because the body count job had been done. And only after a few months did the Vietnamease retake the hill again.
So all the losses of lives had been for nothing. American solidiers had died for nothing while while high ranking personnel got their medals for wasting their own mens lives.
The solidiers made something akin to a working class revolt against their superiors. And fragging and threats became commonplace, so that American unit leaders would know that they will have a hadgrenade thrown at them and be killed by their own troops if they ever tried to waste their solidiers lives in pointless attacks.
So by 1970 had the fighting morale of US Army fallen apart and the leadership had lost control, and no American solidier wanted to be the last man to die in this pointless war. Corruption was rampant in South Vietnam where South Vietnamese generals sold military equpiment on the black market that America had given them. Mortars, grenades, rifles and even tanks could be bought by anyone.. and American troops started to find lots of American weapons in the hands of Vietcong. And drug sales were also a part of this rotten economy.
America had won the battles in the tet-offensive and regained control over the cities. But on the other hand had the large vietnamease countryside all been lost to the enemy. And people had lost trust in all the fake statistics produced by the military about everything from body counts to sorties flown - as a measurement of progress and effictiveness.
People lied about everything either to get promotions or to get home so they could survive the war. And even the accounting metodology idea in itself was flawed. If a dead vietnamese body was found after a battle, then both the infantry, the artillery and airpower would want to claim it as their kill - so there would be no complaints about their unit not fullfilling their monthly quota of kills, and that they therefore next month would be sent out to much more dangerous missions so the monthly kill quota could be boosted.
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Drugs usally gets called great news at first, and then people see drug abuse and hangovers... first came opium with the Napoleon wars, when thousands of solidiers needed painkillers when they took painful surgical operations, and after the war people became drug addicts. And in the American civil war some people overused morphine. And then came the first world war, and cocaine was used as a painkiller, and was seen as a great alternative because people could use the drug wihout any hangovers like alchol, and instead of getting dense, clumbsy and stupid, cocaine made people sharp, confident, and happy. Furthermore no one seemed to get stucked in addiction, but with intense regular use after the war people got stuck with addiction, today about 1 out of 6 gets stuck in cocaine addiction, compared to 1 out of 3 for heroin.
With world war 2 people started to use pervitin, and in Vietnam marijuana became popular.
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Military research is good, and America got an especially good trackrecord of useful stuff from it (GPS, Internet, semiconductors etc). Much of that could continue, while some money could be redirected towards civilian research instead developing clusterbombs.
And the Army can handle their own logistics and construction and having their own personnel handling those tasks instead of outsourcing them to Hailliburton and Blackwater and whatever. Things should go back as they were before Dick Cheney became defence secretary.
America doesn't need jet fighters that the pentagon never asked for, just so politicians could make their constituency happy. And it doesn't need to purchase tanks that just sit and collect dust in the desert.
And then should the government encourage education of scientists and engineers, and discourage people from taking useless genderstudies degrees that doesn't help anyone get a job and only leads to young people going in debt. The government should try to match supply and demand so people have get the skills employers asks for.
This could be done trough taxes, or interest free loans or other means.
And then I would like to government developmental bank set up to support research. This has already been done with great success in both China and Brazil. And not only is the Brazilian bank succesful in risky longterm investments, they also a large amount of profit each year.
And if I could slaughter another holy cow, I would rid of the present system and reintroduce conscription. That would make wages lower, and the best men in society would be brought to the military and providing the military with a large manpower base in the case of a war. Some personell must of course work for a longer term, since its quite expensive to create a good fighter pilot for example, so it would be cheaper to keep the pilots in service some years if they want to.
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The late 1800s was an age when nationalism was taken to the extreme, not just by Germany but by all countries. And Germany was a young country that only came into being very lately (1871), so Germany had to try to from a unifying thing... all the small different German Kingdoms felt like one people rather than as feeling as Bavarians, Prussians, Wurtembergers, Saxons, and Hessians in the first hand. So nationalism was drived into high gear, and the military was a way to achive this. With one military parade after another, all flag waving, all talk abour Germanys long and proud military traditions, and all beautiful patriotic songs and military marches were played non-stop such as Preußens Gloria, Die wacht Am Rhein and Oh Deutschland hoch in ehren.
The founding father of Germany - Otto von Bismarck, also tried to unify the German people by bring it togheter against a common enemy. And the Germans was taught to fear the French and Russians in order unifying the country against a common threat, and appealing to the feelings of all Germans to protect their loved fatherland.
But the side affect from this fear was that Germany went a little bit paranoid, and they thought they needed to maintain a strong military to protect against all outer threats.
And later on would the retarded Kaiser Wilhelm II take power, and he never understood how to play this game of diplomacy and didn't understand politics. He was a clumby arrogant idiot, and he went into collision course with France, Russia and England. He decided to build a huge navy for his country after reading a book that said that the country that dominates the seas would control the world. And his hunger for national prestige also contributed to this, as well as the fear the German military had about having too many socialist urban recruits in the Army, so defence spending was rather put into the navy instead.
But that just made Britain feeling threatened by Germany, and created a naval power arms race between Germany and Britain.
But the German army was great as well in 1914. And much money had been thrown into the military for prestigious reasons, like in all other countries. And the industrial revolution had also allowed massproduced weapons and uniforms.. so massarmies was also possible for the first time. And the German army had started to use their grey uniforms for all German states in 1912 as another step to unifying the country.
And the first world war was a German national trauma, that helped to bring togheter the country. But in other ways it also created division.. many became tired of the German Kaiser and demanded that he should abdicate in order to save his country from further pains in 1918. At first he refused, but soon he was kind of forced to accept it.
Many Germans then dreamt back to the days of the monarchy. And other Germans felt like their military was about to win the war - but the civilian protesters let the victorious army down (much like many Americans look upon their war in Vietnam).
The Versaille treaty forbade Germany to have a strong military and territory was lost and economic compensation would be paid to Germanys enemies. So it was a hard peace. And then Hitler came some decades later, and fixed the economy took back lost land and gave germans pride and jobs. And the military power was being restored with great public support.
And the old tradition of unifying the country by cermonies, parades, patriotic music and culture and creating fear of a foreign enemy was brought up again. Hindenburgs funeral became televised as a great ceremony over a national hero. And likewise was the veterans day and the nazi party rallys made into great military spectacles. To impress foreign allies and frighten the allies from invading Germany. And to create an image to the German people and the world that people supported Hitler whole heartedly, and it created a cult of personality. Even today his propaganda movies are intoxicating. But I guess they give the wrong impression about his regime... changeing your countrys national anthem to contain the word Hitler seems a bit to egotiscial. And likewise the idea of making a party flag into a national flag, and even incorparate it into military standards. And having the soliders swear an oath directly to Hitler. And name a youth organization after himself....... all this after just some years in power. And on propaganda movies, this all seem so natural, but I wonder what the average German felt about all this new things.
Sorry for a long post.
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The German solidier wasn't any better. I would say that their training and tactics was the thing that made them superb opponent until the last days of the war in 1945.
The German army was well equiped and well organized in 1914. For decades the Germans had planned the Schlieffen Plan in to the tinyiest detail and made time tables for all trains carrying troops and supplies.
And even when millions of men and supplies should be supplied on Belgiums tiny roads and bridges they never got any traffic jams, becasue everything had been carefully planned and the Prussian burecracy was the most effiecent of all bureucratic machinerys. Germany had also studied the the Russo-japanease war and the Boer war and well learned the lessons, so German troops had their grey uniforms that blended in with terrain superbly while the french had their red-blue uniforms and suffered enormous losses, before they realized their mistake.
The German army also had the largest proportion of engineers, and every solider was equiped with a spade and much digging was included in their military education of their troops.
While the french had no digging at all in their military education. The British army had learned their lesson about the value of camouflage and digging in, so they performed better than any of the allied Armies. Even the Russians that should have learned more from their was with Japan.
The German army also had other strenghts, which would later on also become valueable in world war II. They developed new weapons and tactics, because Germany had no chance of winning a long war of attrition, so they had to try to come up with new ways of defeating their enemy so they could win fast. They tried planes, uboats, flamethrowers, submachine guns, poison gas, terrorbombings with zeppelins.. you name it. But they also turned all ideas on their heads, and instead of bombarding the same area for a week with a million shells and lead hundred of thousands of men forward by orders from the Highest Commander in chief, the Germans did the opposite. They made a short intensive bombardment to soften up their enemy and then launched a surprise attack with a small group of men that was armed with special weapons, body armour, handgrenades, flamethrowers and submachine guns. And those men could make their own decisions at the frontline instead of constantly awaiting orders from Headquarters.
And the best men was picked for this fighting teams called "Stosstruppen" and gived extra training in infiltration tactics.
And they proved very succesful in defeating their enemies, the first tank offensive the allied launched managed to win lots of ground from the Germans, so they decided to make a counterattack with their Stosstruppen and they managed to not only to win back all lost ground but also push back the allies beyond the original frontline the battle had started from.
This idea of lower commanders taking own iniatives was not entirely new since even the Prussian Army had encouraged their lower commanders to think for themselves and improvise instead of blindly following orders from the top. And this was an important reason why the germans could do so well, when the lack of radio communication made it to take 8 hours on average for an order to reach the frontline from the General Headquarters. And when this order finally came to the frontline, it was often times outdated... the weather had changed, the enemy had escaped while you waited for order to press on, or worse he could have recovered from the iniatal surprise from the attack and brought forward reinforcements and digged in.
The German army was simply superior in 1914, and almost managed to defeat all the allies on its own hand, but Americas involvement finally became the straw the crushed the camels neck.
In World War 2 Germany would use their stosstruppen tactics (aka auftragstaktik) with great success. Their skilled commanders and their rapid decision making caught their enemies by surprise time and time again. And their superb military training made them formidable opponents even in defence. They were also early fans of the radio, which enabled tank commanders to coordinate their attacks and take out superior Russian tanks. And the radio also enabled them to coordinate support from the airforce to a degree the allies couldn't.
And once again they researched superweapons as a way to neutralize the allied superiority in manpower.
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It would have been better if that guy said his shitty opinion online instead of just trying it IRL and then retreat. I guess that there are more people like him, and racists and others who never voice their stupid shit so others can see it getting debunked.
The system of government he advocates is a system of when you become a part of the ruling elite you get the right to use the government apparatus to plunder everyone else who isn't part of the elite. And that makes the elite more rich and everyone else poorer, and that makes guys like him even more despise the peasants because their lifestyle is so different from his, and he likes to think that all his success is by his own greatness and not because the system is rigged.
His example of shareholders in a company is a great example of his ideas. American companies are nowadays ruled by their owners (the shareholders of stocks), and not by families, banks, governments, or having their power limited by labour unions.
Nope. Companies are ruled by the shareholders for the shareholders. And the idea behind this new system is that rightwing economist take for granted that if you own something, you will take better care for that thing. You don't care much about shit in a public park, but you care a lot about stuff you own by yourself.
So if the owners handeled the companies they would be best runned, because the owners would make sure that it would run well out of self-interest. So how have it all worked out since the early 1980s? Bad.
The management of the company plunders the company and give it away to the shareholders, and in return does the shareholder reward the boss by letting him keep much loot in his own pockets. The longterm productivity of companies get harmed when Research and Development budgets are slashed, and workers get shitty wages and long workhours and get happy to move to another job.
American companies pay sky high salaries for their CEOs, on average twice as much as European CEOs and even more than so compared to Japanease CEOs, and yet they doesn't perform any better, and oftentimes even worse. And explaining it all away with "other conditions in America" is bullshit since American CEOs make many times higher incomes than American CEOs in the 1950s. And furthermore do they perform even worse and succeded with crashing the economy so badly that the taxpayers had to bailout many of them.
Europe and Japan shows that other types of powerstructures work better for companies. In Japan do friendly companies own shares in other companies so hostile takeovers is impossible, and longterm progress is assured.
In Sweden there is a system with two types of stocks, where one type of stocks give 10 times as much voting power as the other type of stock, while the other type of stock gives better economic dividens. That system have made it possible for rich families to control their companies and provide stable longterm ownership, instead of just buying stocks and then selling everything off some weeks later.
And in Germany does the government own a large share of companies like Volkswagen so they could put a veto against decisions that would be harmful to society, and labour unions also have a seat at the board of directors and can veto decisions.
The stockmarket is pretty useless. Banks does have stronger self-interest in the well being of the company over a long period of time, unlike the stock speculator.
And also, bankers are not interested in seeing the company taking risks and going too much into debt unlike the stockowners, who wants to load so much debts as possible upon a company so they could get leverage on their money they have put into the company so they could make higher profits. And the results of this shit is ponzi finance and high risk taking that makes longterm industrialization impossible.
Neoliberalism doesn't even work in capitalist firms. And American companies have begun losing out to foreigners. Neoliberals like to think that they are proponents of a low cost economy with low taxes and wages, but in reality they create a high cost economy for the firms with high debt loads, massive dividends, high bonuses wages and stocks to CEOs,
The stockmarket is useless for longterm investments. Its share of GDP was quite low during the economic growth years of the 1950s,60s and 70s. So its not even needed for anything. If one not want to invest pensionfunds into funding research, infrastructure and energy... one could let the government put the money into buying art on eBay, Hockey cards, or lottery tickets. Its almost the same thing as gambling on the stockmarket.
One person buys low and sells for a high price, and some other sucker has to do the opposite. The stocks live their own life, and doesn't have much to do with the performance of a company. One could just look at the performance of Enron.
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Nothing wrong with redistributing wealth when its society and not the individual that makes up most of the productivity, without artifcats such as good infrastructure, institutions, machinery, robots and tools.. the wage level would basicly be the same as in Africa, or in the late 18th century America and Europe.
Furtermore are the wages just arbritrary and not set by the market. So its society who decided how much you could earn, and society can just as easy decide to decrease your artificially high wage. For example with an open borders policy, and then see your wage fall like a rock to a level 20, 30, 40 times lower than what it is today... since there are lots of Chinease, Indians and Ghanease who are willing to do the same job for less.
So not also supporting lowering your own artificially high wage with protectionism would be hypocrisy. I mean why should the market rule over others in your country, but not over you?
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Hitler wanted Russias resources and wrote nasty things about the slavic people in his book Mein Kampf, and basicly saw the huge Russian land as a good way to build a new German colonial empire as large as the British empite that covered fifth of the globe.
Russias growing industry and aggressive behaviour towards countries in the baltic, Finland and Romania made Hitler fear a war with Russia might coming soon. So by invading Russia in 1941, Hitler thought that he would be able to knock out Russia before they had become too powerful. And Russia also seemed weak in 1941, Stalin was a suspicious man who had killed hundreds of Marshals, Generals and other skilled commanders because he saw them as a threat to himself. So in 1940 his army lacked good leadership when Russia attacked Finland, which was the poorest country in Europe. But despite having a large army and the most modern and powerful tanks in the world Russia lost the war totally.
That in turn made Hitler confident that he could invade Russia and easily make it fall apart, when the Russian army couldn't even defeat the finns. Hitler had the best army in the world in 1941, the soliders had been in combat many times before and gained experience. Confidence in the leadership was high and fighting morale among the troops was strong, training and tactics had been improved after experiences in the fighting in Europe, equipment had been tested in real combat and that which performed bad was scraped and the germans tried to produce more of the good weapons that proved effective.
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The problem with all Melanchon, Sanders, Wagenknecht ans such is that refuse to co-operate with nationalist politicians. So they are therefore completely useless. Demaning restricted immigration, anti-islamism and the destruction of the EU is somehow racism nowadays - and therefore impossible to openly support on the left.
So no, the left will never co-operate with the nationalists. Atleast not as long as the left wanna keep their SJW supporters, and support from islamists or black nationalists.
But on the grassroots level I can certainly say that I as a leftwinger would rather pick a rightwing nationalist politician that wanna destroy the EU and do something about immigration, than some useless leftwing coward.
I would never vote for Sanders as long as he think illegal immigrants should not be kicked out or punished. It is impossible to combine a welfare state and a regime that favours workers with open borders or a EU membership.
You have to choose one side. You cannot have it both ways.... but lying fucking cowards like Sanders and Corbyn pretend it is possible so they don't lose SJW-clown voters.
I say such politicians deserve no respect. A politicians job is not to change his opinions to suit the public, no he should stay firm to his beliefs no matter how unpopular they are - and his job is to win the hearts and minds of the voters by having the best arguments.
Fuck the establishment left. The partys wanna be respectable and cooperate with "non-nazis" aka neoliberals. But I rather lose an election that cooperating with Macron, Hillary, Merkel. I want a left that makes deals with UKIP, Le Pen, AfD, the Sweden democrats and so fourth.
Neoliberals, muslims and SJWs are the number1. And not the nationalists.
And I don't think I am alone in feeling this way on the left. Look at the polls regarding UKIP - a party basicly only known for its anti-EU anti-immigration stance... while most voters are ignorant of their marketfundamentalist ideals. Nevertheless did UKIP win strong support in the UK, despite most UKIP voters are standing even to the left of most mainstream leftwing voters in economic policies - and most UKIP voters are more favourable of nationalizing energy companies, postal services and regulating food prices than the average for the British public.
And likewise are the Swedish nationalist party the most popular party among unionized workers in Sweden.
So the top doesn't wanna cooperate with nationalists, while the leftwing grassroots wants to. And the more leftwingers that leaves the left for the nationalists, the stronger will the influence be of the SJWs on the leftwing policies - which in turn will turn off even more leftwing voters.
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No. Capitalists aren't the problem, some of them may even be goodhearted. But lets say for the sake of argument that they aren't, and that we kill them all. Would we then have solved the problem? No. With the system we have they would just get replaced by new capitalists, and they will just to do the same things... not necessarily because they are careless for the suffering they cause, but because they are forced to act in a certain manner by the system that demand maximum profits, and if you don't go for profit maximum even when you hurt workers, consumers and communities, then your company will go bust. You simply have no choice, because of the law of competition, and other firms will do the things you refuse to do and outcompete your firm.
So either you opress people, or other capitalists do. There is no way around it.
You can of course steal some money from the capitalists with taxes and give it to the people harmed by the system.. such as socialdemocrats say.
But that will not undo the harm the system has done, and will do in the future.. as it cuts down rainforrest, deplete fishstocks, poison the world, and torturing animals in factory farms.
So socialdemocracy is far from perfect. Pure capitalism is horrible and even worse than Stalinism. And socialistist have some modelling left to do before they get a properly working society.
So what is the best system? No fucking idea.
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Education and jobs will make poor better off.
Other factors matters too. And when a thing has been sold by a company and the production costs have been paid for, there is a pile of cash left on the table as profits to be shared, and the capitalist takes one part of that pile and the workers take the other part. And since unemployment has gone up, and Reagan did his union busting.. the power of the labour movement have fallen, so they could not negotiate as a good deal as before so the Capitalist/ the owners of the stocks in a company/ the owner/ or what do you wanna call him... he could now take a larger slize of the pie of the profits since the labour movement has become weak. And real wages has fallen in America.
So a good way of improving equality would just to increase wages, by making unions stronger, increasing the minimum wage and decrease unemployment.
Another way of increasing equality is to have high taxes housing, stocks, and inheritance. And low taxes on wages, so people can get it easy to work their way out of poverty. And rich people can still be rich without going over the top so they become a threat to democracy.
Taxes should also go services so they benifit all of society and not just the rich - such as education, healthcare, the police etc.
Another way to increase equality is to instead tax everyones income, but tax rich people at a higher and higher rate the more rich they become.
And then there is this way of having massive inflation to wipe off debts. The economists Piketty claims that the period historically high equality in Europe was caused by inflation after World War 2, when governments was indebted and paid off their war debts with inflation. And since the people had more debts than assets they benifited, while the rich people who had more assets than debts got harmed.
And when you think about it, in most societies most people got more debts than assets, while a small group of people have enough money over so they can lend it out. So when the national debt goes up because the government doesn't tax the rich, then the government is becoming more in the hands of the rich people. And they want low inflation and high interest rates - of course. While the people want low interest rates and a small inflation rate - which is good for them and good for the economy.
But high inflation can also be a weapon against the working class. So if the employers are too weak to win a fight with the unions, they could order a rightwing government to create tonnes of inflation to eat up all wage increases.
So inflation can be a double edged sword. People love to complain about it, even though they could buy a home almost for free like in the 1970s... but yet they complain that their bread have become so expensive to buy. And in times of extremely low inflation they instead complain about having to money to buy a home with and that the unemployment rate is high.
So has there ever been a perfect mix inflation/deflation? Probably not. People have always complained about something.
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So why can't atheists in America wear any headgear they want in the military when sikhs can carry turbans?
Why is illegal for nazis to promote genocide on gays, but "freedom of religion" when muslims and christians does it?
Why are religious organizations exempt from taxes?
Why does religious people have the right to freedom of conscience in healthcare sector, and not other people as well? (for example why should nazi doctors be forced to treat disabled patients when its violating their conscience)
Furthermore, conservatives loves big government in general. They don't mind wasting unessary amounts of money on the military, surveillance and being hypocrites promoting corporate welfare. And nor do they like equality to the law, since their own religion should get special treatment. And rich people usally gain 90% of all the taxcuts they make. And on top of that they get interest rate deductions, and shift the taxburden away from capital and onto wages.
Conservatives loves big goverment just as much as the people you call 'strawman liberals', indeed perhaps even more with all crazy spending. Furthmore, despite all whining about gun control and soda tax, is the conservatives like banning things too. They just wanna ban other things instead, such as porn and violent video games.
And despite the rightwing claim of being the group who using hard rational thought instead moralizing, they nevertheless loves to moralize about "harder punishment", "the poor's overuse of benifits", and saying that unemployment is always the fault of the individual.
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Yes, oil companies creates tonnes of problems besides global warming, for example fracking, tar sands and deepwater drilling make up great threats to our enviroment and then there are geopolitcs problems.
There are plenty of reasons to go off oil now. But must importantly, getting off oil will neighter be cheap or go quickly.. so we better start now, since the world we built around fossile fuels took 200 years to build.
It takes years to plan a powerplant and get permission to build it,and then it on average takes 12-15 years to build it... and we need to build lots of plants.
Furthermore doesn't we have enough capacity of our silicon mines to build any solar panels.. so before we can build those extra solar panels we need to open up new mines, and that would take 10-12 years.
And likewise doesn't we have enough mines to get the uranium we need to replace fossile fuels, unless we open more mines, and the problem is also the same when it comes to car batteries for electric cars and getting enough rare earth metals to build high-effiecent solar panels. And windpower needs more neodymium to be mined.
So to be realistic it will take atleast decades to get off oil. First 12 years for new mines and then 13 for new powerplants. That means that we will spend 25 years burning fuels while we are building a new energy system.
And even if spend trillions things will not go much faster. -You cannot make a baby in 1 month, even if you got 9 women.
So we have to start the transition now, before the oil get scarce and slow the economy down so we don't have any money over to pay for a green energy system.
And we will see billions starve unless we cut down our oil dependency. And our standard of living will fall like a rock.
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Kyle you say that EU can go towards becoming more a centralized superstate now when Britain leave. You can be correct, but most people don't want that and even dislike much of the present day EU. Even the EU-fanboys say "much isn't perfect, but we should try to reform EU" or "EU isn't perfect, but its better than leaving".
So there is a very weak mandate Brussels would have to go on in current direction of becoming a superstate, and by doing so throw countries and will of the people under the bus.
With that said I think its more likely with a weaker EU. Maybe no more countries leave, but just the bare threat of a referendum is a more serious thing now that EU has to tackle. Countries can start blackmailing EU into concessions and softening its imperial ambitions. And if EU refuse, countries can just leave and start trading with UK and other heretics outside the sacred union.
The situation reminds me a little about when protestantism crushed the power of the catholic church in Europe. When many Lutheran countries broke their ties with the pope, the catholic church became weaker. And when the pope tried to threaten catholic countries to bend to his will, no one no longer listened to him. Venice said that if he excommunicated them, they would just trade with protestant countries and muslims instead and survive economically that way and forming new alliences to protect themselves militarily.
And when that happened, the pope no longer was the most powerful man in Europe, but just weak and powerless.
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The holy books were written back in the days when men ruled in society, for two reasons.
1. Might makes right (men are stronger physically).
2. Men did all hard work demanding physical strength like working on the fields or in the mines or sevicing as soliders, while women raising the kids, taking care of the household, cooking and cattle. It was a rational way of organizing society by "the division of labour" to use the language of economists. However times have changed, and today we got tractors, washing machines, dishwashers, microwaves, convenience foods, refrigerators, and kindergartens so women don't have to stay home and make sure things work. And the most burdensome jobs for men have been taken over by machines so physical strength is of less importance today so women can do them as well.
So much of the genderroles are just constructs that change over time. Once upon a time it was considered very masculine to ride horses like cowboys and knights, but today boys gets bullied and called faggots for it, since its something only girls should do.
In the early 1800s painting porcelain was something only men did in porcelain factories in Stockholm, but in the mid 1800s the occupation was taken over by women and the men instead became machine slaves. And the opposite is true as well, some occupations like milking the cows was typically a female proffession before the
dairyman became a male proffession.
I don't think biology plays much of a role in differences between men and women. I think it seems like most people usally overstates the importance of biology, even if I don't rule out that it maybe sometimes plays a role.
My point is however that if all gender differences are biological, then why does they change at all? And why is genderroles different in different places around the world?
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You see technolgical change is nothing new (and I would argue that the washing machine had a larger impact on the economy than the internet, since it doubled the workforce in the economy with all women).
Free trade is nothing new.
And jobs have constantly been taken over by machines , and plants have always moved to other countries. But we tend to not see that and remember those things in good times, since new jobs are created at an equally high phase as old jobs are lost. Thing are very different now here in Europe than in the 1950s and 60s, back then we had a wast arrangement of the government to stabilize supply and demand in the economy, and the goal was full employment (unlike today when price stability is more important). And there was a good social safety net, so if people lost their jobs you would have strikes our shrinking demand for goods. People didn't have to pile up tonnes of debt in case they lost their job, but instead the government helped them retrain their skills so they could take a new job. And there was lots of jobs available so people wasn't devestated in their factory moved to Taiwan.
But today the world is different. The centralbanks are not controlled by the public. The safety net has been severly cut. Instead of talk of government programs to retrain the workforce, many governments have done ineffective taxcuts for the "job creators". There are less government jobs. Unemployment is higher, and that plus Reaganite union-busting have created low wages and low job security. And if you might lost your jobs the next months, why would you try to developt your skills further in the job you are working with? So the workforce doesn't improve their skills as much as before, and therefore lose some productivity.
So the inequalities, job losses and the shitty performance of the west the last decades have been caused by politics, and not by so much by free trade or computerization.
And if free trade and computerization made all the political-economy obsolete, like the fairytale goes, then why do countries then look so different?? Why do the social safety net, regulations and the power of the unions differ so much from country to country?
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Free trade is for strong countries. Their companies don't need protection, because they can stand on their own feet. And if you get two of the strongest countries in the world to make a trade deal that increases competion for the benifit of consumers in both countries, then I have nothing to object to.
BUT, it will come a time when the leading countries go to the backseat of development. Just as England was the leading nation in the 1800s, and then got out competed by Germany and America. And in such cases, your country needs to go back to protectionism and rebuild your industrial base.. and hopefully your companies will make a comeback into the fight.
In general I am totally against free trade. But I think that trade with certain products is good, when they don't threaten important industries of my country. If I import bananas or coffee I don't think it will harm my high tech industries that much, and I can get stuff for lower prices than if I decided to grow everything in greenhouses. So my consumers can save money and have a good standard of living.
But it all depends.. If I was a dictator in a 3rd world country I would strictly prohibit imports of foreign consumer goods. Since the country is poor and needs every foreign currency it can get their hands on to import machines and modern production technologies.. so my country can get out of poverty and starvation. Having a good trade balance is simply a matter of life and death for a poor country.
But after 30 years or so, when my poor country is out of poverty and my companies are strong enough to fight with German, American and Japanease firms, then I would have no problem with opening up my economy to more trade. And my regulations doesn't need to be so strict.
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I agree with much of what you say, but I don't think economic history is a useless subject. Most of the rules that applied yesterday, still apply today. We can learn stuff by experience. But as you say, it is also important to realize that the world is forever changing.
You cannot win the wars of the future with using the same tactics as in the past. And just because a buisness model worked in the past, doesn't mean you can keep on going like before... and if you do, you will end up like many of our present day record labels and newspapers that are dying.
Institutions of society must also change with the times we live in. Women aren't giving birth as often nowadays, and taking care of meals, cleaning and doing household work is easier now thanks to new innovations. So the old ways of dividing work in a household that seemed rational in the past isn't necessarily so rational today.
But we are still stuck with old rules from the past. For example does a woman have a right to claim half the wealth of her husband... even if we no longer live in those old days when women did unpaid work at home.
In Europe we also have absurd intellectual property right laws from the past, which gives an artist copyright protection for his music 80 years after his own death! Because of traditional law that was written back in the days when there was no social safety nets, and when the husband died the family could suddenly be kicked out on the street with no income to survive on, and this rule was instated as a reaction to the problem at that time.
But society has now changed. We have strong social safety nets, so its now absurd to have property right protection for such a long period of time.
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we all know that going vegan is the more moral and environmentally friendly lifestyle.
No I dont. Compare locally produced meat with vegan food made by the big food industry and you see that meat is much better enviromentally. Killing an animal in the forrest makes no contribution to global warming, while producing pesticides, artificial fertilizers, driving tractors, pumping waters, drying food with a radiator, spraying fields with an aircraft consume lots of fossile fuels. And if the choice is between that kind of vegan food and locally produced meat, then the latter is obviously better for the enviroment.
And if you think killing for eating is wrong, then you should stop eating at all. How many humans and animals will starve because you eat a bit of food and they dont? And what about the animals killed when you burn down the forrest to grow plants? And what about the animals who didnt die in the fire, but die when their natural habitats have shrunken and dissapeared? And what about all rats, birds and rabbits that are killed by tractors and pesticides? If you are okay with veggieproduction but not locally produced meat, then you are nothing but a fucking hypocrite.
The problem is that if you admit that you don't care about potentially 100 million climate refugees and 90%(worst case) of life on earth dying out
No. The reason I hate climate alarmist is because most of them arent sincere, but rather they seem to got another agenda than just fixing the problem.
EU fascists and globalists wants to use this crisis to gain more power at the expense of democracy and national sovereignty. Vegans wants to force their lifestyle upon others. Nuclear fanboys wanna replace fossile fuels with a far more dangerous fuel. The ethanol industry wanna rip off the taxpayers. And the banksters wanna scam the public with a market for carbon emissions.
Almost all the "solutions" mentioned just makes the climate problem worse (if we just for the sake of argument say that climate change is real). And the climate gate scandal just made me even more skeptical. If society should undergo big changes, then we should have a debate, facts and democracy first.
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Its true that hunting and gathering cant feed everyone on this planet. But I think of it as local thing of providing a food source that can off-load the agriculture a bit when the world is running out of farmlands to water shortage and soil exhaustion.
Old stylish farms where both cattle and plants was far more substainable than todays system with huge feedlots and huge mono-culture plantations. The land provided the cattle with food, and the cattle provided the plants with fertilizer. And with this old style agriculture where animals are free to move around, getting feed, protected and so on they doesnt getting harm and suffering, in fact they would have it better than most wild animals. What we do need to get rid of is this modern industrialized meat system with pigs and birds piled into crampy cages and getting stuck into their own dung..and where temperature is changed so birds will produce more eggs, and where turkeys are breed in labarotories in order to optimize size according to consumer demands, and their biology has changed so much that they cannot breed naturally anymore because the males is so much larger than the females that they would crush them. And cows are impregnated by a few males in order to maximize milkproduction, and all this have lead to much incest and vulnernarabilities to diseases.....I could list things without end, but the point here is that you dont have to produce meat in the way we do today. There are ways that are substainable, good for animals, good for humans, good for plants, good for biological diversity and enviroment and doesnt cause spread of diseases and pollute our oceans.
We dont have do like today and turning good farmlands in the west into shopping malls (because thats the most profitable thing to do), and then import foodstuffs from Brazil from rainforests they turned into farmland (because thats the most profitable thing to do).
Instead of feeding cattle soy from Brazil, we can for example just grow oysters locally to feed our cattle. They can grow perfectly in rivers where fishlife has been destroyed by hydroelectric powerplants. And if we start to grow them in different waters we can also clean up all nitrogen and phosphorus pollution that industry and agriculture make, that cause eutrophication and death of seas.
That would stop rainforrest destruction, support biological diversity, creating more jobs at home, increasing the national security of the foodsupplies, improve the trade balance and the enviroment and stop the waste of oil globally by stopping ocean transports of genetically modified soybeans.
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When it comes to the global warming debate, it seems you are using other idiots to excuse your own idiocy?
I don't know, but I don't think so. I am a climate skeptic, but never the less I am more in favour of an energy transition to renewables and massive build out of the railroad system unlike many who fear climate change. I think other enviromental problems deserve more attention and I admit that my liking of green energy and railroads is more due peak oil and protectionism than decreased carbon emissions.
On large it feels like all fears of global warming is overblown.
I mean 1-2 degrees difference its nothing I could feel when I walk out through my door. And even if, would that be a huge problem that would now cause the end of the world, when the cold Scandinavia could grow nuts in the past when the climate was hotter? Most climate scientists says that the long term trend is that the climate is getting hotter, but since the 90s the world has become a little bit colder, how can that be if global warming is man made? And by the way, why are people so sure that global warming is mainly caused by man, when many things cause global warming? And even if 1-2 degrees more heat would be devestating, we could release sulfur dioxide into the athmosphere to cool the planet off. Its an old method we know that would work since vulcano erruptions tend to cool the planet down by releasing this chemical.
So maybe I am a nutjob, but I wish that the climate scientists could provide some simple explanations on a fools level so I could understand.
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When things get cheaper people have more spending power over to buy other stuff and thereby creating new jobs.
Machines are indeed impressive and will eventully replace humans, but I dont think we are there yet.
Machines/robots/PLCs/whatever costs lots of money, and if your company is buying one for huge sums of money its not fun if your country is hit by an economic crisis and you are stuck with a machine that cant repay the loans you have taken to buy it. If you have a bunch of workers you can just fire them.
And machines can most of the times only be taught to do one kind of task, while human labour can easily switch from one production line to another, as consumer demand changes and new products enter production.
And the knowledge economy have on the large part not increased skill requirements, but computerization have for the most part on the contrary been dumbing down jobs so even dumb people can do the tasks that previously was difficult and needed skilled workers to do them.
Anyways the government can help people support themselves...and people have suggested many ways of doing that, probably more than I can tell...
1. A Shorter work day. People can share the jobs instead of one group working their asses off, and the other group cant find a job and build the life they want.
2. A lower consumption tax and a lower income tax. That would stimulate consumption and companies will hire more people in a reponse to increased demand for their goods.
3. More government jobs - more teachers, nurses and construction workers should get hired. That would bring more costs in wages, but it would also bring more tax revenue and less foodstamp payouts.
4. A citizen wage - The People can say no to the worst kinds of jobs. Unemployment is no longer the weapon of the capitalists to force people to accept bad working conditions, but now the roles are the opposite.
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Most countries will do well if they would have the same opportunity.
Recources are are a benifit, but they are not a guarantee for sucess. And countries in Africa comes to my mind.
"If someone is against government run education they can just use the free market to create their own schools."
Private schools are driven for profit and public schools are meant to serve the public good. So when you allow private schools you will undermine the system in my opinion. Firstly, the well performing kids from good families will go to private schools, while poor kids in much needs stays in the public school. The private sector takes the apple and leaves the poo for the government. And when the school system has been segregates, the rich would feel less care for the public schools and rather want tax cuts than helping poor kids. And leaves the poor kids in underfunded schools. And schools can no longer fullfill its meaning as a public good, and poor kids have little chance in life because social mobility is lower nor when the fabric of society has been torn apart. And the rich only cara about themselves.
Imagine if roads were private because they were built by the rich and not by the government.
The railway system in India and America was built by the private sector, and companies were paid per mile of road they laid.. so they of course made unnessary turns and didn't take the shortest road between two locations, because it was more profitable to do so.
Swedens railway system was built by the government because the people lacked the resources. And as a result, the railways was instead built to connect two towns with the shortest possible road.
And privatizing roads leads to a tollboot economy Adam Smith and classical economists opposed. Its a free lunch for the rich people. They rich doesn't contribute anything to society while wealth is being sucked out from the real economy by tollbooths, and rents.
So what classical economists wanted was to tax away all rents, and instead keep taxes low on labour. Classical economists didn't want any free lunch, they wanted meritocracy, and rewarding hard work and innocation.
So if taxes on capital is high taxes on labour could be low.
If America did that, US labour would become cheaper and more competative globally. And if you regulate down rents, from mortages, credit cards debts, student loans, car loans etc.. you will let the workers keep more of what they produce. Hard work pays better off. People can survive on lower wages when they don't have to pay much taxes and rents - which makes labour cheap and internationally competative.
And since workers are doing well, consumers would also be doing well, and when people keep more money the can consume more - which creates more profits for companies and it would be more profitable to expand production and hire more people.
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western currencies are floating currencies not backed in something
They are backed by the government.
Western currencies are floating currencies not backed in something finite and material like gold, silver, or other precious metals
The scarcity of a thing doesn't give it any value. If burn a sack of collected butthair the stuff will not increase in price despite its more scarce. Its rather the consumer demand that makes a product valuable. People could be willing to pay thousands of dollars for useless stocks in a bankrupth company if they just imagine the stocks got any value.
* floating currencies not backed in something finite and material like gold, silver, or other precious metals but rather faith in our government our money can either depreciate or gain value over time.*
Guess what? Silver and gold also floats up and down in price. So if you buy gold when it is expensive and you sell it when the price is low, then you will lose money. I know Youtubers who bought Silver at $50 and sold it at $20.... and those people have lost thousands of dollars.
So precious metals doesn't preserve any purchasing power. Its also useless in an economic crisis, since people want shit to eat, they want medicines, they want guns, they want firewood, or batteries.... but a silly coin is just fucking pointless. And no one on the street is carrying 1000 Euros in their pockets so you can sell a 1oz gold coin at a fair price anyways.
If I would store wealth I rather buy useful stuff I could need and that others want, and are willing to exchange things for.
And if I was a rich person I would rather buy forrest, housing and land so I atleast could get some rent income each month - something that is impossible to get with gold.
Gold is overpriced. Its an ugly metal. It got almost no industrial fields of usage. Its garbage. One could just as well speculating in hockey cards, paintings, or buying furniture on Ebay.
let's say a financial collapse for instance; all of your money in the bank would be rendered practically useless. If you truly want to prepare, then it is best to allocate some money now periodically to buying gold and other precious metals as their values stay relatively constant, independent of currency shifts.
This is what clown-"economists" like Peter Schiff, Max Keiser, Mike Maloney, Marc Faber, John Williams and Jim Rodgers have predicted in the past as well, and their predictions have failed. Peter Schiff have promised hyperinflation and doomsday in America for a decade now, while the dollar is strong and the silver price have crashed from 50 dollar down to 18 dollars today. So people who bought silver at the top have lost almost two-thirds of their wealth. For them it would obviously have been better to have saved their dollar or bought government bonds than listening to useless Austrian school economists.
And if an economic crash would happen, I think it would be far more likely that the economy goes into deflation than inflation... so I rather pay off my debts than borrowing as much money as I can to buy useless coins.
The Trichet plan for Europe has been deflationary, and governments have been forced by the EU to run surpluses - which means that they have to take in more money in taxes than they pump into the economy by spending. And that in turn creates a nice balance sheet for the government at the expense of the private sector, who suffers from declining amount of money in circulation, less money for consumers to spend, less profits for companies, lower wages for workers or layoffs - which creates unemployment that push down wages when competition for jobs increase... and when people have less money, consumption, profits and wages will fall even further... and companies have to lower prices so people can afford to buy, but that also lowers profits for companies. So prices fall and the economy is in a deflationary circle, that harms people without jobs, money and who are sitting on large loans.
Historically Kings and various monarchs hoarded gold and silver
This was because medieval armies depended much on mercenary armies, and those troops wanted to be paid regardless if the king they fought for won or lost the war... so just giving a paper note saying "I promise to pay in the future" wasn't good enough, so therefore kings used gold and silver.
However, in a modern economy those metals are useless from a monetary standpoint. Silver does atleast have great industrial properties, but annual global silver production is more than enough to cover global demand for coins and jewelry, and to also leave more than enough over for industrial use. Furthermore is there a limit on how far up the price will go, before industrial companies will start using other cheaper metals like copper or aluminium instead. And a high rise in silver prices would also make people happy to dump inherited silverwares out for sale on the silvermarket and thereby making the price of silver to drop.
And the future for gold as a monetary metal seems even more dark to me, since it is a metal with extremely few industrial uses. Its a soft and heavy metal, and not that pretty for jewelry. Its price is overvalued because clowns have fooled people into believing this useless metal could save them if the world economy would collapse.
But the metal got no "use value" to borrow a Marxist term. You cannot eat it, it doesn't keep you warm... its useless in desperate times. In most economic crashes no one used it either...in Argentina people used paper dollars instead of the argentinian dollar, in Russia they also used dollars instead during the fall of the ruble.
So the gold is soon to be dead as a monetary asset when people stop believing in it. It really got no intrinsic value. Its scarce, but pretty useless - unlike silver wich is much more the opposite.
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David, your statement is ignorant. France not only had more tanks and better and more modern tanks than Germany. They also had 12 armoured Divisions compared to 10 Germans, and on top of that they also had lots of tanks deployed among the infantry - a luxury Germany couldn't afford simply because they didn't have enough tanks.
Furthermore, defensive lines wasn't just a French thing, even the Germans and Erich von Manstein himself was a great proponent of them. And the German forts at the Siegfried line was were similiar to the french design, and they proved their value when France tried many failed attacks on Germany to come to the resuce of Poland.
And many in the french military leadership predicted where the German attack would come. And they won some important tank battles over the Germans in the first days of operation Gelb. Then the political leadership of the allies paniced, and the new british government decided to call back their expeditionary force, which in turn left the flank open for the Belgian army, so they had to retreat as well. And they eventully got cut off by the German push forward and was then forced to evacuate at Dunkirk.
So basicly was it the british side that fucked everything up, while France stood alone, with their frontline in caos, and with a weak political leadership, was then forced to give up and surrender.
The french army did nothing wrong.
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"I don’t even wait." Like in not asking for permission.
And what did he say before that? He said: "When you are a celebrity, they let you do what you want."
Furthermore don't I think most people asks for literal permissions before having sex, and often times that is okay, and other times it ends up badly.
Deporting illegals is simply upholding the law. But maybe you don't care about borders and law and think no one should be deporrted, well I think they should.
Because they are ILLEGALS. If you got brown skin and have permission to be in the country you can stay. Simple as that.
I wouldn't go as so far as banning all muslims, but I can see the rationale with having some countries on a shitlist of unwelcome foreigners.
However, here in Europe I would solve the matter differently..
Pakistan, Algeria, and Afghanistan are all overrepresented in crime-rates and none of those countries is classified as a warzone according my own countries ministry of foreign affairs, so it would be a non-issue to lock them out of the country since they got no right to asylum.
And if the someone lacks a passport and identification they needs to be kicked out wihout any further questions.
You cannot simply have a functioning modern state without IDs.
And then age tests and other tests should be improved, so things doesn't become a fucking Sweden.
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Better then just bailout the banks, but demand government ownership over them in exchange for money.
Then all criminals should have been thrown off a building... no, I mean brought to justice, and they would had all their wealth stolen and distributed to their victims.
The government should then also stop foreclosing on the people that the banks had commited fraud against. That would stop the deflation from harming the economy, and its also the morally right thing to do.
The government should then also stop all other types of fraud, like the creditcards scams banks do (see the PBS frontline documentary) and it slowly closing down the derivitives market step by step, and the scamming of high frequency trading would be stopped.
With all those derivatives gone, it would be easier to regulate them without hurting the world economy in the process.
Then the government could privatize the banks again when the books are clean, the economy is fine, all frauds are gone, scamartists are in jail, and the system is regulated.
However, since I am not an American believing in the market dogma I would use the socialist banking system to give low interest loans for productive investments, such as no interest student loans to STEM-students... and the government gets repaid by taxes instead. Like in North Dakota.
I would make an economic development bank like in China, and a bank for high tech research modelled after the Brazilian development bank - which both serves technological research, private companies succesfully... while it makes an annual profit of over 20%.
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They system is set up by the capitalist class for the capitalist class.
I mean, why should money creation by in the private interest? it shouldn't. Especially not with the disasters we have already seen. So we have a private banking system, but in order to save the system from destroying itself, the government put some regulatory body on top of the system. So the Federal Reserve is government controlled, and the 12 banks below it are private.
And the government only got indirect control over the money supply by setting the interest rates, and regulating the amount of reserves.
And this system is of course plagued with moral hazard, since the banks hold the people hostage by controlling the money. And even if you shut down all fraudy banks and throw all greedy bankers into concentration camps, it wouldn't solve the problem. New banks and bankers will just come and take their place.
So the system have always been dysfunctional, and always will. It was created for profit, and not for the public interest. It can solve most problems though, but it isn't perfect. For example, to get the economy going the banks must start lending money. But the banks only lend money if they think they could get a profit, and they don't lend out money because the economy is weak and there is little hope for any profit. So the banks don't lend out any money. It doesn't even matter if Federal Reserve would let the banks borrow money from them at 0% interest, they still wouldn't lend out any money.
We need to fix the system if we want to solve the problem. Blaming the crash in 2008 on greed would be as dumb as blaming gravity for a plane crash. Greed among humans have always existed, and so has gravity..... but for creating a crash, something more is needed.
A failing component in a plane, or some shitty financial regulations that failed to prevent things from going over board and destablize and crash the system.
As I see it there are two solution: either more regulations, or the government take control over the money supply and make something like the North Dakota system.
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No one is denying climate change - without it the planet would be uninhabitable. What people some people doubt is the catastrophic domesday scenarios people come up with, and that we are heading in that direction.
I think skeptisicm is always a good thing, since religion is not my cup of tea. I may not believe in climate change, but I wanna do more for the enviroment than most climateclowns who wants to subsidse green cars, ethanol fuel and unsubstainable capitalistic vegetarian food, and destroy the planet with nuclear power.
I am for railroad construction, locally produced food and renewable energy because I am a believer in protectionism and think peak oil is a serious threat to our national security, our economy, our food supply, and our society in general. Its a serious threat that could have devastating consequences to the world economy, our production of medicines, and cause world starvation.
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"Like I said, outside of removing private business and having the government regulate prices this will not work because human beings are not good. If you lower taxes on the rich they pocket it. If you raise taxes they raise prices."
Raising prices works is you got a monopoly in a market selling stuff we can't be without, such as energy and food. But if you talk about plastic dogshit toys from Hong Kong, then people will just stop buying their stuff. In my system I think that the government should nationalize the energy sector and slash the prices, since that would make the industry competative and you can produce cheap aluminium, fertilizer, paper or what have you
"Everything needs to go. The only hope is armed violent revolution. Anything less is just playing their game."
The west have progressed much since the early 1800s thanks to the struggles of the labour movement. Life expectancy is twice as high and median income is 25 times higher. We have democracy. We have freedom of speech. We have shorter workdays, we got vacation, we dont have to work every day of the week, we got maternity leave, we got pension, we got workplace safety regulations, we got childlabour laws, we got public health-insurence, we got unemployment benifits..
So this saying that socialdemocracy can't achieve anything is not true. Much job is of course left to do, and we are fighting an uphill battle after the neoliberal counter revolution with Reagan and Thatcher who decided to take some dust off old marketequilibrium ideas that had collected dust on the scrapheap of history for decades.
And the fall of the USSR have taken away all the incentives of the elite to make concessions since they now neighter have to show the world an good alternative to the soviet system, and neighter after they afraid of the threat of the spread of a red revolution that would occur if they pushed the working class down into misery. Much of the New Deal reforms, Scandinavian welfare reforms and introduction of democracy, and Hitlers keynesian policies was reaction to counter the red threat, as the Communist revolution as in fresh memory and people were angry on the elite. And back then there was no social saftety net so people were desperate and angry, and storming government buildings in the USA and the violent unrest forced the government into concessions. The capitalist class had to sacrifice some money and power, or go extict. And with world war 2 came even more protectionism and government control over the economy. And the high inflation destroyed the wealth of the rich, and the people had their debts washed away. And the golden age of capitalism began. And power strongly lied in the governments hands, and democracy therefore meant something.
Unemployment was close to non-existent in America in the early 1960, so wages did go up. And Eisenhower taxed the rich extremely hard. And with the Vietnam war protests came a further revolutionary wave of demands and the right grow nervous and started to fund thinktanks and prepere for a counter-offensive and they bought up the leaders of the hippie movement and supported leftwing groups that didn't challange the rightwing economic world view. And they became largely succesful, since in the end of the 1970s things had turned around and the neoliberal revolution began.
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blakeesmith84 Cowspiracy lacks any credibility to me since it is based on made up facts.
Heres some links to Swedens largest economic blog, that you can use google translate on
http://cornucopia.cornubot.se/2016/03/naturskyddsforeningen-uppmarksammar.html
http://cornucopia.cornubot.se/2016/02/cowspiracys-logner-om-vattenforbrukning.html
Furthermore, Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, have also concluded that this documentary is just stating made up facts.
The book the vegetarian myth also takes up things like how babies getting ill almost dying by drinking soy milk because their vegan parents are zealots in the vegan religion. Cows can consume cellulose, and humans can't. So in places where it is too much shadows and slopes to be suitable to agriculture, animals can live and provide humans with food. When the world is running out of top soil, oil and fresh water needed for growing plants, meat production will play an important role.
But it sounds like you are more into fighting a vegan crusade, than trying to be an adult and being realistic on how we in a short time period can transition our foodsystem into a substainable system that can feed 7 billion people. You doesnt even seem to understand the causes of the global food crisis, since you dont understand the difference between capitalist feedlots and old style 1930s farms or moderate hunting and fishing. Instead you are promoting transporting veggies all over the world... and think that wasting huge amounts oil on transports is okay, and wasting enormous amounts energy on artificial fertilizer is okay since you dont wanna use cowshit, you are okay with wasting top soil and fresh water and thereby turning flourishing nature into wastelands.. like ancient agricultural lands like Egypt and Babylonia that are deserts now when irrigation made the land salty and the fresh water runned low so people needs to drill deeper to get water and trees cant get their roots deep enough to drink so they die. Its no coincidence that desertification and agriculture goes hand in hand. India, South America, middle east and the USA is all starting to run out of water now.... But you doesnt care about those problems, because your vegan crusade is more important.
Nature got plants, plant eaters and meat eaters. And all is essential for the system to work, and they all give and take..its like the circle of life in the Lion King movie. Plants dont like to be eaten so they develop defences like spikes and poisons, however they also need to spread out so their specie can survive and for that they use animals. The plants provide bees and birds with fuel, and animals with berries and apples, and in return the bees pollinates plants and horses shit out seeds from the apple it ate. So the plants doesnt waste energy and effort to provide apples for free, its all about giving and taking...
Meat eaters role in the system is to regulate the ruminantia population so they dont eat up all plants, and when all plants die they die themselves from starvation when the grassfields have turned into mud. That is what happened on saint matthew island.
So to make a long story short. We needs meat eaters in nature. Death is a part of life. And humans have just replaced bears, wolves, wildcats and such, and we are probably able to kill in a less painful way than those animals. Its the way of living as a part of nature. Vegans doesnt seem to wanna be a part of this system of giving and taking... while they take the apples and eat and throw away the seeds into the garbage. Just taking and giving nothing in return.
And when it comes to feeding up lifestock and eating them, it isnt immoral according to me.
We can provide food, safety, a comfy enviroment and temperature. Animals can live a better life in farms than in nature, just like dogs can have it better than wolves. While wild animals often starve and freeze to death.
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A little bit too liberal for my taste but that's okay. For the most part I think we agree politically.
It's hard to say anything in general since there is no clear definiton of different labels, and even if, its still hard to throw people into a box because they usally don't agree 100% with a certain ideology.
But generally speaking I would consider you a socialliberal. Nowadays I consider most followers of socialliberalism to be a little bit of the socialjustice light flavour.. like some of my relatives who are very politically correct haha....but you are not, you are cool ;) And a little bit more openminded than people in general.. maybe because you had have it though and therefore aren't as fast to judge people, as many do.
I don't like academic snobs, so I prefer freethinkers and enlightened people, and think I got more to learn from them than dogmatic dumbasses and partisan hacks.
With liberalism (as in social liberalism) I mean that you support peoples right to do whatever they want without harming someone else: take drugs, buy sex, make an abortion, and women have their freedoms, and you consider everyones human right should be respected and have the right to defend it with guns and leathal force if necessary. And you consider the right to private property a human right like the liberals.
But then you contradict yourself a little by saying you support some socialist ideas that means taxation and infringement upon peoples right to private property.
People should have the right to food and shelter for those who are struggling. You wanna help disabled. And you support everyones right to basic healthcare and education.
When I say you contradict yourself I don't mean to say "hahah look a hypocrite!"
I myself don't consider the right to private property a human right, but on the other hand am I not in favour of the government or corporations just grabbing things at will. There most be strong reasons for things like a mining company confiscating some peace of land, but I don't have much problems with taxation or even high taxation that many anarcho-capitalists consider theft.
I don't consider taxation theft, anymore than a resurant demanding pay for a meal.
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And even if we ignore deforestation, desertification, destruction of fishstocks, pollution.. there are still problems with our economy and society.
Such as peak oil, peak coal, peak gas, peak uranium, peak silver, peak copper and peak phosphorus.
Without those things we can't keep our present standard of living or anything close to that. And without artificial fertilizer and other agricultural inputs millions if not billions will starve. Globalization will decrease as moving cheap bulky goods across the planet will become uncompetative compared to locally made products, as the transportation costs are rising.
And neighter are there enough rare earth metals in the groud of this planet to make enough solar panels to replace the fossile fuels. There aren't enough neodynium to produce the magnets needed to produce enough windmills to replace our consumption of fossile fuels. There aren't enough uranium in the world to replace the fossile fuels for more than 4 years... and after that time has passed we still need to waste energy to cool down the nuclear waste for hundreds of years.. and safely store that shit forever.
There aren't enough waterfalls for hydroelectric power to replace the oil. The entire North and South America has to be cultivated if we would try to feed the global airliner fleet with biofuels.. not only is it absurd to expect that we could do farming everyware, we also need lands for other uses - roads, housing, mining etc.. we also need to grow food to feed ourselves, feed animals and then some people wanna use land for industrial products like tobacco and cotton.
And besides other problems, so is the world also quickly running out of top soil and freshwater - Problems atleast as serious as all the other ones.
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Rare earth metals exists all over the world, and was mined in America as well. But in the 1980s China began statesponsored overproduction or rare earth metals and dumped tonnes of metal on the world market so the price fell and western mining had to be closed down.
Secondly, you don't have to go 100% protectionist or 100% free trade. You don't need any extremes, you can go somewhere in between and make a deal with other countries. Free trade is great for those industries in which your country is strong - because they don't need any protection to survive, rather they wanna go out an take over the world as well.
So protectionism is only something you want in industries in which you are weak.
So will you make China unhappy if you go completly protectionist? yes. So do China want 100% free trade of course not.
And America got a strong innovative economy, so they can have free trade in many industries, and a bit of protectionism in a few. While China of course wanna protect their own weak industries and want free trade for some other of their industries.
And thirdly, there is no silver bullet in the transition away from fossile fuels. No energy source on its own can replace oil (maybe fusion-reactors, but we have already waited for those to arrive for many decades without something happenin).
So what is needed is that we go with what is available. Solar, wind, geothermal, wavepower, algae, oysters etc
I am pretty pessimistic about humanties ability to deal with peak oil to be honest, but atleast we can try to so something about it.
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Russia had a large badly equiped and badly supplied army in world war1, and every russian artillery piece could just fire a fraction of the number of shells that other major powers guns did each month... and if you think that France, UK and Germany had problems with ammunition, then their problems were tiny in comparison.
The allies tried to open a way to transport weapons to russia, but it failed at Galliopoli. So Russia had to industrialize in the middle of the war, and as men moved from farming into uniforms or into the industries making the uniforms food production fell, and wages for industry workers rose as the factories desperately tried to get enough workers.... and the result became inflation and foodshortages. And hunger, economic problems and military defeats caused the Russian revolution.
In theory Russia would have been the strongest of all powers in 1914, when they besides of having the largest army also had the largest reserves with 26million men desposable, while the second largest power: Germany, only had 6 million men in reserves.
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Regarding your model, the "industry/resource" component is well adapted to total wars like WWI&II but in asymmetrical wars and ancient (limited) wars, weapons are often bought on the market (and even soldiers as mercenaries). In this case, the focus is on finding money through any means (taxation/ransoms/foreign support/...) not in building industries, technological innovations and strategic destruction.
Interesting theory. Maybe industrialization have become more important as the cost of killing an enemy has risen.
During the time of Caesar It did cost about 75 cents to kill a man, under Napoleon the cost had risen to $3,000, and in World War 1 the cost had run up to $21,000 per dead solidier. In World War 2 the cost had risen to $55,000 and then it rose to $170,000 in Vietnam.
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You can buy the book "The spirit level" which compares 1st world countries with high degree of equality with low degrees of equality in numerous health indicators and measurements of quality of life. And not only that, the author have also made studies and comparing equal with unequal provinces in France, Canada, China and USA and have come to the same conclusion: Equal societies perfroms much better almost all the time, in everything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level:_Why_More_Equal_Societies_Almost_Always_Do_Better
It would be a good read for christmas for someone with leftleaning views and political interest...
They probably also got some data on their site https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/about-inequality/spirit-level
But I havn't checked, since I am a traditional bookworm.
Anyways, the authors of the book clearly say that it is inequality that is harmful... not rightwing governments per se.
And they say that Japan and Sweden both performs top notch, even though Japan doesn't use a wast welfare system and taxation (atleast not to the same degree) but they reach high levels of equality anyways.. while Sweden is much more unequal society than many other European countries - such as Germany- before taxation, but after taxation had been done Sweden becomes one of the most equal societies in the world.
The feeling I got was that this book was written for a broad audiance by some socialdemocrats. So I now say the conclusions I got from the data, since the cowards don't wanna rock the boat and call a spade a spade... here we go: Neoliberalism sucks. It creates inequalities and harm the fabric of society. It creates all kinds of social problems... and its an extremely cruel society to those who haven't been lucky enough to fall out from the right vagina. And even the scumbag rightwingers who doesn't care about anyone but themselves, should get their head out of their ass a read this book. Unequal societies harm everyone. If you are a rich person in an unequal country you life expectancy is still lower than a rich person living in equal country.
So is it worth dying years earlier and make life messy for the poor, just because of some stupid moral conviction that redistribution of wealth is wrong? What the hell is wrong with people?.....
well maybe I shouldn't be too harsh..... rightwingers are usally unenlightened in every political field, and cling on to their failed marketsystem just because of some stupid dogma.
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America doesn't have any strong leftwing tradition, so I can forgive the confusion. And yes you are right socialism is runned in a completly different way, and production is done 100% for the sake of need instead of profit.
Nevertheless one can also look at things from another perspective, where socialdemocrats became the little brother of socialism born from father Karl Marx.. and socialdemocrats are socialist, who wanna transtion society into socialism by gradual peaceful democratical reforms rather than violent revolution.
So where do I stand? In the middle of socialism and socialdemocracy. I realize the failure of capitalism, and that socialdemocracy can at best only cure the sympthoms of capitalism and not the disease. So the socialist are right in that sense.
But on the other hand, I feel skeptical about the socialism idea. I have asked people how the calculation problem should be solved and other things but never got any other answer than "read this or that book". So to support the idea of socialism, I need to know how it would exactly.
Until then I will continue to sit in the socialdemocrat camp, since there are plenty of historical examples of succesful "mixed economies", but not much to brag about from the socialist camp so far - even though, I will give credit to Cuban healthcare and Soviets impressive war economy in WWII.
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The answer is tribalism. People don't care about facts, they just play for a team. The team comes first and facts are either ignored when they contradict what people wanna hear, or is used to rationalize their choice, after they have decided what side to support.
And since facts doesn't matter and only tribalism does, then nice words become more important than the content and definition of those words. The zombies on the left like to talk about "tolerance" "diversity" "justice" and "equality". While the rightwing zombies like to hear "being hard on crime" "a stronger military" "entreprenourship" "tax cuts" "order and responsability".... and they start to irrationally bark like dogs when someone mention a word they don't like, such as "redistribution of wealth".
Being principled doesn't matter. Republicans love big government and socialism for the rich and redistribution of wealth. Just as the left likes discrimination (against white males), misogyny (its okay for muslims) and they like borders and norms (strangely enough they don't think rape is okay), supports lower wages (to help immigrants get a job), like imperialism (to help opressed peoples of course) and bash the uneducated working class and wanna take away its right to vote, when it votes for the wrong team.
The reason why the right exist is simply because people have been born into it. Just like most religions have been inherited, and doesn't stem from some rational thought. People who still believe in Repblicanism are either intellectually lazy or are too dogmatic to ever change their mind. And a tiny percentage may perhaps have strong intellectual reasons for their choice of supporting the right, and in those instances I only got myself to blame. Either because I havn't come up with a convinving enough argument to manage to convince the opposition, or because I am wrong and havn't done my homework so I am the one who have to change my mind.
With free thinkers instead of zoombies, intellectual thought will always improve on all sides, because everyone is forced up to their own highest standards in the battle of ideas. While in the world of brainless zombies an idea more valued according to how well it fits what the tribe wanna hear and how much it suits their interests. Ethics, rationality and benifits to society at large doesn't matter. Only whats good for the tribe.
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A minimum wage either creates unemployment, higher prices or it just means that you get a larger slice of the pie of the profits.
You get more money while the owners (the guys who ownes the stockmarket shares) of the company gets less money... instead of they get saying 25% profit for every 100 dollar invested in the company the now instead get 15%. Its still a good win for them, but it would have been even more money for them if they could have kept that money for themselves rather than giving it to you.
And since wages have been falling since the early 1980s you would expect that unemployment would be record low now, if all the rightwing economists would be right. Since you know what they say: Low wages = Low Unemployment.
But fact is unemployment was almost non-existant in Europe in the 1950-60s when wages share out of the value added was much higher than it is today. So people had High Wages AND low unemployment. In fact, countries like Switzerland became the first in World history to literarly have 0% unemployment. And my own country Sweden had 1% unemployment in the 50s and 60s. Today we got 7%, while our wage-share is at record low levels not seen since the 1920s.
Aren't most minimum wage workers looking for experience at a young age rather than working full time as an adult?
Most of the minimum wage workers in America are above 30 years old and work their asses off when they try to feed their family. I think it is a sympathic idea to have the least well off in society having it well enough to support themselves. Not everyone can afford an expensive education and not everyone is bright enough either.
The way to combat unemployment I would take would be to stimulate the consumption by taxing capital more and hard work less. And I would create government jobs in construction of railways, houses and powerplants... which in turn also creates lots of jobs in the concrete industry, mining, timber, insurence, banking, manufacturers of excavators and there will be more electricians, painters, builders, carpenters and plumbers that earn a wage and creates demand for cars, tvs and homes and create even more jobs and tax incomes, while government pay outs to benifits decrease.
I would also spend money on government programs to train workers so they could the training needed for some types of jobs. So when smart people goes over from a low paying job that they are over-qualified for, and moving to a better paid job.... then that old less well paid job can be taken by a person who is too stupid to get an advanced job.
And finally I would do like the dictatorship in South Korea, and let the government subsidise and encourage young people to educate themselves to engineers, doctors and chemists... while I put a high tax on uselss educations like sports, media and genderstudies.
Thereby people get a better chance of getting a job and the effiecency of the nations economy as a whole will increase. And young people will not sit with student-debts of tens of thousands that they can't repay when they can't get a job when there are a hundred people who got an education for every media job available.
I know that people hate hearing the truth, but most people aren't special snowflakes that can be whatever they want... but lying to them wont make it any better, rather it just makes them waste their time and money on an useless education that they then regret that they took and feel depressed over their failed career.
By kicking out eveyone but the most motivated from those educations, I think that I do everyone a favour, as great artist then get a better chance of a succesful career whent he competion is gone.
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even government officials of Sweden were baffled by Trump's remarks and asked for clarification
Trump often makes shit up. But in this case I think its hard to tell if he is lying or if he just expressed himself unclear so he got misunderstood.
he heard it on , wait for it now, I am sure you can guess......FOX NEWS.
Yes it is liars media just like CNN and the Swedish press. But in this case of their reporting from Sweden was factully correct. And I would even go further and say that things actully are worse in Sweden than what Fox news say.
As I stated in my earlier original comment, we are so fucking screwed. You see the problem appears to be a segment of people seem to believe everything they read and hear from the Trumpster and his crew.
I know, and I don't like them either. Sargon of Akkads stubborn defence of Trump is just as tiresome as the leftwing calling him Hitler. I want fair criticism. Like for his outspoken support for ignoring international law, support for torture and stealing Iraq's oil and his scamming of the workers that worked for him, Trump university and so on.
Sadly the right is no longer alone in the worship of cult of personality, but the same goes for leftwing tribalism and their postmodernist attitude towards facts. The wage gap has been debunked a trillion times but idiots still mentions it.
Regardless, all the "attacks" you listed have absolutely NO bearing on the discussion nor my comment which was about Trump staying true to form and making stuff up or conflating issues or flat out lying.
Every day in Sweden has basicly been a rape attack and a day of migrant crime. "So last night in Sweden" was just a typical day of failed migration policy. And only hours after his speech, the world could see burning cars in the riots in Rinkeby. And those are not rare events, on the contrary we have seen this shit for a million times the last decade here. And in Paris it has just been the same shit this week, and it happens so often that media no longer bother reporting on it.
So maybe Trump is a Foxnews dumbass, but this time around he was certainly more right than he could have imagined.
Here it is again, Sweden didn't have a clue as to what Trump was talking about having happened in Sweden the night before and the reason Sweden didn't have a clue is because NOTHING had happened in Sweden the night before, certainly nothing to do with terrorist, or immigrants.
Just rapes and burning cars, stones thrown at the police, migrant shops plundered etc etc.
And he also talked about Germany and France, who have to deal with terrorists on a dailybasis and the police in Germany catches terrorist-wannabes on almost a weekly basis. So his picture of Europe is not totally unfair.
Finally, quite frankly I don't believe you when you say you are not a fan of Trump
What you think doesn't matter to me. I explain myself to readers of my comments, and not you per se.
I don't think I will convince you on anything.
Trump is fake news at its best or worst
Trump is fakenews. But he isn't alone. The Swedish government and the Swedish media are even wose liars. And this I don't say like "So now you must believe everything Trump says because the other team lies even more", NO. We should be skeptical of both sides.
And Trump lies like a broken watch, but sometimes a broken watch can show the right time 2 times per day.
And calling Swedens migration policy a total big fucking failure is an understatement.
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Rightwing economics borrowed ideas from Newtonian physics, and that the system is striving towards equilibrium, and supply and demand meets each other, and everyone gets happy.
And no company would ever fraud a customer, because then he would lose his customers and go out of buisness.
Nor would it mistreat its workers, since then would skilled workers move to another company and start working there instead.
And if a company destroys the enviroment, it would get tonnes of bad puclicity that harm sales and can drive him out of buisness, so no company would ever act immoral or pollute the enivroment.
Thats the reasoning behind marketfundamentalism.
And of course, not all rightwingers are strictly following everything I just said in this post. But this is the basis for their reasoning.
Some rightwingers are simply retards who doesn't know the roots of their own ideology and the economic theories based around the idea of a market equilibrium.
So they often contradict themselves.
And a tiny percentage of the rightwingers realize the some of the flaws in the marketsystem, and sometimes even welcome regulation, taxation and unions to a limited degree. But they thinks that the marketsystem works good overall, and therefore regulations usally cause more harm than good.
...
My own criticism of capitalism is that the profitmotive mostly works terribly bad. And I don't see capitalism good in itself. And unlike rightwingers I don't see how the preservation of the marketsystem got any value in itself.
Its just one socie-economic system among many. Its nothing natural, since you must have private property rights before you can buy and sell things and have capitalism. So it was not until government created private property capitalism could be born.. so its quite ironic now that capitalism supporters say capitalism is a natural system, and that governments are unnatural and evil.
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Germany had fought against almost the entire world alone for 4 years. Its really nothing strange with them running out of manpower and exhausting every other resource.
The Austrians sucked, and the Ottomans sucked as well. So Germany had to carry the team to victory alone, and it might actully have succeded with their great army, if they had not been stupid enough to getting USA involved.. and when America sent hundreds of thousands of troops each month the war got lost.
Germany had no tanks, almost no trucks, no men, their traitorous allies was about leaving Germany... so the situation was bad despite all victories and having knocked out Serbia, Romania, Italy and Russia alone, and having signed a harsh peace treaty and getting promised food deliveries from conquered land in the east.
If America didn't had joined the war things could have ended very differently. The British army wasn't feeling to happy either after Somme and all else, but it was still a force to be reckon with. But the Belgian army was almost knocked out in 1914. While the French army had suffered terribly in 1914 as the entire German army pushed on them in early 1914... and making mass charges with bayonettes in old colourful uniforms costed enormous amounts of french lives.
The germans tried to crush France again later in the battle of Verdun which ended in a costly draw for both sides. And the battle might perhaps been the most awful battle in human history, and 80% of the french army fought there.. and collected traumas and terrible memories.
And in 1917 was the Nivelle offensive launched... and the french once again lost huge numbers of men, and the soliders started a strike and refused to obey their officers when they wanted to make stupid attacks, but they promised to fight bravely to defend their country. However, the Germans strangely enough never heard about the strike... and if they had, it might very well have ended the war, as the Germans would just had launched an attack against the french and crushed everything that was left of France's will to fight.
And in 1918, Germany might very well had crushed the French army as well.
In 1918 the odds were even between the allies and the centralpowers. But Americas entry into the war tipped the balance so hard in favour for the allies that Germany was doomed to fail.
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The Swedish media ignored Bernie. They never allowed the Brexit side to share their view. They never mentioned the Pirate party, despite they gave tonnes of media coverage for other movements that was even smaller here such as our feminist party and a nazi party with a few hundred members, And they always pretended that most Swedes supported the war in Afghanistan, and today they are lying about immigration on a dailybasis.............. So by now I have started to learn how they play the game.
They will ignore you until the end. Not until a justice democrat have become the leader of the democratic party will you get any media coverage. And in the second phase media will talk about you, and not with you - and they will say nasty things about you, and attack your caracter and play nasty... because, what can you else do when you are a corporate whore without any logical or moral arguments to defend your shitty political standpoints about defending status quo?
And finally I will say that I disagree with Kyle. This isn't a generational war. This is simply a war about defending the rich people and their interests. Why else do small rightwing movements get much cover, but never sane progressives? The Swedish media certainly didn't like the Swedish pirate party that defended the site the pirate bay and wanted to decriminilize filesharing.
And they certainly feared Bernie Sanders for his talk about regulations, democratic reforms and taxes on the rich.
This condecending rethoric is just a trick media use to play the game of divide and conquer, so the people will fight each other instead of the elite. And old people don't have much friends or energy to hang out, so they watch tv instead and getting brainwashed by the media garbage instead. And they will never learn to handle the internet, because they are old, it costs money and they think they are dead soon so why then even bother learning how to use a computer?
Old farts are low information voters, but they aren't the cause of our problems. The media and corporations is. And they brainwash old farts to use them as useful idiots for their cause.
So I end up with saying that we shouldn't be upset if people disagre with us or is a bit skeptical and say "hereby you are the enemy of justice democrats". No we should make our case and tell the truth. And if repeating a lie could make it a truth, then we should repeat the truth until it becomes the truth.
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1. Globalization is nothing new. Worldtrades share of world GDP was almost as high as today. That means that we can choose it away like countries did after world war 1 and have a high growth rate, low inflation, low unemployment and increased productivity and no panics and crashes just like the period 1945-75. The second era of globalization 1990-2016 have produced lower economic growth, more crashes, more inequality (if you exclude non-capitalist China), it have made Africa suffer from a negative growth rate. And the first age of globalization 1880-1914 was also a period of weak economic growth compared to the Keynesian protectionist period 1945-70.
2. The growth rates was high in America, but they were even higher in economies that were in need of reconstruction. So the problem was not so much investment opportunities as it was currency controls and protectionism that prevented foreign investment.
3. Technological breaktroughs helps trade yes, but if one messure the amount of information sent per unit of time one could argue that the telegraph was a more revolutionary tool than the internet. So globalization is nothing new.
And the new computerized money system have made it easier, and not harder to supervise transactions and trace money, and IMF have already developt tools that enables such things. So the only thing lacking is a political will to deal with the problem.
4. Guilt tactics and shaming mostly work, but often it doesn't. But what the government can do then is to break all contracts and ties with the tax cheating company and instead place an order with a competitor and let it instead partake in government funded research projects. It can stop giving it generous loans from stateowned banks. It can refuse to give the company an export credit guarantee... which would be devestating to it since then it wouldn't be able to get large scale contracts with dozens of billions of dollars simply because it wouldn't have enough financial muscles of its own and neighter could it borrow money from banks at a low rate without a guarantee from the taxpayers to pay the banks if the huge long term risky order can't be fullfilled.
In short, the government isn't powerless against the multinational corporations, its rather the opposite. And especially for a government as powerful as USA. It can easily crash their stock price and having them go bankrupth by actions I suggested, in fact the government doesn't even have to do this actions. Merely the open threat of doing them would harm the company enough.
5. Where do people like to invest? In markets with lots of consumers and a high growth rate. So by locking out companies from the huge American market in which they had invested in they will lose lots of money. Furthermore, companies are national. The homemarkets are a safehaven for companies when there is high volatility on the world markets, and governments are usally willing to give a helping hand to save their companies, but if that system should work they also need to share the benifits the companies get when things went well.
Its uninteresting to move to places just because they got low regulations and low taxes. What attract companies are high growth and a large market. And after that the second most important things are good infrastructure, an educated skilled workforce. and well functioning institutions.
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"Right Wing Fascism" - Well its in Maastricht treaty that all EU countries must have a market economy and respect the four freedoms (translation: forget socialdemocracy and a welfare state, no other politics is allowed than neoliberalism). So it doesn't matter if 100% of the population in your country wants to nationalize the railroads or whatever, you aren't allowed to do so by law.
"Every commenter idiot here yelling "Leave" doesn't know basic economics" Economists of all sorts, Monetarists, Keynesians, neoclassical, institutionalists, Austrians, Marxists, classical school...just fucking all could for once agree upon one thing: There is not a single historical example of a succesful monetary union without also having a fiscal union. EMU is a frankenstein creation that was totally dysfunctional from the start.
Europe never had any problems before this Euro shit, then a few years after the introduction you have Portugal, Ireland, Latvia, Hungary, Romania, Greece, Italy, Spain and Cyprus down in the shit. And the predecessor of the Euro (the Ecu) gave Sweden a currency crisis in the early 90s, since only that shit only happens to idiots who think its a good idea that a sovereign state shouldn't be able to print their own money.
The political ambitions was too important to the Eurocrats for letting facts, history and reality stand in their way. And today we can see the results with a divided Europe, and badly damaged economies in Southern Europe.
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Who are you to put yourself above an almighty God?
As an atheist I'm atleast humble enough to follow my
conscience and my limited intellect, rather than obeying a God out of fear or a "cult of personality" (for the lack of a better term).
If God exist, I believe that God would feel more forgiveness towards me, than someone who are confident in their religious belief in God and still choose to ignore some of his commands. And yes, I call every muslim but ISIS a cherrypicker, everyone who doesnt follow the holy texts 100% is a cherrypicker. And same reasoning goes for christianity and other religions.
In the Bible it says that God is almighty and all good, so the least I could expect of such a good is that his holy books would be so perfect that you doesnt need to do "critical thinking" and having to guess what he wants. And the new testament also contains things I see as questionable.
Jesus is sounding like a hippie who says we should "love our enemies" and "turning the other cheek", but on other occasions he sounds like a warlord: "I did not come to bring peace, but a sword."
He also says "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple." but in Mark 7:10 he says "Honor your father and mother,' and, 'Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death."
In Mark 9:40 Jesus says "whoever is not against us is for us". But in Matthew 12:30 Jesus once again contradicts himself by saying "Whoever is not with me is against me"
And besides from that Jesus says other things most self-proclaimed christians doesnt follow, such as Jesus communist speech in Luke 14:33 "you cannot become my disciple without giving up everything you own."
Jesus also says "If you are dishonest in little things, you won't be honest with greater responsibilities."... which I find to be very silly dumb statement, for example Oskar Schindler did lots of bad actions (lying, bribery, corruption etc) but I doubt few would consider him a bad person for it when he saved the lives of over a thousand jews.
So now I wonder, what makes you think a book full of contradictions can have been the word of an almighty God?
In what whay can a book full of contradictions function as a moral guide, or a guide of life and a guide to building a good society?
And do you think there are only evil actions and no evil people? And if so, why? and why doesnt motives matter more than the outcome?
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Kyle, I forgive you for your wrong stance. I guess you do it because you do it because of media, and of right-wing bigots, of threats of desinvestments and the treat of denied access to the European common market, and much because you think its a thing that the leftwingers should do.
But all those points are faulty. The only leftists who wants to stay in are the European style Hillary Clintons and sellouts. Its true that rightwing bigots support leave, but they are not the only ones..but they are the only ones media show you on tv to scare voters to support the opposition. And media all around Europe are corporate puppets and licking the asses of the establishment, and its true as well as in Sweden, as Poland, Germany and England that the Pro-EU camp almost gets all media time. In 1994 when Sweden had a vote on EU membership, the join-side spent 20 times more money on their campaign than the opposition. And the pattern repeats itself time and time again. The treats of desinvestments doesn't cost anything to make, and is a good way to get concessions from the government and scare the voters to vote out of fear. But Britain isn't Uganda, its a huge economy and ANY country on earth are interested in traderelations with this significant economy. And having freetrade with Germany isn't the right way to go. Britain needs to industrialize and CANNOT do so, because its mandatory to have a neoliberal economy according to the four freedoms in the Maastricht treaty. Keeping some foreign investments out isn't a bad thing, but a good thing, because then the foreigners doesn't buy up your companies and move them abroad or pumping in money into your country so prices rice and create housing- or stock market bubbles that cause havoc.
Any real leftwinger should support leaving. We love democracy. We don't want an EU army and imperialism on small countries like Libya. We don't want mandatory neoliberal policies. We don't need an EU for anything, nothing is stopping European countries from co-operating without an EU. And I think that is preferable, because of people doesn't have any say as EU is constructed today, and no country can put in a veto against ANY decision. Only those who love fascism can now still say that they love EU, just look what happened to Greece.
With an EU without veto, one country will always throw another country under the bus. And I don't want that. I don't want my country ruled by other countries, and neighter do I want to treat other countries as if my country was a colonial power.
I don't want German laws on freedom of speech, I don't want British economic policies, I don't want Polish abortion laws, I don't want Danish mistreatment of animals, and other EU countries don't want our Swedish immigration policies as well.
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Fact is that the Swedish crisis in the 90s had nothing to do with too high wages, too little competativeness, and too much welfare... and everything to do with deregulation of capitalcontrols, too low wages and a stupid currency peg to the Euro.
Fact is that UK's huge public debt was caused by bailouts of the financial sector, and not by the ordinary people using the social safety net, and nor was it caused by immigrants.
Nor was the huge debt in Ireland caused by leftwing politics, since the country had an extremely low corporate tax and a weak social safety net.
The problems in Greece wasn't caused by the average greek being lazy, fact is that Greeks works more hours than most other workers in OECD countries. The scumbags benifited from this crisis was were german bankers and corrupth politicians. And despite people literarly starving on the streets, not a penny is put aside from the weapons deals that the overspending military has done... because big buisness refuse to cut a nickle from contracts on german tanks and warships. And no one have demanded that rich greek tax evaders money should be repatriated.
In the USA, the government cut taxes for the rich under Reagan. But they didn't cut spending, so the government had to borrow money from the scumbags who didn't wanna pay their fair share. Then large corporations get taxpayer money to fund their research.. everything to all Ipad technologies to medicines, but in return the companies move ashore to avoid taxes. The government have privatized all kinds of stuff, schools, prisons, and using police cars with logos, even the fucking military is now blackwater troops. The elite steals money everyware through the government, and the astronimical war debts and bailouts are just the tip of the iceberg.
So now does the rightwing need a scapegoat when they have piled up unsubstainable debts. So now they make up lies in the classic old fashion. Trumps junk about "our country got the highest taxes in the world" is just such typical shit I hear rightwing tards say here in Sweden too.
And yes, the largest believers in 'the white mans burden' is the American rightwing and Eurocrats. They are the ones mocking people like Kyle and call him an isolationist for not wanting to go out in the world with military force.
And the same neoliberals and neocons usally often like to wash the dust away from old racist theories about bad culture in Africa and Asia, as a way to shift the blame away from their failed free trade polices that caused countries there to suffer from negative economic growth, higher inequalities and often worse public health conditions. Because scrapping failed economic policies is out of question, especially when dogma is backed up by mighty private economic interests.
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As I said, things aren't as they were back then.
Yes things have changed. However, schengen is just a human construct, so it can also be changed by humans. The problem with the migrant crisis was caused by Schengen - which meant that each country got rid of their own border controls so there could be free movement within EU, and then all corder controls towards the rest of the world should be handled by countries like Spain and others that should prevent any migrants from coming in to Europe. But then the borders crashed and failed, and there was no 2nd line of defence against the refugee wave.. because all countries had taken down all their own border controls as I said earlier.
And then Merkel decided to give German citizenship to all kinds of migrants without any real background checks... so migrant scum could then move across Europe freely.
Also you do realize, we have a European Parliament where every country has it own voice?
European parliament doesn't propose its own laws like other parliaments, instead it more of an advisory organization to laws that are written. I can see that as a democratic deficit and why others complain, but to me that's just a minor issue. The problem with EU is that it decides a way too large share of the decisions in my country, and the EU law overrides national law. National democracy has become pointless.
And the four freedoms, forbids leftwing policies and only neoliberalism is allowed. So fuck that. I am a leftwinger, a patriot and a democrat.
And even if the 2,4% Swedish members of parliament voted the same, it wouldn't change the outcome. Even an idiot could see that. There are more neonazis in the European parliament than Swedes. Sweden is a tiny country, just like most other countries in EU. We don't have any say. Not even UK had any say and lost 70% of all decisions within the EU, despite being one of the world largest economies and having one the strongest military forces in the world.
So no, EU is ruled by France and Germany. Other countries don't have a voice. In the past you could atleast have made that argument that EU countries could veto decisions they didn't like, and that the EU was ruled by the principle of subsidiarity... but now even that has been scrapped, so you cannot make that argument that EU in any way represents the will of the people.
And you you realize, that you can't compare the economic power/geographic situation of Sweden to Russia and China, but you can compare it to the EU?
Do you realize Spains economy is larger then that of Russia? I guess you didn't, since you wrote this nonsense. Russia is not an economic superpower, its a developing country.
And Sweden became rich despite being a tiny country compared to the Great Empires of the past, so I don't really sees your argument. Sweden did great under military/foreign political neutrality and economic policies designed for the best of the country during the years 1945-1985. So I don't see any need to change that concept. Swedens economic problems began with ECU (the predecessor of the Euro) which throw Sweden into a great depression..........so why the hell would I want to give more power to the incompetent EU clowns, that have destroyed Greece, Ireland and Spain?
Furthermore Swedens economic problems today is rather that we are too export oriented and the government is too restricted in its ability to deal with various problems. For example, like all other countries we got this idiotic goal budget surplus, our central bank no longer cares about unemployment and growth but only about fighting inflation, and we try to follow the idiotic convergence pact and have a low national debt despite we aren't part of EMU.
So for Swedens part there are only upsides with scrapping all that shit. We need more protectionism, more planning, more SOEs, more focus on higher wages and low unemployment, more focus on production for our homemarket than trying to steal jobs and economic growth from mediterranean countries.
- That would stop the imports of foreign economic crisis. With more money in the pockets of the people, we will no longer be the most indebted people on the planet, and we will therefore see no more economic crashes caused by debt bubbles. With foreign capital controls we can protect our economy from rising inflation that cause assett bubbles, like what have happened to Spain because of EU.
We had 70 years of peace and a lot of gained freedom.
There is little reason to believe this freedom was thanks to EU. Sweden have had peace for 200 years, without any help from EU. Germany and France had long periods of peace without any EU, 1815-1870 they had 55 years of peace, and 1870-1914 they had 44 years of peace without any EU. So I am not a believer in the Europhile theory that its in the DNA of a German to wanna fight with a frenchman, and that it is in the DNA of a frenchman to wanna fight with germans..and that they simply cannot help themselves from fighting each other unless the EU prevents them.
So there is not much reason to believe EU created peace in Europe. Germany was occupied by east and west, and her people felt shame rather than hunger for war... so I think people give EU way too much credit for peace in Europe than it deserves.
And neighter is it true that *"EU is a peace-project that have prevented all wars".
Here's a list I made from wikipedia with the wars Europe has fought, and I have also included the EU member Frances wars in North Africa, because I think its not unrelevant.
1954-1962 Algerian War
1956 Hungarian Revolution
1956–1962 Operation Harvest
1958 First Cod War
1959–2011 Basque conflict
1968–1998 The Troubles
1972–1973 Second Cod War
1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus
1975–1976 Third Cod War
1991–1992 Georgian war against Russo-Ossetian alliance
1991–1995 Croatian War of Independence
1992–1995 Bosnian War
1998–1999 Kosovo War
2011 Military intervention in Libya
2008 Russia–Georgia war
2014 Crimean crisis
Free trade doesn't create peace in itself. We had as much free trade in Europe in 1914 as we have today, but that didn't prevent the first world war. So if someone wanna claim EU is a peace project, then they have to show the evidence first.
I don't want that to vanish just because some people were to ignorant and lacked the empathie to handle a refugee crisis.
The schengen agreement has been a failure. The Euro has been a failure. The Lisbon treaty has been a failure.
Europe have been going in the wrong direction. It should stop this EU nonsense. Europe can cooperate without an EU, and each country can choose for themself in what areas they wanna work togheter with other countries, and what they wanna decide for themselves.
Not only is that the most democratic solution, I am also convinced that it would also give the best decisions.
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Germany invaded France the same day as Churchill became prime minister and he was new and unexperienced when he got this caos on his hands, and he got a phone call by the french prime minister who was paniced and thought the game was lost and that the sky was falling down (but in reality it wasn't, and french had already won a few minor battles). So Churchill took the french prime ministers word and started a retreat towards the coast. That left the flank open on the Belgian army so they had to retreat as well. So for 10 days they just moved backwards... and the germans could make steady progress.
Their advance was spread out on three army groups for Holland, Belgium and France. And that left the allied Headquarters in confusion when attacks occured at many places at the same time. Where was the main blow? Was the other attacks just to trick the allied defenders into the wrong direction? Anyways, the fighting kept on.
And the Germans quickly took control over the skies, because the germans had positioned their airfields close to the front so they could fly many missions per day, unlike the allies who had their airfields long behind the frontline.
Allied bombers also tried to attack all germans moving on the roads, but the germans had skillfully incorporated airforce personnel with anti-aircraft guns in the army so the allied losses of bombers grew at an unsubstainable rate, that they had to abolish their bombings after a few days if they wanted to have an airforce left of the month.
And the germans harden their grip over the control of the skies, and bombed allied troops on the ground and knocked out trains with french tanks loaded upon them before they could even reach the front.
And the British army got cut off and surrounded and had to flee back to England, and succesfully done so in the battle of Dunqurk. And the germans captured large amounts of trucks and other equipment. And the british army had lost all their heavy equipment when they had fled. And the germans could now push on into France without having to going across the Maginot line. Paris was taken. And without England and Belgium in the game, France saw it as pointless to keep on fighting alone. The odds was not in their favour, and they knew how terrible the previous world war had been. And unlike 1914 when people was cheering on the streets when the world broke out, people was already tired of wars when it started in 1939.
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Mail only gets delievered in areas where its profitable to do so, while rest have to do without... even if it might harm society at large.
Railroads only have trains driving certain times and certain places.. while ignoring good transportation troughout the country all day so people can't travel or get to work at a reasonable time. Maintance costs is also minimized to keep profits up, which in turn results bad safety and accidents that cause deleys, which makes customers choosing to drive instead when trains are too unreliable to keep in schedule.
Letting the private sector handling the military and applying lean production leads to constant shortages of ammunition and supplies... which makes an army hugely ineffective. Running an army like a corporation also makes it ineffecient, since will focus on killratios, number of sorties flown etc, while ignoring all other more important aspects of war. The failure at Vietnam is great example.
United States have the most expensive healthcare in the world, but doesn't perfom any better than it's poor Cuban neighbour where the average person just earns 1/25 of what the average Joe in America makes. Drugcompanies systematically lies about the effectiveness of drugs and cover up the negative sideeffects. And when success is only measured in profits, the quality of healthcare will suck as a result, because the number of hospital beds and healthcare workers will be minimized in relation to the number patients. The personel gets overworked (and thereby perform less) and the patients feel unsatisfied when nobody haves time to listen to their problems.
And the problem with private schools and cleaning services in schools and hospitals are the same: You can only maximize the profits by understaffing.
And having the private sector run the energy grid usally ends up in Enrons and Oligopolies that push up prices up prices high to keep up profits. That in turn will result in less money over for the consumpers to spend on consuming goods that create jobs, and the high energy prices will impose extra costs on the industry in your country and make it less competative internationally.
If the government can't pick winners, then how come that Singapore Airlines is the highest ranked Airlines? And that Renault and Embraer was government owned for most of the post WWII period? Or that the Brazilian Development Bank makes more profits than most private banks in Brazil?
Furthermore am I not convinced that the present model of capitalism is the best, since it is a high cost economy where labour is taxed instead of capital. Where people are paid less and are more indebted so they got less money to spend to keep consumtion demand up, so companies get interested in hiring and investing.
We have a high cost economy instead of a low cost economy. Companies buy up other companies with borrowed money, at that money needs to get repaid with interest, so the bought company needs to get plundered to pay the debts. Then the company gets plundered to pay for dividends and ridiculously high CEO salaries and stock options for the board of directors.
And behind this crap is an also an ideology that assumes that perfect competion exists, despite its criterias almost never are meet.
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Globalization rests on shaky pillars. Unlike national markets, which tend to be
supported by domestic regulatory and political institutions, global markets are only weakly
embedded. There is no global anti-trust authority, no global lender of last resort, no global regulator,
no global safety net, and, of course, no global democracy. In other words, global markets suffer from
weak governance, and are therefore prone to instability, inefficiency, and weak popular legitimacy.
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Decreasing the profitrate usally means less money for the stock market in todays economy where profits are record high while wages have been depressed for 3 decades.
By giving workers the money, they could buy more stuff, and thereby increasing the profits for the companies, and when companies sees that people want more of their stuff they will buy more machines, factories and get more workers to produce more stuff.
But yes, one could say your first argument about investments is a good one, that people needs to take into account, but I think people makes an error thinking we should slash wages to a minimum so capitalists will invest...because then no one will buy their products.
And increasing someones wage in my example doesnt prevent someone else from taking a job. You do the same job as before and gets paid more.
Why should anyone would be pissed off and say, "I dont want to earn more money, per workhour so now I quit"... because that is what you are basicly saying right now.
A capitalist will always hire, if he could make a profit by doing so, no matter how small it is.
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And to be fair, I can't be angry on the muslims. They just do what they always done. My beef is with the islam apologists - because they are the ones who brought the muslims over here. And they are the ones without any right to complain when society falls apart thanks to their own idiocy, and neighter do I shed a single tear if those idiots get plown down by a truck because they brought this shit upon themselves.
My symphaty is instead with the poor natives who had their country destroyed by progressives. Who didn't want to destroy their nation for some stupid utopian ideal about multiculturalism, open borders and getting rid of nation states.
In my opinion should Muslims be able to keep on with their own religion. But only so in their own countries, and not here in the west where they should integrate or fuck off.
Islam is incompatible with the west. So if the choice is between islam and a modern society, then islam should go.
Muslims can keep on doing their shit, but in their own countries. They got their ways, we got our ways.
They are free to murder jews, gays, apostates, cutting dicks, torturing animals, getting rid of seperation of religion and state, ban free media and unislamic education, treating women as 2nd class citizens, getting rid of democracy, banning video games, music and western clothing and all that shit. But they should do it in their own countries.
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Not really. Adam Smith was a classical liberal and a classical economist - just like Ricardo and Karl Marx. He wanted government to handle infrastructure and tax away all unearned incomes, such as landrents, and rent on capital. And by taxing away rich Aristocrats unearned incomes, taxes on ordinary people could be kept low at a minimum. Doing hard work would pay off, and labour would be cheap and competative on the world market. And since no interest parasites sucked up all wealth, consumption could also be kept high, and producers didn't have to see their profits go away but could invest more to meet the increased consumer demand. And prices on goods, and housing could be kept low, and when the cost of living was kept low, wages could also be kept low - which also contributes to make the countrys labour very competative to labour in other countries.
But modern liberals don't believe in classical liberalism of having natural monopolies in the hands of the government. And modern liberals believe in something called "neoclassical economics" - which is the opposite of classical economics, and should therefore rather be called Anti-classical economics.
Modern liberals believe capitalists and bankers aren't parasites, but instead they think they provide a service.
And generally speaking, rightwing parties usally prefer to tax labour and increase the VAT-tax...while they at the same time cut taxes for the rich, such as progressive income taxes, taxes on housing, taxes on stocks, derivitives and financial assetts.
And "neoliberals" (they should rather be called "anti-liberals") also wants a centrally planned economy - they just want the planning to be done by the capitalists instead of the government.
And instead of a low cost economy, they want a high cost economy.. where housing is unaffordble, where toll booths and banks sucks up all the surplus that society produces so companies can't make profits and workers cannot afford to consume, its an economy where labour is expensive and uncompetative, its an economy not based on meriotcracy and rewarding hardwork but instead only benifits those who have on the expense on the those who have nothing.
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Norwegians, swiss, belorussians are Europeans as well according to most people. So when EU-fanboys talk like EU and Europe are the same thing, then I say that the burden of proving that sits on their shoulders.
And of course they can't prove it, because there are no such objective definition about what Europe is.
There are for example many different opinions on the matter if Turkey is an European country. So if no one can draw the line where Europe starts and where it ends, then this talk is just pointless.
Is Turkey in Europe? what about Armenia? or Russia? or Morocco? or Cyprus?
And if cultural values is our shared heritage, then what are those values? Merkel said that EU and Europe was based on Christianity.
I for my part is not a christian, so that must mean that I am unEuropean like most people in the Nordic countries. So I hope you will kick us out from the EU.
Some say that democracy and enlightment ideas such as human rights are European things. But much of European history havn't been like that. The inquisition and the holocaust are European things as well.
I am not one of those who think that the white man are the reason for all bad in this world, I am just here pointing out the childish intellectually lazy rethortic from the Europhiles, who think doing away with the nationstate is the solution to all problems.
If all countries are united under EU we will have peace and happiness, just like under Rome or the Third Reich. And if people just trade and share a currency, then war will be impossible....... except for the fact that history in the past is filled with a trillion civil wars between people who share currency and trade and even more things than the peoples of Europe share.
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What you and I think is irrelevant. My point is rather that Europes borders are different to different people. I don't consider Israel to be a part of Europe, but others will say that they are a part of the Judo-Christian sphere. And people have their own opinions on a Turkish EU-membership.
Some people say that a muslim country doesn't belong in the EU, while others say that islam have had a place in Europe long before many nationstates, since muslims came to Spain over a thousand years ago, and large muslim populations also existed in the balkans.
Morocco have tried to join the EU twice but failed. Greenland joined the EU along with Denmark, but left it in 1985.
So does Chechnya and Armenia belong to Europe? Well I have seen the later country participate in Eurovision song contest with a few good songs, but I don't know if they belong to Europe.
And when it comes to EU countries, I can see large differences between them in their views upon abortion, political traditions and values so it would be hard to make the case that Europe has a European culture that could be easily defined.
Sweden, what will reinstate conscription soon an seriously considering joining the NATO aswell, just because that "tiny Russia" looked that direction... I don't know what I've been expecting.
Politicians fearmongering. I have no trust in Swedish politicians.
And a Russian invasion is far-fetched. To begin with must Russia try to invade Finland and Nato to get to Sweden first - which seems quite suicidal and stupid from a Russian perspective.
And if they were for some reason were trying to make an amphibous operation instead, they wouldn't even have enough ships to transport enough men to defeat Swedens tiny army. Especially not in good defensive terrain. Furthermore do I think its unlikely that Russia would occupy a country unopposed by the west, especially since the high-treason politicians already have signed Sweden into a defensive military alliance when they signed the Lisbon treaty.
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Manufacturing might not be a job creator in itself, but since manufacturing and chemical industry got superior productivity increases compared to other sectors such as farming and service sector jobs they allow for more money being taken out to pay for higher wages and more taxes for social services and infrastructure.
We have always lived in an innovation economy, and industry and innovation are mutually supporting. Just ask that to a neoliberal economist and he will answer "Yes", and go and ask a Marxist economist and he will give you the same answer. With innovation you can improve the industrial output and economic profit rate. And with industry support research you encourage innovation. And if you lose your techfirms and labs, you will soon also lose your competent workforce when they can't find a job matching their skills, and they have to emmigrate or start working with something else and forgetting what the have learned and doesn't get updated on their field. And without those people you will not innovate anything or create any jobs of the future. Instead you have to import that shit from those who haven't closed down their manufacturing industry.
And since manufacturing jobs often are relativly well paid they also create many service sector jobs. The economist Enrico Moretti said that its estimated that IT-companies in Seattle creates about 5 service sector jobs for every manufacturing job they provide, so the wealth gets spread around.
And Free Trade doesn't work. You cannot afford to get strategically important sectors of the economy taken over by foreigners and runned for their interests instead for the interest of the American economy as a whole. And a free market might be good at doing what is good for today, but it isn't much interested in what is most profitable in the future and in the long run. Having an industry and having government willing to do risktaking research creates the jobs of the future that you talk about.
The government is good at making scientific research, while the private sector are good at using the new technologies to make new products. And the result of this are the Ipads, medicines and advanced weaponsystems that brings lots of foreign money into your country so you can buy foreign products. And your country is innovative and attracts great minds around the world, as well as it creating riches.
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The private sector are cowards. All the tecnolgies in an Ipad (GPS, Siri, touchscreen, the internet and so on) was developed by the government. The government most make the groudbreaking research, because the private sector is too short-termed, have too small economic muscles compared to the government and its totally uninterested in science and research unless it can find a way of making a profit by a scientific discovery.
But when most the costly risky research has been done, its very innovative in its way to commercialising new technologies into consumerproducts, such as Ipads.
So if the government are willing to take the lead and direct public investments and help connecting people with special skills it can achieve great results. Germany have in just 10 years been able to expand solar power from nothing, into producing 24.000 MW (an amount equal to 24 nuclear plants!). China has made equally impressive gains in windpower, and have become the worlds leading producer, and is aiming to produce as much windpower by 2050 as Europe is producing energy in total by now.
Costs of producing a solarpanel or a windturbine has now fallen dramatically thanks to those two countries stubborn push, while UK has failed completly in their green technology research because the government refused to take any leadership and meddle in the market. So they made taxcuts for clean energy instead - but gained no results at all. Simply because the private sector doesn't like taking risks.
USA, which usally is a very innovative country that invents medicines, internet, semi-conducturs and spend enormous amounts of money on defence research, have also failed in green technologies for partly the same reasons as UK, and have only made a half-hearted commitment in this field of research. They let the solarpanel company Solyndra go bankrupth, while the Chinease had a similiar incident with the company Suntech which was saved by the Chinease taxpayers, and has now become among the leading solarpower producers in the world.
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The germans were right about the assumption that landings would happen somewhere within range of allied airpower. But they couldn't pinpoint exactly where, so there easiest guess would be that it would happen in the most narrow part of the English channel. The allies, then tried to reinforce that belief by doubling up the airstrikes at the Calais area, while normandy didn't get as much attention by the bombers.
So then the landings happened, and years of preperations.. with planning for what men to put where, getting the right equipment and then all logistical tasks of transporting fuel, ammo, food 1,5 million men. And it all that went smoothly, and deserves credits as one of the most succesfully planned operations in history in that sense. But what was not impressive was the failure of the allied intelligence to pick up information about the terrain around the beachhead. So while the allied were succesful in their landings, their breakout couldn't be done for 2 months.. despite the germans were heavily outnumbered (just 200.000 men) and didn't have the luxury of supplies as allied units and they also got hammered by naval and airforces.
The Germans didn't even commit half of their forces away from the Calais area even 2 months after the fighting in Normandy had begun, because they though it just was a small operation to divert attention away to an even larger landing.
The gemans had skilled hardened veterans leading their men, and they undestood how to fully take advantage of all trees and bushes in Normandy for making ambushes, and dug themselves in to protect themselves from allied bombardement. The Americans under Patton tried to make a push in the west but got stuck, and Montgomery tired to make a push in the east but failed. The allied intelligence simply had forgot taking this terrain into consideration when they planned the Normandy landings.. despite all access to air reconnaissance planes, local partisans, people who had lived, worked and in the area or been there for tourism.
The sturdy buildings, the stone walls, the thick hedgerows, the tightly clustered houses in many villages, the narrow roads which often were sunken or having stone embarkments on either sides, lots of sturdy buildings enables every competend commander to recreate a great defensive position like the german lines in world war 1.
The allied tried multiple times to breakout but failed every time.. and it seemed like the Germans could have contained them in Normandy for the entire rest of the year. And things didn't look happier for the allies when the british army was starting to run out of infantry after all the fighting.
So an allied a push towards Cherbourg was needed so the troops in Normandy could get a harbour, so the job of supplying this huge force could be done easier. And the American push to the west was succesful, but the main German defensive line around Normandy remained intact, and the allies were still contained by this tiny German force.
But the loss of Cherbourg made Hitler furious, and he demanded a counter-attack.
So the German army repeated the mistakes the allies had done the 2 months, and now they themselves attacked with tanks in terrain totally unsuitable for them. And the Germans suffered so heavy losses that their offensive at Avranches that they had to cancel the operation. And now the German army in Normandy had been weakened so much that it no longer could hold the defensive line intact, as the allies made their next breakout attempt. So at the end of the month the German defense had collapsed, and Hitler had helped to create one of the most fateful military defeats the German army suffered from in World War 2.
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But if you use killratio as a measurement of success, then you will end up with very strange conclutions. First of all, I don't know how you numbers are calculated. Many russian tanks was lost in 1941 thanks to airpower attacking the railway transports and only about half the tanks was operational when the Germans invaded due the lack of maintance and repairs. So if half the tanks in a unit is away on repairs, then its much harder to fight effectivly.
Furthermore, the german forces had more experienced crewmen, while the russians used untrained farmboys. The Germans had refined their combat tactics after the wars in the west, while the russians had purged their army. The germans also had air superiority til the battle of Kursk, so they didn't have to the same constraints. The early t-34 tanks did also lack radio which decreased the level of co-ordination of a unit. And in the early war was the russian tank arm scattered in small units, so when the russians managed to do a succesful attack the effects became very limited.
In all, the tank was great in combat, but bad tactics, bad tank crews and other factors limited its performance. And that is hardly the fault of the tank in itself.
With the reasoning that killratios = success, one could argue that the Elephant was the best tank in world war 2, since it had the highest killratio of any tank.
If the numbers are inflated, and to what extent the role of crewskill, leadership, noobiness of the enemy and circumstances played in, I don't know.
However, that tank was considered unreliable, too heavy, too slow, too inflexible when it its so slow and can't use most bridges, and it did cost way too much to produce, it lacked a mobile turret.
So the germans only produced a few of them and took them out of production in less than a year. If killratios was everything, then I guess that the germans would have kept them in production never replaced them with Tiger I and other tank destroyers.
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"Understanding all these misconceptions and learning about how it actually was I can´t stop to wonder how the Axis actually did achieve so much during the war."
Germany had luck and the element of surprise. They had a superb co-operation between airforce and army. Their airforce tactics was superior, and they could use their planes more often than the allies since they positioned their airfields 20 minutes flight behind the frontline (instead like hours as the allies), which enabled them to fly more bombing missions with each plane on a single day.
The German army also had a long prussian tradition of good leadership and buraucracy. Encirclement battles, kampfgruppen- tactics, stormtrooper infiltration tactics, auftrags taktik was also important components of their successes.
The German army was the best in the world in World War1, but many in the high command were retards. But after the Versaille peace the army was deprived of its heavy weapons and forced to shrink from 3 million to 100.000.
All that meant that Germany only could keep its very best most talented men for the army, which it did. So the Worlds best army got rid of all but the best.
And reichwehr became an excellent little army, but it lacked heavy weapons and numbers. But that changed when Hitler transformed the army in 1935 and reintroduced conscription and created an airforce and armour divisions and artillery.
Germany then got both numbers and heavy equipment to their excellent leadership. But even so, so was Germany much less prepared for a war in 1939, than it was in 1914. But 1939 was a new age with the radio, which enabled coordination of supporting fire, reinforcements, troop coordination and mobility that now crushed the advantage the defending side had in 1914.
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The reason this crisis exist is not because of ISIS, but because of EU. When European countries signed the schengen agreement, they gave up border control around their own countries and replaced it with no-borders within EU and a common border towards the rest of the world.
European politcians pretend to be high minded and love the idea of asylum as a human right for people who flee from opression, but behind their backs they secretly pay guys like Erdogan and Gaddafi to act as watch dogs and scare people away from coming to Europe... because our politicians actully want as few people as possible should come to Europe. But they don't say that openly to their voters, so they act in this way instead - which is cowardly and hypocritical. Hypocritical because they call people question the right to asylum for xenophobes, while they themselves do everything they can to keep the refugees out.
So why did this crisis happen? It happened because the pressure from outside became too large for the countries protecting EUs borders... and when the dam fell, a floodwave of people came into Europe. And 80% of them wasn't even refugees, but just young men from developing countries who came to live off welfare or taking some jobs.
And so many people flooded in at once that no proper background checks could be done, because the government staff was overworked... and the politicians lacked a backbone to close the border. And the "refugees welcome" SJW fucktards thought that everyone coming to Europe was a Syrian war refugee, when most people were not, as I said earlier. Furthermore, the non-existent background checks gave Europe rapists, terrorists, criminals, islamists and lots of worthless welfare bums. Sweden took 160.000 refugees according to official numbers, but the Swedish police themselves think we took atleast twice that number that year if we include all illegal immigrants.
The situation simply became unsubstainable, and even with extremely intolerant climate we have here in Europe - where everyone who wants to
reduce immigration gets called a racist - we started to see economists, politicians, journalists, social media celebrities and others man up and simply demand that our countries rebuilt our own border controls again. And even the Swedish prime minister gave the pro-immigration green party a hard spanking into submission, and threatened to kick them out of the government coalition unless they pumped the breaks.
So the most imminent crisis is now under control, because most countries have acted like Sweden and created their own border controls - just like Europe before the Schengen Agreement.
But huge problems still remains, the green parties in Europe are still opposing a rational immigration policy because all forms of vetting is racist including age checks, kicking our criminals is racist, the police publishing the photo of the Berlin truck attacker was stopped by the German green party because they didn't wanna create islamophobia, media neglect reporting on migrant crimes, and in Sweden our idiot green party in some towns wants to give returning ISIS fighters free housing, free driving licence and help them get first in line for getting a job - things that are totally denied the white skinned blue eyed natives.
The Green party has simply disqualified themselves from any right to exist.
And it seems like they do everything they can to help ISIS and neo-nazi groups expand in Europe. And I cannot say that I feel sorry for them if they get killed in a muslim truckattack, because this is what they bring upon themselves.
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For me the question is: Is it effective? And the answer is NO. And to make matters worse, its probably just counter-productive. It just come across as childish, and more people will go behind Trump and the elements within the left will just distance themselves from childish idealists.
We should protesting against Trumps policies. And we shouldn't protest against Trump the person - because like it or not, he was the one who got elected.
I say, go out and fight when it is effective. It will make the left encouraged to fight whent they see that they aren't alone in their opposition to Trump, and the GOP will have to always think twice before they make something dumb because the backlash will hard and cost them dearly every time.
If you got the popular support, then it doesn't matter if you get called childish. A few years ago opposition against the illegal invasion of another country was childish as well as protesting the spying on average Joe and torturing people in the name of fighting terrorism. Calling people childish and unpatriotic was the fascist way of trying to silence opposition. If you disagree with the consensus of the establishment today, you instead get called a "populist", an "isolationist", a "disatiesfaction voter", "fake news".... all this labels are just designed to attack the person instead of attacking the ideas. So why do people do this? Because they don't like other peoples ideas, and they have no arguments.
So I hope some people got the balls to throw out the scumbags using this types of tactics out from politics, so issues that matters could be talked about. Fascism on the left and on the right both needs to go away.
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You have the ability to change your economic policies by voting, and shift tracks to policies for the workers, for the majority and for those aat the bottom. But if you choose to be a part of EU you don't have that choice.
The Maastricht treaty says that you have the four freedoms, and they are as holy as the 10 commendments are for a christian. You cannot for example nationalize your failed private railway system even when 70% of the britishers support the idea. Why not? Because the treaty says that all EU members have agreed upon having a market economy, and nationalizing the railroads would be considered as socialism.
If you want to sell meat, and ensure your customers that you have treated your pigs well and made them live a happy life by labeling your packed meat... it wouldn't be allowed. Why? Because EU rules says "that would be unfair competition", and we must have a fair competition so we can have a "free market". You see, the factory farming torture complex have EU on their side.. so they use orwellian language as "unfair competion" to prevent fair competition, so customers can't make an enlightened choice because they aren't allowed to know what they eat.
The Maastricht treaty, the abandoment of the subsidarity principle, the stupid Euro idea, the imperialist EU-army project, and the ESM are each on its own a suffiecent reason to leave the EU and scrap the project.
Europe can cooperate in other ways without having one country drive over another. We need more democracy instead of corporativism.
And I honestly never understood the dream old farts have of merging all European nations into one. That just seem like a naive non-solution to a problem of the past when wars were being fought.
The biggest problem in Europe today is neoliberalism. And EU is more a part of the problem, than a solution.
And this idea of an EU army frightens me, since it isn't an army of citizens designed for defending a country. This is an army paid for by EU, and thus not standing under the peoples control but under a foreign entity called EU. And this army is not a defensive force, but a force that should be able to rapidly deploy everyware in the world. EU wants Europe to militarize, and even as the Greek people are starving the EU is happy with seeing their high military expenditures and Merkel refuse to agree to a single cut on the Greek-German weapons deals.
EU wants colonial imperialist war for the sake of corporate interests, just like USA it seems. All EU countries have agreed up the convergence pact that demand balanced budgets, and this pact even forbids memberstates to overspend even in cases of emergencies such as stimulating their economies in an financial crisis.
BUT, for some goddamn reason are military expenditures excluded from that rules. So if you need to balance your budget they think that you should cut healthcare and education instead.
And EU countries have moved away from the large conscription armies of the cold war, and the leaders wanna rely more upon Gurkhas and foreign legion troops so unpopular wars can be fought without so much complaints when dead soliders return in body bags.
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when you call the Cuban system garbage, you simply don't know what you are talking about.
Cubas healthcare is world class even if it isn't perfect, and its a superpower when it comes to healthcare diplomacy. Not everything is perfect, because it is after all a 3rd world country who have suffered from decades of embargo that have prevented it from buying in modern equipment and drugs until recently. But never the less has they achieved impressive progress despite their minimal means at their disposal - they have managed to produce drugs from local raw materials and have developed their own cancer vaccine.
And in 20 times richer capitalist America infant mortality rates are higher than in many 3rd world countries, such as Malaysia who are slightly leftleaning in their healthcare system. So its not impressive what you get with capitalism, and Kyle also just recently uploaded another example on how private insurence companies are scamming people out of money and provide as little help as possible. And that is what you get a market economy approach in healthcare.
A costly, ineffiecent system with shitty services, while all profits goes to useless parasites.
And let me repeat again, capitalism is useless for disease prevention. And why should buisness interests even try to care about stopping a disease if it is no money in doing so? They don't care.
While a system run for the sake of benifitting society, instead of increasing profits for a capitalist.. would care. It would make a campaign trying to stop people from getting STDs and other shit in the first place.
Capitalism on the other hand doesn't care about human lives. Things are only produced for profits, and if a poor person can't afford healthcare he have to die. Just like someone who can't afford food have to die, even if there are plenty of food in existens.
And likewise do capitalism love to destroy public health by selling tobacco to minors in the third world. And destroying public health by overusing sugar and fats in foodproduction in order to increase profits.
So my stance is the same as Kyle on this - I want a single payer healthcare system. And the public system should stop being run like a buisness and the New Public Managment system should be executed. And the world should go back to the ideals of the 1950s with healthcare for all as a goal, and it should be funded by taxes and not by money out of own pockets per operation - which drives up costs.
And if people want beauty operations and other non-essential stuff, then the free market can handle that crap. Since it is non-essential service they do to society, and people have a real free market choice.
-Something which can't be said about essential services.
Its not like when you buy a shitty mobile phone from a company and then buy stuff from another company if you are dissatiesfied. If you get a shitty heart-transplant from a company its not like can switch next week after you have died. And its not a market with an equal relation between a buyer and a seller of a health service - people aren't some experts on organs on diseases, so the seller of a service can abuse his power over the buyer and make him pay an overly high price for his services and give him unnessary overtreament.
In a public system you don't have this problem since everything has a fixed price, but in a free market bullshit system you will have this kind of frauds. And if you try to deal with by more regulation, you fix it, but then you get more bureaucracy.
And less time then goes to the patient, and more goes towards bureaucracy. You simply get less healthcare for your money.
And likewise is our bureaucracy in Swedish schools a result of the rightwing governments push for more charter schools, and its no coincidence that then the Swedish School Inspectorate was created shortly after. And as a result bureaucracy was increased in order to make sure that private schools didn't misbehave too much.
And thanks to this and thanks to the Socialdemocrats in the 1990s, Sweden no longer have the best schools in the world when our results have plummeted, as teacher have to follow stupid guidelines, focus more on bureaucracy than students, and wasting time on failing computersystems.
Finland had the same schoolsystem as the old Swedish system, and according to internatal comparisons they still have the best schools in the world. And likewise have Finland kept their military and railroad system in public hands - while our railroad system is the most privatized in the world and our military is a mess thanks to New Public Management.
And our police is the most mismanaged department of all in our government, and also they apply New Public Management and tries to solve as much crimes as possible - which means catching people who drives too fast get priority over catching people who beat up their wives.
New Public Management - this idea that the public sector should be runned like a private sector company is flawed. Its the opposite version of King Midas who turned everything he touched into gold, NPM instead turns everything into shit.
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The energy grid took time to construct, and it will therefore take time to replace. And as the green electricity sector grows, new ways of dealing with the problems of costs, building materials will be developed, as it has in the past as the price of solarpanels and windturbines has fallen.
One could also deal with uneven energy production with smart energy systems to some extent I guess. But the problem with smart energy saving systems as I sees it is Jevons paradox.
And I don't see nuclearpower as a solution to anything, as our nuclearplants will eventually run out of uranium. And if windpower is useless when there's too little wind and solarpanels are useless when its dark, then nuclearpower is useless as well when the seawater has been heated too much by the sun so that the plant can't run for security reasons.
Older nuclear plants also needs lots of maintance, and frequently breaksdown (like the Swedish ones, which lacks any old spareparts).
And its not an energysource cleaner than solarpower. Sellafield gives out same amount of radioactivity into the environment as Chernobyl every 4.5 years. And Chernobyl will unihabitable for 800 years. One could just look at birthdefects and cancer rates in Falluja to see how clean nuclearpower is.
I frankly don't understand why nuclearpower have suddenly become so popular among leftist, conservatives and libertarians. Especially when its not folks in the thorium club, but people who like Uranium and MOX fuel that could kill all life on this planet much easier and more horrible than global ever would.
Chernobyl nearly destroyed Europe and Russia, and still people can't learn the lesson.
And even if we can't live as kings in the future when oil becomes scarce, we could still have it good with geothermal, hydroelectric, solar and wind, smart electric systems and locally produced goods.
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You shouldn't try to pretend to know everything and lecture other people about nuclearpower when you doesn't even know what Depleted uranium-ammo is.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/19/us-depleted-uranium-weapons-civilian-areas-iraq
https://raniakhalek.com/2013/03/20/u-s-turns-a-blind-eye-to-iraqi-birth-defects-worse-than-hiroshima/
And all western nuclear reactors aren't much better than Soviet ones, even IAEA admits for example that our nuclear plants here in Sweden suffers from more incidents and stoppages than the 4 chernobyl-type reactors in the St.Petersburg region.
Our plants are old, and they lack spare parts so engineers make ad-hoc solutions. and they have been upgraded in a way not orginally intended by the designers in order to boost the production of electricity by letting the termic effect increase, which in turn also leads to smaller safety margins if an accident happens.
And not just Chernobyl have fucked up, we have seen incidents at Windscale, Harrisburg, Tokaimura, and Fukushima to just mention the more famous examples in non-third world countries. And since you mentioned Sellafield I could mention that thing as well.
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_round_up/2617041/the_ecologist_places_leaked_sellafield_fuel_pond_photos_in_public_domain.html
And additionaly there have been minor troubles as well that doesn't recieve headlines or gets covered up by the nuclearlobby.
Not everyone who doesn't sing Hallelulja to nuclearpower is a greenpeace activist, if you think that I suggest that you should take the Soviet propaganda about the Chernobyl accident with a grain of salt. Certainly more people have died and suffered from bad health from this accident than officically have been stated. If one thinks that Kremlin has never lied about anything, then indeed that person is as naive as a hardcore Soviet communist.
Solar- and windpower industry is still in its infancy stage, and new ways of producing energy cost and energy effiecent is constantly invented. Price of wind energy has for example fallen from 30-50 cents/kWh in 1970 to 3 cents/kWh in the 2000s. Better aerodynamics, computermodeling have boosted reliability and trppled effiecency of turbine designs designs, and the operating avaiblity has increased 100% and the expected life-spans have reached 30 years.
And your whining about mining metals can be said about the building materials of nuclearplants as well that needs to be dug up. And solar and doesn't cause any algae, and it doesn't destroy the enviroment like uranium-mining. Solar and wind are also infinite, unlike uranium.
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"Oh golly - a person that thinks reading up on the news is a substitute for actual education."
No one has said that. You just make shit up in your mind. Why are you lying so much?
"Depleted uranium... Yes, that is a problem, no, it does not speak against nuclear power at all."
You deliberatly rip things out of context. When I first mentioned DU was when I talked about the products nuclearplants create.
"The use of DU in munitions is controversial because of concerns about potential long-term health effects. Normal functioning of the kidney, brain, liver, heart, and numerous other systems can be affected by exposure to uranium, a toxic metal."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium
You first say that DU is a chemical, and now you say its something that is a problem but have nothing to do with nuclearpower. Well it does, you havn't disproven my orginal statement that says that depleted uranium as a horrible product that nuclear power creates. The thing is toxic, and its no coincidence that Falluja is what it is.
*"Yes, sweden nuclear reactors suffer more accidents - that are reported.
And have you seen how many hundreds have died due to those accident? Oh, zero, really? Interesting."*
Just because someone didn't get harmed the first time when he was playing russian roullette doesn't mean its a good idea to keep on doing it. When we don't have any methods of getting rid of the nuclear waste its endlessly stupid and irresponsible to take risks by playing around with. If all shit at Fukushima had leaked out into the enviroment it would have been GAME OVER with this planet.
Thats the reason I prefer any energy source of over nuclear power. I even rather have global warming, if that was the only choice.
"So all the reports even from very nuclear-critical organizations around the world are all somehow part of a conspiracy to cover it up?"
You can for example go and watch a Chernobyl documentary by discovery channel, where the former chief of International Atomic Energy Agency - Hand Blix - admit that he was lying on behalf of his organization about the seriousness of the Chernobyl accident.
"Solar- and windpower industry is still in its infancy stage"
They are actually older than nuclear power - for wind specifically a lot older."*
We are talking about the developtment of energy through those means. You have also said yourself that nuclear power is an old energy source when you talked about Sellafield.
*"And now let us look at the real cost.
Oh right - it has heavy subsidies in nearly every country "*
Almost every infant-industry gets subsidies until it can stand on its own feet. By your own standards you have defeated the idea of nuclearpower, since it can't exist without government subsidies.
"So and uranium 'causes' algae somehow - of course."
When sea water is used for cooling, the water gets heated up 10 degrees when its released back into ocean. That heat contributes heavily to global warming and to the growth of algae. Swedens nuclearplants does for example yearly create 140 TWh of waste heat - which is a lot - heating all buildings in Sweden yearly consumes 100 TWh as a comparison.
And yes, uranium is finite."
Yep. Peak Uranium will happen 2030-50 according to most sources. And if we were to increase nuclearpower beyond todays rate of consumtion, to a level where all fossile fuels would be replaced by nuclearpower, then all uranium in the world would run out in just 4 years.
"You know what else is finite? Oxygen, water, neodynium."
Water and oxygen is not really in short supply for the purpose of energy. Maybe you have a point about neodynium, but on the other hand I believe substitutes can be devolpt, and I also don't think that one energy source alone will or can replace oil on its own. Nuclear power certainly can't due the lack of uranium and time needed to build enough powerplants to replace all our consumption of fossile fuels.
What I instead believe in is a series of measures of rationing energy consumption, and using solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric and biofuels altogheter. And local circumstances can decide what energy source that is most suited for the region.
"why not use the uranium? it will just radiate away slowly naturally"
At nuclearplants you get a cocktail of nasty radioactive materials. Iodine-131 got a half-life of 8 days, while other materials such as radioactive uranium could need millions of years, and plutionium which is extremely toxic got a half-life of 40.000 years.
If we are to wait for that shit to decay, we will have to wait forever.
"And why are you so fixated on old technology for nuclear power only, but speaking about future developments for the others?"
People have talked about fussion power for decades without anything happening. And I don't like to gamble with our only planet. People can of course do some research on nuclear energy if they want to, but staying with the old style nuclear powerplants is a big nono for me.
"installing solar-power has a HIGHER death-rate per tWh, than running Chernobyl including its world famous end."
There are sources that say that Chernobyl took almost a million peoples lives. I doubt solarpanels gets anyware close.
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In history we have gone from one energy source to a richer energy source. But the next transition doesn't seem to become like that, since no Energy source got an EROEI as good as oil. And without that you will not be able to maintain a GDP and as large as it is today and keeping the standard of living at this level.
You could of course invent energy saving devices, more fuel effiency and such.... but what will happen when that makes us use less energy? energy prices will fall, and suddenly oil gets cheap enough for some other dude to burn.... and that wouldn't help the enviroment wouldn't it? In fact it would just worsen the situation as new energy effiecent machines comes out on the market, and more people can afford to buy them and maintain them.
This effect have been observed endless amount of times before in history, and it is known as "Jevons paradox". So if you invent low energy lamps and energy effiecent homes, energy prices will just fall and the industry might just use up that energy instead.
So no, excuse my deep pessimism. I have absolutly no faith in we would be able to replace oil. I of course hope that we do, but I'm not convinced about a new energy boom. I'm sure that wind and solar industries will have a good time ahead, but I don't think they could act like a locomotive for the entire economy like the steamengine, electricity and the combustion engine did.
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You say only poverty matters. But you are wrong, because inequality matters too. Unequal societies have higher rates of crime, drug abuse and alcohol abuse, more droupouts, more teenage pregnancies, more suicides, more cases of psychological illness, lower average life expectancy, lower levels of trust and happiness, higher infant mortality, worse performance in schools and the list goes on and on.
So saying increased inequality is a non-problem is just ignorant. Furthermore, is high levels of inequality a threat to democracy.
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Bernie is wrong. The problem isnt soda, it isnt sugar, its the overuse of sugar in foods. When the food industry creates so much obesity in America that it becomes one of the greatest killers, then its not unreasonable to regulate marketing of softdrinks and forcing food manufacturers to switch to other ingridents than salt, sugar and fat. For example using spices instead of salt to cover bad taste of meat, or switching to other types of salt than sodium cloride that doesn't have bad health effects...and so on.
This is not a regressive tax, firstly because its a choice to buy certain types of products (junk food). And when Americas foodrelated healthcare costs exceeds the annual profits of the entire foodindustry, the industry certainly creates more damage than good to the economy and its therefore a huge economic gain to society to shrink this bad cost. The people may have to pay a bit more to keep eating their junkfood, but on the other hand they will have to pay less into the public healthcare system. The economic gains for you are larger than the costs.
The foodindustry needs to get more innovative to create allure by other means than salt, sugar and fat. Even Howard Moskowitz - the father of all foods in America, says himself that the problem is just intellectual lazyness. But there is no incentive today to using other ingreidents when salt, sugar and fat is so cheap. So the government should tax the overuse of those 3 pillar ingridients in food to help creating innovation. And it should stop subsizing sugar and cheese production.
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Drugs should really be the last resort emergency solution. Taking pills that have unknown side-effects might risking to destroying the brain for all future, and with it, all hopes of bringing a person back to normal.
90% of all psychological problems are just normal people who feels down or depressed, and what they usally needs is someone who is qualified handling this type of people and got time to listen. The best solution of all is as usual to prevent people from getting bad health in first place. And jobs and a strong social safety net, is for example a part of this solution. And people need to get a new mindset, your value as a human being is not equal to the amount of money you generate every month to a capitalist hundreds miles away, and just because he fired you doesnt mean that you are worthless. Furthermore, smartass shitheads telling depressed people to suck it up and just get over it, should be talked down. its nothing wrong with being depressed. If your family died in a concentration camp, would you just get over it if someone told you too? or if your 3 kids got runned over by a truck? or if you were a native american and white people killed your entire tribe?
People shouldnt be so judgmental.
Its normal to get depressed over some things, and some gets sad over different stuff than others.
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West got 3 weaknesses:
1. They look at war as just mathematic game, without realizing that not everything could be measured.
2. The wars in the middle east have been colonial wars, and real existential threats. But now the line has become blurry after hostile muslim populations have settled in large numbers in Europe.
3. The low birthrates have meant that fewer men can be send away from the economy to serve in the military, and not everyone is keen on sacrificing their only son in a war when they only got one or two childs.
So with less lazy military doctrinal thinking, huge concription armies and modern weaponary, and with good motivation for a just war, then I think the western Armies would be superior in a world war against China, middle-east, Africa and Russia.
Saddam had basicly the same crappy equipment as China, but the Iraqi army was slightly better upgraded, and their soliders were battle experienced after the war with Iran. And the numbers was also quite impressive.
But the USA led coalition would anyways easily crushed Saddams army like a bug under boot during the 1991 war.
So I don't put much faith in the corrupt Chinease army consisting of poorly equiped beggars.
The Russian military is impressive, but the country is hardly a superpower. Its GDP is smaller than Spains and its population is not large enough to play around and taking massive losses like in the past days of glory.
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And if people doesnt get involved into politics you will continue to have the same type of peope, over and over and over and over and over and over.
The decline came gradualy, because this is not some big time conspiracy by the elite. Rich tend to be overconfident about their own genius in unequal societies and stay away from the poor bastards and developing contempt for them.
While poor people often have lost their jobs, so its no fun to run as political candidate and people humiliate you for lacking a job, not matter how good ideas you have or even if the lack of job is the failure of the system rather than your own... and when such bad stuff happens people gets depressed, overeat, do drugs, selfharm, gets their social life messed up.....and lots of other things that makes it even more unlikely to get involved into politics because of shame, bad self-esteem or whatever.
The way to get out of this one-dollar-one-vote system, is to make people more active in unions and political struggles and get one person-one-vote to replace one-dollar-one vote.
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Sweden was the richest country in the world in the 60s. Norway is having a higher income per head than USA. Scandinavian countries got less people in prison than America, lower infant mortality, less obesity, less drug addicts, less teenage pregnacies, less dropouts, higher average life expectancy for both rich and poor. And on top of that we work less and get paid vacation.
Not everything is perfect in Scandinavia, not now and not in the golden years of Sweden in the 50s, 60s and 70s. But I prefer it any day to dogmatic marketfundamentalism. No country in the world spend so much money on health, a 3rd of the GDP. But still infant mortality is higher than some 3rd world countries. And the healthcare system is the US is in most aspect no better than poor Cuba with an average income per head that is 25 times lower than Americas.
I think America can learn much by studying other countries. And even if I dont like the politics of Cuba, I think there is lots of things we can learn from them when it comes to healthcare. I would borrow economic policies from 70s protectionist South Korea too....I really dont give a shit where good ideas come from and what political system they have, if they work good I would copying them. As long as the cat catches mice, I dont give a shit what colour it is.
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Vaidas Šukauskas
First of all, when I said nationstates did well in the two last centuries, I was refering to the economic miracles we had with national development strategies and protectionism. Free trade has been said that it will stop all wars because countries will become so dependent on each other that war will become nearly impossible. But that's simply not true. The world trade in 1914 was equally high as it was in the late 1990s. We had open borders between all European countries so people could travel without any passport. And all European countries were connected to each with a common currency (gold)........just like today. But yet, the war in 1914 happened anyways.
And responding to the oppression by monarchies is a strawman not worth wasting my time on.
The post-Napoleon 1800s was overall a peaceful period in Europe, atleast more peaceful than the post-world warII period in Europe. And it was possible without any EU. France and Germany didn't go to war either every 25 years like the Europhiles seems to think. Germany and France had 44 years of peace without any EU in 1871. And it would probably had been even longer if wasn't for bad luck.
Loving your country isn't a problem. Imperialism is the problem. And EU is an empire - that was what Barroso (the ex-maoist leader of the European commission) himself said. EU wants to opress small countries, just like the Soviets and Nazi-Germany and other empires. And yes, I know that there are significant and important differences. But nevertheless, has EU got many similiarities. Germany and France are treating small countries like expendable chesspieces on the diplomatic chessboard. Merkel is suggesting that Eastern European countries should be forced to take in migrants against their own will. EU overthrow the democratically elected government in Greece, so the Greek economy could be controlled by a technocratic junta. And the new EU constitution got rejected by the peoples of Europe, but EU refused to accept the election result and implemented it anyways above the heads of the peoples of Europe. The European Court of Justice have also ruled that the European Union can lawfully suppress political criticism of its institutions and of leading figures... and thereby sweeping away our civil liberties. And EU says nothing when Spain criminalizes protests, following the the economic crisis created by EU and the austerity measures implemented - as a will by the EU.
EU is imperialist and undemocratic. Its destructive economic policies have created the rise rightwing forces such as the golden dawn. It has put Southern Europe and the East bloc against Germany. EU has sided with Ukrainian neo-nazis while it messes up our relationship with Russia.
All those developments can hardly being said to promote peace.
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I support automation as well, and thats one reason why I want higher wages. Technological progress is nothing new, and that didn't create unemployment and economic problems. So who is to blame? -Those who designed government policies the last decades.
The new innovations destroys jobs, but they also create new ones. Besides computer programmers, there is also larger need salesmen when digitalization and robotization have enabled companies to sell a broader variety of products to their customers, medicines have started to become custom made for individuals since some of us respond differently to certain drugs, and that in turn createds more jobs to research those drugs, produce those drugs, and selling them.
And with more consumer products and more products suited to specialized needs there will also be a larger need for lawyers in the future.
Overall am I a friend of machines, since they increase output per worker and therefore enables the worker to get more stuff... OR if we should have a growthless economy in the future machinery still improves our lives since they make production more effiecent and less time consuming so we can have more free time instead.
And when we get more money and free time, we can spend that shit on ourselves or others. Get more teachers, get more nurses and we can have more libraries and more time to spend in those libraries. More jobs can be created in the public sector to get rid of unemployment.
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I am a leftwinger and I want restricted immigration. I support protectionism, taxes and regulations because thats what have worked best in the past, and the opposite policies doesn't have any good tracrecord.
I general I am not totally dogmatic in most issues in economics. When it comes to immigration is there an arbritrary line on "how many we should bring in". But I don't think open borders is the way to go.. since the fabric of society would be torn apart if billions invaded and all people had different cultures, different values, and different religions laws and customs. The welfare system couldn't carry the weight. And no one would care about their neighbour, unless "he is one of us". Wages would fall 40 fold, while the owners of the buisnesses make record profits when they can keep all money for themselves. Housing would become unaffordable when the amount of people outstrip the local supply of housing.
You would simply have a bad unequal dysfunctional society with free immigration. And racism would grow when jobs are scarce and unemployment is high. And worst affected would low educated blacks be.
For European countries you also get problems with the welfare collapsing.. and when it collapses people feel betrayed, since they have been agreeing to paying half their wage in taxes only on the condition that they then get good quality healthcare and services in return.
And when illegal immigrants gets into Sweden and get free healthcare, while us white natives have to pay for it with our taxes I get furious. If this isn't institutionalized racism, then what is??
And people from the MENA countries are also low quality immigrants, who are heavily overrepresented in serious crimes.
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"free trade system is destructive"
Yes it is. And free trade means open borders.... I am not saying you are willing to go that far, since I don't know how far you wanna go. The only thing I am saying is that it is getting destructive when a country takes too many people in a short period of time.
Sweden definatly took too many, and of the wrong kind. And the people worst hit by this wave of immigrants, will be other immigrants who came before them. Previously they had it harder than others to get a job and had to wait 12 years on average to get a job.. and when they got one it was usally just a low paid public sector job. The housing shortage causes the government to dump all migrants into a few areas, instead of spreading them out. And that in turn makes unemployment and segregation high, while fundamentalist muslims trying to police secularized migrants in how to behave.
And yes, migrationsverket themselves says that 80% coming to Sweden in 2015 was from countries which wasn't considered warzones. The mirror, the sun and the dailymail also all said that 80% of the refugees to Europe didn't come from Syria.
Btw, I don't like fascists. Neighter leftwing SJWs or rightwing SJWs.
I feel empathy for the working class all over the world - including the poor, the unemployed and those too old or sick to work. But I don't think free immigration is the way to go. Competition for jobs will just give the capitalists more power and weaken labour. And people will go against people. I rather therefore see that the poor countries build themselves up.
And we as the west should stop trying to stop them from doing so. Protectionism is the only way they can industrialize, and we shouldn't force free trade down their throat. If the should have free trade, then it should be free trade on their terms, that they have access to our markets, but we don't have access to theirs.
And as the world is getting more equal, we can protect our markets more.
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The huffington post you linked to proclaimed to debunked five claims
"1. The Majority Of People Are Economic Migrants"
Like I said migrationsverket - Swedish a government agency handling migration- even said so.
"Migrants And Refugees Can Just Stay In Turkey"
The statement is true. I know, the conditions in those camps are awful. But why are they awful? Because theres not enough cleanwater, food, drugs, tents, blankets.. you name it. And why so? Because they get no money. And why don't they get any money?
Because the Swedish government stole money (20 billion kronor) from the foreign aid budget to pay for the extra costs for all new migrants that came.
For every dollar spent on helping a migrant here, we could have given the equal amount of help to 20 persons with our foreign aid.
This migrant crisis politics is ignorant, stupid, and inhumane.
"They Don’t Look Like They Need Help"
Its a stupid argument that I have never made.. its tempting to call it a strawman, but since other people say those stupid things I guess I have to say that the newspapers criticism is fair in this case.
People who uses that argument against migrants are wrong.
"Islamic State Militants Are Posing As Refugees"
Well we already know that terrorist attacks have been commited by refugees, in both France and Germany.
Refugees And Migrants Will Ruin Economies
The one who says its profitable for the economy with refugees has to provide real strong data for it, unless they wanna be seem like a clueless idiot who disagrees with 90% of the economists.
The refugees Germany took can't even get a job at their low minimum wages there because they aren't productive enough.
And in Sweden, data shows that 50% employment among migrants can only be reached after 12 years on average. And thats before the huge refugee wave in 2015, so refugees will be even more unprofitable now when theres even less jobs in proportion to migrants. Furthermore doesn't the data tell the full story, since Swedens statistic of counting someone as "employed" is among the most generous in the world and people who study nonsense degrees can be counted as employed as well.
Furthermore do I think its clownish doublethink by green-leftist to support a citizen wage because of robotization taking all jobs, when they later contradict themselves by saying there will be more jobs in the future.. and we need migrants to fill them - Which is nonsense.
I support the idea of taking a limited amount of refugees. Not because of economic reasons - which would be a terrible idea since its unprofitable.
But because its the right thing to do. We cannot solve all problems in the world, we cannot do everything, but everyone can do something.
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Open the borders completly and billions will come. And I can't blame them, if I was living in the 3rd world I would like to move to America too.
And Americans are overpaid, they might earn less than 30 years ago, but still...
The only reason a bus driver in thee western world earns 40 times more than a bus driver in India is thanks to protectionism. Remove that protection of the jobs and wages fall to India levels. 3rd world people are willing to work for very low wages, and even if they don't find any jobs and just compete for them that will increase the power of the capitalist who can chose to only hire the cheapest and most desperate.
Wages will fall, and capitalist will grab even more power into their hands. And with lower wages consumption will fall, and demand for stuff will dissapear. Along with jobs, taxes and the social safety net.
Worst hit will be low skilled black workers, who are the most easy to replace. Their dreams of a good life like other Americans will be thrown down into the toilet. I don't think its strange therefore that Trump is popular among blacks.
Cheap labor will also make robotization and innovation stop, since humans will be cheaper than machines. Companies will make record profits, but because of lack of demand they wont hire people or invest in machines...instead they dump the money on the banks in hope of atleast get some return. The banks then lend out the money to desperate people who can't live of their own wages, or the banks play with the money on the stock market. And the result is high indebtiness, and bubbles in housing, real estate and in the stock market. Followed by financial crashes and shit.
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+Frank
Tariffs are a trade barrier.
Yes.
Diminishing trade leads to a reduction of welfare.
In the short run it might, but in the long run it don't.
Trade (no matter what or how) and both sides are better off than without.
I am not against trade. I am against free trade.
That's basic economics 101 (Ricardo etc)
Ricardos theory of comparative advantantage is correct in the short run.
But if an African country acquiremore advanced technologies, train up a skilled workforce, learn organizational skills so they can organize work in an effiecent way, and hire talented people so they could build effiecent institutions. Then it will be able to compete with the companies from the richest on earth.
And for this to work, a poor country must say no to cheap imports in the short run. The country should only import modern machines from rich countries so they can start industial production themselves. And then they may also need to import raw materials for their new industry.
So if they make steel they will perhaps have to import coal and iron in order to make their steel, and if they mobile phones, then they might have to import Litium to make batteries and so on.
But otherwise no imports should be done. Because the country needs to save Dollars and Euros to buy American or British machines, because rich countries don't accept Zimbabwe Dollars as payments for those machines.
And a second reason why protectionism is good, is that it helps this African country get some time to build up its factory, train its workers, find experts to hire, improve production technics and simply learn to make things as effiecently as other industrial countries.
And when the industry is strong protection is getting removed. And foreign goods can be imported and economic support from the government is withdrawn.
So why is this all so important, why do we need to industrialize why can't a country just get rich by selling broccoli?
Because a product gets high value when many wants it and are willing to pay much money for it, and when not many other people can produce this product there is not much competition. So much money can be made by high tech products.
And high profits means high wages for the workers so they can spend more money on things farmers, prostitutes, carpenters and hairdressers got to offer in their country and thereby creating more jobs.
And more profits also means more money for the government - which helps it to build more powerplants, better roads, a better police force, and a better education system that helps economic development.
And its hard to invent new ways to produce broccoli more effiecent. While industrial and chemical companies often can invent ways to produce things 10 times more effiecently or even 100 times more productive... so that makes strong economic growth possible, so a country can lift itself up from poverty.
While a free trade country just wants to keep on doing the same things forever, and don't try going into industry when they can't make money because of foreign competition. So the country stays poor. Because you cannot get a hairdresser to make 100 times more haircuts per hour, you cannot get a teacher to teach increase her productivity 4-fold by increasing her class from 25 kids to 100. Well, maybe you can but the quality of her service will turn into shit.
But the same thing isn't true about industrial production. During the industrial revolution production in the cotton industry rose 400 fold! And while a skilled worker could make 2000 cigars in workday in the early 1800s, there are now machines that can make 6000 cigarettes per minute.
And this production increase pushes down prices and makes things more affordable for everyone, it brings in profits to its home country and helps it to lift itself up from poverty.
Protectionism never leads to a competitive industry, but at best to a local production of goods that are not competitive
Then how do you explain the existence of Toyota? How do you explain the existence of Nokia when it made losses 17 years in a row before it started to make profits? How do you explain how the stateowned company POSCO who got much government subsides became the largest Steel company in the world and seen as one of the greatest success stories from the East Asian economic miracle after world war 2?
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I have no problems with religion as a concept, and even if I think its unlikely that a God exist its no way I can disprove God's existance yet, so theres no reason to be so judgemental.
With that said, I think all mainstream religions are total crap and have nothing that justifies their existence.
Their texts contains everything: murder, rape, genocide, incest, pedophilia, hypocrisy, illogical stuff, contradictions, racism, slavery, statements incompatible with science, and the list goes on and on.........
And not only that, religious communities have a tendency to backwards thinking as well. The modern Catholic church have been fighting against condoms, abortion and justice against pedophiles. And muslims is by far the most conservative group, with many mainstream supporters of sharia law, killing apostates and adulterers. And even buddism that many progressives love, is retarded, Dalai Lama has spoken against condoms, sex during day time, analsex, gaysex, and that sex is only for reproduction.
And besides holy texts and shitty morals by churches and ummas, you got things that contradicts those beliefs in a arheological, scientific and logical way. "How could there be a God that is almighty? If he is almighty he should be able to create a rock that can't be destroyed. And if he is almighty he should also be able to destroy an indestructible rock. So if the rock he created can be destroyed, then hes not almighty, and if he can't destroy it he isn't almighty.....So this talk about an almighty God is just nonsense.
And if you believe in evolution you can scrap your christian beliefs immediately. Because then there was no Adam and Eve, so therefore there was no "original sin". And since Jesus was sent to us - the humanity, in order to forgive us the humanity from the orginal sin, his existence seems pointless..........So if you think evolution is true, then you should think its silly that God sent angels and his only son just to be sacrificed to repeal the original sin. A sin that an almighty loving God could and should have done away with by just snapping his fingers, instead of sacrificing a human being.
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It is true that Germany didn't begin the war with a big army and industry like in 1914. The re-arment and competent leadership could compensate for some of the shortages, and later on would plunder help too. But it wasn't until 1943 Germany was able to make large scale assembly line production like the allies. Before then Germany simply didn't have any large scale factories and equipment for such.
One another thing worth mentioning is that an economic crisis can be positive for re-arment, since you don't have to take the unpopular decision of stealing workers from the private sector to feed your army with manpower. With the massunemployment, people rather happily went from unemployed to become a man in uniform, or going to a factory to make that uniform.
Americas quick total mobilization for a war economy in 1942 wouldn't have been possible to make as smoothly without the massunemployment, and all empty factories that laid idle and could be converted into factories for tank production and building guns. The low standard of living under the great depression also made people more tolerant of war rationing, since they were used to meager standard of living.
Had the economy been rolling along well before the war, people might have been protesting the higher taxes and lower standard of living and the limitations put on concumer choice.
But things wasn't like that, so the reaction in USA to the war became quite different. People remember it as a time when the American people became one. Everyone, rich and poor, black and white, women and men had to make sacrifices for the final victory. Unemployed was no longer seen as worthless, but as military service men worthy of respect and deserving of veterans benifits for risking their lives for the country. Other unemployed got jobs in the war industry with well paid wages, and since foodproduction actully did grow under the war, America could afford both guns and butter, and people could get a much better diet than other wartorn nations.
People got jobs, income, and unemployment in US went down to 0%! some factories owners even had to go out on the streets and start searching for workers themselves to fill the labour shortages.
And the high inflation during the war had wiped away the large national debt. The economy was rolling. New innovations was ready to become the next generation of consumer products. And the people which was broken and starving, was now in good shape and had their pockets filled saved money, since the wartime rationing system had made it impossible to waste the money on consumer goods.
And veterans was guaranteed housing benifits and could also contribute to the great demand for consumer goods that would create the economic boom after World War 2.
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Society has changed, so why shouldn't genderroles also change?
Raising kids, cooking, and cleaning was once a fulltime job, but now it isn't thanks to washingmachines, kindergardens, vacuumcleaners, microwaves, toasters, shakeandbake mix, refridgerators, dishwashers, electric owens, convenience foods, babyformula, toys, videogames, movies.. and so on.
We don't live in the early 1800s anymore. And the genderroles of the 1950s are outdates as well for the same reason. And neighter is muscles or intelligence much needed in the workplace anymore as diffucult tasks have been taken over by computers and robots.
Guys like Limbaugh need to be around women more.. (and then I mean, other women than mom). Women and men are 95% alike, if not even more. Saying the 1950s genderroles was the normal ones seems to me just as arbritrary as any other period in history. I don't see it as a biologically natural way of things, or why it should be. And neighter does I see any merit in going back in time in order to build a better society.
I can maybe agree upon famiies are being overworked and buys too much unhealthy convienience foods and spend too much time driving their car to their homes in the suburbs, instead of socialize with their kids and other people.... But that doesn't say that it is a good idea not letting women go out educating themselves and earn some money on their own, instead of being trapped in their lonely home in the suburb.
And as a man I like women who are more than just a pretty fuckdoll. I like women with brains and intellect.
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"The U.S.A is roughly two thirds the population of the EU. Is the U.S.A too large for being democratic?"
Yes. You have many groups within your country who simply hate each other, and the influence the average American have over the Federal Government is non-existent compared to a small country like Iceland who kicked the corrupth banker scums out. Brussels and Washington are not ruled by the people, but by the lobbyists.
I think democracy becomes less healthy when too much power is centralized into one place. But It can of course be an advantage too that the American Federal Government got huge muscles to deal with wars, earth quakes, regulating multinational companies, NASA programs and innovation programs as the internet. But on the other hand does power corrupths.
"nation-states as they are have their place and can deal with issues pertaining only to those particular areas they are responsible for. But something like the EU is for dealing with issues bigger than the nation-state, issues like trade rules, trade standards and a host of other global issues like global terrorism and climate change."
You have a point. And I am not against co-operation and pooling togheter resources for solving problems. But for that we just need to have a meeting as equals with other countries and sit down and talk, and do some give and take. We let everyone contribute in their own way they see fit, instead of regulating things in detail. We should listen to each others challanges and help each other out, a co-operation based on mutual trust and understanding. Unlike the shit EU stands for, where things are regulated by rules and treaties - but treaties are not a sign of trust, but of mistrust. And countries should be free to say "fuck that stupid shit" to rules it doesn't agrees with, such as for example the rule that you can't let your local school only buy meat from a farm that treat animals at a higher standard required by law, because that is called "unfair competion".
"people can choose policies according to their preference" why can't people do this in a bigger nation-state like Indians and Americans do?" If America got merged with the Arab world, would you accept to live under the laws they voted for? Or to take another example, would you like to share your personal banking account with your overspending uncle who never puts in any money and spend like a drunken sailor (like northern Europe feels about the south..yea maybe you help your poor country men, but would you help foreigners)? Would you like to change your foreign policy and fighting wars over a bumhole country?
This thing with one type of policy for all countries work badly when it should be implemented on countries with different history, values, cultures, languages, juridal traditions, type of economy, climate, religions, degree of development, demographics(...and the list goes on).
You cannot both increase the interest rate for one overheated economy and lower it for another economy in recession.
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America is a democracy, yes. But I don't the size of the country is optimal for it, thats all I have to say about that. Would I break the country up? No. I guess most Americans feel a somekind of beloning to this nation despite its flaws. But with EU its different, people don't feel like citizens of European Union, and there are no solidarity to other members of this union the same way like countrymen feel for each other. That makes it harder to respect decisions made without peoples consent, regarding taxing and spending, laws, and changes of foreign policy. Abandoning a policy of a century of neutrality and 200 years without war can be hard for a Swede to swallow.
You say you would respect a democratic decision in America, fine I would also if I was an American. But decisions in Europe are neighter democratically made, or created by your own countrymen. So I have little respect for them. Especially when it comes to undemocratic shit like ACTA, IPRED, TTIP, SOPA,Telecoms Reform Package, Data Retention Directive, and clownish suggestions of criminalizing EU-criticism and banning dangerous word on the internet like "bomb" and "terror".
"America's political problems lie more with its political constitution than its population size."
The problem is also that large countries are harder to influence for the ordinary guy and more interesting for to corrupth when all power is centralized. They also tend to become a bit arrogant to the rest of the world, like Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II and America Under George W Bush.
"economies are increasingly interlinked hence the necessity of common rules and trade standards with international bodies to make them. Such bodies need to be accountable thereby necessitating the creation of new and bigger body politics, without them the only way to do this is on an ad-hoc basis between states and the disadvantage of this is a profound one."
We could fix postal services and greenwich time without any supranational union, so I don't see any need for a Union to organize things.
And the problem with "race to the bottom" as
we see within EU today proves that a union isn't a solution, but rather part of the problem. If we for example want to stop anti-labor policies in Northern Europe designed at dragging down wages so capitalists can get richer and governments can steal jobs and growth from other countries, then the solution for the South is protectionism to keep out the cheap goods so jobs and growth can stay at home.
Furthermore, companies just can't move abroad easily. And secondly, low taxes, low regulation isn't the most important thing for a capitalist. Its demand for the goods he's selling. It doesn't matter if taxes are 0% and bankloans have 0% interest... He will not invest there unless there is any demand for the stuff he's selling. So by having a strong broad base of consumers, companies will come to the country even if your taxes are high.
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"Your problem is that you see these identities as more or less fixed"
Things have always been different, in different parts of the world for various reasons such as climate, the avaibility of resources that determined what the people do for a living and so on.
This might change in the future, if transportation costs fall to zero and we can invent substitutes for all kinds of resources and so on...
And then you would be right about things. A guy in London might have just as much in common with a guy in Botswana as a guy in Oxford. But right now the world doesn't seem that way. And decisions happening here affects me much more than something happening in New Zeeland. So local democracy still matters. And having people from other places deciding everything upon where you live without any consent from the ones living in your place
"You use Iceland as an example to try to prove smaller countries are harder to corrupt, what do you have to say about Luxembourg or Belize?"
Look I wasn't saying that America is totalitarian, I just think that when too much power lies in one-single place its becoming harder to influence a decision.
If you live on the same street as the guy ruling your country, it will become very hard for him to distance himself from the consequences his policies have on the people.
Thats why the banker government on iceland fell,while not a single banker got in jail in America for the financial crisis. Thats my argument.
Furthermore, I doubt the amount of lobbyism and corruption in Brussels and Washington is good for democracy. And with the silly wages and benifits politicians and bureaucrats gets there, they soon no longer got a single thing in common with the working man.
Maybe you now say I have avoided commenting the Luxemburg-Belize thingy? Well, I'm not saying that all small and medium size countries are perfect. I just think that things in general have an optimum size. A small country might lack resources to design policies that the people wants, while large countries got resources but often get corrupted by big money elites, have huge segments of the people with conflicting interests (like pro free trade farmers in California vs protectionist farmers in Florida) and those huge empires often gets a bit crazy like Großdeutschland.
Best would be a country with both some muscles and doesn't become too large for the people to influence.
"why not be part of a global power of our own making?"
The problem is the big bullies, not the small countries. And we should not becoming monsters ourselves when we are fighting monsters. I hate the idea of an EU army, it would not be for me, but for corporate interests forcing the will of European Empire upon poor 3rd world countries. I don't wanna be a part of that shit.
"create common trade standards and regulations (including workers rights) on an ad-hoc basis (which means doing things only for particular purposes"
Yea I think its great.
"it only takes one country to adopt lower standards to gain an advantage and then other countries have to match those lower standards to stop their country from losing out in business"
Like I said, race to the bottom can be solved by protectionism. Instead of having cheap Auschwitz chicken coming in and killing your meatindusty we can just block it. Thereby you could keep your higher standards of treatment for animals.
And selling shitty products will only hit back on the low standard countries. Why do you think that East Asian countries banned exports of low quality goods when they began becoming industrial nations? Could it be because a shitty manufacturer could damage the reputation of an entire country's export industry and hurting their sales?
"One way to try and prevent this is through tariffs but it should be obvious to you why this is generally not a good idea in an age of widespread international commerce."
No. it is a good idea. Economists like Ha Joon Chang points out that the heavily regulated capitalism with much currency controls and protectionism in the west 1945-1975 had much higher annual growth rates than the free trade periods 1870-1914 and 1980-2016.
If protectionism is so bad, then why did it work for China, Korea and Japan recently? And for the west in the 1800s?
The burden of proving that we need free trade doesn't lie in the protectiost camp, rather it lies in the other camp.
"Therefore you need big trading organisations to determine these common standards"
No. Like I said, we could agree upon things in the past without having any supranational unions.
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First of all I wouldn't make a youtube video telling everyone that I got food to plunder. But besides that I would buy food and toilet paper, because they add no costs to store up... you don't buy any more food or toilet paper, you just buy them at another time.
When it comes to finances my priority would be to pay off as much debts as possible, so a crashed economy would harm me as little as possible if I lose my job. So buying gold coins with borrowed money is just complete idiocy. The Eurozone is more in favour of debtdeflation and austarity measures than hyperinflatition or even high inflation.
I think a weapon is a good thing to have to keep muslims away when the police is useless, and a guard dog could also be nice. Having electronic sensors and a smart electronic security system is also a good thing to have if one could afford it. And if you are stupid enough to own useless gold or silver coins (which are useless items when people are starving and rather want food, heat, guns, and batteries) you could dig your coins down into the ground, and if you are afraid of metal detectors you can make life difficult for thiefs to find the coins by also digging down metal garbage at random places so the metal detector constantly gets false alarms.
And forming a local militia to protect the village in the case of unrest could also be a good thing, so houses don't get looted by robber bands.
And if I was extremely rich and had my foodsupplies, my guns, and my debt free life. I could add more things to my list - for example an electronc home security system with glass break detectors, laser trap alarms, security cameras, automatic lightning up of the home when no one is home etc.. and also add up some window fences, a wall (preferbly with broken glass in the concrete so it becomes painful to climb over it), and bushes around the home would added to deny insight, or removed so an intruder can get spotted early on.
When going out, you should just blend in with the rest of the population. If thugs see that you are rich they will just try to rob you, and your weapon needs to be hidden underneath your jacket and easy to access for you. So if a thug comes closer, you can fastly demostrate that you are armed and hopefully he will just turn around and try to attack oldies and women that are simpler prey for a local gangster.
And if you own wast amounts of money I say government bonds is a safe place. And owning forrest and farmland is also safe investments that also generate a yearly rate of return on the money you have put into it. Same thing could also be said with housing, which you can rent out.
Cash is also good to have available at hand. Retards who believe in hyperinflation can ruin themselves buying gold and silver, paintings and cars for money they dont have.
But as I said, I am more of person who rather fear deflation in Europe. And I also think peak oil got more of a longterm deflationary effect on the economy, and if America would go belly up again I think deflation would also be the problem again.
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I know they are different, but the point was: with F22 you can gain air superiority which is the key concern here. Having a luxury attack aircraft / fighterbomber is not as important as air superiority.
And America already got stealthbombers if attacking targets would be needed.
ondly, good luck moving a ground force of tanks and infantrymen large enough to be the first army ever to successfully invade Russia when Russian fighters, bombers, choppers, and their cruise missiles can destroy them at will.
I would strive for for air supriority because thats an advantage, but its not a total disaster if it is lost. Simply because air power is ridiculously overrated.
First of all you have anti-aircraft guns and missiles that reduce the effectiveness of the enemies attacks. Then you got camouflage that makes targets hard to spot.. especially for modern fighter jets. You can of course use attack helicopters, but their limitations are basicly the same as in Vietnam: they can't carry a big bombload (or what I should call it), and they totally lack armour and a single bullet into the hydralic system would be able to bring a helicopter down.
And then terrain and weather puts further limitations on the effectivness of airpower. Furthermore is the bombload that planes can carry limited, and the precision of bombs is garbage.
So in the end, all those factors combined. I think that airpower is far from a determining factor of the outcome of a war. Having a good army, good leadership and a good doctrine is of much more importance.
*"If we lose the war in the air, we lose the war and lose it quickly" Field Marshall
Bernard Montgomery*
And yet the french lost in Vietnam, and the Russians lost in Afghanistan. Furthermore do I not consider Montgomery as a great unquestionable authority on warfare after he failed at Caen and Arnhem despite numerical superiority. He believed in the failed breaktrough doctrine that also made Patton fail at Normandy and Metz, and Hitler also believed in it and had the same bad results in his counterattack at Normandy and his failed Ardenne offensive. But tanks aren't much effective for fighting in forrests and on narrow roads.
"Air power was responsible for victory because air superiority altered the complexion of the war from the very outset." Major General Vladimir Slipchenko.
Some say that the German army lost the war in 1941 with the battle for Moscow (according to the expert among experts: David M. Glantz). And yet the Germans continued to have air superiority until mid 1943. So Germany basicly lost the war before they lost air superiority. And even if one count Stalingrad in 1942 as the turningpoint, the fact remains that Germany was doomed despite dominance over the skies.
And the nazi industrial production rose throughout the entire war despite all bombings, and it didn't decline until the allies took Hitlers oil in Romania and the iron in France.
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Why not banning foods althougheter? Because we need food to survive. Small amount of salt is needed to survive, and a little bit of salt makes your spaghetti taste better, but then you maybe use too much and the food taste bad, and if you eat even more salt its getting unhealthy, and if you still continue to eat salt you will die.
So is salt a problem? No. But the overconsuption is. So therefore the amounts of salt needs to be decreased, by regulation or taxes or both. Same is true for salt and fat. And when it comes to soda its just empty calories and zero nutrients. Producting useless food that cant feed people and contributing to global warming, overfishing and deforestation is a problem that needs to be dealt with.
I support a tax on sugar for that reason. And when taxes on sugar rich food goes up, then we can lower taxes on something else, like income taxes for low income earners. By taxing a negative externality you will do away with health problems and enviromental destruction that costs society money... destruction you have to pay for with your taxes, even if you arent a soda drinker or meat eater. When junk food eaters dont pay for the damage they do, they force others to pay for their unsubstainable lifestyle.
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"I only watch german news"
TV is for idiots.
"I never saw any public news channel spread false news."
Besides nonsense that it was likely that the truck terrorist probably came from Poland... yes, anything but muslim. Thats what you hear in European media everytime there is a terrorist attack or a crime nowadays.
And the irony is that their lies are just contraproductive if the purpuse was to avoid fueling anti-muslim anti-establishment feelings.
Media is extremly biased. And public media is no exception. They clearly supported remain side on the Brexit vote, and they clearly took side with Hillary against Trump. I wouldn't say anything if corporate media behaved like this, but public media gets special funding because it is supposed to be fair and neutral - which means both sides should be have a chance to talk.
Which Germans I talked with says German media aren't doing. Brexit side gets less than 1% of the media time, and the opposite side gets 99% of the media time.
And Bernie got totally ignored by European media. Unless it was news that could shed positive light on Hillary Clinton.
So if you think media is fair, then you are a fucking idiot. Sorry for being harsh on you. But you are stuck in a fucking bubble and needs to talk with people with different opinions in an open minded way.
"I have never experienced sensor ship in germany which forbid the freadom of speech"
You never experience censorship in dictatorship either if you agrees with the regime. And you happens to agree with Germany's absurd policies, so of course no one is stopping you.
"unless it is obvious hate speach"
Saying you want less immigrants is hate speech in Germany, that what one case shown when the police was breaking into peoples homes over posting non-nazi, non-racist anti immigration posts in a private facebook group closed from the outside world. I say that is utter horseshit. The German government can go and fuck themselves.
"But the discussion is nearly always based on an intelectual level"
I have my doubts. German media is embarrassingly pisspoor. How else could someone like Margarete Stokowski or Wolfram Eilenberger have a job at the largest newspapers?
What you are doing here is spreading lies "Germany is a country which is severely restricting democracy and freedom of speech". This is absolutly not true. It's not Poland or Turkey...
Besides all hate speech laws we all know about, there are also other things. Let me just mention the tip of the ice berg:
-Merkel have proposed a ban on linking to websites.
-Germany is a place where a foreign government can sue a guy for making satire of a fascist clown like Erdogan.
-Germany is a place where you cannot even have private conversations in private facebook groups about anti-immigration without having your police breaking into your home.
And now there is talk about Chinease style censorship - a thing which in itself, is suffiecent to classify any country as a dictatorship.
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Because throwing fascism and imperialism on other countries is a good thing when we do it. The stupid peasants abroad should let our superior race govern their countries. They simply don't understand what is for their own good.
By ignoring the democratic will, can we force mass immigration upon countries who doesn't want it. We can criminilize political opinions we don't like. We can use the state to spam our political propaganda. We can force our kind of enviromentalism upon countries where it lacks popular support.
We are also ignorant idiots who have bought into right-wing beliefs, for example when it comes to history, and we think that globalization is a new phenomenon, and we exaggerate its importance. We ignorants also believe in the ancient myth of Bastiat, that "When goods don't cross borders, armies will", even thou Europe had as much free trade back in 1914 as we have today, if not even more, but that didn't stop a World war from taking place.
We have also bought into the myth that protectionism is bad for the economy, and we support lower wages because we think that can create more jobs for all immigrants. We equate all forms of patriotism with rightwing xenophobia and racism, no matter how moderate or pragmatic this patriotism is. And we ignore the fact that in the 1800s was nationalism a leftwing ideology that was opposed by the right, and that nationalism was a tool to gain liberty, economic freedom and unity for the people in the 3rd world.
We don't believe in a peoples army defending their own land with their own blood, because we hate the fascist idea of conscription, so we let other people fight for us instead - Gurkhas, the French Foreign Legion, Blackwater and such a like. We don't like the ideo of a democratic citizen army, so we rather let the elite have their own army to fight the wars we don't wanna fight for ourselves.
We also like wars for the sake of peace as Orwell might have put it. We are useful idiots for the elite, and always support military interventions in Afghanistan for the sake of the women, in Iran for the sake of Gay rights, and in Syria for the sake of the "democratic opposition".
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Alex Jones is a snakeoil salesman like many others: David Icke, Max Keiser, Gerald Celente, James Rickards, Kyle Bass, Mike Maloney, Marc Faber, Peter Schiff, Jim Rogers, John Williams, Bill Still, Karl Denninger.
Some of the conspiracy nutters can be interesting to listen to sometimes, like Michael Hudson, Ron Paul, Chris Martenson, and Nigel Farage... but unfortunatly one always has to double check every time they say something because they say so much nonsense.
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"Mount Pinatubo was an explosive volcanic eruption that threw lots of stuff into the sky, and lots of it high up into the stratosphere. And it sent out large amount of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. That acted, that combined with other molecules there, acted as a reflector of the sun, and it cut sunlight by 1 or 2%, which was enough to send temperatures down by a half a degree centigrade for the next year or two. We've known about this effect of calderas, of explosive volcanoes, for a long time, and their effects have been observed over centuries--that after, in their aftermath, temperatures go down significantly. And the idea is okay--this is done by nature, whether we like it or not. Why don't human beings imitate nature? Would that be a good policy to actually seed the stratosphere with sulfur dioxide? One of the things that is amazing about this is how incredibly cheap it is to lower temperatures by geoengineering--solar radiation management forms of geoengineering. To lower earth's average surface temperature by 1 or 2 degrees centigrade would cost less than $10 billion a year."
Source: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/06/martin_weitzman.html 51:31into the show.
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Identity politics doesnt add strenght to the left, it just cause divide and take focus away from urgent problems to talk bullshit like manspreading. And white hetero males are tought in schools that they are born evil, because they have a stick between their legs, without any fault of their own. No wonder that the left is weaker than ever in Europe and America got weak unions and the democrats are more of a centrist-rightwing party than leftist.
I do support 1st and 2nd wave feminism because I believe in equal rights. And thats also the reason why I am against 3rd wave feminism, black nationalists (such as black lives matter) islamists and other groups within the regressive left.
I prefer classic Scandinavian socialdemocracy over the new fake left that promotes marketization of society, identity politics, cultural relativism, EU membership and doesn't believe in democracy.
I made up the term "classic left" to refer to my own political stance as a contrast to the new bullshit ideas of the so called left.
Regressives love to call themselves nice things, such as being pro "social justice"... which I can admit sounds pretty nice, its two positively loaded words, but when they are combined they refer to something very bad. Same thing is true with the term "ethnic cleansing", its words that sounds good separatly, but put togheter they refer to something very awful.
And so one last thing...
I think human rights is important, but I don't define them the same odd ways that liberals do. For example, I don't consider the right to private property as holy. And unlike them I also consider the right to food and housing as human right that people should have, no matter what.
In that way I think I support human rights, while I think they don't.
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This talk about "human rights" and "individualism" became fasion with the 1968 hippies, who got co-opted by corporate interests. They discredited the idea of social engineering and the welfare state that the old left worshiped. The once so worshiped scientists and enigineers was now said to have destroyed the enviroment with industrialization, and macroeconomics and social science was seen as stuck in a dead end. So people turned into studies in ecology, cultural history and new age spiritual mumbo jumbo.
Massconsumption as mass-society was seen as a foundation for totalitarianism. The liberal left wanted freedom, and not overregulation. Freedom and no totalitarian big government welfare state. The left said that problems in society could not be solved by collective struggle and social engineering, so they wanted individualism. Enviromental problems should mot be solved by the government, but by consumer choice and individual morality. "Action, not politics!" as the hippies shouted.
They said that we were walking into a new age. A post industrial society with a knowledge economy. Knowledge would be more important than money. The assembly line was something belonging to the past. Dirty boring machine slave jobs would be replaced by flexible service sector jobs where people switched from one job to another, and choose their own working hours and instead of slaving under a boss, people would be self-employed and work in global networks. This was the future economy, and governments would be forced to obey the markets since the new economy demanded flexible forms of employment and flexible workhours and so on.
******************************************
Of course all of this is bullshit. We don't live in a post-industrial society, rather the opposite since the public sector now organizing work in ways borrowed from the industry with concepts of "Lean production" and "new public management".
The de-regulation-flexibility-lower wages-privatization, economic recipies have given us hundreds of debt crises and banking crisis world wide since 1975, while there was not a since national debt crisis 1945-75.
The inequalities are huge as Picketty and others points out. And the standard of living has fallen along with the inequalities. More people in prison, more drug use, more suicides, more teenage pregnancies, people feel more lonely as the fabric of society tears apart, more people drop out of collage, more people get depressed and obease and the social mobility is lower.
And this rejection of science and common sense and rational thought, have made the left confused over its own positions. And when the right is attacked, its not because their policies are irrational crap, but because they are "unfair" or "heartless". The political right are therefore seen as rude truth-tellers. And elections is more about a candidates credibility and caracter, than actual policies. It doesn't surprise me that the left embrace pseudo science as homeopathy, and are too confused to kick out radical islamists from a feminist party on the far left. The left embrace much bad right-wing politics and are too stupid to see when they do it.
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I don't know where you got that number from, but I'm still not impressed. GDP growth can either be the result of higher productivity, or by a growing population. In Swedens case, the latter is a strong factor. Half a million people came to Sweden last year, and today the country got 10 million people. No other country in history have tried such an extreme immigration policy. Swedens population growth rate is now in parity with 3rd world countries like Bangladesh.
A high GDP isn't the same thing as a high income per head (GDP per Capita). A country can have a huge GDP and a poor population (like India). And the opposite can be true as well, like Luxemburg.
So which country is the most succesful? I would argue Luxemburg is a better place to live than India.
And furthermore, Sweden's national debt is low, but the population is indebted over their ears. Swedens debt to GDP ratio is the highest in the world. And this is partly a result of the housing bubble here, caused by the tax shifts I talked about, as well as the idiot policy of balanced budget constraint for the government, so the people have to go into debt just to survive when the government is doing a stupid deflationary policy.
And Sweden didn't consider 7-10% unemployment as a sucess in the 1960s like we do today. 1% unemployment was the normal figure, while the oil crisis in the 1970s made unemployment go up to 3%, and then it got called "mass-unemployment".
Sweden also have a growing wealth gap. The railroad system is falling apart since it got privatized. The police is breaking apart. Swedens army was perhaps the strongest in Europe in 1994, but today its among the weakest of the west-European despite defence spending is still high. Our school system togheter with Finlands (which had the same system) was the best in the world til the 1990s, but today its partly privatized and the results have fallen like a rock, while Finland still remains number 1 in the world.
The list goes on and on. And Sweden is in no way unique. The Washington consensus is a disease spread all over the world. And the left have fallen in love with this shit, and they label everyone who opposes EU and unrestrained globalization as backwards and racist.
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I guess there are many differences now. Especially logisticswise with all combustion engines, railways, massproduced arms, and food that can last for years on a shelf. But media and demographics is also different.
And the cost of war have increased according to some:
"Lowell Limpus says that it cost Caesar about 75 cents to kill an enemy in his day. Napoleon almost bankrupted France because it cost a fraction under $3,000 to kill an enemy in his day. The World War ran the cost up to $1,000 per dead solider, and it is estimated that before the present conflicts ends it will have risen to $50,000."
And also ammunition consumption has risen dramatically.
On average it took 400 rounds to hit an enemy under Napoleons days, and
"In Would War II, the United States and its allies expended 25,000 rounds of ammunition to kill a single enemy soldier. In the Korean War, the ammunition expenditure had increased four-fold to 100,000 rounds per soldier; in the Vietnam War, that figure had doubled to 200,000 rounds of ammunition for the death of a single enemy soldier."
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Many reasons....
1. The Germans took the Russians by surprise and could encircle huge groups of men on the first days, and when encircled units were trapped without food, ammo, fuel and water their fighting effectivness was much lower.
Furthermore, did the unexpected attack on Russia cause lots of confusion so the Russians couldn't co-ordinate all their men to make effective counter-measures to the German invasion.
2. The Russian army lacked good leadership since Stalin had killed lots of Generals, Field marshals, Colonels and so on... and then he took incompetent, but politically loyal men to replace all his murdered Generals as leaders over their each own army with hundreds of thousands of men.
And those stupid incompetent leaders would make many mistakes... attacking on the wrong time, getting lured into traps, and so fourth.
3. Russia wasn't prepared for the war, so their airplanes were nicely positioned as a straight lines on their airfields. So when Russias former friend (Germany) decided to betray her, it was quite easy for Russias enemies to destroy thousands of Russian planes the first days of the war.
Thousands of planes was destroyed even before the Russians had any chance to make counter-measures.
4. The Germans would have the total advantage of control over the skies and could therefore use planes to spot Russians troop movements on the ground, while the Russians couldn't see were the Germans were going with their ground troops. So the Germans could make better plans than the Russians.
Another advatage the Germans had with air superiority was that they could bomb Russian troops on the ground and attack trains transporting Russian tanks to the frontline and easily knock them out even before those tanks had a chance to get unloaded off the trains.
And when German ground troops were in danger of getting destroyed they could always call their airforce for help, and German planes would rain bombs upon Russian troops and destroy their attack. But the Russians ground troops never had the same luxury in 1941 because their entire air force had been destroyed the first days of the war.
5. Russian tanks didn't have any radio, while the Germans had. So the Russian unit leader had to order his troops movments by using signal flags in the middle of all enemy fire. And the view range was also limited.
So if you roll forward and attack an enemy there is not much of a problem. But if the enemy on the other hand just suddenly appears on the sides and the tanks got no way of telling their commander, so he could order a swing to the left or right, well then you got a problem...
And Russian tanks would therefore often get outflanked and outsmarted by the experienced German tank arm.
6. The Russian army was in a bad shape when the war begun. On paper it was extremely impressive, but about half of the tanks in a normal tank regiment was in need of repairs before they could be put to use against the Germans.
And Russian infantry regiments often didn't have the manpower they were supposed to have in times of war.
7. The German surprise attack caused panic in Stalin and made him make stupid decisions out of desperation. He forbade retreats and ordered ill-crafted offensives that costed lots of men. And things didn't get better by him ordering the execution of people who disobeyed his insane orders.
And hundreds of thousands Russian solidiers would get killed by the Russians themselves during the war - a waste of lives and solidiers no other army in history have been able to afford.
And the Russians also used unarmed men in punishment battallions to attack German positions in order to clear minefields. And the Russians also lacked rifles for all of their troops, so a regiment could therefore attack the Germans like in the "Enemies at the gates" movie about Stalingrad, so not every man had something to shot with, unless he could pick up a rifle from a dead comrade to use... so the losses was of course heavy for the Russians.
8. Germany had the best army in the world in 1941. In fact, the army of 1941 was even much better than the German army of 1940 that had conquered Western Europe.
The confidence and pride of the German army was record high in 1941. The solidiers was trained and battle experienced. The superior German tactics from World War 1 combined with a great airforce, a skilled leadership, the invention of the radio, and the newly used kampfgruppe tactics had helped the Germans crush the armies of Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, France, Netherlands, Luxemburg, Yugoslavia, Greece and giving the British a bloody nose.
But as I said earlier, the German army had even become much better in 1941 than what it was in 1940. Since the Germans had learned lessons from the wars in Europe and seen what worked well, and what didn't work well.
So training and tactics was improved to deal with all the shortcomings.... the oversized panzer divisions had their number of tanks reduced by half, so more panzer divisions could be created.
The great StuGIII had proven itself to be a great weapon in France and was therefore ordered into massproduction. It was decided that German tanks should get more powerful guns, because they had lacked much to ask for in the fight against French tanks.
So Germany was in the best fighting shape, while the Russian army was in a shitty condition. Stalin had just killed his military leadership. His regime was extremely unpopular - especially in Ukraine where millions had been starved to death under his reign.
Much of his tanks was in need for repairs. And the self-confidence of the Red army wasn't that great after Stalins embarrasing failure in Finland - the poorest country in Europe - where the Russians suffered heavy losses against a small and badly equiped army.... while the Russians had plenty of tanks, planes and guns to spare, but failed to gain any results.
9. Another reason worth mentioning is that the Axis had numerical superiority at the frontline in the first months of the war, because half of the huge Russian army was positioned in the Russian interior, and not all Armies was sitting along the border with Germany.
So it would take time for the Russians to move all men to the front. And meanwhile did the Germans have the upper hand in the fighting the first months of the war.
The Germans had prepared for this war, and the Russians had not.
And the Russian road and railroad network got overloaded, which caused deleys and lower effectiveness for the Russian war effort. Wounded men had to be moved back. Tanks had to go to repairshops. Factories had to be evacuated and equipment moved.
And meanwhile did more men and equipment have to reach the frontline. And millions of men had to be supplied with ammo and fuel. And all this had to be done, while German airplanes was wrecking railroad stations, bridges, and attacked trains and supply trucks.
So things was quite caotic for the Russians in 1941 and 1942.
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Russia was fighting a life and death struggle. Hitler wanted to exterminate half of the population of Russia and enslave the other half. So unlike western countries did Russia not have the option of just surrendering, because of the unacceptably high price of such a thing. And the huge scale of the conflict and large territories that had to be conquered makes a fast victory seem unlikely to me.
Germany had many strenghts, but they also had many weaknesses. Preparations had been insuffiecent. German intelligence expected opposition from 150 Divisions, but after just a few months after Barbarossa had begun they had counted opposition from atleast 300, and despite they had already destroyed 150 by then so were they nowhere even close to victory. And many German Divisions were running low on ammo just 2 weeks after the war had begun.
Luftwaffe was bombing targets with steaming intensity, and its role in the first months was large, and Barbarossa could easily had ended very bad for the Germans if they hadn't been able to take control over the skies as fast as they did. The German army did had very little artillery compared to the Russians, and instead relied more upon air support to soften up enemy opposition. So when Germany lost air superiority in 1943, did the Army also lose much of its fire support for its ground troops. So if Germany had not won the battle over the skies the first days in 1941 and bombed Russian tanks to pieces before they even had a chance to reach the front by railroad, then things could have gotten very tough for the Germans.
Germanys preparations for the Eastern front conflict was insuffient. German trains was smaller than Soviet trains, and therefore needed to be refueled with coal more often and couldn't travel the same huge distances between coaling towers and water stops as Russian trains without running out of fuel. And strangly enough had no German planners thought about this.. so the Germans had no other choice than to start building an entire new railroad network in Russia with new stations and narrower space between the tracks for German trains. Which was a task that sucked resources.
German tanks got exhausted by all wear and tear the long distances it had to travel. And less than half of the German tanks were operational by October if I remember correctly. And the Russians also had many better tank designs than the Germans - but they had simply not started to build those tanks in large numbers yet and given them radios and learned how to use them move effectivly... but it was just a matter of time that the Russians would learn their lesson.
Germany had also started the war with insuffiecent warproduction. The lack of standardization made Germany unable to massproduce things like the Russians and Americans. And instead Hitler thought that he could win this war by using army trucks stolen by the countries he had conquered. But that just added up to even more difficulties to the German logistical organization. And that combined with Spanish, Italian, Hungrian, and Romanian made stuff just made the logistics hopeless when millions of spareparts had to be stored and transported
And I have heard that the average lifespan of a German military truck was just two months because of all wear and tear.
And Luftwaffe was running out of bombs because of all intense bombing. And pilots was getting exhausted by making multiple dive bombing raids day in and day out. And the logistical capacity to transport bombs and fuels to forward airfields was getting harder and harder. So the Luftwaffe had to prioritize between ground support and strikes against communications and industrial facilities... because there was simply not enough planes and bombs to attack all targets that the Germans wanted destroyed at the moment.
And in the long run did Russia have many advantages. Its huge landmass enabled it to sacrifice land to an enemy in a way other countries could not afford to. Its large landmass also provided Russia with lots of resources, such as oil, while the Germans had to set aside large resources to produce much more expensive oil in amounts that were also much smaller. Germany did also consume more food than it produced, and importing food was not an option because of the royal navy blockade... so it was not in a favourable position in a long war.
Russia was also slowly learning from its mistakes. And the confusion the first weeks of the war did not last forever. The Soviet air force was copying Luftwaffes tactics. Soviet tanks was supporting the infantry in their attacks so their attacks didn't just collapse in 1943 like they did in 1942 and 1941. Weapons got improved, and tanks were made easier to massproduce. And the Russians never over-engineered weapons like the Germans too often did.
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Barbarossa was a bad plan on a too large scale with too little planning. The German airforce ran out of bombs to drop. Army units were running low on ammo within the first weeks. More than half of all tanks were no longer operational by October thanks to heavy losses by combat and wear and tear. The Germans had also not planned anything at all on how to refuel their small trains with coal on the Russian railway lines that was built for supplying larger Russian trains that didn't need refueling as often as German trains.... so the Russian water and coaling stations were standing too far apart from each other to be used by the German trains, so new ones had to be built.
Furthermore was the idea of occupying everything west of the Ural mountains completly unrealistic. Militarily as well as logistically. And starting a genocide on East Europeans didn't make things easier.
So I am not surprised at all that Germany couldn't win the war in 1941 or 1942. I am rather surprised that things didn't turn into a disaster for them in 1941 instead of 1944... after all was it just pure luck that the Luftwaffe could destroy the red airforce - the world largest airforce by far - on the first days of the war... and therefore was able to unhindred bomb Russian ground troops and destroy their attacks and soften up their defences.
And if Stalin just had a few IQ-points above 60, he should have not overextended his winter-offensive that almost destroyed the entire German army on the Eastern front. And if the Russians had used their superior tanks (KV2, KV1, T-34, BT7) to fight togheter instead of being spread out destoyed piecemeal by the German tankers, then the Russians could have avoided many unnessary losses and inflicted heavy casualties on the Germans.
My adivice to Hitler would be to fix supplies and tanks for a long war before attacking, and meanwhile let the German army fix a victory in North Africa. And when a war on Russia should be unleashed, then grabbing Caucausus/Ukraine and Southern Russia should be the limited initial goal - since it is a place that can provide Germany with black soil, lots of oil, lots of factories and provide Germany with a strong strategic position with control over the black sea trade, and airbases for strikes into Persia and deep into Russia. And losing Southern Russia would be heavy blow for the Russians - that would be denied many key resources that could be very helpful for a long war.
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The problem is that we don't have the same national priorities and never ever will, and the EU is not a solution to this problem either because this is how things will always be.
Some countries are not interested in colonialism, while that is the most important thing for France. Some countries have different terrain, different potential enemies, different climate, different size of their wallets, different size of their populations - so of course do all countries in Europe have different opinions what the best tank should be like.
A rich country like USA with much oil and money to afford a large logistical organisation for its military will of course like a fuel thirsty expensive tank that needs enormous amounts of maintance, and they like aircrafts that are expensive hangar queens.
While other countries like Germany prefers Leopard2 that is easier to maintain, but the tank is a little bit weaker in firepower and armor.
France does not care about the russian threat because they only care about fighting in africa against people with spears so they do not care so much about firepower or armor for their vehicles, but instead do they want vehicles that are fast.
A country like Ukraine would probably want a tank with wide tracks that can travel over muddy fields without getting stuck. While a country like Sweden wants armored vehicles that can drive through deep snow - so they prefer CV90 over Bradley for that reason.
And both Ukraine and Sweden takes the threat of Russia very seriously, while countries like Spain and France do not worry about getting invaded by Russia.
And then you have military doctrine that also impacts tank design. Germany think it is important to have tanks that can drive back just as fast as they can drive forward - while countries like russia do not care about this ability.
A country like russia wants tanks with autoloaders so they can have fewer men inside their tanks, and one benifit of that is that this also saves manpower that they can use in the frontline as foot soldiers.
Israel is a country with a very small population that cannot afford to lose much blood and meat when it is fighting against its many much larger arab neigbours. So their tanks puts an extreme priority on crew safety to minimize the risk that tankers die in battle.
But building tanks this way do also mean that their tanks might getting more expensive than they otherwise would be. And Merkava is a tank much criticisized for its low top speed, which is on the other hand considered a non-problem by others.
So building weapons is usually a game of making trade offs. And when a country have extremely different wishes than other countries it will become difficult to design a weapon that makes everyone happy. France do have needs that is much different from those of Germany, Eastern Europe, and Scandinavia so of course it will be alone in much of the weapons it makes.
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@RussianThunderrr "King Tiger is not a very good tank"
It was an excellent tank but it was too damn costly to build. You didn't as much bang for the buck. StuGIII gave much more value for your money, since it was a cheap machine that also did a lot of useful things on the battlefield unlike the King Tiger that was rarely ever seen on the battlefield thanks to its many mechanical failures.
"As for Stug... Well heve you heard of VK 30.02(DB)?"
Yes I have heard of it. But as I sees it, I would rather keep the Stugs and Ignore the VK project.
Germany needed to shut down production lines instead of open new, and thus create an even larger logistics burden. If they did that, then it would be easier to start building tanks in large numbers. Tanks without a turret are cheaper to build, they are less complex, they take less manhours to build, and when you save weight by not having a turret you can build a tank with more armour and a bigger gun instead.
So I rather pick StuG than VK, because you more easily can make StuGs in large numbers. And numbers is Germany's biggest problem at the moment.
StuG also got a reliable good chassi with excellent traverse speed, and it got optics superior to any German tank (except the panther). And you don't have to deal with costs related to opening a new production line and research, and kinderkrankheit problems that leaves German troops without tank support.
The VK is after all at best just an average tank with a good gun, and the allies can easily outproduce VK30D with their T-34/85, Comets and M4E8s. And when the allies come with their T-44, Centurions and Pershings then the VK will start becoming obsolete and the Germans needs to invent another tank to replace it with and have to start building Panther tanks anyways.
So I think it is better than to the chassis of old production lines and make them into StuGs or Jagdpanzer IV with the same powerful 75mm/L70 as the Panther tank - which is capable of knocking out any allied tank at very long distances.
And should the allies come with tanks too hard to kill even for the high-velocity panther gun, then the Germans could just start using Nashorn tank destroyers as a stop gap measure until they have found a good replacement for the old PanzerIV tank. The nashorn gun was capable of turning any big allied tank into a burning wreck from 3000 meters away, and it was also a cheap vehicle to make.
And when the German panzerIII and PanzerIV tanks and TDs would become outdated, then their chassis could simply just be converted into artillery pieces, Whirbelwinds, flammpanzers, and so on.
And then the war would hopefully have ended. The allies would probably have won even if Germany had played the cards on their hand in a better way. But it is also maybe possible that the D-day landing could have failed and that the Russians would run out of manpower and the war goes into a stalemate and peace would be signed on much more fabourable terms for the Germans than just unconditional surrender.
Maybe they for example could have kept East Prussia, Austria, Bohemia and German speaking areas in France and Denmark.. while giving up everything else they had conquered.
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@RussianThunderrr "There are few of different factors affected Tiger II reliability"
You know, all tanks got their flaws. I know that Russians never admits tis to be true about their own tanks, but it is true.
TigerII had its flaws like any other tank does. But fact remains that Tiger II was one of the most powerful tanks in world war 2 in terms of firepower and armour, and a 100.000 Tiger II tanks could have had a significant impact on the war.
"But going by just a battle performance, a lots of times"
But the point still remains that most tanks were not able of penetrating its frontal armour and the Tiger II could kill other tanks on longer ranges than vice versa.
"King Tiger performance was operation "Spring Awakening" the force of 600 tanks 45 of which was King Tigers, and no less then 200 Panther tanks attack bridgehead at Lake Balaton in Hungary"
Even the best tanks are shit when your leadership decides to attack with them in unsuitable terrain. Just as the offensives in Ardennes say very little about German tanks, does the battle of Caen, Market Garden, Seelow say little about allied tanks. With your way of reasoning one can then just as well say that IS2 was a terrible tank because it failed to take Romania in early 1944 despite crushing numerical superiority. https://youtu.be/7Clz27nghIg?t=2791
Furthermore was most Tiger II tanks lost to fuel shortages and the inability to recover damaged tanks before the allies took control over an area - which once again are things that should be blamed on the German army and not the tank itself.
Had Germany still had control over the skies and provided their Tiger II tanks with good and infantry artillery support they would have done pretty well.
"VK30(DB) would have the same turret as Panther"
If you just want a new tank with panther turret then why build an entirely new tank as well? Why not just build a panzer IV with angeled armour and give it the L70 panther gun?
Then you don't have to create a logistical burden of having yet another tank model in the German army. Instead you could gain from synergies like commonality among parts, when you use the same wheels, engines and chassis for all panzer IV variant - hummel, whirbelwind, nashorn, jpz4, pz4, pz4 ausf. k and so on.
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I think that the nazi leadership wanted anyone who could do the job of killing innocent civilians with a smile on his face was perfect for the SS camp duty. Killing women and children is hard to do for most people, so many Einsatzgruppen men hated their job and fell victim to alcoholism or mental illness after all deeds they had done.
So to motivate people of taking the job as a death camp guard, they offered higher wages and a life without the dangers of dying at the Russian front. And the men in the Einsatzgruppen got lots of alcohol to make their job of shooting civilians easier. And criminals and thieves were preferred for this job. They lack of morals made it easier for them to kill people, and their lust for plunder could work as a motivation for doing this shitty job so they could steal clothes and jewelry from murdered victims. Criminals did also often get the job of dropping the buckets with poison gas into the gas chambers.
The problem of course was that criminals had a problem with discipline and many of them became mad after all painful memories of killing innocent people they had piled up. So they could no longer do their job. So the nazi leadership did send them to the front - where they hopefully would die. Their death would solve many problems for the nazi leadership - eye witnesses who had seen and knew too much about the holocaust would die and take all their secrets with them into their graves. So the punishment of suicidal front line duty for the guard crew that failed to stop the Sobibor prisoner uprising/escape, was basically just another example of killing two birds with one stone.
Eye witnesses were killed, while punishment also acted as an deterrent example for other death camp commanders for what would happen if they too failed to stop prisoners from fleeing.
The system of killing people did become more efficient as time passed. Gas was cheaper than bullets, and letting slaves empty the gas chambers and burn the bodies into ashes almost entirely dump all the workload on the prisoners, so that the nazi guards did rarely ever have to do any dirty work themselves.
So while the first nazi camps were guarded by fanatical nazis in the early years of Hitlers regime, would they later on become more guarded by teenagers and elderly men that often lacked fanatical political beliefs. The elderly grey haired guards gassed people too, but they were often kinder to the prisoners than nazi guards of the old kind. And the teenagers had a varied temperament, a few were kind, while others could be extremely cruel and they felt like it was cool to wear a military uniform so they tried to make a militaristic posture and trying to impress on their superiors by mistreating the jews.
Another thing that comes to mind about the holocaust is that much of it was done by men in their 30s. Reinhard Heydrich was only 38 when he died. Odilo Globocnik was also born the same year, and he organized "operation Reinhard" that killed of 98% of Poland's jewish population. Adolf Eichmann was only 35 years when he planned all railway transports that would transport millions of people to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Amon Göth (the monster in "Schindlers list")
was only 35 years old when he became commandant of a concentration camp.
To me this seems like those men were too old to be fighting at the front, and therefore took this job of committing crimes behind the front lines instead. Useless men who wished to be soldiers, but stayed behind the front line instead.
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Gripen is a lightweight fighter but I don't think of it as such. I rather think of the big two engine fighters as heavy fighters.
And I believe that being heavy comes with a cost. Likewise do two engines come with a cost.
I believe that most of the succesful fighters of World war 2 was one engined planes for a reason: FW-190, P-51 Mustang, Corsair, Yak-9, Spitfire, BF-109, P-47 Thunderbolt, A6M Zero, F6F Hellcat.
There however existed two engined fighters: P-38 Lightning, Bf 110, and Me-262.
Two engined planes are bigger which means more air resistence. It also means twice as much maintenance - and they also cost more to fly and will spend more time on the ground instead of up in the air.
A bigger plane is easier to see and harder to camouflage. It is a bigger target for the enemy and therefore easier to hit. It have a bigger radar signature due to its larger size. A big plane like F14 Tomcat also takes up much space on an aircraft carrier, which means that few planes can fit inside a ship, while with a smaller plane you might be able to have more planes inside the ship.
Having two engines is however considered safer than just having one. And surely might chances of surviving a birdstrike be higher with a plane with more than one engine. However having four engines is no guarantee for surviving a birdstrike as Eastern Airlines Flight 375 shown, and nor did it save a two engined passanger plane from being forced to land in the Hudson river.
In the past was engines also highly unreliable so crashes caused by engine failures were common. So having two engines was considered safer for that reason. The engines on F4 Phantom was considered highly unreliable for example.
However, times have changed and engine failures are much more rare nowadays.
And if one look at statistics on the number of crashes per 100.000 flight hours are Gripen and F35 some of the safest planes one can fly. They are indeed safer than most two engined fighters. So the old argument that two engined planes are safer simply no longer holds true, when they crash more often.
And even in a classic dog fight without missiles would two engines be a disadvantage more than an advantage since it makes your plane bigger and a bigger target. And yes the plane might survive a first burst of enemy fire that takes out one engine. But then your big plane with inferior aerodynamics compared to the enemy plane with one engine will be at an advantage. You now fly with just one engine like he do, but you fly a heavier plane with more drag, so he will now likely much more easily outmanouver and outfly you and shot you down. So having an extra engine is likely no life saver in air combat.
A few Gripens have been crashing during training and excercises. And even if crashes are extremely rare, and happens more seldom than with other types of planes do crashes with Gripen still happens. But so far have not a single crash happened because it only have 1 engine - as engine failure has so far not been the cause of a single crash.
Indeed I also think that this obsessesion of an almost purely theoretical risk only, of a crash due to engine fire being silly.
If enemy fire destroy one engine and sets it on fire on one plane, then you often times gets both engines knocked out by the fire pretty quickly as they lay closely to the other engine, so when the fire spreads then do both engines quickly cook off.
So for that reason would I rather feel safer flying a Gripen E over the artic region for Canada, then what I would if I was flying a plane with two engines that have a higher number of crashes per 100.000 flight hours like say F4 Phantom.
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Sweden worked best in the 1950s and 1960s during the horrible years of socialism when the top marginal tax rate was over 90%. Sweden was even ranked as the richest country on the planet in the late 1960s. And it had the 4th largest air force and the army would be military numbering 800.000 men in times of war.
But since the free market and the EU came to Sweden in the 1990s have Sweden fallen and become shit.
Sweden used to have the best education system together with Finland which had the same model. But in the 1990s did Sweden privatize its education and school results fell like a rock, while Finland's school system is still considered the best in the world.
Sweden is by no way unique by the way. USA during the years of a Communist Republican president Eisenhower was having a golden age during the 1950s when corporate taxes was around 60% and the richest people had to pay more than 90% of their income in taxes. The government built highways and the economy was roaring. Never before in human history did countries have such high growth rates and low unemployment.
And this was in the 1950 and 1960s when state control and rationing over the economy was still a thing in most countries after the war. When corporate taxes of 60% were the norm and not the exception in the western world.
When income taxes were around 90% for top income earners in most countries. And when inheritance taxes, housing taxes, and taxes on stocks also were high.
Foreign trade was strictly regulated. The stock market was nearly non-existent in most medium sized countries (including Sweden). You could not even take out money from the country when you wanted to travel abroad, but before you would go you would have to send a letter to the government and ask the central bank for permission to exchange your money into a sum of foreign currency... so harsh was the capital controls.
You would probably call that time Communism. But it doesn't matter what you call it, it was still a time where the economy worked better than what it do today, when crashes are 200 times more common, when unemployment is atleast 6 times higher in most countries, income inequality has grown, spending on research and development has been falling, wages has been falling etc etc.
So fuck neoliberalism. It sucks.
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I would say that both France and Britain had better tanks than Germany in 1939-1940, and I say this more as an objective fact than a subjective opinion. Germany began the war with tanks with shitty armour, underpowered engines (compared to the allied tanks which had a better horsepower per ton ratio), and some french tanks had so thick frontal armour that it was immune to frontal hits from any German panzer.
Furthermore was the German tankers also heavily outnumbered, and their tank fleet was mostly consisting of pzII light tanks since their production of medium tanks was so low that they wasn't able to replace their weaker machines to any significant extent.
Germany was also pretty much in love with the idea of building boxshaped tanks, while the french on the other hand was early into that. The only minor advantage German tanks had, was having a two-man turret (which was hardly close enough to compensate for all the advantages french tanks had overall). But the Germans was good at realizing the importance of the radio early on, so they could oftentimes deal with enemies with better tanks thanks to better tactics - such as when they faced KV1 and T-34 tanks in Russia who lacked radios.
The only time in the war Germany actully had better tanks was in 1942-44 I would say. Because then they had the PZIVH and the Panther. And in 1945 the allies got their Centurion, T-44, ISU152, and Pershing... which were just as powerful machines as the German ones.
And overall did Britain actully build quite good tanks. Panzer IV and StuGIII was usally the best thing Germany had, and the Sherman, the Cromwell and Comet could easily take those tanks on quite well. Indeed, they were even slightly superior to those machines, and junk like Panzer III and Marder that Germany used is simply a sign of desperation since those things were hopelessly outdated.
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Germany was better at the tactical level, but they lacked supplies, they lacked experienced manpower, they didn't have air superiority, and they also made many severe blunders at the strategic level (much thanks to Hitler) - D-day, Arracourt, Bagration, Ardennes - which certainly speeded up the defeat of the reich with a year or two. Had Normandy and Operation Bagration not ended up as allied victories, then history would definatly had another course. Germany would still lose the war, but it would have taken a much different path to get there.
So was the German defeats in 1944-45 caused by bad equipment? No. An army can suffer terrible losses even it got excellent equipment - which the Soviet union proved in 1941 when it had the worlds best tanks, KV1, T-34 and Bt7.. and had very good artillery and yet suffered millions in losses.
Another thing we also need to remember when we talk about killratios and such is what kind of opposition our forces are meeting. Having a killratio of 30:1 would be impressive if a plane from the 1950s manage to shot down some MIG15s with skilled pilots, but having a killratio 30:1 is not that impressive if our pilot got a 5th generation fighter from 2017, those MIG15s are driven crappy pilots.
So a high killratio of a tank doesn't tell much, if we don't look at the circumstances on the battlefield, the training of the men and quality of the equipment and such.
And in 1945 things were dire for the Germans, their lack of rare metals had made the steel quality in their tanks really shitty, they lacked paint to camouflage their tanks, they didn't have much fuel. And having great tanks doesn't mean much if the support organization has fallen apart.
Without AA guns tanks were vulnerable to airpower, without proper recon they could easily fall into ambushes, without artillery to soften up the enemy attacks could turn into costly failures and so on.
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The allies had both better tanks and larger numbers of them than the Germans.
Somua 35 had sloped armour and was immune to all tank guns the shitty German tanks had in 1940. And the french 47mm anti-tank gun had the best muzzle velocity and armour penetration of any anti-tank gun in the world at that time. Its true that the allies used many old machines, but so did the Germans too. In fact, 90% of the German tankforce was outdated garbage (panzer I, Panzer II, Panzer 35t, Panzer 38t). While PanzerIII and PanzerIV only existed in small numbers, and their guns, engine and armour was inferior to the best allied tanks and those huge disadvantages could hardly be compensated for by any radio or extra crewman in the turret. Panzer IVD (of 1940) had only 30mm frontal armour, compared to Char B1's 60mm and Matilda II's 78mm.
Char 1b, S-35 and MatildaII were clearly more powerful than any German tank.
Here is what Mosier writes:
By May 1940 the French, as we have seen, had twelve armored divisions, comprising literally thousands of tanks, together with twenty-eight independent battalions of R.35 and H35 tanks." By that same point the British had managed to assemble one armored division, the First, comprising 156 Cruiser tanks and 174 Mark 6 vehicles, 100 Matilda tanks in two independent tank regiments, and another 200 or so Mark 6 tanks distributed among the "cavalry" regiments.
Like the Germans and the French, the British were still thinking about how to deploy armor, so in addition to separate cavalry regiments equipped with light tanks, there were two independent tank regiments equipped with "infantry" tanks, which in 1940 meant a vehicle known as the Matilda, owing to its ungainly waddling movement. The Matilda 2 was a massive vehicle weighing about 27,000 kilograms and armed with a two pounder gun. It was decently armored, and certainly the best tank the British had. The problem was that production was late starting (in September 1939 there were only two of them) and plagued by mechanical problems. In France the BEF had far too few of them to make much of a difference on the battlefield, although the combination of thick armor and a hard-hitting gun gave the Germans some nasty shocks in late May.
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This pocket was just stupid to keep.
80% of the Soviet army was positioned in front of army group middle, so a capture of Moscow would simply be totally unrealistic. The campaign in the south to capture Stalingrad could only go as far as it did because the Germans faced very little resistance when the Russians had concentrated all their forces in the centre instead, and thus leaving the south nearly unprotected.
And the catastrophic battle of Kharkov in may 1942 led to the total destruction of the entire red army in Southern Russia - so for an entire month was the road towards Stalingrad completly undefended and open for the Germans. But the Germans could of course not know how great their victory was so they could not capitalize fully from their victory at Kharkov.
But even if Germany made much progress and nearly captured Stalingrad, I do consider it to have been totally unrealistic to think that Germany would have been strong enough to launch an offensive against Moscow in 1943.
There was simply too many Russian divisions there. And too many trenches, barricades, minefields, tank ditches and obstacles had been put in place since the Germans tried to capture the city in 1941 for Moscow to ever become a realistic target.
The German army had been severly weakened by all losses in 1941. And in 1942 it gambled to capture Stalingrad and southern Russia with the strong divisions that it had left. So after two bloody campaigns launching a big one against a strong well prepared, well dug in enemy and capture Moscow would simply be unrealistic. The Germans could not even capture Kursk, and it had to deal with several big counter-offensives in the end of the battle (like the one at Orjol).
So the best thing Germany could have done would be to empty the pocket as soon as possible and create a flat defensive line, dug in and create minefields and barbed wire so that big areas of land could be defended by small numbers of troops. And then Germany could send away some men in army group middle to fight in the south to help with the capture of Stalingrad.
And once Stalingrad and caucausus was in German hands, then Germany would just make a defensive war against Russia.
And hope that superior German firepower could compensate for the lack of manpower.
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When Russia gets even more powerful and have even more monopoly over the energy will it use it for even more energy blackmail and jack up prices even more so Russia can make itself richer on your expense. Russia will get richer while you get poorer.
But if Ukraine wins, and a marshall plan kickstart the Ukrainian economy, then the opposite will happen. Competition between Ukrainian and Russian gas, coal and gas will mean lower prices for you the consumer, so that you get more money over to buy other stuff and improve your own quality of life. And as people can afford to buy more tables, microwaves and movie tickets will also new jobs be created in western countries and unemployment will go down and GDP will go up along with tax revenues for governments.
This will be a win-win for everyone. Life will be better for us, and it will be better for Ukrainians as money is flowing into their country by foreigners buying their natural gas. And the only losers will be Russia which will be forced to sell their energy at a lower price and make less money from it.
Being economically dependent on the small democratic country Ukraine is also a safer option than being dependent on a large warmongering gangster state like Russia. Ukraine lay close to Europe, which means lower transportation costs for all the food, nuclear power, coal, iron, natural gas and other things it has to offer Europe.
And with cheaper raw materials for European industry is it possible to lower production costs for European products, so that the EU could get it easier to compete with Asia on world markets.
While the opposite of course will be true if we let Russian terrorists win.
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@llJRLL1979ll If your plane is as worthless as your ability to read then I would say that I rather fly a Spitfire than and a F35. A to be true F35 is a worthless piece of garbage compared to Gripen, Rafale, Eurofighter, and Super Hornet and underperforms in parameter after parameter. A garbage truck probably have a lower wingloading than this sh!tty plane, and you still think it can win air combats somehow
😂
This "stealth fighter" have been spotted before by Eurofighters and Rafael. And Gripens Skyward G heat sensor is more powerful than the Pirate IRST on Eurofighter which was able to spot F35. Plus that Gripen is a plane that is cheap. A country can afford to lose 100 of these planes, and then just bring up a hundred more. But F35 have sold itself as a more expensive super stealth plane... so in a war it will just sit in a hangar because this plane is too expensive to be risked losing, and if a plane would be shot down then the blow to fighting morale would be severe. While the same cannot be said about a downed Gripen.
The reputation of invincibility was short-lived for F35 (if it ever had one as the most mocked plane in history) barely had Israel got its first planes before 1 was lost.
The old Gripen C have an equal (if not even a slightly better) kill ratio as the F35 in red flag air combat excercises. And comparing the old Gripen C with the newer Gripen E is like comparing a computer of today with one of the 1980s.
If F35 deserves to be called a stealth fighter, then its probably the sh1ttiest stealth fighter in history. As it can only fly with a passive radar in order to maintain its stealth, and it is incapable
of flying supersonic more than a few seconds, and it is incapable of making 7G turns if its fuel tank is more than half fuel, and Pentagons complains pile up about its short range and other things...
Gripen is a superior dogfighter. It is better at the ground support role. And it costs only 1/5 as much as the F35 to maintain. The fighter is cheaper per plane you buy. And it also cheaper when you include sensors, engines, pilot training combat simulators and such.
So its both cheaper and better. F35 would probably never have been born if people knew in before hand what a sunk cost fallacy failure this project would be. Maybe Americans at least can lick their wounds with the new knowledge on how to make the most powerful jet engine ever seen and pumped in many hundreds of billions to make its arms industry happy and in good health.
But otherwise I do not think America have gotten much plane for its money. And the deal have been worse for Americas allies which America refuses to share the data code with which makes this plane fly.
The F35 have been a failure regardless what perspective one prefer to use.
It have not been the great cost saver its proponents claimed, as the plane have been delayed time and time again and over run its budget time and time again.
The plane have been delayed and its stealth capabilities are becoming outdated.
The plane have not succesfully been able to replace the planes it was supposed to replace. It carries the bombload inside the plane, which makes its body fat and unaerodynamic and thus too un-smooth for being a good fighter. A fighter should also have large wings to be good at turning, but that was not possible since this plane was supposed
to be able to make vertical take off like the Harrier so then it needed small wings. And therefore do this plane have the most horribly bad wingload compared to all modern fighter jets I mentioned in the beginning of my post.
So its a fat bird that cannot turn and is therefore bad at dogfighting.
Its fighter big engine that should lift this obese plane consume fuel at gigantic amounts, so therefore is its range short and the plane is incapable of staying up in the air for hours and wait for a call of help from soldiers on the ground who suddenly need air support to avoid getting wiped out in an ambush... so this plane is therefore just as worthless at replacing the bomb truck / ground attack role of the A10 as it is at replacing the fighter role of F16.
It is also built too much as a fighter which means that it fly too fast to be able to see the targets on the ground and being able to aim its weapons on them properly. And unlike the A10 does this plane not have any armor protection so its therefore much more vulnerable to ground fire, and a single bullet into the hydralics system could then easily bring down an expensive "stealth jet", and boost the fighting morale with the enemy and lower that on your own team.
I think I should stop here, because now my post more and more starting sounding like disability humour of this terrible plane 😂😂
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Russian bots have infested our internet. Pro-russian politicians have hijacked our democracy in both USA and Europe. The war in Ukraine is not yet won despite catastrophic russian losses. That country still pose a threat to peace around the world. We have seen russian led coups in 5 African countries since the invasion of Ukraine. And russia have military precense and agreements with a large number of countries: Libya, Sudan, Guninea-Bissau, Guinea, Central African Republic, Rwanda, DR. Congo, Angola, Botswana, Leshoto, Eswatini, Zimbabwe, Madagascar, Mozambique, Mali Algeria, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Burundi, and Nigeria.
We have also seen Russias ally Iran engineer a war in Israel, and Venezuela recently invaded a neighbour.
So this cancer are spreading like metastases.
Putler wants Europeans to hate USA, and he wants USA to cut ties to Europe. Because divided are we weaker.
And unified are we stronger.
I am on the side of USA and against russo-fascism, and not the other way around. I know that a third of the French electorate have views that are the polar opposite of mine. I view them as the modern day party of Charles Lindbergh
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I am a bit skeptical of polls. I mean in my own country do both leftwing and rightwing voters rank the economy as important in polls. But in the end of the day is that not the issue that most people seem to care about that much. They have not read up much about economics - not even the basics. They do rarely ever make any facebook posts about it. And it is common that even people that are deeply interested in politics will yawn if you start to talk about the economy.
So I guess that people just say they care about the economy in opinion polls, perhaps just because they wanna think of themselves as responsible citizens, sophisticated, and all that.
But in the end of the day is it identity politics and such trivial issues that people spend hours on debating and researching. They shout on the other side and gets upset. The traffic on social media is constantly flowing. And I think to myself, if all those hours spent on this was spent on studying economics instead, then we would have the most economically enlightened population in history.
But I guess that people feel too dumb to understand economics, so they do not even try to read anything to understand it.
So the polls are wrong I think. The economy is not that important. People care about many trivial issues instead. And they get angry issues like identity politics, or a vaccine against a disease with a 2% mortality rate, or some silly "freedom issue" like smoking pot or abolish conscription.
Indeed I think neither leftwingers or rightwingers care that much about the economy, and they care much identity politics instead.
I do however believe that polls are correct when they say that immigration and gun laws are important for republican voters. Those are not trivial, even if personally do not rank their importance on top 5 priority list. But it is okay have different priorities.
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Norway was less populated than Sweden, so when there was not enough land to farm for everyone to feed themselves poverty started to grow and this was more of a problem in Sweden than in Norway in the late 1700s when the economist Malthus visited Norway and Sweden came up with this idea why some countries were rich and others were poor.
Sweden and Norway formed a union in the 1800s, and Norway gained much independence and favourable trade deals with Sweden, because the Swedish king hoped to win the hearts and minds of the Norwegian people so they would want to become Swedes on day, but that day would never come...
The early 1800s was great for the Norwegian economy, but for Sweden not so much.
Norway had a saltwater coast that didn't get frozen during the winter, while Sweden could not use its ships or watermills during the winter because of the frozen waters.
Sweden had 4 times more forrest than Norway, but Norway could still export four times
more timber than Sweden because it forrests were close to the coast and could easily be loaded onto ships and be cut water powered saw mills most of the year.
But Sweden couldn't do that. And Finland also had almost as much trees as Sweden, but all of them were deep inside of the country and far away from the coasts and too costly to transport with horses and water canals could only be used in the summer.
So Finland remained the poorest country in Europe until the 1930s.
And Sweden was also very poor in the early 1800s. But Norway was getting rich thanks to all timber exports to England, and all help it got from Swedish transport ships and trade deals. And when the Norwegians got richer they felt like they could do better on their own, instead of having to pull their poorer neigbouring country after them.
So ironically did Swedens kind treatment result in more Norwegian nationalism.
Norway was a succesful modern and progressive country by the standards of the mid-1800s. But Sweden was backwards. Even arab countries like Egypt had built railroads in their country by 1850, but Swedish politicians refused to build any railroads because they hoped the magic of the free market would solve the problems without any help from the government. And for 20 years nothing happened.
And finally did industry leaders in Sweden realize that something had to be done if they were not going to get outcompeted completly by other countries. So the Swedish government then decided to build the railroads in Sweden. And that was the start of the industrial revolution in Sweden.
With the railroads it become possible to transport all heavy timber from the middle of Sweden out to the harbours at the coast. And with the invention of steam power, did Swedish factories no longer have to close down their factories when the winter started and had frozen all water wheel powered saws.
And with the invention of the martin process could Sweden start using the iron ore at Kiruna - that would bring in billions of profits for the Swedish government, because everyone wanted huge amounts of this high quality iron ore. And Hitler so desperatly needed it to make steel for his tanks, planes and warships that he invaded Norway to protect the harbour in Narvik that transported this valuable Swedish iron.
The Swedish railroads also made it possible to transport other heavy stuff than timber, like coal and iron, so now it was possible to build large scale steel factories everyware in the country far away from iron mines and forrests that made woodcoal.
And the iron mines and ovens that made steel also began using electricity instead of steampower. And that was the birth of the electric industry in Sweden and Norway.
Sweden began building hydroelectric powerplants for electricity. And Sweden also invested heavily into education, so that innovators like Alfred Nobel and John Ericsson would create new high-tech jobs of the 1800s. Sweden already produced steel and electricity so it became natural that Sweden then also began producing mechanical tools and machines as well. And after we had begun with that we also started to make cars, military equipment, telephones and planes as well. And then Sweden also had enough skills with electricty to start working with nuclear power and even become the world leadning expert in that area in the 1970s. And the skills in making in machine tools and electrical components also gave Sweden a good starting point to make mobile phones, and Ericsson would later on become one of the largest companies in the world.
But it was the forrest industry that started to make Sweden a rich country in the 1870s when this poor country started to get rich. And just like the iron industry had led to new the development of new industries, did also the forrest industry lead to the creation of new industries in Sweden.
Sweden did not just sell timber, but also discovered that it could sell matches (as with Ivar Kruger that made Sweden the world producer of matches). But Sweden also began making paper by chemical processes that made the paper bleech. And Sweden began selling so large amounts of paper that it needed to build its own chemical industry to provide the paper industry with all the chemicals it needed. And so was the Swedish chemical industry born in the early 1900s.
And when world war 2 happened Sweden got cut off from all trade with the rest of the world. So it had to invent ways all foreign products with products made in Sweden - everything from Brazilian coffee, to military planes and tanks, to medicines had to become self-made. There was simply no other option, if Sweden couldn't make those things on its own then it would have to remain without them.
So the Swedish chemical industry was ordered to started to make medicines, just like our car producer SAAB started to build military aircrafts. And when the war ended Sweden had created another high-tech industry in pharmaceuticals, and companies like Astra and Pharmacia would become some of the most succesful medicine companies in history.
Norway would however more rely on oil, and Denmark on agricultural products - even if tuborg and carlsberg beer could be considered as industrial products. Finland however, would long remain a poor country that became independent from Finland very lately. It would however make some impressive progress with its strict protectionist policies in the 1900s and the stubbornness of the Finnish government would eventually pay off. The government supported the company Nokia that lost money for all the first 17 years of existance, before it became one of the largest and most succesful companies in the world and created mega profits for Finland and created thousands of jobs.
I think the key for the future is to let countries constantly create new industries. Norway is smart to stay out of the EU and have this option of having their government creating an own industrial policy instead of just listen and follows every order from Brussels that isn't in the country's best own interest.
The oil will one day run out. But Norway will never run out of new ideas to build industries around - like new medicines to invent and sell, like new weapon systems to sell, new solutions for cyber security, or enviromentally substainable biotechnological building materials.
Old industries die out and new are born. Facit no longer sells typewrites to the world, now when everyone rather use a computer. No one use telegraphs anymore when we have telephones. And the car industry created new jobs by destroying jobs of the horse and buggy industry. But society as a whole benifited.
Everyone in the world wants new better products, and they are willing to pay much money for those new products. And if only your country is the one with the knowledge how to make those products, then you have no competition on the market that will push down prices. So if you are leading the technological race then you will not have any competition and you can sell your products for extremely high prices and make high profits. And those high profits for your companies makes it possible to pay workers high wages and pay high taxes to the government.
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@ravener96
"but still, the plane itself is not as cheap as you imply."
When the cost per flight hour is so insanely high as 31.000 dollars per flight hour... and indeed, there are sources that say that the real cost is more like 40.000 dollars, and then I have not yet even counted in the last two years of high inflation.
I think that number is so insanely high that one cannot simply skip over that. You can fly a F16 4 times as much as F35, and Gripen like 10 times as much.
So then I think it is irrelevant what the plane itself cost.
Its not like I just like an air force just plan to buy a plane and then store it in a garage and then not use it for 40 years 🙄
F35 to me looks like an extremly expensive plane. Rafale, F16, Gripen all looks much cheaper in the long run.
I don't know any plane that cost so much to fly as the F35. Its overpriced junk in my opinion.
Having a cost per flight hour half as much as an old B-52 with 8 engines and much more drag is extremely unimpressive to me.
"basically any plane could be turned around quickly"
Most planes needs 20-30 minutes. It can perhaps be shortened in an emergency and if you fly a simple mission with not much bombs attached.
But other planes are not able to do it routinely like Gripen. And if we are talking about simple missions for Gripen we talk about 5 minutes on the ground. So I still doubt other planes can handle that. But go ahead and provide proof for your claim.
To me it sounds like you just make baseless claims.
"being able to use road bases is just a meme. even the f16 can use highway bases"
False. Its low positioned air intake and weak landing gear makes it unsuitable for using improvised airfields.
"and if you have a crew hanging around with ordenance you could rearm it in a few minutes too."
A F16 in the US military have one or two dozen highly trained mechanics to serve this plane which needs 27 hours on ground maintenance per flight hour.
Having such a big group of men following this plane around everywhere would make it extremely badly suited for being operated from highways.
Gripen on the other hand just only needs 1 skilled technician, plus 5 men with relativly little training to serve this plane. Indeed a Gripen pilot have said that he have managed to land his plane, refuel, and take off all on his own in less than half an hour.
So it is a plane built for this kind of warfare.
And other planes are not.
"the only unique aspect to the grippen there is that it has pretty short takeoff distance, letting yout highway base be shorter, an aspect only shared by basically every naval fighter."
A 1200 feet long runway is better to have than an inflexible plane like F35 that needs a 8000 ft long runway.
And those other planes you compare to needs a huge a huge ground crew which makes them much less suitable for highway bases.
"the grippen having the longest range is just outright not true"
You now make a strawman. Look what planes I compared Gripen to. I compare it with modern day 4.5 and 5th generation fighters. Planes that are available for sale.
I clearly stated what planes I compared them with in my previous post.
"both the f18 and f15 has longer ranges"
F15 have a longer range than any other plane in the west.
But Gripen E is superior to Super Hornet.
Gripen have a ferry range of 4,000km while Super Hornet have 3,300. Gripens combat radius for an air to air mission is also superior.
"the f35 has shorter range if you dont allow drop tanks, which i guess is reasonable, but if you do its about on par."
Internet give various numbers of the range of F35 ranging from 1,463 to 3000 kilometers range if you add extra fuel tanks. But regardless is that 1000km less than Gripen E which have a 4000km ferry range.
But you are however right that it is reasonable to compare Gripen to F35 without those extra fuel tanks. Partly because F35C cannot take off from a carrier with them on (and I guess that F35B can't do that as well).
And partly because F35 is marketed as a one trick pony, where stealth is the only thing that makes this plane great and other planes crap - if one would believe Lockheeds propaganda.
"i doubt you have any basis for evaluating the Ewar"
I take the word of military experts on this matter. Unlike other people do I not claim to be an expert at everything - as people do these days. They claim to be experts on everything from Covid, to military strategy, to submarine construction.
Gripen is considered a Growler paired with a Viper. But as I said earlier, its also more than that. With its highway basing, low maintance, its fast refueling and rearming, its meteor missiles, and its pilot friendly cockpit layout. It is a rugged aircraft capable of handling short runways and dirty airfields that most other fighters cannot handle.
It is overall a good plane. And in my opinion the best plane overall. And yes, other planes might have a few things going for them. F15 have better range, F35 have a slightly lower radar signature, Eurofighter might have 1% better thrust-to-weight ratio, Rafale is capable of flying on aircraft carriers and carry a bigger bomload, and Viggen have a higher top speed.
But I try to weight things togheter, and the overall picture I get is that Gripen E performs among the best in almost all those fields. And often it is the best - like it is with wingloading and range.
And given that Gripen also is the cheapest plane in cost per flight hour and undoubtably among the cheapest planes per unit cost if not the cheapest -
then I think it is fair to say that Gripen is the plane that gives you most value for your money.
It is also the plane that gives you the best pilots thanks to its low cost per flight hour and cockpit layout.
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@ravener96
"the f35 is the most capable plane you can buy with no close competition. rather than overpriced, its actually one of the best deals of the century"
LOL. Lets compare it to Eurofighter, Gripen, Rafale and Super hornet.
Which plane of those have the worst Thrust-to-weight ratio?
-F35.
Which of those have the lowest Max speed?
-F35.
Which of those planes are unable to Supercruise?
-F35 and Super Hornet.
Which of those planes have the lowest ferry range?
- F35.
Which of those planes have the worst wingloading?
-F35.
Which plane needs to the longest runway?
- F35.
Which of those planes have the highest cost per flight hour?
-F35.
As you see are F35 the crappiest plane overall.
"you compared it to the f18 and f16, and with bags both of those fly longer than the grippen. the f15 beats it by a LOT and you complaining about me bringing it in kinda means your attempt at cherry picking failed."
You leave out that I also compared Gripen with Eurofighter, Rafale and F35.
And Gripen beats F15 in instantaneous turn rate and substained turn rate - which is probably the most important parameter of a fighter aircraft. It also carries the Meteor missile which is superior to the AIM-120 as it is able to fly all the way to its target.
"the f35 blows the grippen out of the water in this area, we are talking orders of magnitude smaller cross section. the grippen has features to reduce radar signature, it is by no means a stealth plane."
The commonly used definition of a stealth plane is a RCS of 0.1 sqm. Gripen E have a RCS of that size just like SU57 which is also considered a stealth plane. So per definition could Gripen then be considered a stealth plane.
But radar signature is not the only parameter that determines if a plane is stealth or not. Heat signature is another - and F35B did remove its apparatus which mix the heat from its engine with cold air and spread cold liquids around the fusulage to cover up its heat signature from heat seaking sensors.
So when you remove that, then will F35 probably looklike a hot fireball in the sky as it have the most powerful jet engine ever built. And the flames from the engine is so hot that it melts carrier decks.
It will therefore be a hard stretch to call F35B a stealth plane when its heat signature is the worst of any plane and you could easily kill it with a heat seaking missile.
Gripens engine is only half as powerful as that on F35 so its exhaust is much smaller.
Gripen is also a smaller plane than F35 which makes it harder to spot with the human eye.
And with the electronic warfare package it is also more survivable against Russian air defence than F35 because Russian SAMs are quite good at dealing with planes with a small RCS, but bad against electronic warfare.
Gripen have a lot of both. But F35 only relies on its low RCS and is therefore more vulnerable.
Stealth is a relative concept. No existing plane is 100% stealthy. And even the most stealthy planes can be seen on a powerful radar. But the more stealthy your plane are the closer can you fly to an enemy before he detects you. And even if your plane only have a radar signature the size of a bird, and the enemy is suspicious about a strange bird flying at 1000km/h it might be hard to make a missile lock onto such a small target.
So as I see it do we have a cat and mouse game. Where we have better stealth on one hand and better counter measures such as better radars and long range missiles on the other hand.
Gripen have a powerful radar capable of detecting stealth planes and it have the worlds best long range missile: Meteor (a missile originated in Sweden).
F35 on the other hand is a stealth plane plagued with much delays and its stealth materials are no longer of the lastest generation.
And it really have nothing other going for it - if cannot run, it cannot turn, its just a lemon.
And the risk is that Eurofighter, Rafale and Gripen with their powerful radars and sensors still will be able to detect this plane from far away, before F35 can shot back.
All of those fighters have quite capable radars and sensors, and their radar signatures have been substantially lowered with use of new materials, and redesigns of air intakes and such.
And often times are the results quite impressive F15 have reduced its RCS from 25square meters down to 1sqm with F15EX. Or from 5sqm for F16 down to 1.2sqm for F16/block60.
Gripen is the 3rd most stealthy fighter in the world. But unlike the F35 its not a one trick pony. As Gripen is also capable of classic dogfighting. And with good electronic warfare, good missiles, good stealth and good flying capabilities is it a good fighter overall.
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@unitedwestand5100 Many knew the life threatning danger in their jobs at Chernobyl. And I have deep respect for their sacrifice. Many would also have done their job regardless if the Soviet regime would have threating them or not. Someone had to do the job - otherwise all us in Europe would have died.
It is the same thing as with Fukushima. Someone has to do the job at this dangerous nuclear site and die an early death. You don't want it to happen to you, and I don't want it to happen to me.
And you cannot send robots into this place, because radioactivity is so strong that it kills them.
So what do you do?
In Soviet Russia they ordered solidiers, coal miners and nuclear experts to work on the problem.
And in Japan they felt more hesitant to send in thousands of young solidiers to fix the problem.. so this place is still leaking out radioactity as far as I know. And poor old men and prisoners were sent to Fukushima to fix the problem.
So if you wanna have a cynical perspective you can see this as the Japanese government exploiting people at the bottom of the social ladder and sacrificing them to an early death.
But who are you and I to judge?
This is the kind of choices you will have to make when you have a nuclear disaster. Someone needs to do the dirty job or otherwise everyone in the country dies. I would very much like to hear what you would have done if you had been the leader of USSR or in Japan in such a situation - who would you have sacrificed?
And would you have fixed the problem? Or would you have done a half-assed job like the Japanese government to not get too much protests from your own population?
As much as I despise the Soviet government in every other instances, I do think they handled the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster in pretty much the correct way. Had a disaster of this magnitude happened at Harrisburg and I had been the president of the USA, I would have acted just like Gorbachtev.
I would have sent all concrete, lead, and materials I could get my hands on in that big country and then think about the costs later. My priority would be to save the life of my citizens and to prevent the nuclear plant from spreading radioactive material up into the air and poisoning lakes and forrests in America for hundreds of years. And I would refuse to accept that the groundwater would be poisoned and leaking out into the river and forever destroying the water supply for New York city.
And I would not sit idle and let a nuclear explosion destroying everything in 350km radius and pumping out so much nuclear waste into the atmosphere that an entire continent would be deemed uninhabitable for eternity.
If I would have to sacrifice American solidiers lives to get this job done I would do it.
I would preferbly take volunteers for the job, and thank those men by declaring them as national heroes.
I would also mobilize the army corps of engineers to build a sarcofagus so that all dangerous nuclear material would be trapped inside a box and not leaking out into the enviroment and kill life on this planet. And I would also have a talk with the newsmedia to not spread information (yea fascist I know) that could panic among the population.
And I would also kill all dogs and pets in that area since they could contanimate the enviroment, and could die a painful cruel death from radiation. People in Harrisburg would have to leave their homes forever. And
I realize that hundreds of tanks, trucks and helicopters would have to be left on a vehicle graveyard after the job has been done because they are all too radioactive to keep in service. So this entire thing would end up costing trillions.
Do I think it was worth it? Nope. That's why I don't like nuclear power.
I would try to not put myself in this kind of shitty situation in the first place by not building any fucking nuclear plants to begin with. But if shit happens, then it is too late to go back in time to fix the problem. Then you need to act and try to make the best out of the terrible situation you have.
And as I sees it was Chernobyl not the last disaster that would happen. Even after the world have runned out of uranium to use, humanity would have to deal with the problem of all the old nuclear fuel that threatening the existance of life on this planet.
And we need to store it safely for billions of years. And if just 1 out of the 500 nuclear plants gets destroyed by an accident, a tsunami, a meteorite, or by ISIS then it could be GAME OVER for humanity.
If anything is my worst nightmare, then it is this. This scares me much more than global warming.
If I had a time machine I would go back in time and kill all nuclear scientists because they have created a monster that we humans doesn't seem to can handle.
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The Swedish system is better but it have many flaws. I wish we had the option of direct democracy like in Switzerland so the class of politicians would be unable to unite behind the backs of the voters and vote in favor of stuff that lacks support among the wider public. Much like how bi-partisan work in USA is usually about making life more miserable, rather than making life better for ordinary people.
I also think that blocking parties smaller than 4% from entering parliament is undemocratic and stupid. Its only a way of rig the game in favor of the two biggest parties in my opinion, and it forces people to do tactical voting rather than following their own heart.
Because if a government that includes say 3 parties is risking to break up because of one party being kicked out from the parliament because it only managed to get 3.8% of the votes... then will people feel like they have to vote for that party to save their ass and prevent the government from falling apart.
So we have lots of small garbage parties in Sweden. Parties that in opinion polls only got say 2% support like the Greens, the liberals and the Christian democrats. And having 8 different parties in parliament is only making democracy unstable because some politician of those tiny parties put on the breaks for a governement of some tiny bullsh*t issue.
As a friend of democracy I see nothing wrong with having 8 different parties in parliament, but the problem here is that the parties are not that different. The greens are 95% similiar to out leftwing party and socialdemocrats, so I nothing that makes this party unique that would justify its existence.
Nor do I see the need for 2 liberal parties in parliament. And the christian democrats is just a 50%/50% mixture of the ideas from the nationalist party and the neoliberal party. So there is no point in having that party.
So by removing the 4% entery to parliament, you would quicker get rid of useless parties. While young parties with new ideas would find it easier to grow. They could enter parliament at a much earlier stage and voters will therefore not feel discouraged from voting for them as they will not feel like their own vote has just been thrown away with no gain.
And you Americans complain about the electoral collage. And yea I get it, "the winner takes it all" is a stupid idea.
But one good thing about that system is that politicians care about the whole country, and not just about the big cities - like in Sweden, where politicians only cares about Stockholm and the sparsely populated northern half of the country gets no support at all for the issues of its concern but instead its just seen as an area for money extraction, so that policians can give their voter base in Stockholm free stuff to get their votes.
So I am absolutly in favor of discriminating against urban voters. Especially since people in Stockholm have extreme opinions that does not represent the rest of the country. I would in fact be happy if Stockholm was kicked out from our country and was forced to become its own country / neoliberal failed state.
Furthermore do voters not understand how our state work, as its responsabilities are divided up att several levels. 90% of our laws are made in the EU to begin with, so the political polarzation in our country just seem hysterical to me. The Swedish election is far from a life or death issue when our politicians have sold out our country to Brussels.
The "regional" (provincial) elections is mostly about how people want their hospitals and healthcare to be organized in the province where they live. But here to do I think that a large part of the population does not even know what the blue paper they put in the balot is for. And its partly because people are ignorant and stupid 🙄 But it is also because our democratic system is needlessly divided up in so many parts that it can be difficult to get a good overview over the situation, so you can vote rationally according to your own will.
And finlly we have municipal elections where you vote on local issues that only involves your local town or villages.
Personally I think that our own federal government should have more power, at the expense of the EU, the municipalities and regions.
The regions is just a stupid artifact from the Swedish state that existed in the 1600s. So it is about time to modernize the state apparatus.
I think that with a strong government, would people know where they should go if they want to make political change, and who they should hold accountable if things suck.
I understand that I belong to a minority, when I hate the EU as much as I do and want a Brexit style referendum here in Sweden to leave the EU. But let's now instead focus on its harmful effects on our democracy. People votes for the Swedish parliament, and then they get frustrated when they do not get any change, and get angry on our politicians - but it is not the Swedish politicians fault, because the decision has been made in Brussels, and the only way to change them is down in Brussels. But unfortunatly are most Swedish voters too ignorant to understand this 🙄
And even many Swedish anti-EU voters are stupid. You can see this during the EU election years, when Swedish anti-EU parties grows in strength compared to how people have voted in the Swedish election.
To me this is the ultimate form of idiocy. First of all, even if say a Swedish anti-EU party got 100% of all votes it would still be unable to do anything useful - like for example leaving the EU. Because if you want to leave the EU, then you should vote in the Swedish parliament election for anti-EU parties instead. Voting in the EU parliament election is only harmful at best, and counterproductive at its worse. You will achieve 0% change in the EU, while the higher voter turnout will only be used as an argument for EU's democratic legitimacy. Had you stayed home and not voted - like in countries in eastern Europe where only 13% of people have voted during the EU parliament election.. then you have undermined all claims that the EU is a real democracy with support from the people.
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Europe will not get any high tech firms because every member country are not allowed to do infant industry protection and impose tariffs to protect their own high tech companies from foreign competition - and that leads to they are getting destroyed before they have a chance to grow. The chicken dies before it even has a chance to hatch from its shell so to say.
State support of certain companies is also forbidden according to EUs neoliberal dogmatic constitution. So this alternative solution when you cannot use tariffs cannot be used either. And hidden indirect stat support through military spending will not be effective and probably not enough to help any tech companies grow. Not even if military budgets grew by a lot with the Ukraine war.
So the EU have destroyed itself with its libertarian dogma. And since all this dogma is written into EUs constitution is there no way this problem can be fixed in the coming decades. Its probably easier for a country to just make a Brexit if it wants a new industrial policy that isn't a f***ked up failure.
Europe got talents in tech. No company can make high tech weapons like SAAB, Clipdrop is good at AI art, Germany is good at making music programs like Logic, Cubase, Magix and then do Sweden also have some famous computer games like Battlefield 1942, Candycrush, Minecraft, and it have Paradox Interactive, Pewdiepie, Pirate bay, Klarna, Spotify.
So Europe got smart people. But it has never been able to create a single tech gigant equal to Microsoft, Apple, Google and Amazon.
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There is much truth to that story.
Germany surprised attacked other countries, and their auftragstaktik always made them able to make decisions before their could respond to the changing circumstances on the battlefield. And on the strategic level was large troop concentrations encircled by the enemy and cut off from supplies and forced to surrender.
In Russia however it turned out that the enemy had enough resources to survive one gigantic encirlement disaster after another with hundreds of thousands of men being taken prisoner each time. And the iniatial benifit of surprise attacking a country dissapeared as time progressed.
And the superior speed of the German army could not have the same effect as in western Europe because of the long distances, the poor infrastucture and the wear and tear on the German army's vehicles.
The German army did still however remain the fastest army in World war2 throughout the war thanks to its ability to make fast decisions on the battlefield with its auftragstaktik and kampfgruppen.
But on the other hand did the German military still suffer heavy losses. The Russian army compensated its lack of skill and finesse by having Russian troops dig in and creating strong defences that were costly to take. And superiority in artillery, air power and amounts of tanks to support the infantry could help unconfident Russian solidiers to put up a fight against the German veterans.
And as the war progressed did the Russians learn to copy many of the smart tactics that the Germans used, and then use the same tactics against their enemy. The Russian airforce tactics became a copy of the Luftwaffe.
In the end however was it perhaps the large blunders the German leadership made on the macro level which caused the German defeat more than all the other factors already mentioned above.
Germany should have massed an extra army in Southern Russia to capture southern Russia in 1942. The German army should not have overstreched itself by launching its Moscow offensive in october 1941. They should not have invested so much in keeping Rzhev. They should have scrapped overly complex weapon designs, mobilized the women earlier and endorsed the He162 jet fighter project earlier and built surface to air missiles instead of V-bombs.
They should have locked the allies into the Normandy beachhead and turn it into a siege and a disaster for the allies. Hitler should have allowed retreats and allowed a more flexible defence, and then the disaster of operation Bagration would never have happened. And using German armour in forrests and swamps was a bad idea and many tanks were wasted at Arracourt, Ardennes, Budapest and other places
And giving the best weapons to badly trained men was a bad idea. And the German army after Stalingrad would have been better off getting reinforcements to existing formations instead of creating new units only because of political reasons.
The list is very long of the mistakes of the german generals, Hitler and his industrial policies.
Hitlers decisions was perhaps not worse than any other leader. But on the other hand did Germany's enemies have more resources to play with.
The loss of the Afrika Korps, the 6th army at Stalingrad, 400.000 men during Bagration, and the twenty divisions lost at Normandy, and the large losses during the winter 1941-42 with the offensive towards Moscow and Stalins counter-offensive also caused 200.000 - 800.000 losses to the German army.
All in all was those losses too much for the German army to take. And the war more and more seemed like lost.
One could of course wonder what would have happened if Hitler had spared his men and evacuated the Afrika korps and his other troops instead of throwing them away in this wasteful way.
But all of this is of course observations done by a person who have the benifit of hindsight.
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First of all, the greatest change in warfare was the use of barbed wire which was totally impossible to get through without endless bombardment of high explosive shells, and even with huge bombardment it could be a dangerous project to attack across no mans land. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hQ-otfHZx8
Secondly, the machine gun had dramatically increased the firepower of the infantry so a few machine guns could produce the same wall of bullets flying around in the air as an entire regiment of line infantry.
And artillery now had new types of shells and they could hit targets beyond visable range - eventhough that was rarily practical since there was no radio that could be used to direct the fire onto the target. So even if you somehow manage to punch a big hole into the enemy land and take much terrain you would not be able defend yourself that well against an enemy counter-attack.
Your artillery don't know where to shoot because they cannot see the enemy. And dragging machine guns into position would take time. And if the enemy act swiftly you will not have the time to dig in and form an organized defence, but the men would rather being scattered just after the breakthrough and vulnerable to a counter-attack.
And the lack of communication would be problematic for the men at the front who don't know what to do. And the commander who is sitting miles behind the frontline didn't know what is going on at the front - since there was no radio communication and it took about 8 hours on average for an order from the General headquarters to reach the troops at the frontline, and it took an equal amount of time to get information back to the HQ. So the Commander could not exploit his succeful attack or sending in reinforcements to defend the taken terrain from an enemy counterattack.
So with other words, Technology were greatly biased in favour of the defenders.
And what retarded Generals did was to attack and attack again over and over, and thinking that just a little more men and guns would make the next attack likely to succed. And all this lack of imagination costed millions of lives for nothing.
Cadornas 12 Isonzo offensives are the most clear example of this failure to learn from past mistakes. And accusing the General of incompetence is simply a too mild accusation. They are really more guilty of a criminal waste of their own solidiers lives. And Haig, Hötzendorf, Cadorna and Falkenhayn all deserves to have their names thrown into the mud. I can excuse some gigantic failures on their part because of the huge changes technology and tactics, but at some point those idiots should have learned.
And their stupid shit never did anything to bring their own country to victory. The solution then came with the tank that could drive through the barbed wire, the radio that allowed the attackers to call in artillery support and reinforcements, and to get fresh orders that wasn't totally outdated.
And the German stormtrooper tactics also gave the solidiers at the frontline much more freedom to make their own decisions instead of following outdated orders that no longer made sense in the actual period of time. So the Germans could act with much more flexibility than their enemies, and the stormtroops also had much more firepower at their disposal in the weapons they carried, so they were much more flexible than the ordinary troops that had to make the trouble of coordinating things with the artillery and wasting time.
So the German army had turned everything upside down. Instead of bombarding an area for weeks and alerting the enemy, the Germans instead made a short bombardment and used the element of surprise. And instead of leading men from behind the frontline by a dumbass General who knew nothing about the war, they gave experienced NCOs who knew the war and knew their troops the task of deciding on how the war should be fought.
So the Germans could act much faster and their enemies, and the allied orders became more and more outdated as the German rolled up their defensive lines. And they were always a step ahead.
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@righteousindecision2778 Well there are many things to talk about in the American way of production. But I guess I think division of labour is one such classic starting point.
And division of labour means that you divide up work and let people specialize in each separate tasks. And you see this thing in almost every society. People don't work as postman at the morning, and become a doctor on the middle of the day, and end the day by working as lawyer... and the next day work as a pilot and a school teacher.
Instead people specialize their skills in doing one type of job and become good at it, instead of being mediocre in everything. Another benifit of people specializing is that you don't have to waste time from going from one job to another.
And you can drive this division of labour even further at a workplace. Some guy can become a specialist at cut timber, and another person can turn that timber into tables, and third person can make the paint job.
And the point is that your team of experts togheter will work much more effiecently than if everyone on the job tried to do all kinds of work for himself and both cut the timber, assemble the parts and paint it.
And the more you can divide your job up into smaller tasks people can specialize in - the more effiency you get. And if you are only going to sell only one table, then it would be pointless to buy expensive machinery for your workers. But if you are going to sell many tens of thousands of tables, then you realize that cutting timber can be very time consuming without good tools like an electric saw.
And with better tools you get even more effiecent at making stuff. And you can make more tables in workday that you could do before. And you no longer need as many workers to work to produce the same amount tables as before, since the amount of tables produced per worker in a day have risen.
So what you always want to do is to seek out ways to divide work into smaller and smaller parts. And let people specialize in each separate easy task. And you give them tools and machines that are easy to handle even for a villiage idiot.
And then you position those machines in a sequential order inside a factory, and every guy along the assembly line adds his own little part to the construction of a car. And just like with Lego you add part after part until you finally get a car. And each worker produces his own little Lego brick to the car and nothing more or less.
And the benifits of this system is clear. You no longer need skilled labour to build cars and instead you can use cheap low skilled workers. And you no longer specialist knowledge to build cars, so the power the workers have against the capitalist is now broken.
And when the job of building a car have been so broken down into hundreds of small jobs, then you can also start using machines or robots to make them much of the parts and assemble them.
And with standardization you will always have components that fits with each other - like lego bits always fits with each other, and you don't have to tailor made every little goddamn thing. So you can just store screws, bolts and wheels in a depot and know that they will fit - which is nice, imagine if no ammunition could fit into your cannon so you always had to wait until a new shot was specifically made only for your gun.
Instead the military use some standardized sizes of the bullets they use in rifles, machine guns and cannons so solidiers easily can use the same ammunition for one pistol as for another pistol.
And that makes life easier and it makes it possible to cut down the cost of producing and storeing things. And you can also let other companies build all the parts for your firm, while all what you do is it put togheter all the pieces into a car, or a plane, ship, tank or what it might be.
The problem with German production was that it never really went over to Fordism and started to massproduce vehicles along fordist principles of using low skilled labour with specialized tools.
But instead German used craftsmen that kept on building tanks with overly complex designs. And standardization was not taken so seriously, and a panther composed of about 200.000 parts while a T-34 only had about 50.000.
And the proud German craftsmen kept their traditions of using the best high quality components for a tank, despite they costed more money money and took more time to make than other alternatives. The Russian tankmakers realized that it would be pointless to build engines that would last for 40 years, if their T-34 tanks they built were most likely soon a burning wreck, when the average life expectancy for a Russian tank was only 6 months.
So the Russians managed to drive down costs and building time of their tanks by removing all unecessary luxuries. But the Germans never did that, and as a result did they also not produce as many tanks as the allies.
One can of course speculate about the reasons why they never went over to fordism.
If it was because the lack of money in Weimar Germany that prevented
people from buying cars after the hyperinflation and the great depression, so that Germany never would build an automotive industry the same size as USAs?
Or was it other reasons, like stubborn craftsmen traditions, military traditionalism that wanted perfect tanks without backing on any quality requirements regardless of the wartime situation?
Or was it because German automotive industry was lazy and never forced by the nazis into any painful "structural rationalizations" that would force German companies to fire unnecessary workers and become better at making more cars per worker?
Personally I think Germany had problems with all these 3 things.
And it was only in the late war the tried to simplify their designs of their weapons. And the advanced MG34 got replaced with a more "Made in China" MG42. And the amount of components to make a Panther was reduced somewhat, just like the SdKfz 251 used a much simpler design at the end of the war.
But it was too little too late.
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@maxinabo
If Sweden invaded Finland. And if Swedish troops there behaved like the russian army in Ukraine, and murdered, raped, plundered, destroyed cities, turned villages into dust and rubble, kidnapped thousands of children to brainwash them, built torture chambers for finns, forbade finns from speak their own language in occupied lands, forbade them from waving finlands flag, killed people for supporting finlands independence on facebook... and behaving like scum in general....
well then I could very well understand if the Swedish speaking minority would not want anything to do with Sweden.
They would rightfully hate Sweden for destroying their cities and killing their neighbours. And the Ukrainians feels the same way towards russia today.
But for some reason are some people not clever enough to figure that one out.
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The Swedish vikings took their ships down to Ukraine and created a new Kingdom called "Kiev-rus". This Kingdom became large in size and included Russia. So both Russia and Ukraines history begins here. Russia by the way comes from "Rus" which is the name the vikings gave themselves, most historians believe they called themselves that because they came from Roslagen in Sweden.
There has always been this divide between west Ukraine and East Ukraine. The western part is a bit more European and westernized or Polish... while the eastern part is leaning a bit more towards Russian culture.
When the Russians took over Ukraine there was liberations movements - like for example Ivan Mazepa who allied himself with the Swedish empire as it was invading Russia in 1707-09 the same way as Napoleon and Hitler invaded Russia in 1812 and 1941-42. With the battle of Poltava did the Swedish attempt to conquer Russia fail, and the Russian punishment on Ukraine was terrible and thousands of men died by being impaled and dying in terrible pain as they had a pole shoved up their butthole.
The Ukraine remained divided between east and west. One should not overstate the differences, but one should not understate them either.
The country suffered terribly under Stalin. Stalin stole food from all farmers in Ukraine and sold it foreigners so he could get foreign currency to import American factories and machines to make Russia an industrial super power. This resulted in about 5-20 million people starved to death in Ukraine in an episode known as the "holodomor" which is considered one of the worst genocides in history togheter with the holocaust.
This made many Ukrainians starting to hate the Russians and Stalin and wanting for independence. But no one dared ot openly resist the Russian rule of Stalins brutal bloodthirsty dictatorship.
But so came Hitler and invaded Soviet-Russia in 1941. And many people did not know what horrible plans Hitler had, so most people did welcome the German troops as liberators from Russias evil occupation. Most nazis knew nothing about eastern Europe and was surprised as their troops were given food and put flowers on their tanks and celebrated their arrival.
And some Ukrainians took up weapons to help Germany win the war against Russia - because they thought this was the way of getting rid of the horrible Russians once and for all which had caused so much deaths in Ukraine.
The nazis did however have other plans for all the countries which were part of the Soviet empire. Germany had too little food for fighting this war. So instead of producing more food was the plan to get less mouths to feed. Millions of Russian soldiers were starved to death in German prisoners of war camps. The Germans had food to feed them but refused to give them any. And even when locals themselves offered to give away their own food, was their offer refused.
The next group to suffer from the German occupation was the jews. At first did the nazis try to get locals to kill the jews for them... and sure some people in the Baltics and Ukraine also hated jews. And many criminals helped the nazis kill jews, just so they could steal stuff from people they murdered and because the nazis gave them vodka for free if they did so.
In 1941 and 1942 did a few thousand men in units called "Einsatzgruppen" (operation task force) drive around from village to village with their SS men and collect all jews and take them to a location near a forest and force them to dig their own graves and then kill them, or force them to walk inside the back of a truck, and then lock the doors as poison gas from the engine exhaust was pumped in to kill them. People screamed and 20 minutes later was all inside dead, and jews with guns pointed at them were forced to work as slaves to take out all dead and throw them into mass graves.
And afterwards they too got shot.
Millions of people died, only at the place Babi Yar alone was 33.000 jews machine gunned down. Including many relatives of president Zelenski.
And many Ukrainians did the most dirty work at the 6 large murder camps Germany had working as Trawniki guards. Their jewish prisoners hated them even more than the SS guards because they were so brutal.
Germany would later on lost the war. But in western Ukraine did not wish for independence die out.
And some of this hatred towards Russia had been mixed with nazism. But there was also patriotism that just wanted independence without any Communism or nazism... leaning on Ukraines traditional viking age values of democratic rule and personal freedom.
Values which stands in sharp contrast to Russian traditional values of authoritarian rule and opressive serfdom.
And in the eastern parts of the countries you had a mix of both Russian and west Ukrainian ideals.
Ukraine finally became independent in 1991.
Western Ukraine prefered ties with the west, while the east was not so sure.
Russians like Putin thinks that Kiev-Rus is the same as Russia so he refuses to see that this country have its own language and history and values different from Russia. And Putin regards all west-Ukrainians as nazis, because just wanting freedom and independence is nazism according to him 🙄
But as we have seen are things a lot more complicated than that. Ukraine is an old country, many thousand years old. And many do not like Russia, especially not for Stalin killing millions in mass starvation and the brutal occupation.
And this war of aggression it have waged will probably create hatred for decades to come. And for every day it lasts, and for every day planes drops bombs and kills hundreds of women and children does this risk of creating generational hatred of Russia which will last for hundreds of years.
This Russian disrepect for Ukrainians right to rule over their own country have created massive hatred towards Russia.
Even the more Russian parts of Ukraine did not celebrate the arrival of Russian troops with any flowers, because most people identify themselves as Ukrainians despite they speak Russian.
And have the Russian liberation of Luhansk from the "nazis" led to life becoming any better?
The anser is that Luhansk is occupied. Law, order freedom of speech, free media and freedom of movement has been abolished. The grocery store shelves are empety. Breadlines so common in USSR have come back, but without any law and order. The population in Luganks of course know that they have not been liberated, but the one who dares to say anything or vote the wrong way in the "elections" is taking the risk of being beaten, tortured, raped or executed.
Men with guns rule everywhere. If you stand in line for your bread can armed men come and ask you for the key to your car, and if you don't give it to them then you will get beaten down. And if you give them your keys you lose your car.
Criminal gangsters have taken over the area from the police.
Energy blackouts are common, usually is the electricity gone - so its therefore rare that you see any coldwares at the grocery stores. Therefore are most food bought out on markets on the streets nowadays.
Otherwise is the economy dead, and smashed to pieces by Putins war and occupation. Men who are in military age are forced into military service. And if you don't hand over your Ukrainian passport and exchange it for a Russian passport you cannot get a job and an income.
Millions of people have fled form the occupied areas. Which makes it difficult for people to find a job even in Kyiv. And on the streets of free Ukraine are the Ukrainian flag waveing everywhere.
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They can probably use 30 years old shells, but the ones older than that are probably in a horrible shape due to bad storage - like with all other Russian military crap. The Wagner group have posted videos of shells so rusty that they did not dare to load their gun with them because they might explode and destroy the gun and kill the crew.
Many shells do however fly away towards the Ukrainians, and some of them fail to explode and some don't. But regardless will they exhaust the gun barrels on the howitzers for each shot fired. And wear and tear will make the inaccurate Russian howitzers even more inaccurate. And at some point will the gun barrels needs to be swapped out due to exhaustion. And if the Russians don't do that, then the gun might explode in Ivans face.
So I think there is a limit to how old shells you can use. And even if say Ivan had properly stored his ammunition correctly, that would still not prevent them from deteriorate as they get too old. They might not explode, the explosion might be weaker, or the ammunition could when it is not supposed to. And with untrained newly mobilized crews is there probably an increased risk of faulty handling and more accidents. And the Russian artillery fire is today extremely inaccurate because of bad guns, exhausted gun barrels, lack of counter-battery radars, lack of artillery observers, untrained crews, no drone correction of the artillery fire. And add to those ineffiencies the crappy logistical system and ammunition shortage
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@MrBahjatt
The Poles were fed up with having to wait years before getting any tanks, and Germanys pathethic witholding of tanks to Ukraine have made Leopard2 a non-option for Poland - so they bought American and Korean instead.
I don't know the motivation of Poland to buy F16 in this specific case. But to me it seems like Scandinavian countries have bought F35 for political reasons (to get closer ties and protection from USA) rather than buying a weapon for the sake of its performance - as I think that Gripen E would make much more sense for countries like Finland and Norway.
Sweden have however bought NH90 from France-Germany-Spain-Italy-Netherlands... and the helicopter is not just ridiculously expensive but also worthless performance wise and demanding ridiculous amounts of maintence. Had I been prime minister I would give those helicopters away for free to russia as military aid, as they are more of a burden to own than an asset.
I don't oppose the idea of buying more European weapons in Europe - and with that I do not just mean weapons built by companies 100% located inside the EU, but also companies that cooperate with other European defence firms like BAE systems in UK. And cooperation with USA is not much of a problem either since she is an ally and a friend, ans should be treated as such.
If European countries should buy European products, then those weapons needs to be good and not overpriced junk like NH90. European soldiers should not have to die to guarantee profits for french fat cat industries, if there are better American weapons available that can help soldiers fight better.
And all EU countries have different needs, and not many countries are interested in French equipment designed for expeditions in Africa. So those countries should have other options available. And if no such options exist, then they should be able to buy American weapons instead.
I for my part see that French, German, British and American equipment often lacks the requirements needed to be suitable in Scandinavian terrain for example. That doesn't mean those countries make bad stuff, it just means that their weapons will not work well in a Scandinavian context. Bradley cannot handle deep snow as well as CV90 for example.
But otherwise do Sweden use much kit from those countries like the Swedish-French-British Meteor missile, the British Swedish Archer artillery or NLAW, or the German Leopard 2 tanks, and American Patriot.
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Russia got land lots of it. It doesn't more of it. If 11 time zones of land is not enough, then when is it?
Putin land should be quarantined until they know their place and don't think they can just steal land from their neighbours.
The western sanctions have so far just been moderate, while Russia have overreacted and self-inflicted gigantic economic harm on their own society by stealing foreign assets, censoring media and causing a braindrain. Had they exited this stupid Ukraine project after a month - then would traitor countries within the EU push for lifting sanctions and do trade with Russia again.
But Putin has done what no western politicians could have accomplished - he burned all Germany's bridges with Russia.
He forced everyone to finally take a side. And now the entire world is united against Putin. Only a few unimportant clown countries - Belarus, Syria, North Korea, and Cuba openly side with Russia. While even China remains unsupportive and reluctant towards Russia altough their shared disdain for the west. And India is neutral ans slightly pro Russian.. but that is probably about to change as India is having trade talks with Britain, then EU and the Indian prime minister is now on a visit to Sweden...
20 years of trade with the west have failed to create peace and change Russia into a democracy with respect for human rights and love for western values, and peaceful coexistence.
On the contrary have Russia invaded country after country those 20 years. Putin hates the west. And state TV is pumping out lies, conspiracies and hatred towards the west every day for the last 20 years. Ukraines president was poisoned by Putin, Russian political opponents of Putin was murdered, ammunition depots in Czechia was blown up by Russian agents, he poisoned Russians living in Britain. Russia have stolen land from Ukraine in Crimea in 2014, he invaded Georgia, he have waged a 8 year long war in Donbass...
Russia have on mulitple occasions shut off the gas to Ukraine to blackmail Europe.
I mean how many more signs do we need that Russia have not changed? Isn't it obvious that Russia is not a well behaving country but more of a gangster state?
I think it is utterly stupid to be reliant on trade with Russia. And it seems like every dollar they get from trade is not invested for good things - like higher standards of living, schools and hospitals. Instead it is wasted on luxury boats for the elite, nuclear bombs and
weapons they can use for wars of aggression and sabre rattling.
In a way it was not Europe that choose a world without Russia.
I would rather say it was Russia that took the choice to cut all ties with the west. They of course want to keep on trading with the west - but not if that means that they have to stop occupying stolen land and stop committing warcrimes.
Well, I say you cannot have the cake and eat it too.
And not murdering your neighbour is not hard to do. I don't think that is an unreasonable demand. So eff you mother Russia. GKY.
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@KingZealotTactics
"i'm talking in the sense of development"
You mean that freedom of speech, freedom of thought, right to privacy and such things doesn't matter?
That is one of the dumbest things I ever heard. I rather be slightly poorer if I can keep my freedom.
And that is said assuming that what you say is true.
But when you look at pictures from the Eastern bloc, you usually don't see people washed over in consumerism and luxury. Instead you see almost empety stores and people standing in line to get a piece of bread. And people have to wait 10-15 years before they could get a car, and once they get a car they get crappy, ugly low quality trabant.
That was the Soviet bloc in a nutshell.
"You can statistically show"
How long time series are we talking about? 5 years after the wall came down? 15? 30?
I would say that most people in Eastern Europe do not want to come back under Russian occupation. There is a reason why most countries in the East did chose to join Nato and EU instead of returning to their ties with Russia.
I remember in 2003 when a Polish school class visisted my country. As an EU skeptic I was annoyed how uncritically EU positive all Polish students were.
It is however totally understandable that they don't wanna go back to Russian rule, so therefore was joining EU and Nato the only realistic alternative at that time.
And when we see all bullying, use military force, poisoning of political enemies, and use of internet trolls its not hard to see why people who are fence sitters in the middle - like me myself - are turning away from Russia, and joining the western camp.
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@petershaver5006
That is actually not a bad idea. People who want to fight a classic good vs evil war should join the foreign legion. This war along with the war against ISIS are wars with two very clear alternatives: Good and evil.
So if you are about 25 years old and got military training and don't have a wife and kids... then I don't think its dumb to consider the option.
Not everyone can fight a war in the frontline. If you are for example an elderly person you might perhaps help with teaching the kids at school if you are a former teacher. Women without military training can cook food for the troops and produce weapons and ammunition for the troops. Men who are around their 40s could staff anti-aircraft guns that protect big cites and feed those guns with ammunion, or they can do other jobs like driving military trucks with supplies for the troops at the frontline, or guard camps with prisoners of war.
As a foreigner I want my country to help Ukraine. I want my tax money to go to help Ukraine pay its bills. And I want Swedish weapons to be sent to Ukraine to kill Russians.
If my country was the victim of a Russian illegal, unprovoced, unjustified war then of course I wish that the world community would act exactly in the same way for us.
We democracies hava a duty to sick togheter. A small democracy on its own might be weak, but we stand togheter are we strong, and indeed invincible.
We have 60% of the World GDP. We have better motivated troops than what Russia, China, North Korea, and Belarus have.
And our we are technologically more advanced. Our Russian foes are something like 40 years behind us.
For the last 25 years I have never felt proud over my country as it is a country in decay.. with deindustrialization, a decaying democracy and independence because of the EU.
But this week I feel proud after my country decided to sent Archer and 50 Combat vehicle 9040 to Ukraine.
And this just one of all other shipments of aid to Ukraine which include everything from helmets and vests, to C-rations, 155mm ammunition, tens of thousands of AT-4 launchers, and powerful anti-ship missiles and KSP-58.
And other countries have also sent Swedish made weapons to Ukraine as well - NLAWs , Excalibur and Bonus artillery are shells are probably the most famous examples. But also the Swedish modified BMP-1's that was has been mentioned earlier on this channel.
And the Carl-Gustaf that Canada sent, and PV-1110 that some Baltic country sent to Ukraine.
It makes me proud that my little country have strongly helped Ukraine so much to win this war. And I am of course proud that our excellent arms industry finally get a chance to prove foreign critics that our weapons are at least as good as those of other countries.. if not even better in many cases. Archer and CV90 are probably the best weapons of their type around the world. So is Gripen E.
NLAW has also proven itself to be excellent at its job. Swedish anti-tank weapons were designed during the cold war to kill Russian tanks if our country got invaded. Now is Russia invading a country, and Swedish anti-tank weapons have already been killing Russian tanks and vehicles by the thousands.
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Yea we should be so afraid of Russia and nuclear annihaltion that we give in to any blackmail they do. We are too weak to resist the Russian bear so what is the point to fight and see our men die in an unwinnable war? Better then to just give in to Putins demands. Let him take Georgia. Than Ukraine. Then Moldova. Then Kazaksthan.
And then can China take Taiwan with the same argument. And then northern Indiochina and India, and then islands in the pacific that are contested with Japan and the Phillipines. And then let China establish naval bases in Sri Lanka and Africa and expand its influence there and put troops in those places like Russia have in Transnistria and then destabilize those countries so that a pro-Chinese fascist regime can take power.
And now when the Communist bloc 2.0 have re-emerged should we be so fearful to honor our security guarantees that we do not dare to retaliate once a small country like Estonia has been overrun and occupied in less than 48 hours. Would we really want a global nuclear war over a tiny country with only 1.3 million?
The weak leadership from Biden is hesitant about seeing New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, Chicago all getting nuked...
And Macron, Draghi and Schulz are more worried about not hurting Putins feelings and selling electronics and buying Russian gas than helping their allies in EU/Nato.
The rest of Europe realize that the big countries are useless allies and pull out from those useless shitty clubs that only benefits the big countries at the expense of the small - so they try to form their own military alliances on an ad-hoc basis, with very little trust and nuclear deterence backing them.
And Putin can eat up country by country in a piecemeal fashion as everyone is too afraid to fight back.
Everyone is arguing like you that it is better to be safe than sorry. So just giving up and not fighting back is what people do.
People give in to fear and blackmail. Despite the free world do have enough military muscles to crush evil regimes like a bug under a boot if they wanted to.
Idiots in the west will act like elephants who grew up with an iron chain around their foot, and which learned that it is impossible to run away and trying to escape and do whatever they wanted. So once the elephant gets bigger and stronger and you replace the chain with a tiny rope that it can easily break - it will still not even try to flee, because it have learned that it is pointless to try to run away when it got a thing around its food.
And people are equally superstitious, and paralyzed by the feeling of being powerless.
Why fight back against Russia? Its a juggernaut that crushed nazi-Germany, it did beat USA in the space race, and Canada in ice hockey, it have better tanks than the west and the superfast MIG25 jet, and super weapons like Armata, SU57, kornet, S400, and alligator attack helicopters.
And Chinas army is the largest in the world and they got super-duper missiles that have rendered all American aircraft carriers obsolete... so now can USA not dominate the air or sea anymore or transport troops to Asia to hold back the country with the largest GDP in the world and the 2nd largest population!
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If you make harsh statement against one group and want to take away their freedoms, then you can expect a blowback.
I don't know how many times far-leftist and rightwingers said mean things to me. They are too many to count.
But they were mostly expected.
And when a self-proclaimed anarchist speak in favor of extremely autoritarian measures which I would never dream of... well then of course he will get called out to be a hypocrite and whatever.
Calling yourself an anarchist and being pro EU and pro covid passports/forced vaccination crap is beyond me.
Either that or he hates fascist regimes, but for the wrong reasons.
Maybe he likes Hitler for his censorship, his medical experiments, his concentration camps, his purging of enemies of the state, his surveillance state, his policing of what people are free to say, his manipulation of the truth through media, his mass starvation of "subhumans" in Poland and Russia", and so on.
But then he dislikes Hitler because he dislike things like nationalism, the nuclear family, and traditionalist art and culture.
Maybe he is like the guy who goes to McDonalds and order a cheese burger and picks out the disgusting pickled cucumber and eat it, and then throw the burger away into the trash. While we normal people does the opposite.
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I guess that things will be like it was with the Iraq war in 2003 which the American people strongly supported.
Most americans were okay with a an unprovoced war of aggression, they were okay with torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, they were okay with their government behaving like an a$$hole towards European countries. They were okay with a government that took away one human right after another... they were okay with the government spying on the American people. They were okay with suspending habeas corpus and that the government could keep a person in detention for unlimited time. They were bullying any anti-war protestor and calling them "anti-american", and if you protested the government for any reason - even for things that did not have to do with the Iraq war, you could get labeled as "anti-american" or "unpatriotic" and lose your job as a school teacher.
This was what USA was like in the years 2003-2006. The American people even voted for the fascist idiot George W Bush to become president for 4 more years after all the evil shit that he had done. He had jacked up USAs national debt with trillions. He had started a war that killed 600.000 innocent Iraqis. He was the first president in US history that never used a veto to block a government project to keep government spending down - and unsurprinsingly did he spend more dollars than all other presidents before him had done combined!
He was wasteful with money. He was bloodthirsty. He was fascist towards Iraqis, but also to a lesser extent also towards Europeans which he treated arrogantly with the belief that USA was the worlds only superpower and could treat anyone else how they liked. He was also a believer in American exceptionalism, so per defintion was America always a power for good in this world according to his mind - even when it did bad and evil things.
He silenced any anti-war sentiments by labeling them as "unpatriotic". So either you were for George W Bush, or you were an anti-american traitor. So most people did choose to fall in line.
And in most opinion polls did the war in Iraq remain popular among the American people. People were ignorant. Many could not even point out where Iraq was on a map. Truth to be told, most Americans did not care. They did not care about foreign policy and the things which were going on outside their own country. It did not matter to them. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis could die and they did not care. Instead did they feel self-pity about all Americans who had died in this stupid pointless war.
And instead of blaming Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Powell for this mess did the warmongering American right-wingers spew their hatred on muslims instead. And one American rightwing politician suggested that Arabia should be nuked and that the sand should turn into heat from the nuclear bomb. And on TV you could see Fox news pumping out lies and pro-war propaganda nonstop, and rightwing media personalities like Ann Coulter who strongly supported "The war on terror" in Arabia and the middle east delievered the following statement: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."
I think that quote well sum up the worldview that almost all Republicans had back then.
Not just Bush and his government was pro-war, but so was also the rightwing media such as Bill O'reilly, Ann Coulter, Ben Shapiro, and others. And the opposition were silent and afraid to say a single word.
But then this all came to an end.
The fall of the Republican party government did come. But it did not come because of the Iraq war.
Nope. People were upset about things in their own home country instead. They were angry about the governments handeling of the hurricane Katrina and the devestation it had brought to New Orleans.
Finally was someone allowed to criticise Bush's government. And that led to the fall in popularity for the Republican party. And that did allow for the democrats to win the next election. And in 2008 did the financial crisis come and people were tired of all wars and Obama promised to fix those things
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Это была нейтральная страна, которая прагматично обманывала по краям, чтобы остаться в стороне от войны и сохранить свою национальную независимость.
Если бы Германия выиграла войну, люди бы вместо этого жаловались на то, что Швеция прячет датских евреев и норвежских партизан от немцев, или как шведские моряки снабжали союзников товарами.
Шведское правительство действительно хотело помочь Финляндии, но Швеция никогда не предоставляла Германии никаких добровольцев.
Лично я не вижу ничего плохого в том, чтобы помочь Финляндии. Эта страна была такой же жертвой иностранной агрессии, как и Польша в 1939 году, когда вторглась Россия.
Франция и Великобритания также хотели отправить военную помощь Финляндии, чтобы дать отпор русским. Так что по вашей логике это должно сделать их нацистами.
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Western countries make up 60% of the world GDP. Our dominance is total in technology, military matters, economics, cultural influence ("soft power") etc..
So I don't give a rats ass about Russia - a 3rd world country that is soon not even in the top 20 list of the worlds largest economies. And its on the 56th place in the world in terms of income per head (source Wikipedia, CIA income per capita).
Russia is a backwards barbaric sh*thole. And the distance between it and the rest of the world is only growing larger and larger for each decade. The old useless Soviet junk weapons used in Ukraine is not only 30 years behind their western counterparts. That is bad. But that is just the start, as Russia is only getting more and more behind the west.
Russia have still failed to produce a single 5th generation fighter jet, as the SU57 still only exist as an unfinished prototype.
And also the T14 Armata tank only exist in 1-2 dozen.
And meanwhile are the west already on its way developing 6th generation fighter jets before Russia even managed to get their first 5th generation fighter jet operational.
And on the demographic/economic front does thing look just as bad. Russias population decline is now worsened with 60k males in fertile age dying in Ukraine instead of making children. The sanctions have led to a braindrain. And the mass mobiliztion have led to millions of draft dodgers have left Russia. Thousands of more Russian troops will likely die as a result of the stupid and pointless escalation of this war. More untrained Russian troops will get slaughtered in the meat grinder. And wounded soldiers without arms, legs and eyes will be unable to contribute much to the Russian economy in the future. And all PTSD, suicides, crimes and all other mess that comes after a war will only put a further burden on Russian society after the war.
And put sanctions and less energy exports on top of all that and Russia will probably see its economy fall to the top 30 list of the world largest economies. And the armed forces will either lack tanks, or having to use old museum pieces to make up for the heavy equipment losses after the Ukraine war fiasco.
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@Boppy-B-B Britain felt like it stood alone in 1940. And that is what matters. The colonies was too far away to help the motherland which had just retreated from Europe while country after country had fallen like dominos. Now Britain was the only country left to stand against Hitlers invincible armies. And to make matters worse was Italy joining the Axis. And Spain and Vichy France didn't seem unlikely to join the fascist team soon.
It felt like a dark time. Hitlers regime was not a freedom loving one. And now he no longer just had an invincible army but could also tap all the resources of Europe...
So of course is this how many Brits would have felt during the Blitz. However, today we can look back in hindsight and laugh. Germany was never suffiecently prepared for operation sea lion in 1940 so the fears of the British population was not justified by the factual situation. Germany lacked transports, warships, and enough with time to finish Britain off in the summer.
It is also understandable that people felt blackpilled in may 1942. The Axis had won victories at all fronts. Japan had won many victories and its empire now stretched over a gigantic sea and landmass. And if Japan would continue to beat bigger armies and expand at this rate then would soon Australia, India and then California fall into japanese hands.
The Axis had been through a few setbacks in Europe. But most of Europe was now controlled by the Axis and the world under Axis control was now roughly the same size as the allied world in terms of economic GDP.
German armies stood outside Moscow. German bombers had wrecked London. There was German submarines lurking outside the American coast and causing havoc.
It seemed like the Axis armies was unstoppable. France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Denmark, Poland and Yugoslavia had failed to stop the German take over of Europe. And in the pacific was Japan rolling forward and beating forces from USA, the Philippines, the Netherlands, the British empire, and Portugal.
So of course did it for many people feel like it was just a matter of time before it was taken over by the axis. Today we can laugh at this idea when we know how hopeless the Axis situation was. But people back then could not know how much outnumbered and overextended the axis were. And few could probably have guessed that things would turn around so soon at Midway, Stalingrad, El-Alamein and in the Atlantic.
Before the battle of Midway do I think that even the biggest supporter of the allieds war would have felt uneasy.
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An old magazine from Jane's says that Gripen costs 4700 per hour while F16 costs 7000.
So it is nearly the double. However F16 is a cheap budget option compared to all other planes than Gripen. However I guess that those numbers are higher now today, and not just because of inflation, but also because both planes have undergone upgrades. A Gripen C/D might cost 4700, but a Gripen E would probably cost 6000.
However I do believe that the cost per flight hour is more of a peace time concern, when politicians wants to hold costs down and not raise taxes on one hand, and on the other hand try to give their pilots as many hours of flying as possible.
And when a Gripen C/D only costs $4700 per flight hour compared to $31.000 for F35 or 18.000 for Eurofighter... then you can afford much more hours of training for a Gripen pilot.
However in times of war, I think that Ukraine does not care what the costs are - the important thing for them is to win the air war.
I think in the end that Ukraine wish to have all planes mentioned - F16, Gripen and Mirage 2000 plus their old MIG29.
None of those mentioned planes exists in enough available numbers on their own (at least as long as Biden refuse to send jets), so they need to take a mized bag of different planes and cooperate between those machines. That will work well with F16 and Gripen... but it will probably be trickier with Mirage and MIG29, since Sovies planes are not Nato standard and the French likes to have their own weapon systems and solutions on some of their planes.
F18 Hornet cannot be ruled out as an alternative either because its a plane that can handle more rough runways than F16.
It is also like F16 a plane on its way out of service, so some airframes should be available. Unfortunatly not from neutral Switzerland or from Finland who needs their planes until F35 arrives there, and the airframes on Finlands hornets are in such a bad shape after wear and tear that they would be horribly bad choice for Ukraine. But if some other country could spare a few planes... then maybe it is possible that some hornets show up.
F15 Eagle have also been mentioned much. A formidable plane in every way. However what makes me seem skeptical to the likelyhood that they show in Ukraine is that I don't think tax payers of America gives away a bunch of 80 million dollar planes for free.
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The Genghis Khan method of killing millions of people so towns and villages becomes abandoned, farmland gets covered by weeds, bushes and trees did work. He killed 15% of worlds population and actually did create a measurable decrease of global warming thanks to his efforts. Not surprisingly do many climate clowns whorship mass murderers like him. Peter Frankopan is both an Europhile and a Mongolophile, so of course he do think that killing millions of people sometimes is sometimes justifies. That is the impression I got from his strange opinions in his book the Silk road. But imperialism and mass murder made by white people is of course wrong.
Aside from genocide, I do not think there is any realistic chance this goal can be reached by 2050. It took us two hundred of year to create this fossil fuel based civilization we have now. And that cannot be changed quickly even if aliens from Mars hand over a blueprint of a fusion reactor tomorrow. It will simply take us at least decades to rebuild all cars, chainsaws, lawnmowers, trucks, planes, plastic industry, and everything else to run on electricity instead of oil.
And the real future is of course much darker than this fantasy. Not nuclear power, wind or solar combined can come anywhere near replacing all energy from coal, oil and gas that we use. Not only do we have too little of this energy.
But the problem is also that the energy is of shittty quality compared to oil.
In the past energy revolutions in history we transitioned from a low quality energy source to a better energy sources.
We used human muscles. Then we began using horses. Then we used hydroelectric power and burning wood.
And then we began using whale oil and burning coal and began using steam engines. And today we use oil and electricity.
And tomorrow we have to use something else. So far have we not invented anything better than oil.
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Vikings long, strong, brave, manly, skilled sailors. Admireable in many ways, but would never have been able to take on a large organized army head on.
The Vikings usally only had an axe and perhaps an helmet. And some perhaps also had a shield And the lucky richer Vikings could have a sword and some armour stolen from a killed enemy. But Vikings didn't have anything more than that. Their equipment were shitty and their tactics were primitive compared to real European armies. So they had to rely on speed and surprise and take their fast ships near the coast and make a hit and run raid of plunder before anyone could strike back at them.
So the viking woulve been crushed by the roman. The romans had better weapons and armour, better tactics, more experience in real combat instead of killing unarmed civilians, the romans also had better organization, they roman army also outnumbered the vikings, and roman engineering was also superior.
The vikings were pirates more than organized army. They were not like the mongols or teutonic knights
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Things depends on the combat distances. When you fire at targets far away you do want a rifle. While a SMG are better at close ranges.
The M1 Garand was a great rifle for its time (in WWII) when combat distances were large. But modern wars have seen a tendency towards much more close combat distances and then have the rifle become more and more unpractical.
You rarely got the time to aim for a "one-shot, one kill" in Vietnam, even if you were lucky enough to even actually see the enemy. Now you spray bullets into one direction and hope one of those bullets find its target. And even if you are not able to hit anyone, are you probably at least able to suppress your enemy and force him to take cover in a ditch while your firing is going on.
If the modern assault gun is an M16, then could say that M1 garand is the the old WWII rifle.
You say that the modern assault rifle, is a combination between a SMG and the "battle rifle". But personally I do not completely agree with that statement. M14 which the Americans used in Vietnam do however fit very well into the description of "a combination between a SMG and a battle rifle".
The problem with M14 however was that it unlike the M16 still used old heavy rifle ammunition, because the Americans still liked their old M1 rifle and had a hard time of let go of the old ideas of a one-shot kill.
The powerful ammunition of M14 is great when you want send away a shot long distances and kill targets far away.
But the problem is that the recoil also becomes greater with rifle ammunition than it does with small cartridges of pistols and SMGs. So if you wanna fire a rapid burst, then will the recoil become so great that you shake so much that you cannot aim properly or hit your target.
So the solution for the Americans then became to drop this concept of the M14 completely, and go over to the M16 instead. M16 fired smaller rounds which gave less recoil and therefore also better precision with automatic firing. The bullets smaller size also saved weight. And the plastic material did not swell like wood do after it gets wet.
So the old rifle does not have a place on the modern battlefield. The old long range fighting from world war 1 belongs to the past. Now it is instead more important to put as much lead up into the air as possible.
But some modern battlefield theorists do however argue that the sniper rifle now have a much larger role to play than ever, and that groups of one or two dozen snipers can paralyze an entire city.
So there seem to be some contradictory trends going on, with more snipers on one hand, and in the other hand do you see an insane increase of ammunition consumption per killed soldier, with something like 600.000 shots fired for every enemy soldier killed in Vietnam compared to 400 shots per kill in the Napoleonic wars, 20.000 around WW1, and 200.000 in WWII.
I think this video does excellent explain why M1 and M14 does not have any place on a modern battlefield.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mby4hOq-DpI
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I have no problem with Christianity other than I think that people should follow their heart and logic instead.
It is of course possible to be a good person regardless which religion one follows. One can look at the good parts of a holy book and ignore all evil and bad parts. But that does not make me think that is a good idea. One can choose to love your neighbour or choose to hate all non-believers.
And muslims who read their holy texts and only follow the good parts, and christians who also cherry pick only the good parts are no direct threat to me. Heck, I even think that it is theoretically possible to make a peaceful interpretation of evil books like Mein Kampf. But that does not mean that I think it is a good book to follow.
And sadly are there always a risk that someone will read the verses in a holy book that preach hate. And some religious people think they are doing a good thing when they are killing people of a different faith.
So I feel that even peaceful believers pose a latent threat to my own security for that reason. They might be sincere in their will to do good, when their holy book is filled with some texts of cruelty, barbarism and hatred I get a bit concerned.
I am not saying that all religions are equally bad. Some are worse than others.
Jesus despite his flaws did never kill anyone, rape anyone, commit pedophilia, or destroyed a village with 500 people, or worked as a slave trader that onwed black people or took jewish teenage girls as sex slaves. But prophet Muhammed did all those things. Muhammed was a warlord, while Jesus preached extreme pacifism. So yea, some religions are worse than others.
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I see this as the Putinist faction within the GOP just make a smash and grab coup of the party. Trump will be gone regardless if he win or lose the next election. The next time he will be too old to run for president. And he will likely meet an opponent that is younger and better than Biden. The last election was not won by Biden, it was rather an election lost by Trump. People voted because they did not want 4 more years with Trump. The MAGA supporters did of course hold Trump very dear, and say what you want about them, but I don't think there is any doubt that they felt much entusiasm for the man they voted for. And one can almost feel sorry for them for losing the election.
Its like seeing a kid seeing his favorite team lose an important game. But on the other hand.. this talk about election fraud made me lose my sympathy for Trumpers. 4 years ago I liked Trump and hoped he would win. But even I would just say that he should have sucked it up and accepted that he had lost the election fair and square. Taking away power from democracy and moving it to the juridical system and do vote counting is not democratic, and spreading distrust for american institution is harmful for American society and makes you wonder if he serves Putin or the American people.
I am of course not an American citizen so you can choose to ignore my irrelevant opinion if you want. I said that I liked Trump, and yes he did some good things like bringing peace in North Korea and left Afghanistan and had a strong economy. But the he did do many things I didn't support then and do not support now like his 1.700 billion dollar tax cut for the richest percentiles of Americans and lowering of the corporate tax rate from 60% down to around 20% . And now he whines about 60 billion of military aid to Ukraine and say it is inaffordable... to that I say that he got no right to complain after borrowing 1700 billions to tax cuts for the rich.
I am not an anti-vaccer, but I think that much hysteria surrounded the Covid pandemic.. (and I hope youtube censors show mercy on me for just expressing this humble opinion)... however to go from that to going out and holding campaign meetings in the middle of a pandemic is extremely irresponsible. There is really no good justifications for doing that.
I am an anti-enviromentalist, but even I think that fracking is a very harmful and questionable way of getting oil. I am not so sure that getting cheap oil for say 5-15 years is worth destroying the ground water with pollution for 800 years in an area is a good trade off.
And breaking up Nato and siding with Putin against Ukraine is just unbelievable. I never thought I would hear a Republican say he would prefer a warmongering, genocidal, fascist guy in Russia over democracies in western Europe. Countries that have decade long bonds with America that Trump wishes to cut off to help Putin.
Right now do I think that Trump is not an opinion. Indeed if GOP does not show backbone soon, then I see this party itself as a non-option the coming election. I have no love for Biden, but at least he would not side with a modern day Hitler. Trumps puppet speaker Johnson is ignoring the will of the American people that supports aid for Ukraine. Indeed most republicans do support aid for Ukraine. But he blocks it. And that just like the talk of election fraud shows how little Trump cares about democracy.
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@rodi8266
I don't know any other country in history that war after war lose its way towards victory. Russia became a great power during the Great Northern war - a war in which they lost battle after battle despite outnumbering their enemy 3 to 1, and suffered disprortionally heavy losses, and yet they came out winning.
Russia a few years later also lost hundreds of thousands of men fighting Ottomans and Persians and won.
For most other 18th century powers would such losses be unbareable.. Prussia or Sweden could not afford to lose that many men in a single campaign.
The Napoleonic wars meant scorched earth policies and more lands were sacrificed to the enemy than any other country could afford doing. No other country would be willing to burn down so many of its own villages as Russia.
But victory came, but at a high cost.
So the Russians can win wars despite being ineffective and incompetent in combat.
The crimean war was the result of the usual Russian aggression we see throughout history, and the countrys leader throw Russia into a war with troops with outdated equipment and took heavy losses as a result and the war gave Russia nothing aside from lots of death and suffering.
The Russo-japanese war showed that Russia was not so brilliant at war - a great power lost against a developing country in Asia. The first world war was mostly caused by the Russian Tsar. And despite having gigantic manpower reserves (26 million) compared to other countries, where the country with the 2nd largest was Germany with 6 million... so was Russia unable to perform well in this war.
Russias industrial base was once again too weak - just like in the Crimean war - and many soldiers did not even have rifles so they had to attack German lines without weapons and take up the rifle of a dead comrade if they wanted to fight - just like in the movie enemy at the gates. Russian troops came from such a backward and barbaric country that they thought that evil spirits killed men after Germany had bombared their lines with poison gas.
And the Russian artillery lacked artillery shells and German artillery got a larger ration of shells in half a week than Russian artillery got in an entire month... so after 1915 would Russian guns almost fall silent because they lacked ammunition. So now could those Russian soldiers with few rifles not even get any help from cannons.
But Russias leaders did still not give up. Instead were millions of men sacrificed and the war was later on lost for Russia.
The next fiasco was the Russian invasion of Poland. Russia and Japan fought a war which it for once managed to win, but only thanks to superior numbers and fighting against a 3rd world country with a very limited supply of heavy weapons.
Russia would then go on with invading Finland in 1939 a suffering humiliating heavy losses despite fighting against the poorest country in Europe with an enormous numerical superiority and massive numbers of tanks and planes. While the Finns started the war with no real tanks at all.
The war against Germany led to the most catastrophic losses any country in history has ever suffered in war. Russia lost millions of men. The worlds largest airforce was wiped out in the first 2 weeks of the war. Russia lost more tanks in 1941 than most countries in the world had combined.
The Russian army was ineffective and incompetent. And it won only thanks to its numerical superiority. Germany had no oil, no lend lease, no war at only 1 front but instead it had a 5 front war (in Africa, in the west, in the east, in the skies, and in the seas). Once again could Russia win a war despite suffering gigantic losses compared to its enemy.
Russia would later on once again show its military ineffectivness in Afghanistan and Chechenya - wars which it lost.
So Russia is one of the shittiest countries when it comes military competence. And its logistical system is just a mess.. and when you see tankers going out on the countryside and begging for fuel you begin to wonder if Russian logistics exist at all.
If any other country would try the Russian way of war it would quickly bleed to death and lose the conflict.
I consider the Russian military to be the most overly hyped force in the world. Especially after the end of the cold war. Russia is a country with a GDP the size of Spain and its technologically backwards compared to the west.
If it didn't have nukes I don't think that other countries would be afraid of going to war with it and giving it a bloody nose. And as the barbaric evil bully throughout history, it really deserves some hard spanking.
Russia is in a decline. Populationwise and otherwise.
And without manpower is the Russian way of war doomed. And without its military power is Russia nothing.
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German states such as Brandenburg would feel more threatened than ever and turn to Austria and the holy Roman empire for its defence for its independence. Remember, Brandenburg and Saxony joined Austria against Sweden during the 30 years war. And both of them also fought against Sweden later on.
And Russia had enormous manpower resources at its disposal. What was most striking to me when I read this book: https://ospreypublishing.com/russian-army-of-the-seven-years-war-1-pb
Was that Russia was at war almost every year during the 1700s, and lost 100.000 - 200.000 men for each yearly military campaign they participated in... they could one year lose 50.000 men against Sweden, another year lose 200.000 men against the Ottomans, and then they could fight the Prussians and lose a hundred thousand more.
So the question is, could Sweden keep on losing men like the Russians did time and time again? And the answer is of course not.
And no, I don't consider the Ottomans as an ally.
And France was an ally, but one shouldn't forget either that it was Napoleon that made us lose Finland to the Russians.
So I can definatly see that Russia and Germany would gang up against Sweden, and the country being drawn into war with more powers as well if we ally ourselves with France. It would basicly just being another world war just like the Thirty years war, the war of successions, Seven years war, the American war of liberation and Napoleon wars etc.
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I'm confused when did all of this swap to the seven years war?"
The Seven years war is only interesting so far as it led to a chain of events that ended up in Napoleon.
"Mercenaries was a big part of war so the population isn't everything"
Mercenaries cost money, and richer more populated countries could certainly afford more troops than Sweden could.
"Sweden had an influx of german and dutch immigrants"
2000 wallons immigrated to Sweden over a 60 year period.........I wouldn't call that immigration important when it is compared to the large populations of France and the Holy Roman empire.
" if Sweden would have remained strong odds are that Prussia would not have risen to the power they did"
Even if not, they would still have a large, well diciplined and extremely well drilled army. And all German states would probably joined up behind the Holy Roman empire in case of a war broke out.
Austria would support Prussia and vice verse.
"according to me for Sweden to have remained a great power of europe they would have to bene extremely lucky and almost all plans had to go according to plan"
I think Sweden could have become a great power (in the real sense of the word) in the short run. And one could argue that it could have ended up as the most powerful country in the world under Gustavus Adolfhus.
But I also think that Sweden was fighting against the clock. Sweden was great power for only 200 years from mid 1500 to mid 1700, and much of the Swedish expansionism during this time period was possible
thanks to inner weaknesses of our neighbouring empires, Russia, Poland and Germany had their peoples fighting each other.. and was became an easy prey for our superior military. Likewise was Denmark a bit unstable for this time period.
Sweden was also for a short period of time blessed with great leaders and organizers - Gustav Vasa, Gustavus Adolphus, Charles XII, Charles XI and Charles IX.
But this luck would eventually run out, like it did for other countries. And Swedens scarce resources wouldn't allow us fuck up once. While Russia easily could lose an army and two.
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Billions are lost. But even worse are all that the ukrainian people lose - their lives, family members, friends, bodyparts, mental health, their homes, their life savings, their hometowns, their dreams, their cultural heritage, etc...
Money can be rebuilt, but not those other things.
Ukraine suffers as the war drags on. But on the other hand does Putin gain neither... the equipment losses have been so painfully large that it is safe to say that Russias days as a great military power is over. And losing 70k men in combat and another 140k injuries, plus millions of people in braindrains and draftdodgers and you get a Russia with a huge demographic problem for the future. Things were already bad before this war. And now with the loss of the male population in the most childbearing and working age you effectivly depopulating Russia so severly that there will be no future youths that can pay for all pensions, or create a large mass army or keeping the wheels of the economy running.
Rebuilding the military after this war will probably cost Russia a trillion, as lost tanks, planes, missiles, artillery pieces, helicopters and warships needs to be replaced. And dead military contractors will be expensive to hire and they many years of training before they can do their job.
And if Russia would try to replace 100% of its losses would its economy probably collapse from the economic burden it would bring with it. So it will probably take Russia decades to recover. And meanwhile is USAs position of power unchallanged - at least in Eastern Europe. And China cannot count on a strong military support from Russia in a future conflict - as no strong russian army exist anymore.
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Så har det varit ända sedan 1914. Torpeden gjorde slagskeppet omodernt redan under första världskriget. Många vägrade att acceptera faktum under 1920 och 1930-talen. På 1940 talet blev det dock uppenbart att slagskeppen var dinosaurier dömda att dö ut, en efter en slogs de ut av torpeder och angrepp från ubåtar och flygplan. Som Royal Oak, Bismarck, Tirpitz, Yamato, Musashi, Repulse och Prince of Wales, flygangreppen på Taranto och Pearl Harbor.
Så efter andra världskriget var ingen stormakt längre intresserad av att bygga stor artilleriskepp. Amerikanerna tog till och med och avbeställde sitt gigantiska Montana klassen slagskepp mitt under brinnande världskrig. Maktbalansen var rubbad. Alla insåg det. Sjökrig var inte längre något som bara en liten klubb länder som USA, Japan, Tyskland, England, Frankrike, Italien, och Ryssland hade råd med.
Slagskeppens tid var nu förbi och mindre länder kunde nu ha råd med att bygga massvis av små fartyg. Torpedbåtar, korvetter och sånt. På sin höjd kunde någon kryssare få finnas kvar, men då endast för att ge skyddande eld åt torpedbåtarna när de skulle genomföra sina anfall. Men inte ens några nya kryssare ville man bygga efter kriget. På sin höjd kunde stora skepp som jagare kanske ses som användbara.
Men på 1960-talet så ändrades allt igen med nästa stora teknologiska genombrott: missilbåten. Sovjet började som första land att bygga små snabba båtar som kunde bära missiler som huvudbeväpning. Dessa kunde lätt sänka stora krigsskepp. Och att ha stora kanoner och tjockt pansar blev alltmera värdelöst. Torpeder kunde göra massiv skada på krigsskepp med att träffa dom när vattenlinjen eller under skeppet så att fartyget klövs itu. Nu kunde däremot missiler färdas otroligt långa sträckor - längre än vad den största kanonen på ett slagskepp kunde skjuta - och missilen kunde orsaka massiv skada och sänka det mäktigaste slagskeppet i världen med bara en träff.
Pansarskydd har blivit helt värdelöst. Ett slagskepp på 60.000 ton är numera inte mycket mera värt än en liten missilbåt på några hundra ton. Stealth och snabbhet ger bättre skydd och överlevnad än 2 meter stålplåt.
Vill man så kan man så klart se historiska paralleller till tidigare i historien som till 1700-talet när den stora mäktiga svenska flottan tappade kontrollen över Östersjön till den ryska flottan som massproducerade billiga fartyg av lågkvalitéts träd. Ryssarna byggde i rask takt mer än hundra galärer som med sina åror snabbt och lätt kunde röra sig på grunda vatten där de stora kraftfulla svenska segelfartygen med sina hundratals kanoner inte kunde röra sig utan fastna.
Sverige var totalt oförberett för denna nya typ av krigföring. Stora slagskeppens tid i Östersjön tog slut, och istället blev det bättre att ha många små snabba fartyg istället.
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Today in 2022 is the world very different. And despite Putains invasion of Ukraine and David Camerons warning words that Brexit will lead to another World war, do I feel like another world war is very distant. And even if Hitler took power in Germany today, I still do not see how he could harm England no matter how much he wants to, as the German army is in a pathetic shape with soldiers using broomsticks because there are not enough rifles for everyone, and navy and airforce are in an even more pathetic shape with less than a dozen operational shape Eurofighters and a navy equipped with outdated old warships.
It feels like Poland, France and Greece are the only continental powers taking their defence seriously at this point.
While Finland, Switzerland and Italy are taking this at least half-seriously.
So is there any need for a huge British military then? maybe not.
Maybe it will be hard to convince people to spend 1 year of their life in the military and being economically unproductive and unfree. This issue is perhaps more a philosophical one about citizenship, duties towards society, individual freedom and such. And conscription might feel unbritish in a way, and not very much needed right now.
But there are of course also advantages to be had from a large conscription army, as it would create large orders for military equipment for the British arms industry and bring technological development to the country that invented the tank, the radar, the touch screen, and the V-STOL jet. And it could also make Britain more military secure in an age when large capital ships have become obsolete, and having the stronger navy is no longer a guarantee for controlling the seas when missiles, airplanes and submarines have changed the playing field.
And sending away the average Britons sons to die in a pointless war like Tony Blair Iraq adventure will be so unpopular that it will be nearly impossible to do. He would have to use Gurkhas, Blackwater troops or create his own French foreign legion for his colonial wars.
Personally do I think it is worrysome from a democratic standpoint with an EU army for a bit of the same reason.
Conscripts are not the best troops when it comes to shooting down your own citizens - like Gaddaffi noticed when he ordered them to fire into crowds and they refused. But if you use non-nationals, or troops who are loyal towards their pay master and not their country, then of course the situation becomes a bit different.
This is what happened in Rome with Marius reforms, and the legions became loyal to their Generals and not to the Roman republic or the Roman people. And what followed was brutal civil wars between Generals who tried to grab all power Rome for themselves, and all the bloodshed and huge costs for those wars did tear Rome apart, and help bringing about its fall.
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Most experts say that the Austro-Hungarian empire was a relic of the past and that it would have fallen apart sooner or later even if no war would have happened.
This empire was after all only bound together by the monarchy and a little bit by Catholicism. But both those things were a bit outdated by the early 1900's. This Habsburg empire had been built out of royal marriages, so that is why its borders looked so strange.
Many tiny pieces of land did also accept their Austrian overlords in the 1500s and 1600s only because they feared the muslim Ottomans otherwise would conquer them and take away all their independence.
But since the late 1600's had the Ottoman empire been stagnating and the threat and fear of an Ottoman invasion faded away.
So could the German minority keep this empire together? Probably not.
Some richer parts of the empire had no interest in sharing their wealth with other more primitive peoples. While other parts would be economically hurt by independence.
So perhaps a loose union between all ex-Austro-Hungrian states would have been possible.
Something like an EU only for Balkan states, where they could share economic costs for railway construction and military spending and a military pact of all countries to protect against Russia and the Ottomans.
At best could the Austro-Hungrian empire perhaps have hoped for becoming like the USA, where states like California, Texas, North Dakota, Carolina and so on could determine most matters by themselves, and letting the Federal government handle the printing of money and military expenditure.
But personally I think the most likely fate for Austria would have been a complete break up of the empire sooner or later anyways. The Austro-Hungrian empire was after all just a relic from the medieval feudal era.
Nationalism, democracy, liberalism, pan-slavism, and such forces was too strong for an old empire that could not modernize itself. If it choose democracy - then it would lose the monarchy which was the only thing tying the country together - so it had to be an oppressive monarchy in order to survive. And democracy would also mean that the German speakers would lose their dominant position within this empire.
So the empire was doomed to be dysfunctional and ineffective in handle economic funds and as a military fighting force. This was already clear in the mid-1700s when the country got their ass kicked by Prussia under Frederick the Great with a country that was much smaller.
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One of the most important lessons one can learn from history in the healtcare field is that disease prevention has been the most important factor behind the longer lives people live today, when people normally die when they are 80, instead of 30 as in the early 1800s.
No effective medinces existed in the 1800s and the first blockbuster drugs came in the 1930s, so how was it then possible for people to live twice as long in England before good medicines had been invented?
The answer is disease prevention. Do away with the causes for disease so people don't get sick in the first place. One way of doing this is of course controlling immigration.
But it is also important with other things like getting people to eat healthy, sleep, workout, vaccination, taking a shower and use soap, don't eat where you take a shit, build sewers, drain swamps to get rid of the breeding grounds for malaria mosquitos, have good housing so people don't have to live with sick people or breath in mold from a badly ventilated apartment.
Disease prevention will become more important in the future as antibiotics will become less and less effective. And importing migrants with exotic infectious diseases will only risk of undoing decades of progress that have been done in eradicating disaeses that previously caused much harm in the western world.
The world is at risk of going back to the 1800s again where we had no effective medicines.
I am an optimist and I see that even the stupid unhygienic people in the 1800s managed to double life expectancy from 25 to 50 years without medicines or flush toilets. So I think people will still be able to live long lives also in the future - as long as one doesn't get sick, because then there is no longer any get-out-of-jail free cards that will save you anymore.
The worst case is if we fail in the disease prevention, then we will go back to the early 1800s when people didn't die so much from cancer or heart diseases as they did from virus or bacterial infections.
Doing away with globalism completly is not a preferable thing as I sees it, but some controls are obviously necessary. And illegal immigration needs to stopped completly.
And having Pharmaceutical factories in India that on a daily basis leaks out medicines into the water and thereby cause resistance is simply unacceptable and should be punished by the world community. If they don't get their shit togheter, then they should not get any foreign medicines at all until they get their house in order.
And the mistreatment of animals in CAFOs should also be stopped, and we should boycot countries that export meat that uses antibiotics to treat the many diseases that CAFO animals get. The meat industry is using 80-90% of all the antibiotics in society, so if they can't stop making animals sick then they should be forced to shut down and get replaced by old school farmers that doesn't
mistreat their animals.
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The battle of Kursk turned into something it was never intended to be. Manstein just wanted a small offensive to straighten the frontline and encircle and destroy a number of Soviet troops.
But the operation was deleyed, and deleyed and deleyed, and Hitler wanted to have his super tanks there to ensure success. And meanwhile did the Russian make minefields, dig trenches, build tanks and concentrate more forces to that area so it would become a hard nut to crack.
And by then this battle was about to turn into something it was inteded to be: A large operation involving all troops available for the 1943 summer offensive. And it was the first days of July and the offensive hadn't even started yet. This slow warfare wasn't much like the old Blitzkriegs in the past with surprise attacks and speed. This was a battle that both sides prepared for for a long time.
So of course did many Generals abandon the idea of an offensive in that area, because it would likely be dearly bought victory at best.
Germany started the battle and on paper did they as usual did they inflict disproportionatly high losses on their opponents. And they did actully have some success at one side of the pincer, but the operation was anyways no longer kept in move. Why? Because Hitler wanted troops to be moved to defend Italy against an allied landing in Salerno.
So the Germans were probably likely to take take their objectives if they had wanted to. But the Kursk operation would have been useless anyways, since the Russians were beginning their huge offensives at Orjol and other places simultaniously. Which could pose a serious threat to the northern pincer of the Kursk operation, so my guess is that the Kursk operation would have been called off anyways regardless of what happened in Salerno, due to the risk that the northern wing of Kursk might be encircled.
So what would I have done? I guess that I wouldn't had attacked at all, but rather saved my forces for another day. The summer had been lost anways, so I could as well use the time to beat back the allies at Salerno and then in other places. And meanwhile could I try to keep my panzer divisions at full strength for the next summer offensive.
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@erodinspikewing6917
I think there is a big difference between a soldier and a hunter. And I think there is a big difference between a hunter and a guy who has never hold a rifle before in his life. There are lots of different skill levels in handling weapons, and also in knowledge how to behave in combat on a battlefield. How you should form a formation in battle, how you should behave in urban combat without getting yourself killed, etc.
Not much is known about the leidung among historians, and how it was designed and so on. However the impression I get is that a fleet was set up for a short military campaign. And as soon as it was over was the fleet disbanded and fighters returned to their homes.
The problem as I sees it with such a system is that the fleet stops to exist. All knowledge gained in battle is soon forgotten as the fleet is gone and the men who did the fighting have gotten old and died.
This is why there was a big improvement when we one decided that we should also keep our navy in times of peace. And that we should draw lessons from the wars we have fought, and see what worked well, and what worked bad and what changes do we need to do to improve our navy so we can be more succesful in the next war? Changes to our tactics? changes to our weapons? Better routines on our ships? Better training?
So I think there is a big difference between a navy, and some guys jumping into a boat driving off to a foreign land to plunder just for fun without any standardized military training, tactics or anything.
Its like comparing a soldier to a hunter. Soldiers will normally be much more effective in combat.
The difference between professional and unprofessional armies might have been small in Scandinavia in the 1500s. But what made Sweden such a powerful war machine on the battlefields of the 1600s and early 1700s was that we had driven our professionalism to our armies further than any other country in the world.
Poland was country of winged hussars, brave knights in shining armor with enormous personal courage and iniative. But they lacked team spirit and well organized tactics. Sweden on the other hand lacked any glorious chivalry in their warfare. When you looked at the Swedish army over a battlefield of the 1600s you rather saw large formations of men moving in formation. It was like watching a big machine moving over the battlefield when you saw a big column of men swallowing polish knights in a very methodical and organized way with tactics organized into perfection.
Sweden enemy Denmark also lacked the Swedish armys professionalism. And for most part it worked for them. In the wars of the 1500s was Denmark richer and stronger than Sweden. They laid close to Germany and had lots of money and could buy German mercenaries, which easily did cut Swedish farmers with no military training into pieces. Swedish troops were cheaper and could be effective in ambushes in forests, but overall were our troops inferior. Unless the war was long and lasted for years because then it was too costly to keep the mercenary troops, because they were much more expensive to use than giving farmboys a weapon.
Denmark won victories, but they learned nothing from them. Because as soon as the war was over was all mercenary regiments disbanded, and all Danish farmers was sent home.
Sweden on the other hand learned from their mistakes. The worst defeat in Swedish military history was the battle of Kirchholm in 1605 where a large Swedish force despite enormous numerical advantage got totally crushed by a tiny Polish force. This disaster was a wake up call to Sweden that many improvements to the Swedish military had to be done. And everything was improved, training, organisation, tactics everything.
So the next wars we fought we improved our army even more, and in the next even more. And soon did we have a very combat experienced army and the best military machinery in northern Europe.
So the next time Denmark would face Swedish troops we did kick their asses and in two wars was had Denmark been dealt catastrophic defeats. Denmark was 100 years behind Sweden in organisation because they had been lazy and relied on mercenaries to win their wars instead of trying to build an army for both times of peace and war with could bring knowledge, skills, tips and tricks further from one generation of soldiers to the next. From father to son.
So therefore did Denmark always start their wars with no knowledge at all about tactics and such and made the same stupid mistakes as in previous wars. And while the Swedish soldiers had been training togheter for years and the men know each other since they came from the same town or village and had a great team spirit - could the same not be said about Denmarks troops. Denmark hired German men to fight for them and forced some Danish farmboys to become soldiers and all those men were now just thrown togheter into the same regiment, and none of these men knew each other before, they had not been training togheter with each other before the war... so of course their manouvers on the battlefield was always a bit more clumsier, less diciplined and the men did not have the same willingness to fight and die for the rest of the men in their own company as the Swedish troops.
The Swedish troops had been friends with each other for years, while the men in the Danish regiments barely knew each other.
And when it comes to navies do I likewise think there is hell of a difference between a professional navy that uses experienced seamen who spent 10-20 years at sea (like the Dutch or Danish navies) and a navy that uses mostly land based peasant with little or no maritime experience at all (like the Swedish navy of the 1500s and 1600s).
And I also think there is a big difference between the permanent navy Gustav Vasa created, and the viking fleets that was used for small military missions that might last a few months or years and then was disbanded.
Gustav Vasas navy of the 1500s often used farmboys on galley ships. Such ships used much manpower. But on the other hand was peasants cheap compared to experienced professionals. And using galley ships was excellent for the shallow waters around Stockholm, Finland and russia where big ships could not sail without a risk of getting stuck or sink. And sometimes it was also an advantage to use oars.
Later on would Sweden build some of the biggest battleships in Europe with much firepower such as Mars, and very much technological cutting edge. But despite that was it extremely uncommon that ships tried to fight each other with cannons and sink the other ship. Usually did ships fire the cannons on each other and then did men try to rush over to the other ship with swords and pistols and trying to take it over.
Because it was funnier to steal an enemy ship than to sink it.
And sinking an enemy ship was usually very difficult back then. Cannons had a very bad range... probably with an accuracy of less than 300 meters. and a big ship made out of wood do usually not want to sink quickly in the first place.
It was not until the late 1600s it started to become common to try to sink enemy ships with guns. And by then had the Swedish navy become much more professional.
However before then was there not much difference between a sea battle and a land battle. As ships were filled with many hundreds of soldiers from the army that was used for trying to take over the enemy ships.
"The general agreement among historians that Sweden had far superior naval forces to Poland and Germany"
Nope. Had you asked someone to rank the best navies in the baltic sea in year 1520 when Sweden became indepedent I think they would rank Lübeck as number 1 best. Denmark as no 2. Poland with its rich big cities that made Stockholm looklike a village by comparison as number 3.
Some serious attempts were also later on made to build a navy by poland during the wars King Sigismund waged against Gustavus Adolphus. And there was a big fear that the Spanish navy would come and help catholic Poland invade Sweden. And to combat this threat was the ship Vasa build along with other warships.
Poland was a rich superpower back in those days and culturually, economically and technologically superior
to Sweden in almost every way.
And after the defeat at Kirchholm in 1605 was it probably few people who believed that Sweden would ever become a great power.
"Also, the point about the English and Dutch navies is blatantly false"
Sweden did not exactly sail to America or the pacific on a regular basis like those fleets did, so of course we did have less experience. And even if the Swedish merchant navy was impressivly strong by the late 1600s during Swedens height of its power, would I still say that 1000, 2000 or maybe 3000 merchant ships in the Swedish merchant marine is quite a tiny number compared to the 28.000 ships strong Dutch merchant navy of the same time.
When the Great Northern War began did Charles XII have an impressive fleet of 49 warships. However that should be compared to 172 British warships and 118 Dutch ships. With navies with sailors that were more experienced than ours.
One could of course make a few advantages out of the Swedish system, like it was fast and easy to mobilize Swedish sailors and quickly make them ready for battle while for Denmark you first had to transport them from Norway to Denmark and then put them on a ship before the Swedish navy cut off the communications between Norway and Denmark.
Sweden also had an uniqely good access to building materials for its navy. And Swedish warships were often very well maintained and could often last for many decades. There are for example ships that Gustaf III built that remained in service for 80 years! I think it is extremely rare that ships lasted anywhere near that long in other navies. Especially in the russian navy that use spruce trees for their ships instead of oak - which resultet in extremely poor quality ships.
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You ask the wrong question. It is not interesting how the FA18 stacks up against Gripen. The interesting thing is how it stacks up against russian jets, and here it do stack up pretty well.
F18 is an older plane than Gripen so it is unsurprisingly inferior. Gripen usually beats Finlands F18 in duels.
And on paper do the most modern variants of those planes - Gripen E and Super Hornet show that Gripen is usually better.
Thrust-to-weight ratio: Gripen E 1.06 vs 0.93 for Super Hornet.
Max speed: Gripen E Mach 2 vs Mach 1.8 for Super Hornet
Supercruise: Gripen E Mach 1.2 vs none for Super Hornet which is incapble of that
Ferry Range: Gripen E 4,000km vs 3,300km for Super Hornet
Service ceiling: Gripen E 50,000ft vs 50,000ft for Super Hornet
Wing loading (a lower number equals better): Gripen E 58lb/ft2 vs 94lb/ft2 for Super Hornet
Rate of climb: Gripen E 50,000ft/min vs Super Hornet 44,882ft/min
But Hornet is better at a few things..
Hardpoints: Gripen E 10 vs. 11 for Super Hornet
Payload: Gripen E 15,875lbs vs 17,750lbs
Specialties:
Super Hornet: Carrier based aircraft, a long service record, can take off from rough runways.
Gripen E: Extremely small needs of maintenance. Not much time needed on the ground for maintenance - only five hours for every hour in the sky compared to 17 for F16. Gripenonly needs a small ground crew of only 5 men including 1 certified mechanice (compared that to 20 highly skilled mechanics which are needed to keep just one F16 flying).
After landing you can refuel the plane and add weapons to it in just between 5 or 15 minutes (depending on type of mission), and then your plane is ready for take off again and is up in the air.
Gripen can also use improvised runways which are very short. It have a powerful radar and electronic warfare kit, and it can carry both Meteor and AIM-120 missiles. The plane is also relativly cheap so it is not a big deal if a plane is lost in combat.
Negatives:
F18: Old design, unremarkable performance in the air. Two engines which means much more maintance.
Gripen E: Slightly smaller bombload and fewer hardpoints because of the small size of the plane (Carrying an extra pair of missiles could perhaps come in handy in air combat against many opponents in the air). Stupid localization of the probe for aerial refueling, which makes this moment a nightmare for pilots as it is located behind the seat of the pilot and is therefore hard to see.
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Tariffs do work and history shows so. Which was the fastest growing economy in the world 1780-1820 and had the highest tariffs in Europe? It was Britain.
Which country had the worlds highest tariffs 1820-1890 and was the fastest growing economy of the world at that time? It was USA.
Which country had the worlds highest tariffs on manufacturing goods and the fastest growing economy measured in GDP per workhour 1890-1914? It was Sweden.
And later on have you seen the worlds fastest growing economies like Japan, South Korea and China repeating all these economic wonders.
So the free trade dogma is based on stupidity and ignorance.
And not all jobs are worth saving because not all jobs are equally valuable. If you wanna make a poor 3rd world country rich, then you need to replace all low paid jobs with higher paid jobs. And when different parts of the economy inside a country is competing for workers there will be winners and losers. South Korea used to be the largest shoe manufacturer in the world during the 1990s. However later on would South Korea see a strong rise in its high technology sector, and Samsung was performing strongly and needed more workers and was prepared to pay high wages to get more workers to help it make smartphones. However this pushed up wages not just in industry but in all parts of the South Korean society, and that was good for South Koreans that now would get better paid and get a higher standard of living than before now when their high tech industry was rising.
But the shoe industry was the loser as it could not compete with Samsungs higher wages. And higher wages harmed the profits of the shoe industry, so the shoe factories moved to other countries instead.
And this is the typical development of things when a country is transitioning away from jobs with lower wages to jobs with higher wages. There will always be losers. And we should not try to prevent every job from being lost. We should do the opposite and try to destroy as many low paying jobs as possible and replace them with high paying jobs, and we should try to speed up technological development as fast as possible.
If you do want every job from being lost, then you should make the tax payers save every old outdated industry that could not handle competition... save the horse and buggy industry jobs that cannot handle competition from cars, save the Kodak analog cameras that cannot handle competition from digital photography, support ice harvesters that are getting outcompeted by refridgerators, and help the typewriter industry that have a hard time since the innovation of modern computers.
Personally I think that we should help some jobs and destroy other jobs. We should support high tech jobs by all means... including tariffs and government support, and regulations favoring them. While we should try to despose of old dying industries. If some poor country in the 3rd world wanna make money from taking over our low paying jobs and then ship those products back to us for a low cost - then fine, let them do that. We get cheap products and they get a steady income. Maybe they don't earn that much from their primitive industries making beer, milk, toys and such. But it is at least better paid than non-manufacturing jobs.
And yes manufacturing jobs are more valubale than other jobs. Because they got higher productivity than jobs in say farming, raw material extraction and service sector jobs. You can invent more effiecent production methods in industry and use robots and machines that can upscale production to become 400 times more effiecent. But you cannot do that in farming, because it takes time for chickens and potatoes to grow. And trees need say 30 years to grow. And service sector jobs like chefs and hairdressers cannot do 400 times more job in a workhour... because that level of productivity is simply not possible in the service sector. A roman barber can probably make roughly as many haircuts in an hour as a modern barber can. And a chef cannot increase his output 400 fold without the meals he serves gets lower in quality.
And producitivity matters if you want your country to go from poor to rich. No medium sized country have managed to become rich without increased productivity. So the talk that manufacturing doesnt matter is just ignorant nonsense.
Tourism does earn a country foreign cash that allow it to import foreign goods, unlike manufacturing does. And neither can a country like USA with 300 million people just live off tourism. And selling raw materials is not making countries rich, since the global competition is strong as many countries in the world got coal, wood, copper, cotton and sugar. And new materials are constantly invented that can replace those materials - like for example artificial sweaterners instead of sugar, synthethic vanilla, and optic cables are invented to replace old copper cables which makes the global price of copper to fall like a rock and hurt copper exporting countries in africa.
But knowledge based products in manufacturing does not have does products. If your country is one of the extremely few countries that knows how to make high tech products, then the competition is low and you can charge high prices for your exports and make big profits that allows for high wages and large tax income for the government. And when your country is making the newest most hot thing, then of course is global demand for that product enormous - which allows you to sell massive quantities at a high price which means enormous profits.
And by being a world leader in aircraft manufacturing, creator of jet engines, and stealth aircrafts do USA gain massive amounts of wealth. And by the US government with state support (and not the free market) helped to create the internet, GPS, semi-conductors, and so on did USA manage to create some of the largest companies in the world like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook and so on. Europe does not have anything similiar.
So it makes sense for USA to just to temporarily curve the free market, even if it means short term costs for society.
Sure did it cost money for Japans consumers to have tariffs that forced them to buy inferior japanese cars at an overprice instead of buying European and American cars back in the 1950s. But today have Toyota managed to grow into one of the most succesful car manufacturers in history thanks to that, instead of getting crushed by foreign competition. Had you been an economic advisor of Japan in the 1950s you would have told them to not do any protectionism. You would have said it would be insane to think that a poor 3rd world country just destroyed by a big war should try to compete with the worlds largest economic super power in car manufacturing. You would have told japan to save its money by not helping Toyota, and instead should Japan have followed the free market and continued to do things it was good at. And continue to sell silk, fish, porcelain, soy and textiles.
And with your advice had Japan continued to remain a poor agrarian society instead of an industrial powerhouse. And we consumers in the western world would never have enjoyed playing any Nintendo, driving any Toyota, or any electronics from Sony.
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"Basically serbian propaganda"
Nope. I think he tries to be neutral. As a westerner the knowledge of this topic is limited and thus most people prefer a neutral stance. And you take neutrality as being pro-serbia, which is not. I personally blame Serbia for the war and sugarcoat things less. But nevertheless do I understand why people carefully avoid strong statements on this. Its not easy to access good information here in the west.
"I am sick and tired of foreigners patronizing the Balkan nations"
Its easy for us who are done with our state building process to look down on other parts of the world which have not come as far. I can see why people want independence. The EU have made me realize that independence and democracy for my country cannot be taken for granted.
I do endorse civic nationalism.
But ethno-nationalism is something I mostly only got negative feelings about... black lives matter in USA and muslims in Western Europe only cause hatred and divide. They put their own groups self-interest above the interest of their country. So I only got contempt for this movement.
But if foreigners and racial minorities act loyal to their country then I have nothing against them.
The tragedy of the Balkans is that you got similar language, culture, history and everything. But yet you kill each other. You have a nice climate and beaches, but instead of enjoying life you fight wars.
Your countries are smaller than the Swedish province I live in. But still wars are fought for this tiny plot of land. And the land is not even holy like Jerusalem or containing oil - nope. It was a poor Ex-Communist country back in the 1990's, and wars were fought getting control over poor areas. A meaningless war in my opinion. Perhaps a breakup was inevitable as people in the comment section say. But why wasn't it then done peacefully at least.
When Norway broke up with Sweden in 1905, it didn't lead to a war. And today are relations between the two countries very good. Sweden had peace for 200 years now.
But will all Nordic countries form a Scandinavian country together? I doubt that.
We Swedes ruled Finland for 800 years. We gave them our laws, our religion, and the most modern state apparatus in Europe back in the 1600's. Our school system and railway system is the same. The finns were treated as equals when they were part of the same Kingdom. They had their seats in the Swedish parliament. Swedish troops fought to defend Finland against Russia, and Finnish troops fought for Sweden.
But the language difference is still great. Finlands language got more in common with Asian languages than it got with European ones. So all efforts winning the hearts and minds of Finns for 800 years have been wasted. They do not want to become Swedes again after they have declared independence from Russia.
And as a Swede I cannot blame them. I would not want to be ruled by another country that speaks another language either. No matter how rich, sophisticated and kind they might be.
So if 800 years of kind occupation did not work to turn Finns into Swedes, then I am not surprised Austro-Hungrian empire got torn apart either with it much greater cultural barriers.
And the EU project of merging 30 European countries from all 4 corners of Europe just seems like insanity created by historically ignorant people.
"I'm disgusted by Serbs who fail to condemn the politics of Slobodan Milošević"
I agree. Not all Serbs are bad people. But those who cannot even condemn this warmonger, dictator and murderer then I got nothing more to talk about with them. They have a rotten moral compass. They are the reason why I dislike that country.
"After WWII ended, German enclaves in the east disappeared"
The German world fell apart already in 1918. German was until pretty recently having almost the same status as English on the Balkans, since it was the language of the Austrohungrian empire and all small countries that sprung up from that empire had to learn it.
So if Czechs, Hungarians and Yugoslavs wanted to speak with each other they could use German. But after the empire fell apart and also Germany got mutilated in the next war - there was very little reason to keep on using this language. And the German speaking minority got kicked out from many places in Europe after WW2.
A typical thing of a fallen empire I guess.
Personally do I think that countries with provinces with a large foreign minority should try to be respectful and sensitive to that minorities demand and don't try to shave its will down their will with force. France is granting Alsace-Lorraine much independence, but the province is still a part of France despite the majority of the population are Germans.
And same goes for Åland, which have a 90% Swedish population but is part of Finland.
So ethnical conflicts and tensions can be minimized and war being avoided. Personally do I think that both Åland and Alsace should change owners. But the 2nd best alternative is probably much local self-determination.
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@antemesinMisericorde
"You say all six nations of ex-Yugoslavia have the same culture, what you basically mean is, Serbian culture is seen as the norm. Otherwise, let me tell you, there is no difference between Scots, Welsh and the English."
There is an British culture and there is an English culture. They are closely linked.
Same goes for Croatia and Yugoslavia.
And that makes this conflict seem so unnecessary and tragic. The cultural differences are so small that reasonable people should have been able to work them out. At least most of them.
It would have been another thing if you shared your country with ISIS... then it would have been more difficult to combine pork, beer, short skirts, and music with the fundamentalist values of the other half of the population. So I would see why a failed state would have been unavoidable in such a case.
Not all countries end up in civil wars like Syria, Iraq and such. Switzerland isn't having Italians, Germans and French trying to kill each other. So sometimes I do think that cultural differences can be worked out.
"Croatia and Slovenia are accused of sabotaging federal financing of which they were actually largest contributors"
I agree with you here.
I can also admit my ignorance about Eastern Europe in the 1990's.
Richer part of countries suddenly did not want to pay for poorer parts. Richer Czechia broke off from poorer Slovakia, so Czechoslovakia became two countries.
And Yugoslavia also got torn up.
Personally I do not see economic plus and minus between provinces as a problem, since every country haves them. But on the other hand, if you do not feel solidarity with that particular part of the country you get a problem...
Germany's unwillingness to pay for Greece economic problems in one such example.
So would you like to work your ass off each month and put all your salary into a bank account which you share with your lazy unemployed drunk uncle who constantly like to over-spend money?
- Personally I can understand if people have a bit mixed feelings about this idea.
"Serbian culture is seen as the norm"
All I am saying is that it is related to the other cultures on the Balkans.
Just as it would be tragic if the English, Irish, Scots, Wales, Canadians, Americans, and Australians would fight a war against each other.
Of course do all those nationalities have their own sub-group of British culture. They are similar but different.
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Its our way or the highway. What is there really anything we can or should compromise about? If someone breaks into your house, kills your dog and destroy paintings and furniture, and then he claims ownership over your living room should you give that barbarian anything? I think not. He should go to jail. And if that is not possible, then he should be outright killed on the spot.
I think it is good that we steal all frozen russian assets and give them to Ukraine as a form of war reparations. I also think that the west should give the green light to an Ukrainian invasion of Transnistria - that could remove the russian military force which prevents democracy in that country, and the land strip could be a bargening chip in a peace negotiation.
And Yes I absolutly think that the west MUST humiliate Russia. That is the only way they will learn to make peace with their neighbours and stop trying wars of aggression against their neighbours. Right now they can always try a war against their neighbours since there are no downsides of trying and only upsides - If you win a war you expand your land, and if you lose you don't have to pay anything.. no land ceded, no war reparations, no war criminals punished...
All this has to stop.
Russia should not be above the law. And we should destroy their grandious megalomaniac self-image they have of being more than anyone else. They should be treated just like any other country period.
So if Russia goes out from this war with their money stolen, and with no land gained but only land in Transnistria lost, and being an international paria, embaressed for its military failings that could not prevent a loss of territory.. and a destroyed economy and military.. then Russias self-image has to change. They have to realize that they are not Superpower anymore.
And thats the end of it.
Russias history is filled with losing war after war. The lost 10 times more soldiers than the Finns, and Finland was able to keep their independence... but in Russian propaganda is the Winter war and Continuation war not portraid as humiliating lost wars for Russia.
Same goes with their pathetic failures against Nazi-Germany and enormous losses, and that their country was saved by lend-lease is totally left out in Russian history books.
And that Russia lost 19 out of 20 battles against Sweden in the Great Northern War is also something Russia likes to forget and only talk about the battle of Poltava.
So it is therefore time that we in this war leave no doubt which side is the loser, and which side is the winner. Russia must suck it up that they lose this war and get humiliated. They need to wake up. Wake up like dumb child who think he is a great hockey player and musician because his mom told he so... but now that stupid child needs to hear the painful truth and find a new hobby that he actually got some talent for.
The Russian people is like this child with an unreaslistic worldview. From education and from media have they been taught that russia is a great military power that have never lost a war, and never started any unjustified wars and had any evil intentions and commited genocide.
I think it is time that russians learn that their military sucks. And that they should get another hobby than militarism.
Fix their own economy in their 3rd world country, instead of destroying other countries for example...
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As I said earlier, I think it was extremely unlikely that Germany would win the war by 1943 - about 1-3% percent or so. And neighter am I sorry that the nazi lost. I just think that there was still a small chance to win after Stalingrad. And by winning I mean that Germany could inflict so heavy losses on the allies that they would have to agree to Germany keeping all her core provinces including Austria, Alsace, Sudetenland the Danzig corridor and Danish Holstein.
Germany still possessed much military power as the large number of men involved in the Ardennes battle and Bagration shows. And the number of uboats was actully higher in early 1944 than what it was in early 1942. And Germany's military production was gearing up and reached its peak in 1944, when an impressive 80% of its GDP was directed to the war effort. And if the Heinkel 162 had been early on choosen for production instead of the complex two engined me262 or the me109k, then Germany would have a much better chance of also protecting their factories from being bombed.
Had also priority been given to air-to-air missiles and surface-to-air missiles instead of to the V2 rockets, then the allied airforce would certainly bleed heavy losses.
And had Hitlers orders of static defence, fortified towns and "not a step back" been replaced with a more flexible defence, then the German troops would no be so likely to get trapped in encirlements, while it would be easier for the Germans to mass forces for massive counter attacks on the flanks that would smash the Russian troops as they have advanced forward so much that their lines have streched out thin and they have runned of supplies. Von Mainsteins counter-offensive it Kharkov in 1943 is a classic example on how the Russians could have been crushed.
The Russian army would bleed to death as they make one failed major offensive after another.
That never happened in real life, but it likely could have happened, since in the real world would the Russians would have runned of manpower faster than the Germans on the same path of aggressive offensives as they did from late 1943 til early 1944. And their liberation of Ukraine could relief some of their need for manpower. This is the conclucion Zetterling makes in his book "The Korsun pocket".
The Germans could then just wait for the Russians to make the mistakes and run out of manpower, and then the push to take southern Russia could be made. And then another defensive line could be put up with barbed wire and minefields that reduced the need for manpower to defend it. So men could be sent from the east and to the west.
The entire landing operation could also very well have ended in a disaster for the allies if the Germans had concentrated all their reinforcements to the Omaha beach (instead of Bayeux) and crushed the landings there. And then they could have moved all their troops to the next beach and crushed the D-day landing zones one by one from north to South.
Furthermore did the 7th Army defending Normandie only have 11 Divisions. While 18 Divisons were positioned in Pas the Calais during all the weeks that the battle for Normandy lasted because the Germans still thought that the main allied landing would come somewhere else even after D-Day had happened.
So there was much troops that could have been moved to Normandy and ended all hopes for an allied breakthrough. It would be impossible to support the allied beachead in Normany throughout the winter, and the allied planners had never anticipated that.
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@BojanPeric-kq9et
Hyperinflation happens in third world countries with a socialist regime, or in countries that have been war torn.
It does not happen to modern industrialized economies where production capacity is high. And especially not in a country with a strong global reserve currency with an extremely high international demand.
And it is true that some people have been over-optimistic about the sanctions effect on the russian economy. However I do not consider those people to be stupid necessarily given russias history of having a fragile economy. No other economy had such a large stock market and GDP drop as russia during the financial crisis. And the effects of a low oil price, the war in Afghanistan and the Chernobyl disaster plus some inherited structural problems of the eastern bloc economy from the 1970s did break the russian economys back and some consider it to have strongly contributed to the fall of the Berlin wall and the Soviet union.
I dont think we will see any 1917 event in russia because of the sanctions and war. ButI think the russian economy is spiraling downwards, and using currency reserves and capital controls will not work forever. Especially not when fighting an expensive war that consume large amounts of money each month.
To me it seems economic pain rather comes slowly, but on the other hand may it start to cut deep. Sanctions, braindrain, dead young men, falling birthrates, lost export markets, and lost expensive special equipment like submarines and awacs planes will be extremely difficult to replace.
Rebuilding the military will take decades.
And the more russia prospone its transition over to a modern manufacturing industry economy - the harder and costlier will it get.
And selling raw materials is not good as terms of trade vs high value knowledge intensive manufacturing goods just falls all the time.
So russia will only get less and less for the oil, timber, and gold it sells. And the little manufacturing that are being done is done with weapons - and this war is not good for exports.
So yea i believe in a bear market for russias part.
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If what the Bible says about Jesus are true - that he performed miracles, cured sick people, turned water into wine, fed thousands of people with bread and fishes, and that 3 wise men followed a star on heaven to give him gifts, and that Jesus caused some trouble at the temple with the moneychangers, and that people came up to him to ask for advice from this wise man, and that he made a triumphant entry into Jerusalem on a donkey and was meet by cheering crowds, and how Jesus made himself an enemy of Philistines and the powerful clergy - and of the evil and powerful Caiaphas.
The jewish people did also choose Barabbas over Jesus in a famous vote over which criminal that should be pardoned...
Jesus also made prophecies about the future which all came true... He told Peter that he would deny that he know Jesus three times before the rooster crows that day when Jesus died. And when Jesus died did the veil at the temple get torn in two, as he predicted.
If all those stories are true, then I conclude that Jesus must have been a very famous person and a man often heard of. Especially if he truely was the son of God, and if it was commonly believed that he actually was a man close to God.
Therefore do I find it very strange that nearly no documents exist of him from the time period that he lived. I mean this person would certainly be a more important person than even Julius Caesar and emperor Augustus - people where there exist lots of sources that confirms their existence. But the same cannot be said about Jesus, where the Bible written decades after his supposed existence are the only source of evidence that we got for his existence.
That makes me wonder if the Jesus story is just made up. When you write a biography about someone 300 years after he lived then you don't have much credibility in my eyes, especially not if you sit in the other end of the medietarranean sea and write down things you imagine happened to Jesus.. I mean the people who did write some of the Bible texts have never visisted the holy land and made things up, because the terrain description in the Bible does not match the terrain in the real world - neither now or back in Jesus days.
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What we have today is feudalism. Its certainly not the people who decide.
And feudalism is not mertitocratic, on the contrary is it totally against sane policies. Sweden tried rule by noblemen between 1721-1809. And that was the worst period in Swedish history. The country lost 4 wars in a row and got economically ruined, and then was Finland and Pomerania lost. All because of the incompetent rule of the nobles.
And still we were lucky, because things could easily have ended even worse, in 1743 and 1809 was there a very high chance that Russia would have taken over the country because of the treason and betrayal of the nobles.
The best periods in Swedish history was after the Kings had executed all of the nobility. Then was the country, rich, unified and strong.
Polands history is basically the same. A great power with enormous population and resources got wrecked only because of poor leadership and selfish nobles that put personal interest before national interest. And the result became that Poland got divided up, and was subject to one genocide after another - Swedens murder of 20% of the population, Hitlers murder of 20% of Polish population in the holocaust, the Katyn massacre by the Soviet union.
So getting rid of the nobles is the best thing a country could do. They should be forced to live in poverty and the only way to make career for them should be by serving their King/country.
If they try to carve up their own indepentent countries within the state, then they should be put down for treason instantly.
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@alexanderrose1556 "nationalism (the cancer of all politics"
Nothing wrong with nationalism. I much prefer that over the fascist globalism we have today. The world was in many ways better 30 years ago than what it is today with EU destroying one freedom after another - spying on its citizens, censoring freedom of speech, removing the right for people to decide over their own body, etc.
I can say that I only hold all Europhiles and "world citizens" in utter contempt. They are traitors to their own countries and traitors against democracy.
We can look at globalist ideologies that have murdered far more people than nationalism: Islam, Communism, neoliberalism, Christianity.
Personally I do think its very doubtful if the crimes of nazism deserves to be assigned to nationalism, since their ideology was a hybrid that also included fascism, socialism, social-darwinism, and possibly some inherited christian hatred of the jews from Luther and the catholic crusades.
I see nothing wrong in celebrating a countrys own culture and history. And nationalism was also one of the main driving forces for creation of democracy in the 1800s. And nationalism drove liberation movements in the 3rd world against western explotation. And patriotism was probably the most important source of motivation why allied soldiers took up arms against Hitler. Few people did risk their lives for Stalin, Communism, and such.. and the mass gassings of the holocaust only began in 1942 - 3 years after the war had began. And most people back then knew almost nothing about what happened in Germany's 6 top secret murder camps inside Poland.
So once again, the patriotism was the main motivation why allied troops fought against Hitler.
So it is nationalism we have to thank for bringing an end to Hitlers terror.
Like it or not, but it is thanks to men who fought for mother Russia, uncle Sam, Polands independence and so on which brought an end to Hitlers reich. And I'm not even taking anything away from Jews who just fought for their own survival or French Communists who simply just hated nazis. All I'm saying is that patriotism was probably the most important thing for most soldiers. Hitler had declared war on Russia and declared war on USA, and dropped bombs on England... so now soldiers had to go out and defend their country.
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People say they will be used as StuGs, or as point defence behind the frontline, or as indirect fire artillery. Or perhaps given to the Luhansk and Donetsk armies. But given the lack of dicipline among the leadership and the careless attitude towards losses would I suspect that they sooner or later are pushed into idiotic frontline attacks just like other tanks, just to get slaughtered.
And if you lack any other tanks, then maybe this is what you have to do.
Anyways, had I been a western country and been given a thousand T-55 tanks as a gift which I could not throw away, then I would just remove the turrets and use in a defensive line - perhaps to defend a coastline like that the fortifications on Crimea. And when the turret is removed I could rebuild the chassis of those tanks into recovery vehicles, mine clearers, engineering tanks with a bulldozer blade, flamethrowers, or putting a 155mm artillery piece on top of it and making it a self-propelled gun, or I could perhaps put a Gepard turret on top of it. And if the chassi is crappy it would not matter much since I dont think a point defence AA system would have to move around much. And being a bridgelayer is probably pretty boring when you don't lay bridges. And being an artillery piece does not require much movement either I guess.
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@ruggeddiscipline6026
Russias economy is smaller than that of Spain. With all sanctions, braindrain, draftdodgers, costs of the war etc will the Russian economy soon probably not even rank among the top 20 largest economies in the world. So who cares about Russia?
- None.
And China is not going to overtake the dollar anytime soon. Its a technologically backwards country compared to the west. And west superior technologies gives it a superior economic and military might.
China is suffering from overpopulation and enviromental problems. And in the coming decades will the country have to deal with an economic and military decline as the population is ageing and shrinking.
And with that development do all hopes of overtaking USA go away.
China does not have natural resources and a steady demographic trend like USA does either.
And the dollar is on a solid ground. USA does also have more allies than either Russia and China. And while Syria, Cuba and North Korea are 3rd world countries are Japan, South Korea, France, Germany, UK, Canada, Australia, Italy and Spain pretty big economies.
Togheter does the EU and UK have about 800 million people - which is 5 times more people than Russia.
Russia is a backwards sh*thole. It have nothing to sell aside from oil and weapons. And who wants to buy crappy Soviet weapons in the future after the failure in Ukraine?
And oil is not a resource that will last forever. So Russias days are numbered, unless the country starts to change and abandon its traditional barbaric ways.
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The East Bloc collapsed and the Cold war ended with people in Germany took to the streets and protested and the Berlin wall was torn down.
And all regimes are weak and have to bow to the people. Hitler was very scared that the German people would rise up against his war, like the German people had protested against world war 1 in 1918. So he always listened to public opinion and tried to avoid a total mobilization for war of German society for as long as he could. Only in early 1943 was Germany mobilized for total war... and that was like 3 years after Britain, a year after USA, and one and a half year after Russia.
So it was too little, too late to win the industrial war against the allies.
And even if his brutal regime was capable of killing approximatly 12 million people in the holocaust, was this regime still pathetically powerless when it feared a backlash from public opinion. The protests at Rosenstrasse was a battle that protesters won against Hitlers regime that wanted to take away all jewish husbands from women in Berlin and deport them to Auschwitz to be gassed to death. So had the German people only protested more, its possible that the holocaust would never have happened.
And also Communist China today are fearful of public protests. It had to bow down and abandon its zero-covid policy with its brutal consequences for ordinary people out of fear of backlash from protestors. And this protest was anti-Covid restrictiosn, but it also started to become anti-regime protests, and pro-democracy protests... and this scary development
could not be crushed by brutal force alone. So the Chinese government quickly scrapped all Covid measures over a night, and Covid began to spread like a wildfire in China among a population which previously been totally unexposed to the disease and lacked the natural immunity which could be seen in other countries such as Sweden.
And the result became an over-burdened healthcare system as hundreds of thousands catched Covid, and the shocks to the Chinese economy became severe. This was not what the Commie dictatorship regime had wished for, but this is what they got.
And all this shows that public opinion matters. But then of course you need to break a threshold and have much willingness to fight among the population and a large part of the population must be against the regime. It didn't help that tens of millions of people protested against the Iraq war in 2003.
Preferbly do I also think it helps if the population is armed, so that the police is fearful of using force to break up a protest. Or even fearful of trying to break up a protest peacefully.
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If we only just settled in America before everyone else then we might perhaps had a chance.....
But Sweden was too cold for a large population back then, and it couldn't use its huge natural resources in Northern Sweden until the 1870s when the first railroads were being built so tonnes of timber, charcoal and iron ore and steel could be transported at a cheap cost.
Around year 1800 did Norway actully export 4times more timber than Sweden despite Sweden got 4 times more forrest land than Norway. And this was because it was too costly to transport heavy timber and other heavy goods to make it profitable enough for creating new industries.
England had no ice that covered their waterways half the year, and they plenty of people that could pay for a canal construction project - while Sweden was ice cold and had a tiny population that was quite poor.
So Swedens great export boom had to wait until the railroads were invented, and until scientists had invented a new process that made it possible to use phosphor rich iron ore, that Sweden had in Kiruna, but couldn't use.
And Finland had to wait even longer to become a rich industrial nation, because of the same reasons, since most of its timber laid far away from the coastline and couldn't be sold to other countries without better transportations. So it didn't matter that Finland almost had as much forrest as Sweden.
And using waterpower to cut timber was more of a problem in cold Northern countries, and this problem remained until the steamsaw and electricity powered saws got invented, and people could use lightbulbs to work in the dark winter nights. Findland was still the poorest country in Europe during the 1930s.
So Sweden was a poor agricultural society during the 1600's and 1700's, and there was not much else than that and exporting iron, copper and trying to control the baltic trade routs.
We never was any big player in trading tobacco, slaves, silver, chinaware, tea, cotton, silk, spices, sugar or textiles and other manufacturing products.
Sweden was only good at two things back then. Farming and fighting wars & making guns.
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@limedickandrew6016
"Swedens Army was almost wiped out to a man"
You are talking nonsense. Sweden did even late in the war have a large army, and the recruits were not old men and young children but military aged males which can be seen in for example in the Swedish invasion army used against Norway in 1718.
And russias victory happened only because King Charles died in battle in Norway - had he not died would likely Fredrikstens fortress have fallen 3 days later as the garrison was nearly completly out of supplies - and with that fortress out of the way would there be no obstacle left standing between the Swedish army and Oslo. Trondheim in the north was also under siege and only had 2 weeks of supplies left according to Norwegian historians. So all of Norway was basically about to fall when the Swedish King died.
And had Norway fallen into Swedish hands would Denmark be forced out of the war and having to sign a peace on Swedish terms. And the Swedish army could then be moved to Germany, where the tiny Hanovarian army with 7000 low quality troops would be no match for the battlehardened Swedish army. And Hanover would be forced to sign a peace on Swedish terms. The next step would then be to invade the undefended baltics. And their loss would mean that the russian troops would be forced to leave Finland - as the russian army otherwise would starve to death as the road network in Finland was in a too poor condition to be able to support a large army of tens of thousands of men.
And if russias army in Finland could not import food from russia by land or sea, then it would be either forced to retreat or to plunder the local population, but Finland was such a poor country that even if it was plundered 100% it still not be able to upkeep large russian forces there - so a russian retreat would have been unavoidable. So in one blow would russia lose all its gains after 20 years of war, as both the Baltics and Finland would fall back into Swedish hands. And Russia would once more be standing without allies, and its population would be tired of a never ending war. And England would become more interested in intervening into the war on the Swedish side with the Hanovarian King out of the way.
If russia wanted to drag on the war there would be a risk of civil war because of the war exhaustion, and Ottomans, Saxons, Poles, Prussians and Brits were all potential enemies of russia at this point of time.
So it would be wise for Peter to just settle for peace instead of continuing a never ending war.
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@limedickandrew6016
"According to Wikipedia, Russian dead was 295,000, for Sweden it was 200,000. Hardly 4 to 1."
Murdering civilians to compensating for the inability to make good results on the battlefield is a typical russian thing.
You can look at wikipedia at the loss ratio the russian army suffered battle after battle.
They outnumbered the Swedes 4 to 1 in the battle of Narva, 37.000 Russians vs 10.500 Swedes, and yet they still managed to lose 9000 men and get 20.700 men captured and 177 cannons fell into enemy hands. While the Swedes only suffered 667 dead.
A few months later in 1701 came the battle of Düna. The Russian and Saxon forces outnumbered Sweden 2 to 1, and had an advantageous defensive position, as the Swedes had to do a river crossing.
And yet Russia lost the battle with 1300 dead and 700 men captured. While Sweden lost 100 dead.
And next came the battle of Rauge in 1701, where 7000 Russians faced 2000 Swedes. The battle ended with 50 Swedes killed, while Russia lost the battle with 2000 men killed, wounded or captured.
The next humiliation was the battle of Saločiai in 1703. Here 6000 Russians face 1,100 Swedes. The battle ended with a Russian loss of 1500 men killed and over a thousand flags and banners falling into enemy hands.
Sweden lost 40 men killed.
(How is this even f**king possible to be this bad in the age of pikes, bayonets, muskets??)
In 1704 did a Russo-Polish force of 15.000 men get beaten up by a Swedish force of 3000 men plus 2000 Lithuanians at the battle of Jakobstadt.
Sweden won the battle with 238 men dead, while the Russo-Polish side lost 2300 men dead and 500 men were captured.
In 1705 there was the battle of Gemauerthof; 7000 Swedes faced a Russian force of between 13.000 or 20.000 men. Sweden won the battle with 1900 men casualties, while Russian losses numbered 5000.
In 1706 did a Russo-Saxon force of 20.000 men go to battle against 9400 Swedes in the battle of Fraustadt.
Sweden won the battle with 400 men killed, while the Russian and Saxon losses were 7377 dead, and 7,900 captured.
In January 1708 did a Swedish force of 800 men attack a Russian force of 9000 men, in the battle of Grodno. Sweden won the battle losing 11 men killed and Russia had 150 of their men killed and 50 men captured.
In 1708 was the battle of Holowczyn, 12,500 Swedes went into battle against a Russian force 28.000-40.000 men strong. The battle ended with a Swedish victory with 265 men killed, while Russian losses numbered 2000 men.
This dangerous river crossing by Swedish forces, became the favorite victory of the Swedish King Charles XII.
And as you see, had the Swedes already won many battles by then.
A few weeks later was it time for the battle of Malatitze. A 5000 men strong Swedish force faced 13.000 Russians. Sweden won the battle, losing 1050 men killed or wounded, while Russia lost 2,700 men killed or wounded.
Then a month later came the battle of Rajovka in september 1708. 2.400 Swedes fought against 10.000 Russians. Sweden won the battle, and lost 100 men killed while Russia lost 375 men killed.
In 28th of January 1709 was the battle of Oposhnya, where 2000 Swedes fought against 6000 Russians. The battle ended with a Swedish victory. 19 Swedish men were lost while Russia lost 450.
12 days later came the battle of Krasnokutsk–Gorodnoye. 2.500 Swedish riders went to battle against a Russian force of about 5000 to 10.000 men strong. The battle ended with a Swedish victory, with 132 Swedish men lost while Russia lost 1200.
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@bj0urne
As I sees it can one own physical things, like for example a chair. I can own it. I can sell it. I can repaint it. I can change the cushion on it if I didn't like the old one.
So then I do not understand why I shouldn't be able to do the same thing with say music, and just remix it and add some sound effects to make it sound better.
If I am not allowed to do that, then I do not consider it to be ownership - as I am not able to what the hell I like with the product I just bought.
And maybe this is one of the main reasons why I think the copyright industry needs to die off. Because I like to own things.
I prefer to own programs instead of renting them online at an overprice. I prefer the old days when I could have a game on a CD or a harddrive instead of having it only available through Steam.
And many of my books I have paid for am I unable to read because of some DRM protection.
So I consider the entire copyright industry to be a scam. And a threat to our democracy, with all their bribes of politicians, with their demands for laws that allows big corporations to spy on people (to make sure they don't download), and their eagerness to apply censorship.
The piracy movement on the other hand wish to democratice access to culture, knowledge and information to rich and poor alike. The pirate bay was the modern version of the library of Alexandria.
And the national heritage should belong to the citizens and not some owners/aristocrats/copyright holders.
Just like people should be able to visit a museum for free and learn about their own country's history, should people be able to listen to famous song of the past that are part of our cultural treasure. Its nothing strange with that I think.
What is strange are people who defend the current order, when some relative of a dude who died 70 years ago decide who should be able to to use a videoclip, music piece or whatever that was created one hundred years ago.
I think that is extreme.
And those who believe that more copyright is always better, and equals more creativity do I think should be more honest and openly advocate 12.000 years of copyright and a system where we all pay royalty fees to those who invented the wheel and the roman alphabet.
Because this is how absurd things are.
If the choice stands between sacrificing democracy and personal integraty on one hand, and copyright on the other - then do I easily sacrifice the copyright system.
Much of the best art and culture has been created by those who had no interest in making money. Franz Kafka wrote his books for himself without any intents of gaining fame or riches, and his books were found in his drawers after he had died and then publiched to the world and became famous.
Nearly all arguments I have seen from the pro-copyright side have either been dishonest or intellectually lazy. Things they say like "one illegal download equals one less sale" which I do not believe, as I do not think a child in Nigeria downloading a media editing program worth 1200 Euro would have bought it instead if it wasn't able for downloading. I simply do not think he had the money. Indeed, its possible that he have only helped to popularize a product by using it.
Another tiresome slogan is that it is a human right to get paid for work - which is not true either. Especially not if you are working with say art or sports. Just as I do not get paid for cleaning up my own room, are there some hardworking people who are talented at painting tin soldiers or playing floor ball that will never get rich no matter how much talent they have or how much effort they do. And meanwhile do some garbage artists and athletes get millions.
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@pinesandtraplines
"M8 the rich dont even need loopholes. Theyre rich enough to just move, and usually that involves moving their businesses/money."
First of all you do not move your buisness. Someone mentioned small buisnesses, and I highly doubt anyone moves their resturant or hairsaloon from Sweden to Finland just because I raise corporate taxes. But you perhaps talk about bigger companies?
Then moving isn't easy either. You cannot just move to another country instantly. It will probably take a decade
as you need to wait for the construction of a new factory, train new workers, find new suppliers and financiers... while you lose everything you have built up in your old country.. your trained workforce, your suppliers, financiers, your political connections, your lucrative government contracts, your export guarantees from the government, etc etc. And now you lose everything and have to start from scratch somewhere else.
And that is huge costs involved in a transition. The costs are usually so high that they outweight the benefits of moving.
And if a company threatens to betray my country, then I can just threaten to play hardball with it and beat it back into submission. I do not even have to beaten it. I could just threaten it with tearing up all government contracts with the company and publicly say that from now on will my government buy medicine, military trucks or police cars from a competitor instead. And that threat of billion dollar losses for the company would be enough for the stock market to panic and the stock price would fall like a rock, and the company gets thrown to the sharks who seeks to make a hostile takeover of the company.
The company will get wrecked and the tough guy CEO will come crying to the government and beg for forgiveness like a school boy. And an example had been set for other companies what happens when you try to blackmail a country.
And finally I also will have capital controls at my disposal when my country leave the EU.
This tool will make it impossible to move out money from the country without approval from the central bank.
American companies wanted to move out from Hitlers Germany because they did not like his regime, and they did not wanna support his aggressive military build up. But moving out was easier said than done did Ford and other companies notice because of all capital controls.
If you sold your factory you could not take the money out from the country because of the capital controls. And then would just another German manufacturer of military trucks use this factory to produce weapons for Hitler.
And using that profit to buying other German companies would be equally pointless since the German economy was centered around rearmament. So there was really nothing Ford could do but letting their factory remain in Germany.
"We've tried your idea before"
Yes it was tried in America during the 1950s and 1960s. And also in Sweden during the same time period.
And it worked excellent in both cases.
"I dont think you realize what your rhetoric is. Its communistic"
Yea, the economic policies of president Eisenhower was Communism
🙄
"Also places like Sweden are already taxed heavily, even when they hardly pay for their own defense."
Sweden was ranked as the worlds richest country back in the late 1960s. Back then we did have the 4th largest air force in the world. And our armies was among the strongest in Europe. And it had to be since neutrality meant that Sweden had to do things by themselves. It could not count on other countries doing the job of defending the country for them like Denmark or Norway.
It is fair to caracterize cold war Sweden as a very militarized society. And we could afford both a strong military and a strong social safety net. So your argument does not hold up to reality.
And no, Sweden does not need America. Our army was Europe's strongest in 1994 before we joined the EU and decided to scrap our military and some of the oldest infantry regiments in the world.
Our army did not just have the numbers back then. It did also have quality. The Swedish air force had Gripen fighter jets - which in my opinion are the best fighter jet in the world right now. Our army had hundreds of upgraded Leopard2 tanks. And the navy had Gotlands class submarines which are considered superb by international standards, and have even mulitple times been able to take on an entire American fleet and sink a US carrier during naval excercises.
So the Swedish armaments industry is among the best in the world. Producing everything from tanks, to SPGs, IFVs, APCs, submarines, aircraft, AA-guns, grenade launchers, and combat boats. Sweden was also a world leader in civilian nuclear power back in the 1960s and had its own nuclear bomb program. That worried the Americans so much that they promised nuclear retaliation on every country nuking Sweden in exchange for Sweden scrapping its secret nuclear bomb plans.
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@sasi5841
"You kept calling things immoral without explaining the first principles behind it."
Okay you are not a liberal believeing that all unearned priviligies should be abolished.
"Flat tax or sales tax or tariffs are excellent for generating revenue without creating too many loopholes."
That tax does not take into consideration what thing you wanna encourage or discourage. I for my part do not believe that all industries are equally valuable. I want old industries to die and that their resources are moved to new ones. The faster this process of modernizing your economy becomes the better it will be for your country.
If your country is the first in world in building space ships then of course you will be able to huge profits.
Everyone wants this new product. Its not like trying to sell cars to people who often already own 1 or 2.
And you will not have to bother about international competition since you are first, and only your country know how to make space ships. So you can charge high prices for the product you sell as there is no competition.
And with high profits you can pay high wages and taxes and make your country rich.
And likewise if you are stuck with building cars while other countries have begun building space ships and no one no longer wants to buy cars because everyone wants to buy a spaceship instead. Then will your old industry get ruined. And your country will fall into poverty.
It will become poor because people like you are lazy. You do not want to make the hard effort of trying to do something new which is hard. It takes time and money to build new industries like the one that makes space ships, Ipads, precision medicine, and super-computers.
New industries does not grow up spontanously by themselves by you doing nothing. They are the result of deliberate industrial policy by the governments in most cases.
"Wealth (assuming it isn't obtained through acts of agression or some other underhanded method) is probably the most fair and socially beneficial metric people have come up with."
True. Everyone does not have to be exactly equal. But lifting up the bottom and reducing the tops can be beneficial. I cannot see how society benefitted from the higher inequality the last 40 years. In the past did a small status symbol like a yacht be enough to symbolize that you were a succesful high status person. Now is that no longer enough. As the rich have grabbed more and more of the pie, every billionaire can now afford a yacht.
So its no longer cool. So billionaires then needed a yacht that was 60 feet longer than others to show that they could afford it unlike the rest to prove that they were richer than others. But then did those less poor among the rich also be able to buy a longer boat. So now you needed a yacht that was even 60 feet further than the last one..
And owning one private jet is no longer enough, so you need to own multiple.
And so does this silly competition among the rich continue. And this is of course nothing new either. Rich people bought usless expensive clothes back in the 1700s just to show that they could afford it. The clothes themselves were useless and unpractical but rich bought it just as a status symbol.
My view of all this however is that grabbing money from the bottom and give to the top, only results in more of this nonsense which is to no benefit of anyone. So flattening the top of the pyramide makes sense.
Billionaires does not need a 10th gold plated toilet. Now will they have to do with 1. They will still be able to live a life in luxury, but they need to find new hobbies to compete with their rich peers in their pointless status point hunt.
And lifting up the poor is also important. For self-esteem. For their sense of feeling valuable and self-made.
Not having a job and feeling you can contribute to society is corrosive to self-esteem. Being unemployed and having to live with mom and dad and being depressed is not good. And its probably not easy to go out and date either, and trying to maintain self-esteem as a loser. And even if you by chance find someone, you cannot afford to move out and form a family.
And the pro-rich policies have also made housing prices high and unaffordable for all non-high educated single households.
To me it is therefore no suprise that unequal societies are bad ones. People are more often depressed. Depressed people eat chocolate, drink alcohol and use drugs to comfort themselves. Obesity makes people more likely to die from diseases. And of course are also school results worse and criminality higher in those socities.
Teenage pregnanices are more common. And the fabric of society is torn apart when the lives of rich people and the poor differ so much that they have nothing in common anymore.
Rich starts to look down upon the poor as losers responsible for their own failures, while their own success have absolutly nothing to do with they themselves have rigged the system in their favor. And the poor look at the rich as behaving increasingly arrogant and starts to dislike or even hate them.
It is no fun to hang around rich people who are just rude and ask humilitating questions and makes you feel like a loser.
So the fabric of society gets torned apart. And there is thereby no longer any point in acting in solidarity with other parts of the country. Rich people does no longer want to pay taxes for schools and the police, and rather use that money for their own kids private school and their own private army and gated community.
No one benefits from such a society as I sees it. I think people prefer a sense of community instead of a hostile society that have been torn apart. And public health is better in equal societies. And average life expectancy is not just better for the poor, but also for the middle class and rich as well.
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@ThatFalloutGod
it's "the poor" "stealing" from "the rich."
Like I said moms and pups does not get bailouts. And as share of their income and wealth do the poor pay a higher rate than the rich.
”The rich" would still be paying more than "the poor" could ever dream of in taxes, because they spend more money. If you want "the poor" to have a higher percentage of their income be disposable, then you have to lift barriers that needlessly take-away their money, which would mean lowering all taxes and regulations”
Sounds so simple but the real world is more complicated.
And don’t get me wrong, I like a low income tax and low VAT tax. But I also know that lowering the VAT tax only works to some degree. If you remove it completely then will companies only see that they are able to raise prices and charge more for the food they sell. So a better solution then would then perhaps be to tax people and then give the poor a bit of extra money instead of giving them a tax cut.
A low cost of living would make it possible for companies to pay out low wages and the workers would still be able to live a good life with a good standard of living. And the low wages would mean a low cost of production that gives companies an advantage in international competition.
So I therefore do not want to tax incomes and consumption of everyday goods. I rather let taxes fall upon things like housing instead. Which is hard to tax evade. And it is also a personal choice if one wants to buy a small home or a big castle and thereby paying more.
A tax on housing doesn’t harm industry. It push housing prices down. And it is oppressive and racist towards big cities. So love this tax instead for that reasons.
”If you think a tax system is supposed to be built to "reward hard work," you don't know what you're talking about, you're just purely ideological”
You don’t believe in industrial policy. You just think that new industries grow up by themselves spontaneously. Well I don’t share this view. I believe that infant industries needs government support. And that creative destruction should be encouraged.
Your ideal government is a lazy do-nothing that hopes things sort themselves out somehow.
”arbitrary red-tape”
That is in the eyes of the behold I guess. Usually it has been right-wing governments that have loved to introduce more regulations where I live.
”You wanna get bitchy about politicians being bought for corporations and shit, while simultaneously wanting the government to have the power to discriminate against people on tax-policy and waste the money they get. You literally can't have it both ways, pick one.”
The economy should be runned in the best interest of the country. And special interest groups that wants to harm the country to only benefit themselves at everyone else's expense should be crushed with a hard fist. This is economic nationalism.
And industrial policy is about benefiting some parts of the economy at other parts expense. The Southern farm states paid for the industrialization of Yankee land.
This was bad in the short run. But in the long run I think America has benefited greatly by not listening to people like Andrew Jackson who did not want any change. He wanted America to remain a country of small farmers.
And if he had gotten his will through, then would American probably not be the richest country on the planet today.
”it would be far less than the tax-rates they're paying now“
If the rich pay even less than they pay today. That means that you have to pay more.
Your share of the tax burden increase.
”I want a 5% federal income-tax, you really have an issue with that?”
I prefer taxing housing, land, capital incomes, rents, consumption of luxury products, tariffs, taxing pollution, taxing inheritance, and corporate taxes on matured industries.
If that is not enough, then MMT will offer a huge extra boost.
And if that is still not enough, then I would perhaps consider taxing incomes or creating a 5% time tax where the value of each dollar gets reduced electronically each month.
This will of course have a huge deflationary effect on the economy that money printing needs to compensate for. So then maybe a 2.5% tax increase and a 2.5% money supply increase would be better.
As you see, I don’t like income taxes in general. I like meritocracy and think that hard work should be rewarded and not being punished with higher taxes - like Swedish rightwing politicians want.
”they're mainly responsible for the situations they're currently in”
Warren Buffet said that had he been born in Asia then he would probably have been a very poor farmer. We are dependent on the societies we are born into. Do Swedish bus drivers earn 40 times more money than Indian drivers because they are 40 times better drivers?
You perhaps think so. But I don’t. I think the overall productivity in a country sets the wage level.
And if you got good roads, and efficient bureaucracy, a good energy grid, good access to educated workers, internet access, and labs filled with high tech equipment and factories with modern robots - then of course your workers will be more productive and produce more output per workhour. Which allows you paying higher wages than third world countries do.
We are products of our societies. So this hyper-individualistic view that each person is an atom in a bottle doesn’t make sense.
This preacy rich man’s moralism just feels outdated. I do believe that most people want to earn their own honest living.
”Which means lowering and simplifying all taxes, lifting regulations, and stopping the concept of welfare that we currently have.”
Welfare is good and allows people to take risks - like starting a new private company with the high risk of a failure. And if the person fails he doesn’t not have to starve to death on the street.
Usually it is right-wing governments who prefer welfare or creating new jobs. Because unemployment is a tool to press down wages and discipline the working class by scaring them with unemployment. Personally I prefer that everyone gets a job instead. That would not harm the tax payers or the self-esteem of people. And parts of the national workforce will not needlessly be destroyed by long term unemployment and become unhireable by no personal failings of their own. A job guarantee program is therefore both humane and smart.
And better than universal basic income, welfare and other stupid sht.
”The government sucks at virtually everything.”
I disagree.
”The rich" aren't bad, they're not mean, they're not evil. They're just people that work in the Free Market like everyone else. Unless you have some actual proof of malpractice, assuming they're any of those things without evidence just makes you a jealous, entitled prick.”
Its not a free market when you get bailed out by government money like Lloyd Blankenfein.
I would say that most billionaires have never earned billions through a free market or taking any risks or invented anything new. The people who gotten rich by privatizing Swedish schools get money from the Swedish tax payers to provide education and then they put money into their own pockets - money stolen by the taxpayers for their low quality education. And doing deals with governments with profits guaranteed by taxpayers is as little risk as one can take, it is not an investment of bold people but from cowards. It takes no talent to become rich by being a parasite on the taxpayers.
Gustave Flaubert said that behind every big fortune is a crime. That might be an exaggeration, but when it comes to billionaires it is usually much truth to it. Like the scammers who built the railroads in America and built extra long twists and turns of track just so they would get extra paid by the taxpayers.
And the industrial revolution in Sweden was based on selling timber, and the rich Dickson family got their wealth stealing trees from government owned land and selling the timber and making a fortune. And then they bought up land cheaply from farmers by offering them bottles of vodka and then making them signing fraudulent contracts.
Most millionaires have probably earned their money honestly. And I do admire those people. I know a few of them and I am impressed. But the billionaires are more often than not people who built their large wealth by deals with the government and big scams.
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@fluttercoat3899
I think the American tax system is pretty good as it is now, regardless what clueless European leftists think.
It is certainly better than the system of the supposed leftwing Sweden - where the socialdemocrats abolished the inheritance tax, the wealth tax, and got rid of the tax on housing and replaced it with a small fee, so nobody has to pay more than 1000 dollars for their home. Not even if you bought a mansion for 20 million dollars with a helipad on the roof do you have to pay any more money than a low income nurse assistant.
Sweden also dropped its corporate tax from 60% down to 22% today. So it is therefore not hard to see why Swedens bad behaviour have influenced other countries, and made American buisnessmen complain to their government that their corporate tax should be dropped too. For decades did America resist this stupidity, until Trump finally decided to lower it from something like 60 down to 20 percent.
So for my own country I would pretty much wanna copy the American tax system.
And if I was an American I would like to get rid the interest rate deductions that subsidise the banking sector and negative destructive behaviours of people and corporations by making them over-borrowing money. This perverse incentive contributed to the financial crisis of 2008.
And the corporate tax could be raised a bit. America is a big economy and self-suffiecent. Its long distance to Europe on the other side of the atlantic have traditionally worked as an extra protective tariff barrier so the country did not have to adopt its policy as much as small countries had to do when their European neighbours adopted a new policy.
America has therefore been the country which have been setting the trend for the rest of Europe the last 100 years. When America went for interventionism policies of Franklin D Roosevelt, then Europe followed and did the same. And when America abolished the gold standard in 1971, then Europe soon followed and did the same. And when Reagan introduced neoliberalism and trickledown economics, then Europe soon did the same and got Thatcher, and even the mixed socialist/market economies of northern Europe followed the trend.
So the conclusion I can draw from all this is that America does not need to worry about Europe or the EU, its strong enough to do as it want. And Americas tax system is pretty good. So if you are jellous about not having the good things of Scandinavian countries, then I would say that is because you spend your money on other things. Your tax system is more pro poor and middle class, and pro worker than that of Sweden.
I consider my own country to be a dystopia as far as taxes concern. No other country in Europe have both abolished the inheritance tax and taxes on housing. Italy and Germany might abolished one of the two, but compensate that with taxing the other extra hard. In Sweden neither are taxed. Workers incomes are taxed harder than speculation on financial instruments.
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King of Prussia is a cooler title than elector of Brandenburg, so doing a re-branding was all this title change was.
Prussia suffered harshly from the 30-years war and lost much of its population, so it took in immigrants from other countries to compensate some of the losses and took a pragmatic policy of religious tolerance to accomplish this.
Frederick the Great conquered Silesia from Austria - which was a small but very rich province.
Austria didn't like the idea of losing a province which contributed 25% of their country's tax revenues, so two wars was fought about this place. Frederick would also expand into Poland and give Prussia better control over its trade routs as well as linking together his scattered territories. Frederick also fostered the industrial revolution and created the most well ordered economy in all of Germany. He created the first modern education system and runned his country according to enlightenment ideals and introduced press freedom, abolished torture and went further with religious tolerance than any other country. The Prussian bureaucracy became the most well runned in the world. And the Prussian military got an excellent reputation after its performance in the wars. It was a conscription army, but very well trained and capable of swiftly performing complex maneuvers on a battlefield which no other army could accomplish without getting their formations turning into disorganized chaos. The rate of fire of Fredericks infantry was also superior and thanks to much training was Prussian troops able to reload and aim their muskets so fast that it happened reflexively.
But Frederick left no heir, and his successor was a useless weak King - which meant that noblemen took could take over the country and run it for their own special interests rather than caring about what was best for the country.
And the result became that the gigant budget surpluses Frederick had used decades to build up was squandered in only a few years. And the large army turned into shit and got humiliated in its wars against France.
Prussia would however rise again and become one of the winners of the Napoleon wars. Many tiny German states got merged into larger units when the French took over Germany. And when the Napoleon wars was ended did many states merge once again. And Prussia would thereby expand its territories much. And tiny Baden which nobody had heard of or cared about in the 1700s, had now become one of the largest German states.
Prussia continued with its state-led industrial revolution in the 1800s. And it wanted the tiny German states to agree to letting Prussia building railroads into their lands so that Prussia could could connect her heartlands with the Prussian provinces in the Rhineland. But the tiny states refused to agree to railroads and removed trade barriers, so the 2nd best solution was therefore considered - the Zollverein - which turned all of Germany into a free trade zone so that Prussia indirectly could connect all her provinces economically to each other. And Germany started to merge more and more and become one economy instead of multiple ones scattered all over all corners of the country.
The Napoleon wars had also created nationalist feelings. Many wanted a united Germany. The nationalist movement also wanted to create a large unprofessional army - a militia (a Landwehr). And it was a democratic movement.
But this movement was opposed by the rich and powerful establishment of conservatives which hated democracy and wanted a small professional army which they considered more politically reliable (and thus less of revolutionary threat) and they also considered it as more military effective since the Landwehr often had gotten slaughtered and humiliated in the Napoleonic wars. And the conservatives cared more about preserving their own titles and privileges than creating a new order and a new united Germany. And some conservatives cared more about things like serving God than about serving the national interest.
Much of the 1800s would be a power struggle between those two factions, the democratic nationalists vs. the Conservatives. Germany would however get created in 1871 under Conservative Bismarck which preserved much of the established order. Then did the established order fall in 1918 as the Kaiser was removed after the loss of world war 1. But the power struggle continued.
Many Germans hated the new Weimar democracy and wanted to go back to an authoritarian rule under the Kaiser - like for example Ludendorff, Ernst Jünger, Spengler and others. Hitler also hated the new democracy, but he did not want to restore the monarchy, but instead he wanted to create his own dictatorship.
And when Hitler got into power, then he solved power struggle between nationalists and conservatives once and for all. He simply combined the worst ideas of both movements. He borrowed the anti-democratic authoritarianism and fascism from the Conservatives. While he borrowed the intolerance nationalists had against ethic groups like Poles (which refused to assimilate and become Germans) and the intolerance against religious minorities like jews.
So Hitler basically just embraced outdated politics which were so typical of the 1800's. His race theories and views on women were also pretty outdated - even by the standards of the 1930's.
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"You are talking from complete 20/20 hindsight."
No. Had I been a nazi in early 1942 then I would have adviced Hitler to skip Rzhev because it was not a priority for Germany - all it had was a piece of useless railroad. Southern Russia on the other hand had oil, black fertile farmland, industrial capacity, black sea ports, lend lease routes - which would benifit Germany greatly. And even without the oil, this would be a great price for Germany. And it would also be a disaster for Russia to lose it for the same reasons.
The Russian economy was at the brink of collapse in late 1942 and if Russia could not win at Stalingrad and take back Caucausus, then the economy would likely have collapsed just as in 1917. And with strangeled lend lease supplies, and newly created food and oil shortages after the loss of southern Russia it would be very hard for Russia to keep on fighting the war - even if America would increase its lend lease in Alaska and Archangelsk.
The war would definatly then change in caracter. There would be no liberation of Southern Russia or supplies from USA that could replace Russian workers... so Russia would therefore suffer from a manpower shortage. And this in turn would force Russia to change tactics and not let med just die in a wasteful manner.
The great offensives on multiple fronts in late 1943 where the Russians took much land in exchange for heavy manpower losses would never happen. Simply because the Russians could not afford to waste men in such a matter even in the short run.
Russia was a poor country, and it didn't have tractors or expensive industrial machines like in USA or Germany - So Russia therefore needed more workers to things by hand. Today it takes on average 4 Russian workers to produce the same amount of stuff as 1 American worker. So as you can see cannot the Russian economy spare workers the same way rich countries can. They cannot just buy a tractor to replace one farmer and then send him to the frontline, or buy a big machine that produces stuff instead of a worker.
The Russian economy needed its manpower. And the Russian military was also desperatly short in manpower. So in late 1942 there began a growing dilemma? Should the army get too little solidiers? or should the farms and industry get less workers, with the result of less weapons being produced?
So Stalingrad would probably have been a disaster for Russia even if Germany would not succeed getting much oil from southern Russia the coming years.
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@VT-mw2zb
"In order to get any more troops than they already had in 1942, the Germans would need to abandon the siege of Leningrad."
The Germans had a dozen Divisions in France they could have used on the eastern front instead.
"First of all, divisions of the AG Centre were already reduced in strength. It went from 9 battalions per division to 6"
Then those divisions could be sent to France to protect against an unlikely allied landing while the stronger formations would be sent to Russia.
"Why? Because the Soviet was fooled thanks to a deception plan called Operation Kremlin"
It was because of multiple factors. Stalin thought the main blow of the German offensive would target Moscow, just as it did in 1941, and most high military leaders tend to ignore economic factors of the war so therefore was Moscow wrongly seen as more important than Southern Russia. So therefore did the Russian side worry more about protecting Moscow than defending southern Russia.
But the main reason why 1942 started well for Germany was that Stalins massive winter offensive had attacked too deep, and over a broad front. And supplies and coordination ran out for the Russian offensive spearheads, and the Germans could isolate them and destroy them one by one. And the winter offensive that could have completly destroyed the ostheer and ended the war in 1942, instead turned into a disaster for the Russians with gigantic losses.
And then the bad news continued with the last big military disaster à la Soviet 1941 happened when Russia suffered a crushing defeat at Kharkov in May in 1942.
So the campaign in Southern Russia started better than what one realisticly could have expected beforehand. However, things could have gone even better for the Germans, and they could have exploited their success even more. Just as destroying the worlds largest airforce in the first days of the war in 1941 was just an incredibly lucky shot, but the Germans could of course have exploited this success even more. What if the battle of Britain would have never happened and Germany would have had more bombers? What would have happened if the Luftwaffe destroyed the entire Russian baltic fleet in a Pearl Harbour style attack?
This is one of those big "what if's".
A better start of case blue would in itself probably not change much. But in combination with other factors it could have changed the tide of war significantly, and end up with the capture of southern Russia - a disaster for the Russians. It would almost be like Frederick the Great losing Silesia - continuing the war without it would be hopeless.
*"The main issue with 1942, from the German perspective was their distance from their kick-off point, Voronezh to where they wanted to go was about 30% longer than the distance they covered in 1941. This was the plan when they were short on both men and fuel, compared to 1941*"
Germany was weaker than in 1941, but so were also the Russians. But in terms of firepower instead of manpower the balance had changed in favour for the Germans and to the disadvantage for the Russians (according the the book Hitler vs Stalin, by Mosier).
And this talkingpoint about distance is strange. Army group South had faced hard resistance in 1941 while army group north could capture the baltics in just a few weeks. So expecting south to move long distances like army group north was not so much to ask I think. The Germans gave this front priority and supplies and weather was better in the south than in the north.
And initally was the Russian resistance also very light on this front - but that thing could the Germans of course not know back then.
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@ommsterlitz1805
What I have learned from the Ukraine crisis is that France have been more busy with not humiliating Putin, Germany buying gas, and Orban blocking aid packages to Ukraine... while the only country that held Ukraine alive was USA until stupid Europeans could look beyond their short-term self-interest and help Ukraine.
Other examples of EU cooperation is when France and Germany stole hospital equipment from other EU countries in the middle of a dangerous pandemic that many feared would kill millions of people. So with friends like that, who needs enemies?
The solution is that Europe go back to how it was during the Cold War. Every country must take responsability for its own defence. That is how Sweden was able to build its own world class fighters, tanks, IFVs, SPGs, uboats, anti-tank weapons, anti-ship missiles, and field the worlds 4th largest air force and an army with 800.000 men.
Had we told USA to got to hell, and told Ukraine to rely on France instead. Then I don't think Ukraine soon would cease to exist.
Macron is a man that rather flirt Chinese commie dictators and condemn USA, than defending the free world.
I think we should preserve the ties to USA and Nato. Without USA I don't think there would be any Baltic States today. The French would just sell them down the river and let Russia occupy this area and commit a genocide like they do in Ukraine, and murdering people for wanting democracy or for singing their old national anthem instead of the russian one are things that are okay with Macron. France, Spain, and Italy have lately increased their trade with Russia.
So I can say that there is no common view in Europe on who is our friends and who is our enemies.
And nor do there exist any consensus on what kind of a military we should have. Swedes wants a military built purely for self-defence... while France wants an army capable of expeditions into far away foreign lands instead - like their former Africa colonies. Something I am not willing to pay for and are totally disinterested of. I think France can pay for their nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers out of their own pockets instead. Tax payers in other countries should not be forced to pay for their stupid colonialist imperialist dreams.
They should just realize that they lost Algeria, Vietnam, and the Suez canal and get over it.
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I think this channel is good. Its the flip side of the same coin of The Modern Man by Dan Bacon and others... they have a more positive view of women, while this channel have a more negative view. And the truth is probably in between.
I guess women are attracted to many alpha male traits, and those whimps trying to please a woman might be good people at heart, have admireable intentions, and truely love women... however they do things in the wrong way, and the woman lose respect for them and lose interest. And to some extent can I as a man not blame them. If the men are trying to bend their opinions to please the woman, then they are just coming across as dishonest - and I why would a woman wanna open herself up to another person who cannot be honest back to her.
And sure are looks important, however men needs to think more about what kind of woman they do actually want... because women are not all the same... some women likes sports, others are intellectuals that like books, some are gamers, some like to dance or to cook, some are just boring and got no hobbies, some have this or that political leaning... and etc and so on.
Fortunatly for us men, do women not care so much about looks as we do. They care more about your personality instead, and if you cannot provide a such, then it doesn't matter how much muscles and money you have because you will not get laid.
But if you got social skills, are funny and can create interesting conversations... then you will be able to find the kind of woman you want, and it doesn't matter if you are short, bald, have a high pitched voice and live in your moms house.
From time to time one can see an ugly guy walking on the street hand in hand with a very attractive woman, and how is that possible? - Its possible because the reason I just mentioned!
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What damage?
I as a foreigner do not hate Britain for leaving. If others do, then that is saying a lot more about them than about Britain. I do no consider fucktards like Tusk and Verhofstadt to represent my views. So Britains diplomatic reputation is intact.
And what is so horrible to write your own laws? Common law is still one of the most important legal traditions in the world regardless if Britain leaves or not.
And there are plenty of economists on both left and right who voted for leave.
The only damage Britain have had, is the sour climate inside of Britain. And that is entirely the fault of whiny remainers who cannot accept the result of democracy when it is not going their way. Britain is a big country and will do fine. EU fascism is unecessary and brings nothing good. And there are also other forms of international cooperation you can do if you feel like it, and there are plenty of examples of that - UN, IMF; NATO, WTO, Interpol, etc
and even if you do not get a trade deal with the EU, then so what?
The EU could trade with USA, Japan, Brazil, China, India and other countries for years even without a trade deal. Because then do WTO rules apply.
Britain will probably get better trade deals with other powers when it negotiate on its own... instead of having to waterdown every deal by compromises with 28 different countries, different political factions, and listen to different economic interest groups and lobby groups before coming to any conclusion.... and there you also have the reason why the EU always needs so much fucking time to negotiate trade deals, and why it is almost imposstible to change old agreements.
When Britain can talk to other countries directly without middlemen then things get simpler and more effeicent for both parties. And UK is a big market, so you got some leverage.
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"end of their social class"
I don't think this is true. Most officers had played the game clean. And Manstein and Guderian would get nice treatment by the allies after the war, even if you would apply a little higher standards upon them.
Most German officers also wrongly believed that they still had respect and admiration for their skill by their British counterparts in 1945 - so they became sad and surprised when they did not get a salute from allied officers as they surrendered. Most Britons was simply tired of the war. British cities had been bombed and many had died in the war, so the love for Germany was gone. And the news of German war crimes had tarnished the image of German officers as respectable professional gentlemen.
But the German officers did not know that back then. So most Germans therefore preferred to surrender in the west.
Only a handful few SS men wanted to keep on fighting the war, because they had painted themselves into a corner. If the Russians found out that they were members of the SS, then they would be tortured and executed instantly. The Russians knew that the SS had committed so many war crimes that the did not give any pardon.
And trying to flee as an SS man was not an option.
You could be killed as a deserter by the Germans if you were captured. And throwing away your SS uniform and pretending to be a civilian or Wehrmacht soldiers was not an option either - because every SS soldier had a tattoo on his arm to tell doctors which blood-group he had, in the case if he got injured in battle and needed a blood transfusion. So it would therefore be pretty easy for the Russians to found out what men were members of the SS, and which weren't.
So many SS men kept on fighting the war until the end in Berlin. And they massacred regular army soldiers, old men in volksturm and innocent civilians for "defeatism" if they did not show the same enthusiasm for the war as the SS.
So the German people began to hate the SS. Now it no longer just massacred foreigners, but now it had also begun to kill many hundreds of Germans from place to place as the German military retreated.
Some German commanders feared prosecution for war crimes, but they allowed their men to surrender because it was the right thing to do, and they did not want their men to die a pointless death. Otto Carius is one such example.
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The west have given away so much equipment to Ukraine that it needs to win now in order to not let earlier investment to have been in vain. Many countries have now given away some of the best weapons they have.. Caesar, PZH2000, Archer, HIMARS, Combat Vehicle 90, Bradley, Leopard2, Abrams, thunderstreak, NLAW, Javelin etc.
So far have Russia suffered gigantic losses and the west have not yet even lifted a finger trying to get its industrial military might at bear. And ammunition problems have so far been solvable by importing 155mm shells from South Korea. But there are lots of countries in Europe, America, and Austrialia that can make those if the war escalates so I see no problems in all this.
And sending away 50 Bradleys to Ukraine is no big deal as I sees it. I mean USA still got 6000 left so it can afford to send thousands more if it wants to. And the west also have lots of old weapons that are going to get phased out... F16 fighters and A10 warthog. Those planes are very old, but still much better than their russian counterparts.
So even if we give Ukraine just scraps and spares would it still probably be enough to beat Russia.
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The Russian tree is based on earlier practical experience with tank designs that worked in the past:
T34→T44→T55→T62→T64→t72→T80→T90
The Nato countries are not so similiar. But because of standardization within Nato have almost all Nato tanks used the British L7 105mm gun (Centurion, AMX30, Leopard1, M60, M1 Ambrams etc) and later on have the 120mm rheinmetall gun become standard (used on for example Leopard2, M1 Abrams) and also other tanks use120mm guns such as Leclerc, Challanger 2, Merkava, C1 Ariete.
Priorities have been different for the many armies. British Chieftain was a slow tank with good armor and firepower. French AMX30 and German Leopard had bad armor protection, but their speed and firepower was excellent.
And M50 Ontos, Merkava and Stridsvagn-103 could be seen as very odd birds, with very innovative designs.
The last generation of MBTs are however much similar in many ways Merkava, M1 Abrams, Leopard2, Leclerk, Ariete, Challanger 2 do look much similar and all have 120mm guns. But there are of course also many differences.
Abrams is a heavy tank while Challanger2 is much more lighter. Abrams use uranium ammunition, while German Leopard 2 doesn't and therefore have to get a new gun to be able to kill the newest Russian tanks without using uranium ammunition.
Also Merkava could be upgraded and get a bigger gun. But today that is not so important. Using a 15cm gun to kill and old T-72 tank of Israels neighbors would be overkill. Why use a big an expensive shot to kill a cheap garbage tank if you can easily kill it with small shots instead? So it is better to stick with the old 120mm ammunition that is easier and faster to reload, and you can also carry more rounds of ammunition.
When Israels neigbours get better tanks, then it can become time to reconsider doing an expensive upgrade of the gun and armor for Merkava. But today that is not so urgent.
And Leclerk is a tank that will not be upgunned, because it can't be. Its turret ring is too small to carry a bigger gun, and that means that Leclerk will be unable to penetrate the armor of Russia's new Armata tank.
Challanger 2 is a tank with much potential left. But the British government does not want to spend more money on that tank, and have even thought about buying Leopard2 tanks instead. And the Italians have much upgrades to do before their C1 Ariete can play in the same league as the other MBTs. That will of course cost money for the country with economic problems. As it is today however do this tank need better frontal armor, since even a world war 2 T34/85 tank would be able to penetrate the lower front plate. And the precision of the gun is under-performing.
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@phaedrussocrates7636 First of all, just because I don't care as much about climate change as you do doesn't mean that I don't think we should reduce our dependency on fossile fuels. Peak oil, peak coal and peak natural gas are serious issues. What you do is to label everyone who disagrees with your climate views as a heretic and as an evil person. And of course you will scare people away from the left when you behave like this, you idiot.
"we will put a man on the Moon in 10 yrs"
I don't care to listen to racist fools who include reparations for the negro slavery in their plan.
And replacing all buildings in America with new energy effiecent buildings is just insanity in the level with Communist China where they demolished buildings to get wood for heating the owens in the steel mills so they could meet their governments insane targets of tonnes of steel produced.
Normally does a country only builds a few percent of new homes to add to the national housing stock, while most of peoples need for housing has to be meet by people trading houses with each other. But you insane clowns thinks that you could scale up things, and perhaps build 10 x times as many homes in a decade.
And not only that... you fix all real estate such as stores, depots, office buildings, warehouses, industrial buildings, shopping malls, hotels etc
There is not enough skilled construction workers for that and nor do you have enough cranes and machines to build all that in just a decade - as you are also shutting down all fossile fuel.
There is absolutly no reason to take the left serious anymore.
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@djchristian82
I just recently read that myself as well and I strongly disagree with my politicians on this. I did also speak out about the hypocrisy of our "gutmenchen" during the artifically created "refugee crisis" of 2015.
Hundreds of thousands of welfare tourists and fortune seakers from Africa and the middle east was allowed into our country
despite they were not fleeing from any war or opression.
But on the other hand did our government not let in any Ukrainian war refugees.
I think that is enormous hypocrisy and stupidity.
I also think one could argue that countries have more of a duty to help other countries in the same region. So that European countries should help other European countries. And muslim and arab refugees should be an arab problem.
International law also says that refugees should stay in the first safe neighbouring country they get into. So if war refugees from Afghanistan flee to say Iran, then they should stay in Iran.
And as far as I know do Sweden not share any border with Afghanistan, Irak, Syria or Africa so we have absolutly zero reason to take in anyone from those places. Especially not when most so called "refugees" came from places with no war such as Morocco, Iran, Egypt Algeria.
Back in 2015 did the Swedish open borders activists call Poland and Hungary for racist for not wanting to import a foreign culture, importing housing shortages, importing welfare queens, importing rapists, and take in tonnes of people with a culture massivly different to our own.
The open borders activists did not call everyone racist and ignore answering how we should pay for all new people, how we should be able to integrate them, how to provide them all with shoold and hospitals, how we should give them all work and housing.
To make the hypocrisy even worse did Poland already made a fantastic job in helping over a million Ukrainian war refugees. So the Swedish and German gutmenchen gave me great disgust and contempt.
Sweden is not a low wage economy with simple jobs. So being goat herd from the middle east will not give you many jobs here.
Sweden is secular and not very religiously conservative. So for a deeply religious muslim with very old fashion views on womens rights and homosexuality could Sweden be very challanging.
And while other cultures are collectivists are Swedish culture super-individualists and Sweden being the country in the world where it is hardest to make a friend - which does not make integration easy.
If Sweden wanted to help people in poor countries it would be better to just pay places like Rwanda, Brazil, Turkey and Indonesia to take in those "refugees" instead.
That would be a win-win for us, for the refugees and for the countries taking them in as they get economic help from the west.
And meanwhile are those places religious, collectivist and offer more job oppurtunities for people without any basic skills in mathematics, reading and understanding of the local language.
Ukrainians on the other hand would more easily fit in into our society. They are more educated, and they share the christian culture (if we can call it that?). And with the word "culture" I do not mean food, music, poetry, local dances and such...
I rather mean things like values, traditions, laws and such things.
I don't Ukraine kill people for things like apostasy and atheism for example.
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@Kieselmeister
"becoming carbon neutral"
As if "carbon neutral" matters when nuclear reactors contributes massively to global warming through other ways - only the tiny amount of Swedish nuclear plants creates over 200 Terawatts of waste heat, which is more than the amount of energy we spent to heat every home in cold Sweden for 1 year. So when you release all that waste heat into the ocean you contribute massively to global warming. And this heat also stimulates the growth of algae - and all algae growth sucks up all oxygen from the water so that all fish dies from lack of oxygen.
"No other reactor design before or since has ever been as dangerous"
According to IAEA are Swedish nuclear reactors even more unreliable than those 4 nuclear plants of Chernobyl type that are stationed outside St. Petersburg. On an average year are our old plants closed down more days for repairs than theirs.
And there have also been incidents that were close to becoming nuclear disasters, but were stopped in the last moment. So therefore are they not much talked about in the news.
"the only reason fukushima happened"
Fukushima reactors are not safe in my opinion. Almost all (if not all) nuclear reactors in the world use an old analog technology instead of digital ones. In my opinion is that retarded. I have done some PLC programming myself, and I do not agree with the idea that analog is superior to digital. I would say it is the other way around.
"The technology to make reactors which fail "safe" instead of failing "deadly" has existed for over 40 years"
Nuclear energy have existed for so long, and still people market it as something "new" and "high tech" when it in fact is an old technology invented by a Swedish guy a hundred years ago. Meanwhile have seen disaster after disaster happen Sellafield, Harrisburg, Chernobyl, Tokaimura, Fukushima.
And every time nuclear fanboys says its only "a one time event" "so unlikely that it would never happen". And yet they keep on happening. And people blame earth quakes, Communism, greedy Japanese companies and all kinds of things... except nuclear power itself. A dangerous energy source we have not yet learned to master, and yet we put the survival of the entire planet in danger. No one in the nuclear lobby gives an answer how we can safely store nuclear fuel safely for hundreds of thousands of years.
Instead I usually only get a bullsh*t answer: "technology will solve this".
But what if technology doesn't solve every problem in the world? What is plan B?
If I was optimistic about technology solving every human problem, then I would rather drive my car on
lingonberry juice than nuclear energy.
"and are still operating dangerous 50 year old reactors instead of replacing them"
And still there is no plan what to do with all the toxic radioactive plutonium, uranium, cesium. 75 years have passed since Hiroshima was bombed, and this problem have not been solved yet. Well I have lost my patience with the nuclear lobby.
This problem should be fixed before more money is spent on nuclear power.
There was enough nuclear waste located at Chernobyl to kill all life in Europe - and there was a high chance that a second nuclear explosion nearly did just that.
In Fukushima there was even more spent fuel stored - and fuel which were even more dangerous than the one stored at Chernobyl. And if that fuel leaks out into the environment, it is enough to kill all life on this planet.
We are with other words playing Russian roulette with all life on this planet.
What happens the next time a disaster happen? Maybe we aren't that lucky. And once all nuclear waste leaks out there is no way you could get the genie back into the bottle. It is GAME OVER for the planet.
And it doesn't matter if it happens because the Japanese were foolish to build nuclear plants in a land prone to earthquakes, or it happened because of an ISIS terrorist attack, or a meteorite falling down from the sky and blowing a hole into the metal container at Fukushima containing all spent fuel. We will all die.
"But the USA's schizophrenic environmental lobby has demanded that all spent nuclear fuel be buried in the desert, while also refusing to allow the waste to be transported TO that desert because it would have to go past their houses, so it just sits forever in cans in swimming pools at the reactor sites."
I think the world should come together and solve this problem once and for all. We should pump in money into USA so we can finish this storage facility in Arizona. And the "not in my backyard" club and their hypocritical governor should be thrown under the bus.
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@robertspatscheck307
"Pick and chose does not work when you sign up for a club, you accept all of it, or none."
Then leaving the EU is the only option. I prefer democracy and I will not accept my country commit national suicide for "the greater good" of the European Union.
As I said earlier. I despise Ireland's tax haven policies and UKs low regulation market fundamentalism.
But I think voters in those countries should be free to have those policies if they want them. Democracy should always come first. And if the EU cannot accept that, then it must be abolished.
I as a Swedish voter do not want to import diseases into my country only because EU considers the freedom of movement of pets to be sacred. Nor do I wanna trash my welfare state, our industrial policies, our neutrality in foreign policy and so on.
So the EU needs to die if it cannot accept those things.
"it seems like you are fatalistic."
I look at history. EUs track record is not the best. And all the change it have pushed for have always been for the worst.
"I don’t think you know what fascist means"
Let me be clear, I only hate the bad sides of Fascism. I do not dislike the good sides of it. Order is good, for example.
But when I use "fascism" as a smear, I do it with association with the negative sides of it.
Such as censorship. Non-transparency and non-accountability for the rulers. The arbitrary will of the people in power goes before the rule of law. Unlimited powers for the ruler. People have no right to privacy. And democracy is being ignored when it goes against the will of the rulers/ruling class. And the media is biased in favor of the ruling class, while other voices are not allowed to be heard.
And the EU fits perfectly into all those criteria I have listed above. And the examples are too many too list..
Article 13 for online censorship, the EUs proposal to not allow the press to report on islamic terrorist attacks, the non-transparency of the EU commission and the non-accountability of it. And to this day have it not been revealed what EU clerk designed the economic austerity programme for Ireland that wrecked that country.. and calling this a "democracy deficit of the EU" is a huge understatement.
And unlimited power is also true. With the Lisbon treaty you got a law that says that the EU can choose to takeover unlimited amounts of power in any political area from the member countries.
And online privacy have been scrapped with the EU introducing the IPRED law.
And democracy have been ignored time and time again by the EU elite. Voters rejected the EU constitution, but the EU renamed it ("the Lisbon treaty"), and rammed it through anyways.
And when it comes to the media can we clearly see the pro-EU bias. The EU takes my tax money and gives it to journalists subsidies for writing pro-EU propaganda. But anti-EU propaganda media does not get any subsidies at all from the EU.
So it is not surprising that both BBC in Britain and SVT in Sweden are strongly pro-EU. And it is always pro-EU voices that you hear on TV, but skeptics are denied a platform. Even if 40% of my country wants to leave the EU. How could that be?
I mean we can discuss all other topics on tv. We are even debating drug legalization, despite less than 10% of Swedens population would support that idea. But huge questions about the EU are not discussed at all.
Not even when the Constitution in my country was changed and 200 years of neutrality was abolished with EUs Lisbon treaty did our state media say a word about the event on TV. Everything was covered up.
And I have spoken with German, Brits, Romanians, and Poles and they all say that things are exactly the same in their countries.
So the EU have perverted democracy and manipulated public opinion. Truth is not allowed to reach the people. So the people in power cannot be held accountable for anything they do. Its sad to see how much things have rotten. I remember that my country was the most free place on the planet in 1994 before we joined the EU. And today it is just a rotten banana republic. An occupied territory for resource extraction for the Merkel reich only.
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@owensomers8572
I think that the nazis had come to more over to the idea that they would move the jews to the killing site, than doing the opposite and transport germans to the place they lived and then shot them.
The germans wanted more secrecy in their killings, instead of having people taking photos and eating ice cream while massacres like Babij jar took place. So transporting people by train was essential from now onwards - which had been decided at the Wansee conferance in january earlier that year. And perhaps even earlier than that as some death camps had already been put to use before that conferance.
So it would make sense to burn the bodies and clean up the mess after themselves. Many experimental methods was probably also used as this stage. It was not until say 1944 that the germans had finalized and perfected their killing methods with the creation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
But before then in 1942, was Germany trying everything it seemed. Progroms and lynching, starvation, working people to death, sterilzation experiments, gas vans, mass shootings, lethal injections, gas chambers and different types of gases, etc etc.
So to me it makes sense that they tried the same thing with the disposal of bodies - they tried many methods. Pyres, cremation ovens, mass graves dug by the jewish victims themselves, excavators at Treblinka, bone crushers, dumping ashes into rivers, using ashes as fertilizer to grow
birches etc etc.
The nazis had not yet decided which method was most effiecent for their needs so they tried out different methods to see what did work and which did not work.
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"the Goodwill Wehrmacht is overrated"
I think the contrary is true. People expected Ukraine to fall within 3 days. Now have this war lasted for over a year and Russia have lost more men than USA had in 20 years of fighting in Vietnam.
"Their air force is practically non-existent"
And the Russian air force is nowhere to be seen as they are too afraid to penetrate Ukrainian airspace. Ukraine does however fill the air with drones that bombard Russian troops. And the remains of the Ukrainian air force fills the function of a fleet in being. Not bad for an air force that started this war with fewer planes than their enemy, less trained pilots and planes that were less modern than those of their enemy. The Ukrainian airforce have done well considering those circumstances. While the Russian air force have underperformed - and to paraphrase what Perun said: " it have been a waste of 15-20 years of military spending, as the russian airforce have proven itself to be almost utterly useless throughout this war."
"the majority of their pre-war tank reserves and other losses that they simply do not have the capability to recover from"
Ukraine says they have more tanks now than when they started the war. So many enemy tanks have been conquered that Ukraine have managed to compensate their own losses and even adding a few extra tanks to their inventory. And on top of that have they been given extra tanks from other countries such as Poland, Slovenia, Albania, Slovakia and Czechia.
To me it rather seems like the Russian tank force will never recover from this year.
Their best tanks are gone. Their tank crews have been sent up to Cosmos with their flying turrets. Sanctions are harming Russian tank production. And the thousands of tanks that exist as reserves on paper are heaps of rust that lacks modern upgrades, corruption and maintance have destroyed them. People have stolen metal from gun sights. The coating around electric cables have vanished after a half a century since the tank was built. And even without rust, have the armor quality decayed a lot since the tanks were built because of wear and tear that cause metal fatigue and because of ageing.
And if the Russian army of 2022 was piss-poor when it came to basic tank tactics and combined arms warfare - then will the Russian army of 2023 be even more crappy as men with even less experience and even crappier machines and crappier support troops will take over.
Ukraine will start the next year better prepared than the last one. It now have all the anti-tank weapons that it needs from the start. Troops have gained training in Europe. Fighting morale is high after the victories last autumn. The have learned what their crappy opponent are upto. Russia cannot launch any succesful strike against Kyiv, because there only exist one road towards it - and Russia tried that last year and it failed. It failed despite they had experienced troops, more modern tanks, lots of artillery, lots of cruise missiles, attack helicopters and aircrafts to support it.
This year are the enemy prepared and knows what direction Russia will take. And the badly trained Russian infantry has to attack a prepared enemy with lots of anti-tank weapons. And they get no cruise missiles, helicopters or aircrafts to support them. And most of Russias SPGs have been lost so there is no way momentum can be kept high in any offensive. Russia still have lots of APCs, but not so much tanks. So the attack towards Kyiv has to be done without tank support for the infantry. So as I see it are all their offensive plans doomed to fail.
Furthermore are all the logistical issues from last years not solved - but on the contrary have they become worse by the lack of trucks.
I feel sorry for Ukraine that Russia is dumb enough to continue to press on in a war that has already been lost so badly.
But on the other hand do I feel much joy to see that Russia is throwing more and more salt into their own wounds and increase their own pain. Eastern Europe will feel relief to see the Russian military utterly destroy itself for decades to come. And that Russia is undergoing a de-industrialization as only about 15 out of over 60 Russian car manufacturers now remains, and that the country have undergone a massive braindrain.
This war is also a demographic disaster for Russia with severe long term consequences.
Sometimes I begin to wonder if mr Putin hates Russians more than I do.
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"I think that Putin was probably even more surprised than the rest of the world when he realized that he (and Russia) is at war with the Ukraine."
I think he is as surprised as Hitler was in 1939 when he invaded Poland and didn't expect that other countries would suddenly jump into the war and start helping the country that he just invaded. Hitler had invaded the Rhineland, Austria, Sudetenland, and Czechia without any military resistence from the west. And likewise was west doing nothing when Putin started wars in Chechenya, Georgia, Dagestan, and Crimea.. so he thought that invading Ukraine would be easy.
Ukraine would be demoralized with the lack of western support and quickly give up, even if it would fight bravely the first few days Putin thought. And regardless would the west be able to do too little too late to save Ukraine. And Germany would remain passive as Russia have a knife pressed against its throat with the gas weapon which could kill the German economy.
So Putin did certainly not expect that taking Ukraine would be this hard. The war has become a nightmare for him.
And when it comes to Russian propaganda do I think many Russians have fallen victim for it. Putin himself is on one hand considering the west as weak, decadent, lazy, materialistic, dumb, and overly interested in comfort so beating them in a war would be easy for the more practical minded Russians that are used to hardships.
But then do Putin fall victim to doublethink. One time do he feel contempt for the west as see it as weak. And in the next moment he feels great fear from it. He is paranoid and thinks that the USA is out after him. He constantly fears being poisoned. He sits at long tables because he is afraid of sitting close to someone who might be sick and have Covid or some other disease. He is a coward hiding in his bunker the entire war. He was even so afraid of an western air raid that he did not allow any military planes to fly on his victory day parade on May 9th, as he wanted his military planes to be ready to protect the skies over Moscow from a sudden attack instead. Things are getting silly 🙄
And what George Orwell called "doublethink" is really what is typical of Putins Russia. And of Russian propaganda in particular.
It is filled with constant contradictions towards its own talking points. First they say there is no war in Ukraine, and in the next moment they accuse the west of a proxy war. First they always say they are winning in Ukraine, and in the next moment they mobilize the reserves.
The laugh at USA and say its military is worthless and just leave equipment behind and flee from Afghanistan and say that USA and the west have the most worthless military in the world. And in the next moment they say that Russia is only losing in Ukraine because it is not just fighting Ukraine, but they are also fighting Nato 🙄
Russia is in that regard the first post-modern state in history. It doesn't care about truth. It holds no values.
In the propaganda does Russia try to appeal to everyone and not just a few. To the leftist they say that they are the inheritors of the Soviet heritage and that they are a counterpart to USAs imperialism and capitalism. To the rightwingers do they say that Russia is a bastion against progressivism and a defender of christian family values.
To the westerners they pretend to be an European modern country and an attractive large market. While to the Africans they say that they are the fighter against the west and their imperialism and the defender of the 3rd world.
The Russians are prepared to lie about anything. They lie if they think if that it is going to suit them.
And telling the truth is of course illegal in Russia. Calling the conflict in Ukraine for a war will get you into jail. Criticising the military will also give you severe sentences. Indeed, I have even heard that such a small thing as saying that the T-34 tank
had many serious construction flaws is a criminal offence in Russia.
And with such a lack of diversity of opinions and lack of critical discussions - then of course you do get a stupid ignorant population. And maybe one can say that Putin is one such idiot that that the Soviet education system have produced.
He is either completly ignorant of Ukraines history as an independent country. Or he is lying.
Or he is both lying and being ignorant.
And with such a fool in power, it is perhaps not a surprise that Russia makes bad decisions. And the country have never dealt with its dark Stalinist past the same way as the Germans have dealt with their Hitler
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Societies are always developing and new ways of running institutions will develop. Sometimes you get more commodification / Capitalism. And other times things are reversed.
People are afraid to bring down the world order they live in, because the alternative hasn't been tried... or even worse, nobody have presented an alternative world order.
The fall of feudalism is one such example. And then slavery was abolished, women got equal rights. Then Soviet union happened, and fear of it spreading to western countries forced capitalists into making concessions to the working class to avoid a Communist revolution... so they gave in and provided free healthcare, free education, vacation, unemployment benefits, higher standards of housing, food regulations, retirement, abolishing child labour, shorter workdays and fewer days at work, and state owned government utilities.
So society have changed much the last 100 years. There was no one sitting with a finished plan on how the modern society would be organized back in year 1900... but instead did the society we have today come about piece by piece over time.
Likewise don't I think that the guys bringing about the French revolution was quite clear about all amazing changes Napoleon would bring about... democracy, the declaration of human rights, the abolishment of feudalism, replacement of the outdated Roman legal code with the modern code Napoleon that is still used today, the meter system, ambulances, hospitals, the modern adress system, meritocracy, religious freedom etc
I don't think anyone planned those things in advance.
People just brought down the old world order and came up with their own alternative solutions as new problems showed up.
So personally I am not fearful about destroying Capitalism. It is a system with gigantic flaws.
But it is also a system with huge powers, which can be used. And a skilled statesman knows how to combine the best of capitalism with socialism or other systems... and thereby create an optimal economy and society.
A system much more efficient than capitalism than is in its 100% pure form.
Central planning can be useful. Just as the profit motive of capitalism also can be useful for speeding up technological change and the creation of new products. The food industry have changed more in the last 100 years of capitalism than the 2000 years the preceded it.
And this for both good and bad of course. Personally I feel lucky that I can eat food that taste more delicious than ever before in history, because food scientists like Howard Moskowitz have used methods like "bliss point" and other tricks to fine tune foods for creating maximum pleasure and thus increasing sales.
But the downside of the capitalist food system is of course that food companies exploit humans biological evolution to make us into sugar addicts that over consume unhealthy foods that makes us sick.
Food is cheaper than ever under capitalism, but the backside of the coin has been underpaid workers in the food industry, horrible standards of animal welfare, and a gigantic waste of fossile fuels to make that food cheap.
Capitalism have made food cheaper than any other economic system could. But capitalist agriculture have also wasted more energy than every other food system - 10 calories of oil had been used for every 1 calorie of food you eat. And gigantic amounts of fresh water, top soil, phosphor have been wasted on a scale never seen before in history.
So are there other better ways of doing things? I don't think there is any way of knowing.
Just as a peasant in the 1700's could not know that another society was possible with democracy, individual rights, and a social safety net.
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Russia is an aggressive, evil neighbour. But its military performance in Ukraine has been pathethic and its losses has been staggering. So invading another medium sized country would be too much for them to handle, even without a Nato intervention.
The reason for staying out of Nato would be to prioritize military spending for our own military defence rather than preparing for military operations in Africa, Asia and the middle east where I see no reason why our troops should go there.
I rather want an army of the people than a small professional force loyal to the power elite. This is not just about democracy and independence. It is also about our country being better prepared to handling disasters overall. If we preserve our Cold War total defence with large stockpiles of everything from gas masks, to hospital equipment to having an agriculture that could feed our own population - then we would never had healthcare workers dying of breathing in Covid virus, and we would not be threatened with food shortages and higher food prices because of Putins war or because of lack of global food exports because of Covid.
And with a large fleet of helicopters and men in the national guard would we be able to put out fires in our forests on our own without paying other countries to help us. We would also be able to act quicker without waiting for help abroad.
We would also have lots of shovels so conscrips quickly get rid of snow from railway tracks in a dramatic sudden snowfall.
And we can fill sandbags to stop flooding from destroying peoples homes.
And we would have lots of helicopters to save people from sinking ships.
Overall do I think that a small professional army is stupid. And that Nato is bad use of tax payer money. We don't need small battlegroups for fighting wars abroad. Our military should be for our own country only. We should not become dependent on other countries.
Cutting down our military spending and joining a military alliance instead as a way to gain security ended badly for us in the past - just look at the Scanian war and the battle of Fehrbellin in 1685. This ended up being a very costly and unnecessary war that Sweden got dragged into by our ally France. This unnecessary war could have been avoided if our traitor nobility had paid their taxes so that we could have had a strong military to defend our country instead.
Sweden also got dragged into the unnecessary Pomeranian war 1757-1762 because of our alliance with France. This war also ended with a failure.
Historically speaking have Swedens own interests best been served on our own by a strong military. And neutrality gave us a flourishing economy. In the later half of the 1600s we gained one of the largest merchant fleets in the world - because England, Holland and France all constantly went into war with each other and ships from those countries came to Sweden and paid money to register their ships as Swedish ship so they could sail with a Swedish flag and don't being afraid of being attacked by British, French and Dutch pirates who had the permission to attack ships from an enemy country.
But since they were not at war with Sweden, and our fleet was of the strongest in the world did no one dare to attack ships that were sailing under a Swedish flag because they feared dragging Sweden into war on the side of their enemies.
In World war 1 did Sweden stay out of the war. For 60 years time had Sweden borrowed money from Germany and now was that sum so large that it was like 150% of our GDP and no one knew how Sweden would ever be able to repay Germany our debts. But when world war 1 started did the German state collect all debt claims the German people had towards Sweden, and used that as a way to pay for all gigantic imports of steel from Sweden. Swedish steel industry grew 2 and 4 fold during the war and export such gigantic amounts of steel to Germany that our gigantic trade deficit had been wiped out in just for 4 years. And our factories and mines had expanded their capactity so much under the war that much of it had to be closed down after the war because there was no longer any demand for all that iron and steel.
In world war 2 was Sweden never seeing the same death and destruction as the rest of Europe. Because of the war had Sweden become forced to become more self-reliant. We had to make our own medicine when it could no longer be imported, so this was the birth of our pharmaceutical industry. And our arms industry flourished as we begun making our own military planes.
And after the war could Sweden reap the fruits of its wise policies. Sure was structural rationalization in the 1920s forcing Swedish firms to become more effiecent than those of other countries. Sure did the governments support of infant insutries like ship building also begin to finally pay off. And the lack of foreign competion after the war also helped creating an economic wonder after the war.
Sweden became the largest shipbuilder in the world. Some of the largest drydocks laid in Sweden. And the worlds biggest oil tankers were built in Sweden.
So neutrality is good.
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Name one event in military history when a country have replaced one thousand artillery pieces with artillery pieces from another country. You can't because there is no such example. And you expect that could be done in just 9 months, that makes me think that you are as clueless about the world as a Russian 🙄
Ukraine has been given enormous amounts of western artillery and equipment. Including hundreds of tanks and one hundred of the worlds best self-propelled guns - PZH2000, Caesar, Crab, Archer, Himars. And then M777, FH70, L119, Paladin, M270 on top of that. Plus the worlds best counter-battery radar - the Swedish made ARTHUR - is now fighting in Ukraine. But also USA and Germany have donated counterbattery radars such as Cobra.
So now do Ukraine have the upper hand in this war when it comes to artillery. The more advanced weapon systems will probably come to Ukraine one day. But it takes time to train the crews and handle all the logistics. And if crews are training on those weapon systems now as we speak, then I feel sure that this will be a secret unknown to us until that day when those weapons suddenly appear on the battlefield and take the russian military by surprise.
I will also say that the most dangerous time for Ukraine is now gone. The country have now wiped out the professional army that Putin threw into Ukraine in February. All that is left are tiny remains... and Putin have tried to fill the manpower shortages with reservist junk troops with bad training, bad willingness to fight, and they are also badly equipped.
The dangerous shortage of russian artillery shells are now also gone. Enormous amounts of ammunition has been captured at Charkiv so Ukraine will have ammunition for many extra months just because of that. And even more after this failure at Khersun. Furthermore have Ukraine now managed to open their own factory that can produce 152mm and 122mm shells and western powers can provide unlimited amounts of explosives.
This gives Ukraine all the time it needs to slowly transition over to using western weapons if it wants to do so.
And as I said earlier, Ukraines dominance on the battlefield is now so total that you can see videos on youtube with hundreds of trucks standing in line on a road - something that would be suicidal to do if the Russian airforce was not incompetent.
And Ukrainian artilllery can now stand in the same spot for days when they are firing as the risk of Russian counter-battery fire is so low. Russias advantage in artillery last summer is now gone. Now it is instead Ukrainian artillery that dominates the battlefield. And Russia is now using old M1943 152mm howitzers from World war 2. Just like they use world war 2 rifles and T-62 tanks because they have runned out of modern equipment.
Things look good for Ukraine. I feel more hopeful than ever for their victory. Even Germany, the Republicans in USA and the new Italian government supports Ukraine. So things look more hopeless than ever for Russia. They are losing almost 1000 soldiers killed per day now. I don't think this is substainable for them...
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@Trbrigade
22 Pzh 2000 14 from Germany and 8 from the Netherlands (and six more planned by Italy)
48 Paladins - 22 Paladin from Norway, and 6 from Latvia, and the UK is sending 20 Paladins (perhaps even more)
18 Krabs from Poland
18 Ceasar (12 from France and 6 from Denmark)
26 HIMARS
One or two dozen (?) Archer from Sweden
11 units of M270 (5 from Germany, and 3 from UK, and 3 from Norway)
70 units of L118 105mm Howitzers (54 from UK and 16 from USA)
152 units of m777 155mm guns (142 from USA, 6 from Australia and 4 Canada)
Lithuania transferred and unknown number of 105-mm M101 howitzers to Ukraine
15 155mm TRF1s are promised by France
FH70 unknown number given by Estonia and Italy
And an unknown number of mortars from Finland (Vammas 120mm KRH 92)
And Lithuania are sending 120mm Panzermörser M113s
All in all are we talking about 380 artillery pieces here... probably more than 400 including those who are considered the best weapon systems that money can buy, or at least pretty modern: Caesar, Archer, PZH2000, HIMARS, M270, and Krab - which togheter makes up around 100 Self-propelled guns.
And those are just the arms shipments that we know about. The real number is likely even higher.
It should also be added that Eastern Europe have provided Ukraine with a large number of Dana, Gvozdikas, Zuzana, Grad, Vampirs, 152mm D20s and such.
So unsurprisingly do Ukraine now have the superiority in artillery over Russia.
Good gunners, good artillery pieces, high precision ammunition, world class counter-battery radars, and drones to observe the shots is a deadly combination.
Ukrainian artillery is very likely to score a deadly shot on the first hit, while the same cannot be said for the inaccurate Russian artillery.
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First time that I strongly agrees with Ben on anything I guess. As a leftwinger we do not often have the same views.
We can however agree upon beheading babies are evil and people who do that are evil people that needs to be neutralized. And celebrating the holocaust is simply unacceptable and muslims, arabs and leftwinger needs to condemn this. And people who support this or support Hamas or tries to relativise this needs to be kicked out from mainstream leftwing political parties. This is simply views that should not be accepted or tolerated. Period.
And I do not care if this cause a civil war in the labor movement. I do not care. If people are in this movement just to promote ethno-nationalist garbage, or trying to promote a conservative religion that wanna opress jews, kill gays, criminilize blasphemy and torture animals, and mutilate children and such then they do not belong in our party. And nor am I interested in the palestine conflict as it is not an European concern. But I think that wars and human rights violations are bad. And I cannot say that the muslim side in this war are the good guys when they are the ones killing civilians, starting most of the wars, fire rockets against civilians, celebrate pro-holocaust messages, denied jews and christians access to holy sites before Israel took control over those areas in 1967. And acting hypocritical and demanding return of former muslim lands in palestine but refuse to return former indian land to india.
The left should admit that the main cause for this war is islamism. Not islam practiced by moderate muslims, but extremist islam. A thing too common which is the reason why muslims cannot get along with anyone it seems - not with Israel, not with India, not with China, not with Russia, not with Europe, not with USA, not with Africans, not with Phillipines, and not even within the islamic middle east as Syria and Irans wars with Iraq and Saudiarabia has shown. And nor does this religious extremism seems to get along with buddists, jews, hindus, orthodox christians, catholics, protestants, atheists, african pagans, coptics, yazids, or even sunni and shia muslims.
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I think countries which never had been independent until recently are more nationalist - Ireland, Norway, Poland etc.
And countries which have recently been through wars when the country needs to stick together to win and everyone has to sacrifice also creates nationalist sense of belonging to a greater cause... countries like America are very proud of their participation in World war 2.
Hungary seems to fit into both categories. The country was always an annoying province in the Austro-Hungrian/ Habsburg empire and they always demanded degrees of independence and not having to pay taxes and demands that Hungarian troops should not be led by German officers but Hungarians and so on. So they were never allowing themselves to be pushed around by their German masters like many other people.
But many slavs gave up their independence? Why? - Because the choice stood between sucking Austrians stick and getting their help against the muslim Ottomans and keeping some independence, or becoming crushed and subjugated by the Ottomans.
So the slavs choose German protection. But as soon as the Ottoman empire got sick and was about to die, then did all independence movements sprung up on the Balkans and wanted to become independent from Austrian rule.
They no longer saw any need for their German masters. And Austrian empire was based on very harsh oppressive serfdom. The aristocrats paid nearly no taxes at all. So everyone else had to pay much. So it easy to see why everyone hated this empire so much.
Its borders was a totally artificial construct gained from royal marriages and its protection selling to weak slavic peoples on the Balkans. So the empire included modern day Belgium, Northern Italy, Czechia, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia, Transylvania etc.
To me it seems like people who have not yet gained independence and are late comers to the game of creating nation states go with etno-nationalism. Like the kurds for example.
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Ukraines economy is already strained, and taking workers that pay taxes and dress them uniforms and having to feed them, cloth them, provide them with training and ammunition costs money. And when more western money was blocked by pro-russian traitors in western countries (ie speaker Johnson in USA, and Orban in the EU) then it would be difficult for Ukraine to fight this war in the long run if they would be running out of money.
Another big problem is that dressing large parts of the male population in uniform and sending them away to sit in a cold trench line and smoking cigarettes out of boredom would lead to war exhaustion, and their girlfriends, brothers, sisters, parents and children would miss them and get tired of the war more quickly.
So I can understand Zelenskys decision to not wanting to call up more reserves. At the time he took the decision it seemed like the right one. Now in hindsight its easy to blame him and say that the west would help Ukraine economically so there is nothing to worry about. And that he should have mobilized more men, so that Ukraines war veterans that have fighting every day for 2 years could go home from the frontlines and see their families for a few weeks, while new men is holding the frontline.
This could prevent war exhaustion among the Ukrainian veterans, and especially among Ukraines best regiments that has fought in almost every major battle in this war because Ukraine had not had any major reserves.
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P-51 was probably the best since it was a superb dogfighter and had a massive long range.
Fw190A was much ahead of its time when it entered service. The best plane in the world in 1941 and 1942 and possibly even 1943.
Yak-9 was a great late war airplane with a performance better than Fw190 in many aspects. Even more impressive is the design when we take into consideration all the wartime constraints the Soviet economy had and the lack of vital building materials for aircraft manufacturing such as the lack of aluminum. But Russia was still able to build an amazing plane like this even their poor country with material shortages could never afford to waste aluminum like the Americans, or using the same high quality fuel, or afford to waste two aircraft engines on a single plane like the Americans did with P38.
P47 was a great plane which is often neglected because people rather talk about the P51 which was better and more good looking. However, P47 was one of the best planes in WWII. The American ace Chuck Yeger did prefer to fly the P47 over the P51 despite it wasn't as agile. And the reason was that the P51 could be shot down with a single hitting its engine, but the P47 could take much more beating and still survive. The P47 could have half its wing blown off and still being able to fly home and safely take a landing. It did also have great range and it was able to do the ground attack role and annoy German anti-aircraft gunners the same way as the IL-2 with its ability to survive enemy fire.
Its engine was big and it gave this ugly plane massive power, so it was actually also a good plane in the skies as well.
Other planes on this list should be A6M zero, Hellcat, Yak3, Bf109 and the Mosquito.
Some planes do not deserve a place on this list. And that is the Corsair and the Spitfire.
Both were great planes, but neither had much impact on the war. The Spitfire had a short range and could therefore not compete with the P51. And the Corsair was also a late war design which arrived when the air war in the pacific already had been won by the allies since long ago. Its big propeller and high speed made this plane too impractical to operate on a carrier deck, so it became a land based aircraft - which in turn limited its usefulness. It was however excellent in combating targets both in they sky and on the ground - but in 1944 and after was there really no need for this plane. Bombers were better at taking out ground targets, and this plane was pretty much overkill when it came to taking out Japanese airplanes that were mostly obsolete designs flown by pilots with nearly no training.
And the P38 was a plane with some impressive features, but it was surely not on the top list of the best fighters.
The kill ratio in North Africa was catastrophic and highly in favor of the Luftwaffe pilots when the P38 arrived. This plane could easily be out-turned and outmaneuvered. It was a big target. People love to argue that two engines gives greater speed and gives the plane a greater chance to survive an air combat since the plane does not need to go down only because one engine is taken out. Reality does however not side with this theories.
Two engines also means a bigger plane and more resistance from the air which slows the plane down. And having a big clumsy plane with much weight and drag to handle fighting an enemy plane is hard enough to handle with 2 engines, and with only 1 engine does this plane become hopelessly under-powered and will likely be shot down anyways. So having 2 engines does not mean more survive-ability. A plane with two engines were also a luxury that only USA could afford with its massive industry and access to rare metals. Planes with two engines are expensive to more costly and demand more time to maintain - which means there are less time available for flying combat missions.
For the reasons above it is therefore not much surprise that most of the best fighters in history have been single engined like F16 and P51. While planes like Bf110 have been considered a disappointment. P38 was also a disappointment in North Africa for the USAAF. Most of the job to kill off the Luftwaffe therefore fell upon P47 and P51 instead.
But in the Pacific did this plane do a great job. The plane had very long range that allowed it to cross the wast ocean and fight targets far away. The plane did also have one engine that did fly clockwise, and the other engine flew counter-clockwise, and that in turn gave this plane great stability than any other propeller plane and made more easy to operate for the pilot. And the lack of a propeller in the nose gave the pilot great frontal view and allowed a massive pack of firepower to be centered in the nose.
And since firearms were in the nose and not in the wings was the fire also the precision of the salvos much greater and the plane could hit targets twice the ranges of other fighter planes of that time. So the firepower was both more powerful and had greater precision.
And the plane was also able to carry much weight, which made this plane a deadly attack aircraft - both in France and in the Pacific.
The P38 was an interesting plane in many ways. But it does not belong on any top 10 list of best WWII fighters.
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@alganhar1
" the British would probably disagree with you"
Their subjective opinion doesn't matter to me. I bet some butthurt Romanians and Italians also demand some of their planes to enter this list, but I do not care bit about their national pride... just as little as I care about Britishers opinions...
"Spitfire took over as the primary frontline fighter "
It was a good plane. But it was not an important one. He163 was also a great plane that was even better than the spitfire, but its impact on the war was nearly none. And that is what we are talking about here.
You could have the best plane in the world, but if it is not fighting the type of war where this type of plane is needed, then it have not much impact.
"You slam the Spitfire for its range, saying because of that it had little impact on the war, yet you state the bf 109 should be on the list"
The difference is that Germany was fighting a defensive war, while Britain was fighting an offensive one.
Bf109 could fly over German cities and defend them - and in that case was their plane doing its job.
The Spitfire however was needed to escorts to allied bombers over a foreign country far away - and here does the short range of the spitfire become a problem.
The allies needed a long range plane. Because from 1941 and onwards was the German airforce mostly focused on Russia, and the attempts to dominate the skies over Britain had been frozen for a future day.
"An aircraft that fought in every theatre Commonwealth troops fought in can never be said to have had 'little impact' on the war however."
The plane was never produced in the numbers of Bf109. Spitfire was an airplane that could been replaced by other planes on other fronts, the Russians could just have produced their own fighters if the Spitfire never existed, and the American planes could also have filled the same role as the Spitfire in other theathers, regardless if we talk about West Europe, Germany, Italy, North Africa or the pacific.
P47 and Fw190 were more important ground attack aircrafts. The Hurricane also had more importance than the Spitfire during the battle of Britain. There was really nothing unique about this plane.
I do think that the Mosquito is more amazing because of its impressive flight performance and all wood construction. But I cannot say the same about the Spitfire.
The Spitfire was one of the top best planes in the world 1939-41, but aside from that it would not be anything special at all about this plane. It was roughly equal to the Bf109 in everything.
And if Germany had used the Spitfire and Britain used the Bf109, then of course my list would have contained the Spitfire as one of the most important planes of the war. The Germans would have probably mass produced it just as much as they did with the Bf109. And the short range of the Spitfire would have not been a problem for the defensive war that Germany was fighting.
The Spitfire was probably a slightly better plane than the ugly Bf109. But I am more impressed by Germany's ability to keep their old plane throughout the entire war thanks to small upgrades. Germany did not have any USA to help them with building materials, spare parts, and engineering. And neither did they have any high quality lend lease oil that allowed their planes engines to operate on optimal performance.
So I would say that I am a bit more impressed about the Bf109 than the Spitfire also for this reason.
The Spitfire was a better plane, but Britain did not have to bother with the same many problems and limitations that the German had. Britain had resources, and the country was not fighting a two front war with different demands like Germany did. The eastern front needed planes good at fighting at low altitudes, while the air war over Germany was fought on high altitudes.... so Germany needed a plane that was good at both those things and always had to do design compromises that did allow their planes to be as good and specialized at certain tasks as the allied planes were.
At some point was it not possible for the Germans to compete. And in 1945 was the game probably over for Germany's propeller planes. They were in a developmental dead end, and there was simply not possible to upgrade the Bf109 any further, and the war was about to being lost.
I am surprised that the Germans even bothered to develop the Bf109K variant. Maybe they did stick to their old plane for nostalgic reasons, when it was obvious that their country instead needed jet fighters like the He163 or the Fw190.
But the Bf109K did however remain a respectable opponent even to the best Spitfire and Mustang variants... despite all the problems Germany had, that I earlier mentioned.
So the Spitfire was not terribly important to the war. And you can cry all you want about it being unfair that this plane does not come in on the top list of fighter planes only because it was born in the wrong country and thus never had the chance to fight the same type of war as Germany.
But life is unfair. Sometimes do great weapons never get the place in history that they deserve.
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"I have nothing against it, except that if one engine stalls, there's no other to keep that bird flying. Up the Canadian North, that means a dead pilot if he's not found and retrieved fast. I lived in the Arctic. I know the problem: a minus 40 degrees can go down to the minus 90s if the windshield factor really interacts."
- A plane could go down crashing for multiple reasons and not just the engine - the flight control system can fail, the landing gear could jam, the B26 bomber often had accidents because it came into landing at a too high speed, and the Me109 had its tight landing gear that caused many crashes, and so fourth.
So it makes more sense to actully look on how many planes have been lost in total than just stirring oneself blind on the fact that a plane lacks an extra engine - like you do now.
JAS39 Gripen have so far not have not had a single crash caused by its engine. And it is also overall a safe plane that is more likely to get you home alive in a trip to the north pole than a F/A 18 Hornet.
And a twin-engine pilot will just be equally dead in the artic if his plane gets hit by lightning and crash, or if his plane gets destroyed in a mid-air collision or hitting the ground, or if his flight control system fail, or if the pilot makes a mistake because of spatial disorientation or if he forgets to close a hatch after his plane has undergone aerial refueling and run out of fuel and crash, or if someone shots down his plane by mistake. A fuel tank could also catch fire and bring down the plane.
So as I said, much things can bring down a plane - not just a failed engine. And with that in mind I would say Gripen is one of the best planes for artic climate. Northern Sweden is a also a cold place that needs to be defended, so its an obvious must for Swedish military aircraft that it should be able to function in cold harsh climates. Northern Sweden is very cold, and this is why this country produces so many NHL-players.
And Gripen also got equal or better range than F35, Eurofighter, Rafale, and Superhornet.
http://gripen4canada.blogspot.se/p/how-the.html
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Why would anyone buy Soviet junk after this war when it have proven itself to be so obsolete?
Those rusty asbestos junk probably only costs money to maintain and scrapping. At best will those vehicles remain in service until more modern Nato equipment takes over their role in the Ukrainian army. And when that day come, then will those machines become museum pieces. Ukraine will probably indeed have enough Soviet equipment to donate some tanks to every tank museum around the world in exchange for something in return.
The war musuem in Ukraine after this conflict will have the most odd samples in its collection from Russia, Ukraine, USA, UK, Poland, Sweden, Australia, Czechia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Germany, France, Spain, Turkey, Iran, Korea, Taiwan, Macedonia, etc etc
And its weapons ranging from the iron age like the MTLB - to modern weapons like Archer, Caesar, Panzerhaubitze, and modern drones and special artillery ammunition.
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@mikakatzensuper0072 The EU is stagnent. Only Haiti and Zimbabwe have performed worse than Italy since it joined the EU.
Income inequality, has increased in
Britain since EEC entry in 1973 – as it has in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. The same pattern holds for Austria, Spain, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden.
We have seen the Euro crisis caused by the Euro currency and the stupid abolishment of capital controls. And that have resulted in economic disasters in Spain, Ireland, Greece, Cyprus, Italy and Portugal.
And even among the "winners" within the EU have development been negative. Germany have been able to steal jobs and GDP growth from southern Europe thanks to their advantage of lower wages. And the German government have done this deliberatly by cutting welfare programs and thereby forcing people into poverty and desperation to accept any low wages any company would offer its desperate workers. And the result have of course been rising inequality and poverty in Germany.
And what are other countries forced to do then when German companies outcompete them and steal their jobs?
- They too are of course forced to also lower their wages like the Germans did by creating unemployment and cutting welfare programmes and forcing people into povery and desperation.
And that is what the EU stands for. It rather have poverty and desperation than protectionism and a little bit of inflation. The EU hates you if you are a worker, or if you are poor, or unemployed, or sick.
The EU is shooting itself in the foot. When it makes people poorer, then nobody will be able to buy the products that companies make, and then they will need to shut down production and fire workers.
And when more workers get unemployed, then even less people will be able to buy any products... and so this vicious circle goes round and round.
And the EU handle every area of the economy with this destructive incompetence. And common sense and working solutions are always sacrificed on the altar of the idea of a United Europe.
The tax system is another such thing that the EU sucks at. The low tax countries are stealing companies and rich peoples money from other EU countries so that they get big holes in their government budgets.
So to fill those budget holes they need to raise taxes on the poor and those who cannot afford to pay an expert to do tax evasion for them.
And countries like Ireland can act as a parasite on other EU countries and steal companies that other countries have spent decades to built up.
So what is the EUs solution to the problem that it itself created with the free movement of money and removal of capital controls?
- The EUs solution is to force all EU countries to introduce a minimum tax rate.
So the EU fucks things up for everyone. It makes it impossible for countries to maintain a high tax welfare state even if the voters would want it. And it also makes it impossible for countries that want super low taxes to have it.
The EU hates everyone.
The EU once again hates workers and the poor, since they are the ones who have seen their taxes been going up the last 30 years, while the rich and big companies pays almost no taxes at all now, despite their profits are bigger than ever, and wages have been falling for the last 30 years.
So the EU have fucked up the economy. And it have made life a misery for ordinary people. Only rich aristocrats got any reason to like the EU.
Personally do I prefer the American tax system which is the opposite of the European. I want low taxes on incomes so hard work gets rewarded. And I want higher taxes on inheritance, on rents, capital gains, housing and high corporate taxes.
The US system rewards hard work, meritocracy and discourages useless speculation that pushes up housing prices. And low taxes on labour also makes the country more competative on the world market.
While the EU system does the opposite.
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@xazorus9229
"Right, but you wont ever that military."
By this argument you make you can just as well say USA will never be fully self-suffiecent in arms production either. All armies in the world are filled with outdated crappy equipment, while some are worse off than others. Even in the US army do you have soldiers sitting on sandbags inside their APC because of the insuffiecent protection they offer.
"you get +/-1 Trillion USD"
That is a big maybe. USA and UK did sign a paper that they would defend the indepedence of Ukraine. So are any US and UK ground troops involved in the fighting are there any no flight zone? Nope.
If Sweden was nuked is it certain that a weak president like Biden would send away nukes on Russia if that would mean 300 million Americans will die as a result? I don't think you can say with certainty that Sweden will get that help.
And it is only against Russia and the EU Sweden could need help. Minor threats non-existential threats can be handled by ourselves.
"Forgive me if i am wrong but I dont think Sweden spends 200+ trillion per year on defense."
Nato did spend about 1 trillion dollars on defence about 10 years ago. So your numbers are way off..
"Yes you are obligated to respond if Article 5 is invoked (which has happened 1 since its founding)."
Yes and that led Europe into participating into the shameful and costly Iraq war in 2003. So all talk about Nato is "just a defensive alliance" is therefore just a lie. The attack on Iraq in 2003 was not a defensive war.
"A case can be made that you lost out on a fully independent foreign policy when you joined the EU in 1995"
True. And I would indeed say that the EU membership is more catastrophic than any Nato membership will ever be.
Leaving the EU is therefore my no.1 priority. All other political issues are irrelevant until the Swexit problem has been solved.
"Times change, if a country refuses to change then it risks catastrophe"
If it becomes a puppet state to a foreign power, then I don't feel bound to defend it. There was no vote about joining Nato, despite the Swedish constitution says that "All offentlig makt i Sverige utgår från folket och riksdagen är folkets främsta företrädare." - All government powers in Sweden comes from the people, and the parliament is the representative of the people".
The Swedish politicians are traitors. This is not the first time they commit treason. The Lisbon treaty was an even worse violation of our constitution.
Swedens leading politicians are Quislings who betray our democracy and betray our country by signing away our independence.
"I am not saying that Sweden should or shouldn't join NATO, that is for them to decided."
It should be up for the Swedish voters to decide and no one else. If we cannot vote on the single most important foreign policy change the last 200 years, then why have democracy at all?
And why should Sweden have an army?
I don't wanna waste my tax money on a Swedish army too weak to defend my own country. And killing brown people in foreign lands so EU and USA steal their resources is not something that I am interested in. France can for her shit with her own money. I do not care about Africa. I am not a world citizen. I am not an EUian. I do not think my European identity is that strong either. I am a Swede, and nothing else.
The Swedish army should be for self-defence and nothing else. The only benefit of joining Nato would be that we can sell more weapons to other countries now. But on the other hand, why the hell would I care about that when all Swedish defence companies have been bought up by foreigners since we joined the EU?
Bofors is American. Scania is German. Hägglund & Söner is British just like SAAB, Ericsson have merged with Japanese Sony, etc etc
I do not give a shit about those companies anymore. They are no longer Swedish. This is the destruction globalism/neoliberalism gave us. 60 years of industrial development thrown into the trash.
Now do everything have to be rebuilt from scratch. And there is no other way if we want to remain a rich and independent nation, instead of being a sub-serviant puppet state doing low-paid assembly jobs for other countries while other countries keep all the well paid jobs for themselves.
This failed economic model needs to die. Otherwise will Sweden die.
Sadly does it seems that many Swedes cheers for the destruction of our country and our rich history.
Only materialism and here and now matters to them. They behave like Marxists in Maos China who happily demolish thousands of years history as if it mattered nothing to them.
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@thearisen7301
"You're looking at a single year"
Just like people who are anti-renewable like to cherry pick times when those energy sources are unavailable.
To me is this a very relevant example to make and should not be ignored, just because some nuclear power enthusiast feelings are getting hurt.
Nuclear power failed France a year when it needed it the most. And this shows that you cannot rely on just one type of energy source.
Diversity is a strenght.
"Warm rivers wasn't a big deal btw"
We have had many warm summers lately. And that seems to be a new trend. London was 40 degrees warm last year.
- Which is disgunstingly hot if you ask a Scandinavian like me.
So I want an energy system able to function despite such an awful weather. If you dismiss solar power because there are sometimes a rainy day, and you dismiss wind power days when the wind is not blowing, then you must also for the same reason dismiss nuclear power as it is useless when it is too hot outside.
"Sweden's new Gov is looking pretty hard at adding new nuclear"
The Swedish government is a puppet state of the EU so right now it is building wind farms like crazy - like tens of thousands of them.
Because this have been decided in a room by the European commission where not a single representative from the Swedish people participated.
There is much talk about building new nuclear power in rightwing circles, but I doubt any such project will be put in place any time soon. In the end will it probably be the socialdemocrats that will back down and agree with the rightwing parties once big industrialists starts to complain about higher energy prices.
And even if Putin dies tomorrow will energy prices remain high in Sweden. Partly because energy exports to Germany - as Sweden is forced to do as a puppet state. Partly because Sweden have invited Facebook and other companies to have their servers located here - which is stupid and useless as those companies don't pay any taxes, live on government subsidies, provide no jobs and just one server hall consumes as much energy as a medium sized Swedish town with 200.000 people.
And to that all enviromental idiocy.. like all electric cars that also now demands energy.
And add to that Swedens 10% population growth with 1 million refugees the last 20 years that have also increased energy consumption.
And furthermore have energy consumption increased a lot - like equal to one nuclear plant - just for the stupid decision to make a carbon neutral steel plant in northern Sweden.
And add to that that we need energy equal to a half new nuclear plant just to provide an electric car battery factory in northern Sweden with energy.
And meanwhile have our Green party been dismantling our nuclear power with one hand, while they at the other hand sponsor insane enviromental projects like this on the other hand... and with no idea where the energy is going to come from.
They just shut down nuclear plants, flood our country with immigrants, invest in green projects and "green cars", and supports economic globalization that leads to companies like Facebook and Google open server halls and steals energy from out energy without offer any benefits in return, while our bakerys go bankrupt because of high energy prices.
How about we just start saving energy instead of wasting it on bullcrap?
The planet only got a limited amount of resources and we cannot increase energy consumption forever.
Oil, uranium, land, and such are limited resources.
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Russia economy is badly battered and ammunition production is likely to fall off a cliff next year. Already today is Ukraine firing more artillery shells than russia. And with ATACMS arriving and the last years horrible russian losses in artillery and MLRS will make the future even worse for russia. And North Korean artillery shells sent to russia is like putting a plaster on a guy who just had his entire leg chopped off. Its low quality junk in too small numbers to make any difference.
The next year is likely getting horrible for russia. Its economy is going down, its artillery is disapearing, its missiles are going away, its helicopters are held far away by ATACMS, its black sea fleet cannot stay in Crimea, the country is running out of tanks.
And now it is using 90 year old military trucks (GAZ AA), 70 year old tanks (T-55), 130 year old rifles (Mosin Nagant), and 70 year old armored personnel carriers (BTR-50).
And I don't think russia would be using such old equipment and needlessly put their own soldiers lives at risk if better more modern equipment was available. And to me this is a sign that russia have suffered extremely heavy unsubstainable losses.
And if russias professional army equipped with T-90 tanks couldn't defeat ukrainians back when russia had enormous superior in tanks and artillery that could fire 63.000 shots per day - then I don't think russia can win this war when it have fewer tanks than ukraine and firing less shots per day than Ukraine, and having artillery that is of a lower quality.
And russias professional army is also dead. Its counter-battery radars are gone. And now are only badly equipped, poorly trained, and badly motivated troops all that russia is having left.
So I likely think russia is heading towards a loss. And I think that even a Trump election win would be too little too late to save Putin from a loss. He have already lost too much men and equipment by then to turn the tables and win the war. And even without american artillery shells would the rest of the free world be able to provide enough shells for Ukraine to keep it fighting and making the final push needed to drive home victory against a totally exhausted enemy that have no tanks or artillery left, and only got lots of useless meat - men that gets blown up by ukrainian artillery before they get the chance to even fire upon any ukrainian infantry.
And without artillery and tanks you cannot make any succesful offensive tanks. And russia lacks both, and its infantry lacks both training and weapons - so its combat value sucks, and especially so in offensive operations.
This Avdiika offensive might be the last major offensive russia could pull off in this war. And it should be noted that this offensive is done with with BTR-50 and the last modern tanks russia got. And even unit in the russian army - VDV looklike complete rookies unsure how to act on a battlefield. So things do not look good for russia.
The Ukrainian army might not be well trained professional soldiers according to western standards. Indeed they are far from it, and especially after all losses they have suffered. But Ukraine do on the other hand have lots of good kit, and artillery superiority both in quality and quantity and that is worth a lot.
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@warrenokuma7264 But money is not relevant as it can be created in unlimited amounts. What is more relevant is the price in terms of workers and workhours needed to build one tank, or how much raw materials was used to build it.
The problem with averages is that they often does not reflect reality, or what is normal.
Say that you have 4 girls that all weight 50 kilos each, and then you have a fat guy that weights 400 kilos. So if you add up the total weight of them all you get a total of 600 kilos, and then you divide those with 5 persons, and then you get an average weight per person that is 120 kilos.
So is the normal weight in this group 120 kilos? or should 50 kilos more represent the typical normal value?
So if you add up production from different tank factories you could get very different values of productivity. Some use unskilled labour and even slave labour, while others have specialized tools and trained workers.
And then you could not just say that you can scale up production of a certain tank without the productivity going up or down. Maybe productivity will go up as economies of scale now makes it possible to transition to massproduction technologies and factories now can now be use at its full capacity?
Or maybe productivity will just fall, as there are not enough skilled workers to build all extra Panther tanks, so slave labour, immigrants, women and children has to be used instead - which leads to much lower effiency of production.
And production might as well also become more hampered by bottlenecks when you scale up production - like what should you do when there are not enough copper to start building 3000 Ferdinand panzers?
It is an interesting subject Bernhard comes up with here. And I don't think mainstream economic theory have solved this problem. My opinion might be unpopular, but I don't care.
I agree with Bernhard. Technology does not work like in video games, you don't know the price of a new technology, how good it will be, how long it will take to research and what spin-off effects you get.
And when it comes to producing tanks, you cannot just expect everything to happen just over a day. New production technologies and ways of organizing work takes time to learn. Learning workers how to make a new tank model takes time. And tanks gets more powerful on the battlefield and cheaper to produce, when constructors sees new ways of making those tanks, and remove the cheek on the panther turret that act as a shot-trap, or fix the hatch on the Tiger tank so that tank crews don't have to get the hatch landing on their heads.
Useless components are removed, and the production time to make a tank could be cut down to a minimum.
So the tank gets its performance peak the years down the line.
But it is hard to say how good a tank will be then. Maybe it could be as succesful as the old work horse Panzer IV and be a good tank throughout world war II. But it cold also just be like the Panzer III that never really gut upgunned and became the great tank it was until 1942, and by then it was started to get outdated.. so this tank never really reached its full potential during its time of service.
Looking at snapshots of averages in a single year I think misses the bigger picture of things. Since industrial effiency takes many years to create.
Even if spies from Moçambique succesfully manage to steal blueprints from BMW on how to build the latest car model in exact detail. They would still not be able to start massproduce cars in any time soon since they lack organizational skills, trained workers, engineers and experts that know how to apply all solutions in the blueprint and so on.
And making a new car plant and supply it with energy and living quarters for workers, financiers, suppliers and so fourth will also be another effort in itself.
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@warrenokuma7264 A country that can print its own money can never run out of money. Greece can run out of money, because it cannot make its own money, because only the European central bank can make Euros and not the Greek government. USA however can never run out of dollars because it can create as much dollars as it wants to. The only limit to how much money a country can create is inflation.
And a government got two tools to fight inflation in peace time. It can increase taxes so that money that have been pumped out to the economy by the government now gets taken back by it. And it can increase the amount of stuff produced in the country - because prices double when twice as much money chases the same limited amount of stuff, but if you double the amount of stuff, then you have no price increases.
In a wartime economy it is difficult to increase civilian production. But prices can be kept under controls by taxes, price controls and rationing. When people cannot buy unlimited amounts of beer and cigarettes because of rationing, then they are forced to save their money because there is nothing they can consume.
So all newly created money becomes savings for the people.
One persons debt becomes another persons asset. The government goes into debt to buy tanks, planes and uboats while the people sees their assets increase.
And the national debt is never a problem since it is just owned by its own citizens, and should never and can never be paid off anyways. All paying off the national debt means is that the government takes money from the people by taxes and gives the money back to the same people.
And then the money gets destroyed. Since money is the same thing as debt (for a further explanation you can see this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nBPN-MKefA ).
So the government can create unlimited amounts of money. And inflation is never a problem. The ideal way to rule a country in peace time would be print as much money as possible and use the money for productive investments in better infrastructure, energy grids and spending on science and research and create jobs so that unemployment goes down to zero.
Then your economy runs on full capacity, and it would be pointless to print any more money, because all extra amounts of money you print will not result in extra amounts of stuff produced so prices will only go up and inflation will only rise as a result.
But as long as you have unused resources you can print up as much money you want. And other countries will have no problem with loaning money to you, since your economy is growing so fast that paying off old debts gets easier and easier when your country gets richer. Australia the last decades is a perfect example of this, since they have borrowed more and more money the last decades but the debt as a share of GDP have still been falling because the economy has been growing so fast.
So borrowing money is not dangerous. Especially not from your own people, since your country neighter gets richer and poorer by doing so. The only interesting question when it comes to borrowing money from other countries is if that money is used for INVESTMENTS in building factories and improving infrastructure and the economy.... or if that money is used on CONSUMPTION of useless shit like flatscreen TVs, military weapons and other useless shit that does not improve the economy in the long run.
And if you waste money on useless shit and don't repay debts, then foreigners will lose trust in you and would rather do buisness with other countries - and that will decrease the demand for your country's currency and it will fall in value, and importing stuff from other countries will get more expensive and you start get to see price inflation on all the oil and bananas you import from abroad.
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Well buying tanks and blowing up bombs is not good for the longterm economic development like spending money on building hydroelectric powerplants, roads, bridges, education, research and such.
So of course you get inflation. So in a sense you are right that budgets matter. But they do not matter as much as people think, and nor is inflation as bad as people think. And nor does an increase in money supply automatically result in high prices.
So of all the constraints a country have in war, money is probably the least of them. And keeping inflation low is not seen as the most important thing if a country fight for its life in a war about life and death. Would you whine about inflation, if ISIS would try to take over your neighbourhood? I don't think so.
A country would print as much money as it needs to win the war.
Anyways the money supply increased much more than the rate of inflation in the Kaisers Germany in world war 1, and in Soviet Russia during ww2, thanks to those countries effective systems of rationing and price controls. Which show that money printing does not lead to an equal amount of inflation.
The financial crisis in America is another example, since president Bush spent more money than all other presidents in US history did combined and yet the country didn't get any hyperinflation. And then president Obama did the same thing and also spent more money than all presidents in America 200 year old history, including George W Bush. But still no hyperinflation happened despite 13 trillion dollars had been pumped into the US banking system from the US government. As a comparison one could say that the inflationadjusted cost for World war 2 was 4.6 trillion dollars.. (source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yREOUxo6Qdc ) just so you get a grip on how much money we are talking about. A trillion dollars is a HUGE sum of money. If you spend one dollar per second since the day Jesus was born until today, you would still not have spend enough money to come up to a trillion dollars.
Anyways let's go on, in the case of America you mentioned, did the inflation wipe out much of the national debt occured during the new deal and World War II.
The Great depression had wiped out all peoples savings, so the war and all the rationing forced people to save money when they couldn't buy stuff. And 12 million men served in uniform, and the other Americans worked to produce that uniforms and all else the war effort needed, and the country basicly had reached 0% unemployment. So everyone had a wage, and everyone had been forced to save money during the war. And inflation had wiped out much of the old debts.
So the country was ready for a post-war economic boom.
And when the war was over and people were tired of rationing and not being allowed to consume what they wanted, so they all rushed to the stores to buy stuff. And all the civilian demand for goods that had been kept down during the war could now go up.
So when the war ended was the US economy in great shape.
Despite the country had mobilized 12 million men, and built more military aircrafts than the rest of the world combined and created the mightyiest navy in history.
Creating money is as we concluded not the same thing as inflation. If I create a billion Swedish SEK and put them in a bag and dig a hole in the ground and throw the bag into the hole and cover it in mud, will inflation then occur? Of course not.
Only money that is in circulation in society pushes up prices when people compete with each other for the limited amounts of stuff sitting on the shelves of stores.
If the government prints trillions of money and people only put their money on their savings account on their bank instead of spending it on buying stuff, then you will not see any higher prices.
And if people use their money to pay off old bankloans you will even see deflation happen, since as I said earlier, money is debt - and when you pay of your debt, you will destroy the debt and in the same time also destroy the money.
So you get deflation.
Other reasons why prices don't go up have I already mentioned. Taxes takes money out of circulation from the economy, so when you take more money out of the economy by taxes than you print money and put into, then you will get deflation. And deflation is very bad for the economy, and companies can not sell their goods at a full price and debts gets harder to pay off.
While you get inflation when you do the opposite and create more money than you take back in taxes - and that is a good thing for the private sector, since people now can get more money without Peter having to rob Paul of his money as the only way of getting richer himself. But instead could people now get richer without anyone else having to get poorer.
And finally does also economic growth prevent money printing from pushing up prices. Because if the amount of money chasing the same amount stuff both double, then you will not see much inflation.
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George W Bush became president with only roughly 12.5% of the American people voting for him in year 2000.
Half of the population are able to vote. Half of those able to vote did choose to go out and vote. So now about 25% of the people participated in that election. And less than half of those who voted choosed to vote for Bush.
So here you did get a president with only a tiny part of the people backing him.
So there are clearly flaws in American democracy. You only got two parties. Money in politics destroy's everything and Sanders, Warren and Ron Paul are all corrupt and all hypocrites. Trump was probably the least corrupt American politician I know of, but even he was far from perfect.
I can't say that I got any solution to America's problem. Even without lying media and corporate money would the election system still have many flaws. The country is too damn big for every voice to be heard I guess.
The 2nd thing worth commenting on is that democracy in European countries fills that role that that rulers got the consent from the people below him. In medieval times you rather had the King listen to local elites rather than the people itself. But good Kings were skilled at doing compromises that both benefited the crown and the people below him.
Using coercion and saying "do as I say or I cut your head off" does not create much loyalty between the King and his subjects, and people will try to avoid oppressive taxes as much as possible and you will get much revolts and civil wars. And the subjects will behave passive aggressive towards their rulers and try to hide and cheat as much as possible with paying their taxes and avoiding military service.
A weak central government on the other hand would only mean that the local nobility takes all power for themselves, while the King is weak and cannot mobilize any strong armies to defend the Kingdom. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was one of the largest empires that Europe had ever seen. It covered a huge area, had a large population and gigantic amounts of potential resources at its disposal. But the central power was weak and the noblemen could put their own self-interests before the common good, and the result was that the King did not get much taxes and could not raise any strong armies. So Poland became the victim of bullying from all its neighbors: Russians, Ottomans, Swedes, Austrians, and Prussians.
Sweden on the other hand is perhaps the best example of a strong state in the early modern period.
Its resources was slim and the population was small, but the country became a great power nonetheless thank to its super-efficient economic and military organization. The country managed to punch above its own weight so much that all of Germany and Poland laid under Swedish occupation and Moscow, Warzaw and Prague fell to Swedish troops.
Sweden could raise the funds for its many wars by the King getting consent to be ruled from the people (or their local representatives in every village and city around the country). The priests acted as a middleman. The worked on behalf of the King to spread government pro-war propaganda and helping the government collecting data on how many males that were born in an area (so the government knew how many men it could conscript and tax). But the priests also worked on behalf of the locals, and they did send their demands, wishes and complaints to the KIng.
And the local bailiffs and governors also worked as a middleman for the King and created bond between central power and local power.
Since the local aristocrats and the people felt listened to the felt more willing to cooperate with the King. Revolts were rare and protests were solved peacefully with compromises. A power struggle like in France or Poland with central power vs local aristocrats never occurred in Sweden.
The aristocrats saw no conflicts on interests like in those other countries. On the contrary did they see a stronger state as a good thing. A growing empire meant more land conquered that the nobility could take. Serving the military meant good paying jobs and high status, and same did go for the civil service that needed to grow as the empire expanded. Its simply no longer became possible for the King and his council to do all the job by themselves.
The empire needed a huge staff to do diplomacy with other great powers. And to raise funds from Sweden, Finland, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Russia, Poland and colonies in America. And the King could not be at all those places at the same time and overseeing that everyone was doing their job properly. So having men that could be his direct link between him and the people and ruling all provinces according to his will made the huge empire possible.
So the lesson for modern times is that for an efficient government you need cooperation between the ruler and people at the bottom of society and everyone in between. You to make compromises that takes the greatest burdens off the back of all members of society and distribute it more fairly according to ability to bear them.
Using the principle of "might makes right" and taxing your own group at 0% and other people at 100% will only create a dysfunctional state that is military weak, and filled with lots of inner conflicts.
The point in having democracy is therefore as I see it to let people have a say in how the rulers rule the country.
And sometimes do the ruler need to realize that he have gone too far, and start listening to the people even if he dislike what they say. The house of Lords should remember that they are supposed to serving their society and the people in it, and not let their own personal gut feeling and personal interests always come first. Refusing to vote for Brexit, display a huge aristocratic arrogance similar to the French nobility that refused to pay any taxes at all before the French revolution despite all farmers, burghers and non-nobles were taxed over their ears.
The selfish nobility only cared about themselves and did not give a crap about the society that they had to thank for everything they had. So they became beheaded - which was not totally undeserved.
And the Roman aristocracy behaved in the same way as the French. And Wall street act just the same way today.
They have just become a useless parasite on their society.
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@jonasastrand9945 Svagt jämfört med hur starkt det var under kalla kriget, men starkt jämfört med övriga krigsmakten. Kustvärnet har slaktats helt och finns inte längre. Armén har sett nedläggning efter nedläggning av regementen med 500 åriga anor, och inte ens militära katastrofer som Poltava eller Kirkholm lyckades med Göran Persson lyckades med i 2004 års försvarsbeslut - att förstöra 98% av Sveriges mäktiga kalla kriget armé.
Och våran flotta är svag, men i ärlighetens namn är den kanske inte längre så behövd idag. Det är inte som för 400 år sedan när vi hade provinser i Baltikum, Tyskland, Finland, Holland, Norge, Amerika och Afrika att försvara.
Vår handel behövs försvaras liksom våra kuster. Men mycket kan göras med flygplan och kustrobotar. Vi har ju också haft världens största varvsindustri årtiondena efter VK2, så att stötta denna industri från statens sida med att lägga in orders på ubåtar som vi egentligen inte ur militär synvinkel behövde makes sense om man istället ser på saken ur industripolitisk synpunkt och förmågan att hålla vid liv viktiga krigsindustrier långt in i framtiden.
Göran Persson och Reinfeldt har varit katastrofer för försvaret. Likaså EU och alla dess naiva tankar på att ryssland inte är ett hot om vi bara kan börja bedriva handel med dom istället, och den idiotiska tanken att vi bäst försvarar Sverige i små utlandsinsatser med ett insatsförsvar istället för ett invasionsförsvar.
Vi la ner alla beredskapsförråd, så vi varken längre kan hantera skogsbränder eller epidimier som Covid.
Vi har haft dåliga överbefälhavare som slösat upp våra ytterst små försvarsbudgetar på strunt som cyberförsvar och utlandsinsatser och skapandet av battlegroups åt EU.
Owe Wiktorin var en ÖB som kom från flygvapnet, och helst skamlöst ville han slakta både armén och flottan för att bygga ut ett redan överdrivet stort flygvapen istället.
Gigantiska mängder beställningar på JAS Gripen lades in. Men efter att flottan och armén var sönderslagen, så drog Persson även åt plånboken för JAS, så att färre flygplan beställdes.
Resultatet blev ett kriminellt resursslöseri. I synnerhet med tanke på att Sverige redan då vid den tiden hade ett bra flygplan i Viggen.
Som tröst för oss svenskar kan man i efterhand säga att detta dåraktiga beslut har tagit oss till idag, när Gripen E finns kvar och har utvecklats till världens bästa jaktplan (i alla fall om vi bortser från F22 som ej går att köpa då det icke exporteras).
Gripen E är en vacker svan nu. Hade Sverige varit ett större och mäktigare land hade det förmodligen utklassat F16 och F35 nu. då planet är typ nästan överlägset i allt. Men andra länder köper inte Gripen pga politiska skäl (man vill vara god vän med USA) och då är ett flygplans förmåga mindre viktig.
Jag skulle nog säga att Sveriges flygvapen fortfarande kan stinga väldigt hårt. Om jag vore ryss skulle jag nog frukta ett krig med Sverige, för att landet skulle inom nolltid slå sönder all handel som passerar Öresund, med förödande effekter för handeln för St Petersburg och Kaliningrad.
Och ryssslands flygvapen är mer omodernt, har sämre taktik, sämre vapen och sämre piloter. Och Sverige kan kompensera låga numerär med fler sortier, och mer effektivitet. Så nej, att underskatta det svenska flygvapnet vore nog ett grovt misstag.
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Firstly, Germany did not have enough ships for sea lion. Secondly I don't think the German air force would be able to destroy the royal air force, and then the royal navy, and then being able to pull off support for a land invasion of Britain in the short span of just a few months.
And even if Britain have had a weaker government that signed a peace treaty with the Germans, I still don't think it would dramatically change the situation on the Eastern Front.
Sure, Germany could have won in the east even if Hitler was with the western powers. His killratio was exhausting the Russians faster than the Germans until 1944, and Hitlers Southern offensive in 1942 could have been devestating for Russia.
But nevertheless, so was the odds against Germany. And 3 German Divisions in North Africa, the Italian army, and some German Garrison troops in the west was still not enough men to secure a victory on the Eastern front.
Odds would still be against Germany.
And even if 1940 had been a period of peace after the fall of France, that would have made food imports from South America possible for Germany. But Germany would still probably be dependent on oil from Russia. Unless it could import from oil from Persia and Indonesia.
But the war on Russia was not just a resource matter. Hitler wanted the land for his people, and he wanted to exterminate the slavs. Nothing would probably have stopped Hitler from attacking Russia, even if it clearly was against the best interest of his own country.
Germany would lose a friendship. It would lose a great trade partner. And its armies would suffer horrific losses that would weaken Germany immensly.
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You confuse skill with luck. The Germans were just lucky that they could destroy the largest air force in the world the first day of Barbarossa with a surprse attack on Russian airfields. And without air support the German army would have suffered huge losses in 1941, because the German artillery was 12 times weaker than the Russian artillery in 1941, and 20 times weaker in 1944.
Furthermore did the Russians posses tanks in better quality and quantatity than any military in the world in 1941. And no other country even came close to match them. So had Stalin not forbidden retreats and incentivised stupid decisionmaking, then the Germans would not have won the great victories they had in 1941.
And the German Army lost 3000 men per day during Barbarossa. So no one could fool me into believing 3 Afrika Korps divisions of 45.000 men would have made any difference on the Eastern Front. 45.000 men would just had been eaten up in only 15 days.
Only the battle for Moscow alone killed more German solidiers than the losses it took during all the invasions of western Europe combined (Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Netherlands, France).
The German military was exhausted by october and should have taken a rest instead of pushing onwards. Its logistics was strained. More than half of the tanks were no longer operational because of all wear and tear and fighting, huge manpower losses needed to be replaced, Stuka pilots were being by all the bombing missions and the Luftwaffe didn't have enough bombs or planes to deal with even half of all the targets that were on the list to bomb.
So an attack on Moscow in 1941 was simply overly ambitious, and a stupid waste of resources. And even if they had sacrificed all and gotten into the city, its doubtful that they could have taken it. Probably it would just have been lots of bloody streetfighting.
And neighter woul the conquest of Moscow have ended the war. The Swedes took Moscow in 1612, and that didn't mean the conquest of Russia, and neighter did Napoleons conquest of the city 200 years later end differently.
Probably would the Germans just be too weak to both hold the city and protect their own flanks, so the option was to retreat and leave the city or getting encirled and trapped as they were in Stalingrad.
And Germany was once again lucky that they didn't lose the war already in the winter 1941-42 when Stalin launched his massive counteroffensive that pushed the Germans back 300km and nearly crushed the German defensive line in the central Russia.
Hitler refused to listen to his Generals, and his policy of forbidding retreats had saved the German Wehrmacht from total destruction. And Stalins massive offensive turned into a costly disaster for the Russians since they were easily cut off and destroyed when they had pushed forward so fast that supplies couldn't keep up..
The winter offensive was a disaster for the Red Army. And without this disaster it would have been impossible for Hitler to start an offensive in Russia in 1942. Furthermore had Germany also lost enormous amounts of planes, heavy artillery and machines during their winter retreat. And manpower losses to cold and fighting was huge despite they won a victory.
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So would I say that Germany would be the likely victor in war against Russia? No.
They had a small chance. But odds were not in their favour.
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Vasa is just one of Sweden's great warships. The country used to be one of the greatest military powers in Europe during the 1600s and early 1700s. Its military conquered Moscow, Poland, Denmark and all of modern day Germany. So the history of the Swedish army is more impressive than the history of its navy.
But Vasa was the most powerful warship in the world when it was built. Kronan was also the most powerful warship in the world. So Sweden built lots of warships and it did had one of the strongest navies in Europe. Only Spain had a stronger navy. And if one walks a bit longer into modern time, then only France and England would have stronger navies than Sweden.
The maritime world have always been a global one. And ships and commanders could serve one country after another, seamen were an international community.
Tordenskiold (Norway's naval hero and equivalent to Admiral Nelson) even planned to move to Sweden help Sweden fight against Russia, only a few years after the long war between Norway and Sweden was over.
During the many wars in the late 1600's would the neutral Sweden become the largest naval power in the world, because France, England and the Netherlands were constantly at war with each other, and their merchant ships came to Sweden, and wanted to register their ships as Swedish merchant ships. And sail under the Swedish neutral flag - to not get plundered by British, French or Dutch warships or privateers.
Sweden also supplied all navies in Europe with the materials they needed - iron and copper from Sweden, tar from Finland (Österbotten), rope from the Baltics, and Oak tree from the Baltics, Pomerania and Sweden (Blekinge).
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Can we even have peace talks with Putin - the man who never keeps any of his own promises, a man with no boundries and who happily build torture chambers for children and make nuclear threats?
I believe it is mostly likely that Ukraine wins this war. But say that their counter-offensive bogs down and gets no where..
then I think that the clock is not ticking on Putins side. His economy runs big budget deficits. He could mobilize more people to cover his losses - but that would not be popular in an election year. Especially not if you have to scrap the bottom of the barrel and now take nice white kids from Petersburg and Moscow and send them to Ukraine - without training, and with rifles from 1891 and old T55 tanks.
Indeed, a Swedish volunteer in Ukraine said that 80% of the russian troops his group captured lately were men who did not possess any functioning weapons. And for that reason is he very hopeful for an Ukrainian victory which he now sees just as a matter of time.
I believe that in a peace deal will lifted sanctions be a carrot for russia which can be offered in return for concessions to Ukrainian demands. In the end do russia probably need the west than vice versa. And not all countries in Europe are dependent on Russia. Hungary and Italy are. But Sweden and Norway was from the start 100% energy independent from Russia and all their homes are heated with electricity from hydropower, nuclear power, and Norway is a huge oil producer. The homes in Germany are heated by natural gas, so Germany was in a difficult situation in the past - but not anymore, as it now import all its gas needs from other countries such as Norway, USA, Netherlands, and others.
France is big on nuclear power. So the dependency on Russia looks very different from country to country in Europe.
Sweden could probably easily boycot russia for the next 500.000 years if needed to be. While other countries have it less easy.
I don't know why companies from Italy and France have such a big love for russia. Especially not when countries such as FInland which is a neighbouring country to Russia and once was part of Russia, and was forced to trade with Russia after WW2 to maintain good relations - have managed to undo their economic ties with Russia.
And I can understand that some industries have a hard time to leave Russia quickly even if they wanted to. But in my book do not stupid fashion brands belong to the category of companies vital for the functioning of a society. Puma, Lacoste Reebook and such companies can just go f*** themselves. And as a consumer it is easy to boycot them. Just buy your shoes and t-shirts from some competitor instead until that day they leave rubusiness list.
The money they pay in taxes to the russian government is funding Putins war and killing of civilians. And for what? So a company can make more money off some silly fashion products.
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I think they are not as excellent as their propaganda claims. But they are good. Strong motivation, creativity, experience and superior command structure gives them large advantages over their enemy. They are also of course doing well because the Russians suck - their army is corrupt, badly motivated, badly diciplined, its badly equipped, their command structure suck, they suck at combined arms warfare, they are using unencrypted communication, their tactics were depevoloped for outdated weapon systems that easily gets eaten up by cheap modern western weapons such as manpads.
Furthermore have conscriptions added further advantages to the Ukrainians. An army that takes out 80% of the best men out of a countrys male population will have an advantage over a country that takes out 20% of the worst.
A professional army usually gets men from areas with high unemployment where men cannot find another job and go to the military - not because they want to, but because they cannot get an income any other way. So in that way you get men who join the army for the wrong reasons. They are not there for any higher cause like patriotism, defending the free world or such. Nope. They are there only to get paid. Desperate men who often are ethinic minorities that cannot even speak the language of the country they serve - like the Spanish speakers in the US army.
The Ukrainian military consists of software engineers, film directors, teachers and ordinary people in general. Men who are there to defend their homeland. Smart men who bring their unique civilian skills and add them to their military. For the propaganda war, for flying drones or for doing the cyber warfare against the Russians.
The Russian military by contrast consists largely of prison convicts, village idiots who literarly do not even know how to tie their shoes, ethnic minorities, homeless Moscowites, kidnapped migrant guestworkers, forcefully conscripted Ukrainians in Donbass and Luhansk who are forced to fight against their countrymen or getting killed on the spot by the Russian occupants.
The Russian soldiers do not wanna be there.
And even the small spoils that remains of Putin's contractors and more trained experienced soldiers are not that great soldiers either..
The Russian military training largely consists of bullying by officers and comrades, and beatings. Soldiers are often raped by their "comrades". And corruption is widespread and the officers steals equipment which they sell and put the profits in their own pockets.
So the soldiers do of course as a consequence not care about their comrades that much. The years of misery have brutalized the men... so when a war happens they easily starts to commit warcrimes.
Soldiers that are raping and looting and abusing civilians and spend time to find food to steal are not effective soldiers as they spend less time at the frontline dealing with the enemy. And if half the men are drunk or away to gangrape some women, then of course will the half of the men be missing in the frontline and the combat effectivness of the unit will be hampered.
So the Russian military does not really have a professional army.
Its more like an undiciplined horde of raiding rapers and looters which are ill-diciplined, and all men are fighting for themselves and not as much as a team.
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@DefinitelyNotEmma
"Ah yes comparing 1776 with muskets and all vs 2023 with mass produced main battle tanks, artillery barrages, land mines and loitering munitions."
If we compare the economies of the west (USA, EU, UK, Australia, Canada, Norway) with russia we see the west being 25 times larger. There is no way russia can win an industrial war if the west invest its political will to outproduce it.
"The only way that Ukraine can win such a war of attrition is either by utilizing foreign recruits"
And your argument is just total nonsense.
Ukraine is a large country. Its as large as France was in world war 1, when France was among the most powerful countries on the planet. It endured 1,4 million of men lost in World war 1 and kept on fighting.
So even if Ukraine would have suffered 300.000 dead like russia would Ukraine still have lots of men left it could spend.
However personally I think that Ukraines losses are much lower than those of russia.
Russia is reckless and do not care about its own soldiers lives so it happily spend them in the most wasteful ways.
Its incompetence is also staggering. And the quality of russian military healthcare is also garbage - which means that russian soldiers are more likely to die from their wounds than ukrainian soldiers. And light wounds have to wait for treatment and turns into severe injuries that makes russian troops unable to return to combat.
So for good reason would I not be surprised if Ukrainian losses are just 25% of those russia have suffered.
But as I said earlier, even if we take the extremely unlikely assumption that Ukrainian losses are just as heavy as the russian ones will Ukraine be able to fight this war for years.
Ukraine have millions of men and women in military age. And if they would mobilize 25% of their 40 million people they would be able to field an army of 10 million men.
And losing 300.000 men out of 10 million is easily absorable.
So this war will not be determined by how many men die. Almost no war in history is determined that way. Only ruskies completly ignorant of history seems to think so ;)
Reality however is that this war like all other war is a contest of will. Is russia willing to accept say 5 million dead soldiers for two tiny eastern provinces Donetsk and Luhansk?
- I don't think so.
Are Ukraine willing to fight very hard for freedom, self-determination, and to avoid russian genocide and opression?
- Yes I do. Ukrainian soldiers feel motivated to fight and to risk their own lives, they fight a war against evil.
And russian soldiers do not feel much entusiansm at all for the war. Millions of russian men dodging the draft, russian men are posting videos every week complaining about military life, lack of payment, lack of weapons and lack of training, and the extreme losses at the front, and drunken leadership.
All this are not good signs for the future of russias war effort. And the assaniation of the Wagner group and the arrests of Girkin and Navalny is also making Putin unpopular among the war hawks.
As I see it is this war a lost cause for russia.
Putin should have accepted a peace deal in April last year, when the appeasement faction in the west still had the upper hand and russia still had strong forces at its disposal. Putin could have begun mobilization early, and as his professional army was not yet wiped out he still had a chance to train his mobilized troops to make them more useful in battle.
But Putin squandered all those chances, and now his game is lost.
He probably also hoped his energy blackmail would crush the west last winter, but a warm winter and plus Chinas covid lockdown that decreased global demand for energy and led to cheaper energy prices world wide destroyed Putins plans. And the west have mostly fulfilled its energy transition away from russia. Indeed, Germany succeeded very early, and was no longer dependent on russian gas months before the winter even started according to the Guardian.
So now it seems like russia have no aces left up its sleeve. Putin only makes wishful thinking that somehow his boyfriend Trump will save him.
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The common red thread I see with men like Hitler, Milosevic and Putin are that they are ethno-nationalists and imperialists. They are not moderate patriots that loves their own country and are happy at that - like the Ukrainian people are.
Nope. These guys are supremacists that thinks their own people are better than everyone else. They are inherently good by definition, which makes every action they make justified no matter how evil it is, or rather that is only just how they sees it. Everyone else sees these men are evil monsters and warmongers.
They are willing to use war as a mean to redraw borders, and ethnic cleansing is just another means to an end as they sees it.
For those who have studied history of ideas, I think its very appearant that these men are all stuck with ideas from the 1800s, when a country's only measurement of success was the size of the military and the land mass it conquered. Gobineaus silly ideas of race was copied by Hitler. And building colonies and empires was seen as a must, a country had to eat others or get eaten itself.
And many Germans believed after world war 1 that they lost the war and could not develop as much economically as say USA, Britain and France because it lacked colonies. So conquering russia therefore became seen as necessary. And today are Putin seeing retaking the lands lost in World war 1 as important, and taking Ukraine is vital for russia if it wants to restore the Soviet union and remain a relevant world power. Or that is at least how Putin sees it.
They seems to totally have ignored the fact that countries could become economic success stories even without having to occupy resource rich areas. Indeed post-war Japan have been able to trade to get all the resources it needs and become an extremely succesful country. Same goes for South Korea. Indeed Frederick the Greats Prussia could be another example of a country with few natural resources that succesfully became a rich economy with a strong manufacturing base.
I think that nationalism is an ideology for good. I put it in the same camp as patriotism. I think that having the same culture is good for creating a healthy society that is held togheter, instead of being divided and filled with hatred. Having common values, traditions and laws and such are good things. That is what I mean when I talk about "culture", and not food, music, poetry, art, dances and such.
Because of course can people eat pizza, kebab or noodles also here in Sweden if they like. But I happily keep values like gender equality and such and do not wanna replace such values with anything else.
With that said, could my nationalism be described as "civic nationalism" that is based on values. And everyone regardless of race can become a Swede.
Ethno-nationalism on the other hand is based on blood and belonging to an in-groop. Like belonging to the Serbian minority in Yugoslavia and seeing themselves as better than anyone else of the peoples that also lived in Yugoslavia, and therefore thinking that they have the right to rule over others. The same behaviour balkanization could also be seen among ethnic minorities such as blacks in America or muslims in Europe, or among Scots in Britain or Catalans in Spain.
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First of all did the loss of the 6th Army and 4th panzer corps cause a huge gap in the southern part of the Russian front, and the Germans were lucky that they didn't lose the other half of the Army Group. But if that would have happened the South would have collapsed, and Germany would be forced to try to plug the hole with what they had - and they didn't have anything suffiecent to compensate such a huge loss. And moving troops from Army Group North and Middle, would just strech those army groups thin as well.... and then the Russians could just smash those army groups as well, and the entire Eastern front would be left unprotected for the steamrolling red army.
And not trying to plug the southern hole was not an option either. Germany needed rare earth metals, it needed the Ukrainian coal mines, and losing the airbases on Crimea would threaten the Turkish shipments of chrome to Germany........And worst of all, having a million men on the southern flank of Army group mittel would be a disaster for the Germans. And of top of all those things - I guess a political crisis would be ensured. Stalingrad was bad enough, and many countries were starting to make diplomatical moves towards peace and leaving the Axis. And had the Southern front totally collapsed and Ukraine quickly fallen to the Russians, and Romania and Hungary had become next to fall.... then I guess that the Axis-alliance would fall to pieces pretty fast.
And the only thing stopping the red army then, would be bad weather and logistical constraints rather than fierce enemy opposition.
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Its a cheap plane suitable for the Phillipines with its many widespread islands. The plane is modular so it can be upgraded.
So if the Phillipines one day wants to upgrade from the old C model up to the better E model, then it can do so. Then the Phillipines gets one of the best aircrafts in the world if not the best.
- A plane with a thrust-to-weight ratio better than Rafale, F35, and Super Hornet and almost equal to Eurofighter.
- A plane with a lower wingloading than Eurofighter, Rafale, F35 and Super Hornet.
- A plane with an upgraded version of the same powerful radar as in Eurofighter.
- Gripen can carry most American and European weapons including the powerful meteor missile, IRIS-T and the old RBS15 anti-ship missile.
- Its a plane that is easy to maintained and needs a smaller and less trained ground crew than any other modern fighter in the world. It needs extremely little ground maintance compared to other planes, it only needs about 5 hours on the ground for every hour it is flying in the sky. Compare that with for example the swing-wing F14A Tomcat that needs 50 hours. And even planes that among the best in the world in this regard does not come close, F16 that also only have one engine to maintain typically sucks up 27 hours in one squadron in USA. But even the most modern variants of the F16 with airframes that havn't been worn down much and therefore needs little fixes, still needs twice as much hours as Gripen.
- Gripen E have 4000km range. Which is more than F35, Eurofighter, Rafale and Super Hornet.
- Gripen only need 5 to 15 minues (depending on type of mission) to refuel and rearm before the plane can be ready to fly another combat mission.
- Gripens E radar cross section probably lay around 0,1-0,5 square meters. Which is a lower number and more stealthy than any other Russian, Chinese or European fighter.
- Gripen C (the older variant which the Phillipines have bought) did score extremely well in the red flag excercises in USA, which is considered the most realistic tests of airplanes air combat performance. Some even say it is even more demanding than real air combat. As Millenium7 concluded did Gripen outclass the other planes and score multiple kills on Eurofighters and F16s with very few own losses.
- Gripen have a legendary Electronic warfare capabilities. Some people describe it like a fighter than can fly like a F16 Viper but also have the electronic warfare capabilities of a F18 Growler.
- Gripen is having the lowest cost per flight hour compared to any other modern fighter. You can 10 hours of pilot training on Gripen for the same amount of money you fly 1 hour with F35 for example. And that means that your air force can afford to train your pilots much so your country will have the best trained pilots in your region when the day comes when you have to fight an air war.
- JAS39 Gripen is a plane built as a fighter, ground attack aircraft and reconnaissance aircraft as its name "JAS" implies.
Jakt = fighter,
Attack = attack
Spaning = reconnaissance
So without a SAAB salesman, working for SAAB, or being a pilot myself... would I consider Gripen E to be the best plane in the world right now. I congratulate the Philippines to making a good choice of a plane that is both capable and cheap.
Unlike many other countries do the Philippines have the wisdom to buy a plane based on its performance rather than politics, bribes or other nonsense.
Its a plane good for shooting down Chinese fighters, bombing terrorists and sinking enemy warships.
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@pouncepounce7417
"No vaccine works 100% for everyone, that is a myth"
So why then force everyone to take it? Everyone must make up their own mind if the benefits outweight the downsides. Healthcare workers should assist people with honest information about upsides and downsides, but in the end it should always be the patient himself who decides if she accepts a treatment.
I think this is a fundamental right. The day when I self become a patient I certainly want to be able to decide what medicine I want to take, what treatment I wanna follow and so on. I don't need a paternalistic dictator deciding over my own head because I am too stupid to understand what is best for me.
Maybe he will stop me from eating snacks, wasting time with PC games, and forcing me to take medicines with terrible side effects to treat a disease that I do not care about.
Perhaps my health will improve, but life would be an unhappy one. It would be hell.
I think it is more important to be happy than healthy. To be free and find pleasure in life. And all this is what Fascists want to take away from patients when they want to destroy the principle of person centered care.
Idiots that wants to create hell on earth.
People should be free to decide over their own health. I think that even consent from children is important. Not only does it make my job easier when I don't have to feel like an opressor. It also improves the results of the healthcare as patients gets more motivated to follow their treatments when they feel involved, listened to and understand why they need to follow health advice.
I work with the patient as a trusted friend and an ally rather than as an enemy which you wanna lie to that you have taken certain medication while you have not.
"The variation of the virus or germ needs to be low, too many strains, to fast mutation and the effective rate drops"
So by pumping out vaccines while pandemic is happening at the same does not contribute to this problem?
Vaccinated people spread virus, unvaccinated spread virus, and you get more mutations than you otherwise would.
To me it would make sense that we vaccinate the risk groups and prioritize that they get all the doses of vaccines first. Thereby would we kill two birds with one rock. We protect the risk groups and minimize the virus mutations.
"We have less and less ICU capacity because people are leaving the profession due to overworking."
Sweden is the country with the lowest number of ICU beds in western Europe. But not even we have any severe crisis in this field. I also spoke with an ICU nurse last spring, and he says that things have their ups and downs.
Things are mostly calm now. It was only in the first months of the pandemic and then later on in december the same year that there was large strains of the capacity. But even then was things not as bad as media says if you look at official government data.
I would say the biggest problem for healthcare is that politicians do not want to spend money on it. Hiring more nurses and improving wages and working conditions would also mean tax increases - and politicians do not want that, so instead do we get overworked nurses that are now quitting birthing centres at a high rate, 50 nurses yesterday, and 38 the day before... because they do not feel like they cannot stand the long workdays, lack of breaks and having too few coworkers so they often have to take care of 2 mothers who are giving birth at the same time.. which is of course impossible.
Its not safe for the patients. And skilled workers quit their jobs and rather start other careers. That is the result of prioritizing low taxes. And you thereby get the healthcare you deserve.
And the proposal of forcing healthcare personnel to vaccinate - as in Italy and France - would only make things even worse if it was tried here in Sweden. A large part of the elderly care workers in Stockholm are immigrants, and immigrants are anti-vaxxers. So good luck trying to vaccinate them.
You would lose half of your workforce over a night. And now you need the people who remain working to work twice as much. They will become overworked, hit the wall and quit because they cannot stand the high tempo, the long work days, lack of breaks and lack of time to communicate with patients and coworkers. And this will lead to more risks for the patients and a lower patient satisfaction as they feel that no one ever have any time to listen to their problems.
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@pouncepounce7417
"as soon an disease is contagious medical decisions are not "personal" and no drug or procedure ever will be 100% effective for everyone until we have very personalised medicine."
Perhaps I would agree with you if we talked about Ebola, Anthrax or something of that magnitude. If there was a 99% chance of dying from the disease, then I would not hesitate taking a vaccine. Even if it was a shitty vaccine with a 25% mortality rate.
But the case we have today is not like that. What we have is a disease with a 0.6% mortality rate here in Sweden (or rather 0.1% when we exclude Stockholm). Meanwhile are the mortality rate of the vaccines higher than that of the virus according to some estimates (by FDA I think it was).
So vaccinating young people then simply does not make sense. You will then do more harm than good. But I guess the hippocratic oath means nothing fascists...
"So to not infringe on our freedoms we have to allow contagious disieases to run rampant?"
Where do you draw the line? If we accept vaccine passports for this mild disease, then why not force people to vaccinate also for other diseases?
Why not force everyone to take a flu vaccine? Its soon flu season you know, and that kill many elderly people too. So why not force everyone to take that vaccine too before they can get their freedoms back?
And since you are okay with forcing people to take vaccines even when the downsides outweight the benefits where do you draw the line?
If a vaccine against the common cold causes cancer would it be okay to give it children?
"We have now diseases that are returning because people think vaccines"
Once again you are comparing apples with oranges.
THIS VACCINE PROTECTS AGAINST THE SYMPTOMS ONLY. IT DOESNT STOP YOU FROM GETTING SICK. YOU CAN STILL INFECT OTHER PEOPLE DESPITE HAVING TAKEN 3 SHOTS.
Stop comparing it to other vaccines.
Either you are dishonest and cannot have an honest conversation about the benefits of this vaccine.
Or either you are too dense to see that there is a difference between this vaccine and other vaccines.
This one have bad effect (it only gives 30% protection that only lasts a few months and gives weak protection against mutations). It have been rushed into production in record time, and its long term negative side effects are unknown. Lisa Shaw and others have died - a side effect which I do not see with other vaccines... as if blood cloths and heart inflammation is not bad enough.
And once again, this vaccine is supposed to protect me against a disease with a less than one chance in 200,000 to kill me if I get it.
I can see the point in taking many vaccines, but this is not one of them. Nobody should be forced to take an experimental vaccine unless there are very good reasons for it. And with the ridiculously low mortality rate there is no good argument why anyone should be forced into taking it.
"I draw the line where i decide for other people to die for my freedoms"
I expect that you support vaccine passports for the common cold, the season flu and ever mild disease out there.
I expect you to take a vaccine that gives many negative side effects, even if this vaccine only will protect people with a rare disease that only happens to 1 out of 5 million people... because no one should die for your freedom right?
I look forward to the day when egoistical elderly get forced to take vaccines to protect children, and then that the elderly will die a totally unncessary death this way. Maybe that day they will stop being hypocritical fascist scumbags that love tyrannizing the younger generations.
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@pouncepounce7417
"The 1916 flu had way lower mortality rate than it played out because of the world war and no to little measure to prevent rapid spread, coupled with medicine not that advanced, but it serves as an very good case study that mortality rate shoots up high as soon you run out of doctors and nurses"
Hospital care is the last line of defence in my view. The first line of defence is you yourself. And that defence is the most important one. If people ate healthy, quit smoking and excercised on a regular basis, then life expectancy would increase greatly.
Why would life expectancy in England double between 1880 and 1950? I would say it was because the invention of soap, and that new sewer systems was created that could separate waste water from drinking water. And higher wages so people could afford more calories each month. And better housing with better ventilation, less mold and overcrowding.
Effective medicine did not come into wide use until the 1950's. And it was not until the 1990s that we began using stents to treat myocardial infarcations. So there was not much doctors could do back in the early 1900s.
Therefore will I attribute the doubling of life expectancy to work with various forms of disease prevention.
Better nutrition, sanitation, and so on.
And I think that people in general greatly over estimate the importance of healthcare and under estimate the importance of disease prevention. To this day I would still say that prevention is more important. It would not surprise me if the high mortality numbers in Covid in certain countries got much to do with a population with obesity problems and smoking habits.
All this also makes me feel calm in a way. If bacteria would become resistent towards all forms of antibiotics we have, I still do not think we would revert back to having 30 years of life expecancy of the 1800s.
We now got knowledge and we have ways to sterilize hospital equipment, we can protect staff with hazmat suits, we don't live in the middle ages when people were under nourished, only owned one pair of pants with shit in the back, and when soap and clean water didn't exist so babies had to drink beer instead.
We now got vaccines (and yes, many do great benefit), we fix clean water in Africa without parasites, we drain swamps with malaria mosquitos so the disease goes extinct, we know the concept of quarantine, we have access to oxygen gas, Japan got rid of snails that spread the deadly schistosomiasis by murdering all sick animals on their island, and thereby got free from this parasite disease. We got mosquito nets to reduce the risk of populations to get malaria.
The list is very long in ways we can reduce the risk of people getting sick in the first place. So prevention is very important. And if we do a good job here, then we can reduce healthcare spending. And if we discover early that someone shows symptoms of a disease it will be easier and more effective treatments for that patient. But if you wait with treating a cancer it could grow larger and spread to other parts of the body and kill you.
"We lost the knowledge that humans are prone to die if we are not carefull because medicine became too succesfull for our own good."
I would say that peoples overall health has improved thanks to better food, housing, sanitation and so on.
This have made us less sick and more likely to survive to a higher age. But we have also a bit forgot that we need to take care of our own bodies. Medicine is not a miracle cure to all our problems. If it was, then we wouldn't see weak elderly women taking 17 tablets every morning and still remaining fragile.
So once again my best advice to someone is: eat healthy, quit smoking and excercise.
You perhaps don't like that advice. You don't wanna be healthy. You wanna be happy. Happy and eating snacks, and take it easy in your sofa playing video games.
And for me thats fine. I think happiness is more important than good health. We will all die one day regardless how well we treat our bodies.
So I therefore do not buy into this "Health über alles" ideology that some fascists like to preach nowadays.
People should be free. Free to make bad choices. If you wanna be free to destroy your own health with a bag of potato chips, then go ahead. I do however hope you do not do it too often.
"and that you did need vaccinations aside your travel papers back 60 years as an normal fact of life is forgotten."
If a country don't want to let me in thats fine. America don't take in Commies so you have to sign a paper that you are not a commie before getting let into the country. I also think that quarantine rules Sweden had before EU occupation was wise - because I see no need for diversity regarding importing foreign deadly diseases in animals. Malaria has been exterminated here, and I see no need to import sick dogs from other EU country and spread this disease here only for the sake of solidarity with other EU countries.
Nor do I like do import Echinococcosis from Poland and other countries so people can die from eating contaminated blueberries.
But on the other hand do I not want fascism. Swedish vaccine passports is something which I as a Swedish voter
should decide upon, and not some f*cking foreign politician. If other EU countries relies on tourism and is worried about that, then its their problem that they could solve on their own.
And I am not willing to share my private health information with foreign government and greedy corporations without my own personal consent.
As a nurse I am bound by an oath to not reveal my patients private health data. So I think it is very strange that governments, corporations, journalists, and everyone else should get access to it willy nilly.
The patients are not here to serve anyone. They just came to the hospital to seek help for their problems. And we using their vulnerable position to extract data from them to benefit private interests of corporations and spying governments is fundamentally immoral in my opinion.
"The covid cases on ICU who block beds kill people who do not have covid infections by now, simple as that."
As I said earlier, the newly vaccinated took up my time last summer. Those are the ones who got so sick that they needed an ambulance to the hospital. While the unvaccinated were extremely few. So the waves of Covid seemed to corralate with the waves of mass vaccination.
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The Russian junk lost the wars in 1967, and in Iraq in 1991.
Personally I have more respect for Saddam Husseins military in 1991 than the military of the Russian federation in 2022. Saddam had advanced SAM systems, and not just from Russia, but also from western countries as well. His military was large. And his T-72 tanks were less outdated back then, than what they are today 30 years later.
Saddams army did furthermore have much combat experience. And the Americans were fighting an enemy on the other side of the planet.
The Russian army on the other hand cannot even fight inside a neighbouring country without their logistical system falling apart the first month of the war 🙄
So no I do not have any respect for the Russia military. Why should I? Their performance have been piss poor and embarrassing - with other words, well in line with Russias historical tradition of enormous losses and a slow tempo of advance.
Soon a year has passed, and Russia have lost twice as much men as USA did in 20 years of fighting in Vietnam.
And more Russian tanks have been lost than what Britain, France and Germany have in their arsenals combined.
This war has put the final nail in the coffin of the myth of Russias enormous invincible military strength.
Their historical trackrecord says otherwise with all defeats, catastrophic disproportionally higher losses than their enemies and humiliations since year 1900 - russo-japanese war, first world war, polish-bolshevik war, the winter war, the continuation war in 1944, the war with nazi-germany, afghanistan, the first chechen war.
Russia have a garbage military. And its economy is smaller than Spains. I think it is clear that this is not a super power we are talking about. Rather a 3rd world country with nukes, like Pakistan or North Korea.
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@gerfand It was a strong military on paper. An army of hundreds of thousands. Large number of tanks that was consider relativly modern and a large air force and air defence with both western and east bloc weapons.
It was generally speaking considered at not just one of the strongest militarys in arabia, but also in the world back then.
And its troops had also been battlehardened after a decade long war with Iran.
It was however a badly motivated and badly organized foe that could do little against western weapons and better training and organisation of the west.
And the same is true for the crappy Russian army.
Russia failed to conquer the poorest country in europe, and ended up getting humiliated by Finland in the winter war in 1939.
And now in 2022 Russia invades Ukraine and ends up being humiliated and losing to the poorest country in Europe again.
The Russians suck at war. And have done so for centuries. It should try to stick to another hobby they are better at. I don't know.. maybe playing hockey, making "funny" vodka videos for youtube and such.
To me Russia just look to me like its botox leader Putin - a dwarf with just a phasad.
And if the T-72 tank was outdated in 1991, then it must be considered even more outdated now when Russia uses it in 2022.
The russian military lacks nightvision and bullet proof vests. It now even uses world war 2 rifles and helmets, T-62 tanks in Ukraine. And it is forced to import tanks from Belarus and ammunition from North Korea... countries which aren't exactly known for quality weapons so to say 😂😂
But you still claim the Russian military to be great compared to Nato? 😂😂
I say that all aircrafts in the Russian airforce are crap compared to Rafale, Gripen E, Eurofighter, F22, and F35. Heck even old F15 Silent Eagle, F16 Viper are considerably better than the best Russian planes.
Especially considering that the Russian pilots only have about 200 hours of flight training per year - which is not even enough to be good at take of and landing... so no wonder Russian jets constantly crash into Russian apartment buildings 😂😂
And the war on the economic front will be disasterous for Russia as it relies heavily on western components. From everything from smart bombs to high precision components for its tanks.
And without high precision industrial robots with 5 arms that can cut metal into a fractions of a millimeters precision can no Russian advanced weapons be made.
https://youtu.be/RnIvhlKT7SY
No wonder that Russian tank production have runned into problems... and Armata production has been cancelled. And T-80 and T-72 production had been lowered as well. And instead have Russia decided to ramp up production of the old low-texh T-62 tank instead 😂😂
Medvedev even took a trip visiting a tank factory to motivate the factory workers by threatening them with jail time unless they worked hard 😂😂
I think things cannot become more typically Russian than that - ruthless, opressive, barbaric, dictatorial,
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You are wrong and I think you are doing Ukraine a disservice. The reason why Ukraine has not mobilized more men has more to do with it not being popular among the Ukrainian population, and moving young men from work into uniform will harm the economy. And the west has been half assed with its economic and military aid... so its not obvious that Ukraine would get full compensation from the west if it actually did what it was being told. So that will of course harm the economy while getting soldiers without training and equipment.
But on the other hand, Ukraine needs more manpower like women and young men. Those could be used in non-combat roles, so your view that the conscription is the same thing as a death sentence is extremely ignorant. Ukraine can continue to use its elderly men for combat roles just like before, while women and 18 year olds just drive military trucks, handle the anti-aircraft systems defending the cities long behind the frontlines, help with guarding russian prisoners of war, and patrolling the border towards Belarussia, or guarding the entrances to military bases and airfields.
By doing so do Ukraine no longer need its elderly soldiers to do those tasks, and more elderly men can be freed up to use at the frontline, or using them as reserves so that some units can get some home leave so they can for once visit their own families after 3 years of war.
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@peceed
"Unfortunately no one believes this bullshit anymore. Cost of fuel is not a big part in TCO"
There are many reasons why the F35 is more expensive than Gripen, and fuel is just one of them.
"moreover the aircraft with stronger engines can have lower fuel consumption due to lower afterburner usage"
F35 cannot super cruise. And yet it is fuel thirsty and an extremely poor range compared to other planes.
Much due to the fact that it is a fat bird that is totally unaerodynamic when it have a fat body that should hide everything inside it, like the large amounts of fuel, the weapons, the engine, stealth equipment and so on.
"Finally, army doesn't care about fuel per hour, but fuel per ordnance delivered."
I bet the air force will think it is relevant what the cost per flight hour is. When a F35 is 8 times more expensive to fly an hour than a Gripen, then you get 7 hours less pilot training than a Gripen pilot.
It is common knowledge that the most important factor for who wins an air battle is which plane have the best pilot. And that is likely the Gripen pilot since he got more training than other pilots.
"Czechia will switch its Gripens into F-35"
They made a half-assed decision to buy a small amount of older version Gripens. Now they wanting something more, and they choose F35.
Often times do such decisions have more to do with politics than with performance of an aircraft.
Compare Gripen E with F35A and you and you see Gripen beating the shit out of F35 in area after area - wing-loading, thrust-to-weight ratio, top speed, combat radius, ferry range, turnrate, unit cost, cost per flight hour, hours of ground maintenance per flight hour, logistical foot print and needs a smaller crew on the ground with less training, it can use short ordinary highways for take off, it can rearm and refuel in less than 10 minutes, it have never had any history of not functioning in sub-zero conditions, and so on.
"Gripen is a very nice aircraft, but in order to become better success on international market it should be little bigger, it should occupy a "better F-16" niche."
No need for that 🙂
I can quote what global defense corp has written:
"If you built an F-16V Block 70/72 then add EA-18G Growler's sensor suites and electronic attack capability into F-16V fighter, you get Gripen E however Gripen is less expensive than any western fighter jets"
And personally I will add that even this is an understatement as Gripen E is even slightly better than F16 in many areas.
Gripens survivability and stealth is built more around electronic warfare than stealth materials - which is a more long term substainable strategy, as this can and mouse game between detection equipment and stealth materials is advancing very fast, and if your plane only rely on being built with stealth materials for your protection will your plane likely quickly become obsolete.
Gripen on the other hand use electronic warfare pods that knocks out radars ability to track it. And this can be constantly upgraded - unlike the body of a stealth aircraft.
So in this regard will I consider Gripen one of the most survivable planes in the world, if not the most survivable at all.
Especially in the current war against Russia where the Russians use S-300 and S-400 anti-air missiles.
Those are very good at detecting stealth aircrafts, but they are very vulnerable to electronic warfare. So here will Gripen be a better choice than F35.
But that doesn't mean that Gripens stealth is crap without electronic warfare. In fact, after F22 and F35 it is the most stealty aircraft in the world, with a RCS of 0.5 sq.m. Which would be lower than that of stealth planes like SU-57 and Shenyang FC-31.
RCS for F16 block 60 is an RCS of 1.2 sq.m. so its size on the radar is therefore more than twice as large as Gripen, and will therefore be able to be spotted from twice the distance of a Gripen.
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@peceed Politics, bribes, stupidity.. Gripen does not get the contract even when it is obviously a better plane according to the specifications that the Norwegian military was looking for. And yes I know that F35 got 10 hardpoints, but when it is carrying missiles externally its no longer a stealth fighter, isn't it?
And red flag combat excercises are considered more challaging than real combat, by pilots who have tried both.
And I have already debunked your nonsense about payload and price. Fact is that this plane is cheaper than all other planes, and its cost per flight hour is $4700 vs $31.000 for F35 (and some say its even 34.000), or $24.400 for Australias F18 E/F, $18.000 for Eurofighter, and 16,500 for Rafale.
In fact I if we would ignore the political benefits, such as friendship with USA, buying weapons from another Nato country and such and only looking at the specifications and nothing else - then I cannot think of any worse choice of a plane than F35. Even with external fuel tanks added will F35 still have a crappy range and need to be refueled every five meters. It is a plane with a troubled development, where it wasn't even able to fly when it was too cold outside.
So using this garbage plane to fly long distances and guard the Canadian air space near the North Pole seems like a terribly bad idea. Its range is too bad, its cost of flying is too bad, and being a plane project with trillions pumped into it and still have problems like not being able to take off when it is freezing temperatures is just pathethic.
The combat radius for an Air-to-air mission is only 1,100km for F35A when it only relies on its internal fuel, while it is 1,300km (with centreline 290 gallon tank) for Gripen E. While ferry range is 2,200km for F35 and little more than 4,000km for Gripen.
And Gripen have a lower cost per flight hour, and it never had any problems flying in northern Sweden were temperatures can become -40C°.
In the case of Switzerland and Finland who likes dispersed jets able to take off from highways, are Gripen better for that job than the big fat maintenance intensive F35. And its the ridiculous costs of flying such a plane is not suitable for the reseources of a small country.
Switzerland did in the past even find the idea of making their own mini Gripen to be interesting - the ALR Piranha. A plane tailormade for Switzerlands needs. And that plane have got more in common with Gripen than it have with F35.
To be honest do I think that even the US military would not like the F35 if they could have seen the end result after all billions pumped into this plane. But after years and hundreds of billions had been wasted there was no going back.
When I think of economics, and the term "sunk cost fallacy" is the first thing that always comes to my mind the F35 program. And I am not alone, millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic have the same view.
F35 was never able to live up to its expectations. It never solved many of its development problems. It will still melt asphalt and the decks of aircraft carriers with its hot engine exhaust. So warships needs to cover their flight decks with unmeltable material for yet another billions extra cost to the tax payers.
It almost seems like the US Navy have forgot the original purpose of this plane - that it exist to serve the US military, and not the other way around.
I will remember this plane as the biggest mistake in US military aviation history. America have made many good planes with their own specialties: P51 Mustang, Corsair, F86 Sabre, F4 Phantom, A4 Skyhawk, F105 Thunderchief, A6 intruder, F14, F15, F16 and so on.
But F35 does not fit into this list. Its expensive. It cannot fly. The hangar queen needs an army of servant and specially made this and specially made that in order to be able to fly from a warship or airfield. AV8B Harrier could use dispersed locations for its flying - the F35 can't because it melts the ground, and thus have it failed with the only purpose for why it was made - to replace AV8B and a bunch of other ageing planes in the US military.
And using this plane as an attack aircraft to bomb goat herds with kalashnikovs is just a criminal waste of tax payer money. This plane is unsuitable as an attack aircraft.
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@petertyckare3432
Alla 8 partier motsätter sig en Swexit och är därför EU vänliga. EUs kostnader för Sverige är långt mycket högre än medlemsavgiften, då EU även ger oss kostnader som extra regelkrångel för företag, en negativ handelsbalans med EU länderna, våran stats fiskala och monetära möjligheter att föra en bra ekonomisk politik har också kraftigt begränsats vilket gör att inflation och deflation nu gör mera skada än innan vårt medlemskap. Vi kan ej heller fostra framtidstindustrier till att växa när EU förbjudit statsstöd och tullar som skulle kunna ge en "infant industry" möjlighet att växa.
Vi har förlorat storföretag efter storföretag, som har sålts av till omvärlden efter att vi anpassade oss till EU och tog bort regeln som hindrade utlänningar från att köpa mera än 25% av aktierna i svenska företag -så bye bye Astra, Pharmacia, Ericsson, Volvo, Scania, Bofors, Hägglunds, mfl.
Nu är landet avindustrialiserat pga EU vännerna.
Så finns det ett endaste skäl att stanna kvar i EU?
- NEJ!
Just därför struntar jag i vad som händer med EU. Den enda tänkbara lösning på denna soppa är att lämna EU. EU kan ej reformeras, och allt sådant snack är bara slöseri med tid. Och ju mer tiden går, desto mer skada tar Sverige.
Det är därför bättre att lämna EU än att slösa tid på att "reformera EU".
Eftersom Sverige ska lämna EU så struntar jag fullständigt i om Ukraina är med eller inte. Det är EUs problem och inte mitt. Jag känner inte att EU angår mig, eftersom en framtid inom EU är otänkbar.
Blir Sverige kvar i EU så upphör Sverige att existera och blir bara en obetydlig provins i Europas förenta stater.
Då är allt förlorat hur som helst. Så vilken roll spelar det då om Ukraina går med?
En värld utan Sverige är hur som helst ingen värld värd att leva i. Då flyttar jag utomlands, och låter det här landet förfalla och gå under.
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@elektrotehnik94 Gripen have beaten both planes in red flag excercises. It also beats them on almost all parameters when one compares them on the site gripen4canada, and Gripen is also capable of seeing stealth planes beyond visual range with Skyward G and other powerful electronics. And it is also able to carry the powerful meteor missile, while both F22 and F35 are unable to carry the AIM-120 amraam internally, so they will then have to carry them externally and lose their stealth if they would try that.
Furthermore, If I want a real spy plane I would rather take another Swedish plane from SAAB: Globaleye, which got a radar which can probably see planes 10 times further away than the radar on F35.
The high maintance costs (and the less flight hours for the pilots), the enormous logistical footprint (and the long hangar queen time), and the less flexibility, and the tiny fuel capacity and range are also other drawbacks that do me make consider Gripen to be a superior plane.
If your spy plane have to rely on aerial refueling, then the enemy can choose to target the tankers and cut off your ability to fight over some territory, or he can even worse track down your stealth planes with the tankers radar signature and shot them down.
And while Gripen can be refueled and rearmed in less than 10 minutes, and all maintance could be handled by only 1 experienced mechanic and 4 conscripts... do almost all other military planes need one or two dozen skilled mechanics to operate them. And often do advanced planes need 50 hours on the ground for maintance for every 1 hour in the sky. So Gripen is the worlds best plane in this regard. One Gripen pilot said that he could do all the maintance himself on the plane and after he landed he could refuel the plane and do some maintance and take off again in less than 45 minutes.
F22 is an excellent short range fighter plane. But its not so good at much else, and it is also a stealth plane that is an older generation of stealth planes made out of an older generation of stealth materials for its construction. F35 is more modern in this regard as it is a more modern plane with more modern construction materials and the pilot got a helmet that allows it to see enemy targets in all directions and fire on them from strange angels.
However, the F35 is handicapped by its attempted jack of all trades design. Making the plane a bomb truck that can carry much weapons inside its fusulage have made the plane fat which cause much drag. Gripen have an extremely weak engine compared to F35, F22, Eurofighter, Superhornet, Rafale and F15.... but still is it a fast plane capable of flying faster than Mach2 thanks to its good aerodynamics.
F35 on the other hand got the most powerful jet engine ever built, but still it is slower than all other modern jets in the world (Gripen, F22, Eurofighter, Superhornet, Rafale and F15) - probably because of its crappy aerodynamics. And this have also contributed to an enormous fuel consumption and a short time that it can remain airborne.
F35 also have small wings to be able to VSTOL, but the drawback with small wings is that you get a very high wingloading on F35 compared to all other those modern planes that I just mentioned. And on a fighter jet you want as a small wingloading as possible - the smaller the better.
F35B also needs runways made out of expensive special concrete that can endure extremely hot temperature without melting, so I do not consider F35 then to be a flexible plane that can make a take off from any minimal sized runway like the AV8B harrier that it is supposed to replace.
Gripen on the other hand is not a VSTOL plane, but it can take off from ordinary highways and other extremely short runways, so Gripen is an extremely flexible plane in this regard. You do not need a huge logistical train and a platoon of ground crew to take care of the plane.
Gripen is a remarkable plane. It is flying in northern Sweden where temperatures sometimes can reach -45C.
And it is also flying in hot tropical climates in Brazil and Thailand. And it would not surprise me if a naval version for aircraft carriers would be made one day given that it is a plane that was originally made for extremely short runways. It is a powerful little plane. F18 Hornet was also orginally a failed land based fighter that lost the competition against F16 to become the new light-weight fighter for the US airforce. It was then converted into an aircraft carrier jet, and has been succesful ever since. So I cannot see why Gripen could not do the same journey.
Especially since it is even more powerful (which is perhaps unsurprisingly, as F18 Hornet is an older plane, and it is therefore a bit unfair to F18 to compare it with Gripen for that reason).
In all this long text I have been nagging much on American planes. But don't get me wrong. I love American planes.
Historically it have always made some of the worlds best, if not the best... P51H, Corsair, F4, F105, F14, F15, F16, and F22. F35 is not a bad plane. It easily beats the crap out of anything Russia have. Even if it isn't even classed as a fighter, but more as a multirole aircraft.
F22 is excellent in air combat. The only plane in the world that can be said to be almost an equal to Gripen in this regard. And it can easily jack up a huge kill/win ratio against any other plane. Also the stealthy F15 Silent Eagle would probably be more than a match to any other military jet in the world in air combat.
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I would destroy the Russian military in Poland or western Ukraine where I might have a logistical superiority .
And after wipeing it out I would move in on broad front into Russia like Germany did in World war 1 when it won the war there. I would also invest resources in roads and railroads. Balts and Ukrainians should not have been mistreated.
The Russian military have larger numbers, but Germany can still win if it manages to encircle Russian troops and cut off their logistical supplies and thereby strangle one Russian army to death after another. German superiority in tactics and mobile warfare and its equipment with superior firepower could balance out Soviets superior numbers.
And with defeat after defeat would morale in Russian society fall apart. And the economy would fall apart as well with higher inflation and food shortages. People might rise up like it did in 1917 and kick out their ruling regime and install a new one that would accept any peace terms no matter how horrible.
When the Swedes invaded Russia in 1707-1709 it probable came close to destroying Russia in that regard. The Russian army had suffered one humiliating defeat after another: Narva, Rauge, Saladen, Jakobstadt, Gemäuerthof, Grodno, Fraustadt, Holowczyn,
Malatitze, Rajovka, Veprik etc.
So the morale of the Russian army was pretty low in 1709. So had the Russian army been defeated at the battle of Poltava
in 1709 it could just have been another of those indecisive victories that Sweden won where Russia lost enormous amounts of men. But a defeat on that scale could also have been the last straw that did break the camels back.
The Russian Tsar was unpopular. 9 years of war had led to higher taxes, church bells had been molten down to become iron cannons, manpower losses had been high. People were tired of the war and war exhaustion were high. And Tsar Peter was unpopular among the nobility before the war for his attempts to westernize the country and when he introduced the beard tax.
Another crushing military defeat could have made the country rise up in revolution like it did in 1917. Many nobles could see their chance of grabbing power, and a Russian civil war could have been started.
And another victory for the Swedes, could have encouraged more of Russias enemies to join the war against Russia.
First of all would the Ukrainians who already were pro-Swedish join the Swedes to gain independence from Russia. And Poland which was a Swedish puppet state could see a chance to retake provinces that Russia had stolen from them back in the 1600s.
The Ottoman empire had 20 years earlier been at war with Russia and would also be interested in retaking land and destroying one of its most dangerous arch-enemies. And Persia would also be interested in destroying its arch enemy Russia.
Sweden did not play its diplomatic cards that well until very late in this war. So here it missed a great oppurtunity, which could have made the odds more even and forced Russia to accepting peace.
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Probably. Tanks from the cold war had most of their armor put at the front and a little to the sides while the rest of the tank was weakly defended to save weight - and that made sense when the biggest threat to tanks was other tanks that were most likely to shot at them fron the front or sides. But today this is not the best choice. Now would it be best to have the thick armor in the front and on the top of the tank, as the biggest threat from enemy fire still comes from the front, but now are the threat from flying drones a much more dangerous threat then enemy fire from the sides.
And no in the world tank is prepared for this new threat from drones. Not even Leopard2A7, M1A3 Ambrams, Merkava 4 which are the worlds best tanks.
The same goes for warships. The torpedo and anti-ship missiles hunted Battleships into extinction like humans did to the mammuths. And for the last 60 years have warships seen missiles as their biggest threat. And counter-measures have been developed against them. Patriot missiles can now shot down other missiles. And Phalanx CIWS can spray defensive fire to protect a group of ships against incoming missiles.
However drone boats are a new type of threat against ships. They are not easy to detect, and not all ships can lower their guns to protect against a wolfpack of drones coming their way. The drones are cheap, they carry large payloads, they are hard to see becuase planet earth is round and prevents radars at surface levels from seeing far. And even if they could see far would it be hard to see a drone boat with a low siluette that is hiding much of its body underneath the surface. The electric engine for the small boat is very silent and hard to detect in an ocean filled with noise - especially at longer distances. So neither sonar or radar will therefore be easy to detect. Seeing the heat from the boat will also be difficult as it is such a small target and will therefore produce very little heat, and the little it produce will be hidden under water and you will not see the warm heat from the engine since it is only watchable from the rear, and the ship is driving towards you and you can only see the front instead.
The low siluette on the drone makes it also hard to see in the evening, and impossible to see in a dark night.
And even if you use massive search lights and fire lots of cannons with tracer rounds would it still not be easy to take out a drone boat as water effectivly curtails the power from machine gun rounds, and the extremely well sloped armor on those low siluette boats will bounce off most low calibre fire. And probably especially so when the boat is partly under water.
And even if defenders would be lucky and one or two boats would be destroyed, would there still be other boats around there that could cause massive damage if they just score one hit.
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Kazakhstan is European. Ok sure.
I guess that Russia, Israel, Turkey, Lebanon, Greenland, The North pole, Svalbard, Bouvet Island, Morocco, Australia, the McDonalds islands, and Antartica will come in the next episode.
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@TheLumberjack1987
Russia got oil, gas, coal, uranium, gold, titanium, fertilizer, and food stuffs. So it will always have things to sell to other countries and get foreign currency in exchange for the stuff they give away. So they will always have foreign currency reserves. However, being blocked from western capital markets and having difficulties with importing western components will severly handicap Russias ability to compete with the west - both on the battlefield and competition with western companies on world markets.
One day will their government no longer be able to pumping up the value of their currency artificially by using its own currency reserves. One day will they run out of all their dollars and Euros they had stored up from before the war.
And when that happens will they no longer be able to use dollars and Euros to buy Russian rubles and thus artificially pumping up the value of their own currency. And when that happens will the ruble lose its value against all other currencies. And foreign imports will become more expensive.
And if a hyperinflation will happen, then I think it will not because of money printing. Rather do I think it will be more because the worldwide demand for rubles will fall because of all the sanctions (people no longer makes any trading with Russia and therefore they don't need any rubles), and then will the law of "supply and demand" put down the value of the ruble.
Another classical defintion of inflation is "when too much money chases too few goods". So if industrial production falls because of western sanctions, then will there be very little goods left to chase for all that ruskie money.
'
So if hyperinflation happens, then I think it would be for those two reasons - falling global demand for rubles, and decline in Russian output of stuff produced.
And that could trigger a general loss of confidence in their currency, which could make that currency to fall in value even more like a rock in water. And then can no longer a suitcase of rubles buy a loaf of bread.
I feel like it is unlikely that things would go that far, but I can of course be wrong.
The Russian leaderships stupidity throughout this war made me think that it would not be beyond them.
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@makavelithedon801
I rather believe him than russian propagandists that have been wrong a million times since the war started and does not have ny best interest at heart, and just wish to hurt the west and do not care about truth, rule of law or moral rules based world.
Russia have told us they were going to win this war in 3 days. Now have this war been going on for 900 days. And russia has been retreating and retreating. They lost the battle of Hostomel, then the battle of Kyiv, they lost Chernigiv, lost Sumy, lost Charkiv, lost snake Island, lost Khersun, and now they have even lost control over the western black sea to a country with no navy.
This must be the most incompetent military in history. And I cannot say russias performance has been any better elsewhere in history. Not at Tsushima or the winter war.
This argument saying they have runned out of manpower is extremely ignorant. It was debunked many months ago by Anders Puck Nielsen, and yet do dumb people repeat this sh*t.
Ukraine has 40 million people. France also had 40 million people and they keept on fighting world war 1 even after they lost 1.3 million men.
Ukraine has lost say 100.000- 200.000 men. So they could easily keep on fighting this war.
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Russia started this war with a numerical advantage and with help from Belarus. However losses have been significant and the mobilization is putting more Ukrainians in the field. Logistical issues and mud have prevented Russia from capitalize on its advantage of professional troops and material superiority. Ukraines surprisingly determined defence and its skillful professionalism in ambushes and Ranger warfare behind enemy lines attacking supply trucks have also been significant.
Western anti-tank missiles and the failed Russian air superioty are also significant game changers.
Russian numerical superiority or not will I say that a long war will be a tough campaign for Russia. 100-200k extra conscripts will not replace the loss of professional soldiers. Crappy unupgraded Russian tanks cannot replace the 370 or 600 or so tanks lost which were upgraded and the best Russia had.
Conquered equipment have further contributed so change of balance of power here.
I think Russia can accept more losses, and Putin wants to save face and his own career. So losing the war is unacceptable to him. The problem however is that more Russian tanks and men thrown into battle will likely not solve anything.
Its one thing to mobilize a new army, and its another thing to equip it. And if logistics and maintance was terrible in the army he sent into Ukraine in the end of february - then wait until you see the underequipped demotivated conscript junk army he have called in to replace it.
And if logistics was a problem for the old army, then adding the problems with an additional new army and even crappier equipment will only make bad things worse.
Ukrainians are more determined to fight than ever. Emboldened by their success and their hatred of Russian warcrimes will make surrender unthinkable to them. And as I said earlier, green forests will create more hideouts for Ukrainian Rangers and special forces to cause devestation behind enemy lines. And the further back behind enemy lines - the less counter fire from the Russians will there be.
And if Ukrainian propaganda is true that much long range SAMs have been stolen from the Russians then I think odds have become even more even in the material sense. Sanctions on Russia have made reparing damaged vehicles impossible and harm Russias economic ability to fight a long war as well as creating problems at maintaining public support for the war.
In itself this is perhaps much of a problem, but if Russia continues to humiliate itself, suffer heavy losses and got no major successes to show for it - then Putin will have reason to fear the survival of his regime.
It remains to be seen how far the west is willing to go to defend Ukraine. Sending MLRS from Britain is probably the furthest step I know of so far.
However cutting off trade with oil and gas completly is not a step EU or Russia seems likely to wanna take as it would likely mean mutually assured destruction of each others economy. Think of the oil price shock of 1973 hitting Europe again. With massive inflation, unemployment, falling GDP and global economic economic crash that will follow. Inflation goes up and so does interest rates and unemployment. Overindebted households cannot pay their debts and lose their homes. Higher interest rates also means less money over for consumption, which means less sales for companies, lower profits and companies are forced to fire workers.
Stupid Germany have painted itself into a corner, and it will take at least 10-15 years before Germany and Italy get rid of their energy independence on Russia.
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@user-stanis777
Det här kriget går inte bra för ryssland. Ni har inte längre någon chans att vinna det. Vore jag en ryss skulle jag vilja ha fred så snart som möjligt för att spara så många ryska soldaters liv som möjligt, och för att hindra att ryska tanks och kanoner sprängs i bitar till ingen nytta alls.
Kriget är också en tragedi för Ukraina med all sin förödelse.
Det kommer att ta tid för Ryssland för att återhämta sig. Relationerna till andra länder har skadats allvarligt. Pengar som kunnat användas till att bygga nya broar, köpa in bättre apparater till sjukhus och stödja ryska företag har slösats bort i detta krig.
Rysslands rykte som militär stormakt har skadats av detta dåligt skötta krig, och länder i arabien och indien lär vara tveksamma i framtiden till att köpa ryska vapen.
Rysslands folkmängd kommer att fortsätta att sjunka som en sten i vattnet. Det var ett stort problem innan kriget. Nu kommer problemet bli ännu värre med alla unga män som dör och skadas och tillbringar år i den ukrainska leran istället för att stanna hemma och dela kärlek med en vacker kvinna.
Ryssland har förstört sitt rykte för årtionden framöver. Eran aggressiva hotfulla utrikespolitik har förstört allt hopp om ett mäktigt ryssland ni hoppats bygga.
Finland, Ukraina, Georgien, Polen, Litauen, Estland, Lettland, Tjeckien, Slovakien, Rumänien... folk i alla dessa länder hatar er.
Vi svenskar ogillar också ryssar, men i dessa länder så känner man ett starkt hat.
Det beror förstås på allt förtryck, krigande, mördande och hård ockupation Sovjetunionen och Ryssland gjort i dessa länder.
Det är därför folk i dessa länder känner så stark sympati med Ukraina. De vet vilket lidande Ukraina står inför. Och de hjälper Ukraina med hela sitt hjärta, på samma vis som de hoppas att andra länder och Ukraina ska hjälpa dom i fall dom blev invaderade av Ryssland.
Vill ni vara den stora ledande stormakten i östeuropa, då föreslår jag att ni prövar att bygga vänskapsband med era grannar istället för att hota dom.
Små länder skulle då vända sig till er för att få stöd istället. Så eran makt och inflytande skulle vara mycket större. Små länder skulle se det som ett välkommet alternativ till USA, EU, och Tyskland.
Men allt sånt hopp har blåst bort med den idiotiska ryska utrikespolitiken de senaste 30 åren 🙄
Naturligtvis lär du ge fan i allt vad jag har att säga. Jag är trots allt en oviktig person som bor i sveriges ödemark.
Men lägg gärna mina ord på minnet. Skulle du i framtiden känna ånger så kan du tipsa din barn och framtida generationer av ryssar om de råd jag har gett.
Kom ihåg att barn, fyllon och fiender är ärliga. Jag är brutalt ärlig med dig om hur jag ser på ryssland. Det är en jobbig sanning du antagligen inte vill höra.
Men saker går inte bra för ryssland.
Ni kan göra en omvändning som jag föreslår.
Men ni kan förstås fortsätta på den inslagna vägen. Men sen tar det stopp. Ni får slut på vapen, pengar och soldater.
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I dunno. Maybe McDonalds, Pringles, Coca-Cola, pasta with lots of cheese, chocolate bars, cookies, pie, ice cream, Marble cake, vodka, sausages, nutella, "Elvis sandwich", Kool Aid, Honey Smacks, Pop-Tarts, Cheesecake...
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Nobody likes Tories. Not even tory voters.
I will give tories the blame for the economic austerity under Cameron which caused huge harm to the British people and damaged the economy. And there are also a few minor things they also can be blamed for - like cutting defense spending and plans to get rid of the Challanger 2 tank.
But in the big picture have labor mostly been the one deserving of all the blame of the misfortunes of the country the last 10 years. Tony Blair created the Iraq war. Gordon Brown increased the debt-to-GDP ratio to levels higher than what Britain had when World war 2 was over. He was the Obama of Britain - a man who said the right things and offered a hope of change, for most of his history he sided with the working class. But when he finally became Prime Minister he was just a shit bag politician like everyone else, and threw all red blooded people under the bus just like Obama.
As I said earlier did he increase the national debt massively. He stole money from you the tax payer and gave to his rich upper class banker buddies. The banks had gambled too much on the roulette wheel and lost tonnes of money, so either they had to go bankrupt, or they had to be saved with your tax money.
And he choose to do the latter, since he did rather side with aristocrats than with the people.
So money that could have been used for schools, the NHS, tax cuts for the middle class and poor were now pumped into banks instead, so they could keep on paying millions of pounds in Christmas bonuses to rich bankers.
A few years later would David Cameron lie and blame this huge national debt on overspending on poor people. So he did cut welfare programs and hurt the poor people of the country even more.
And now you have labor. A party which have learned nothing from the wrongdoings of the past.
Instead it only caused unnecessary division in the country by refusing to accept the democratic outcome of the Brexit vote.
And on top of that do they push for identity politics - which have ruined BBC, and made their programs unwatchable garbage. And now it pushes for fascist/authoritarian measures during the Corona crisis, even if the lack scientific backing, and UKs super-harsh lockdown have not had the effect of the lowest death numbers in Europe, but instead have UK performed worse than countries with less hard lockdowns. So people have unnecessarily been robbed of their freedoms and the economy has taken much unnecessary harm.
And finally as a leftwinger myself, could I never support labour, because of open borders, neoliberal EU, identity politics, Green New Deal-Communism and such.
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A large number of russian units within FSB's territorial defense, Spetsnaz, the presidents own national guard Rosgvardia and the regular army commited mutiny during the weekend and joined Prigozhins coup. This includes some of Russias best remaining military units, and the consequences of that should not be estimated. The source of the list Denis Zelenko:
Military unit 11659: Command of the 22nd Separate Guards Special Purpose Brigade (RosGvardia),
411th Detachment of the 22nd Separate Guards Special Purpose Brigade
108th Bataysk GRU Spetsnaz Detachment
387th Object “C” of the 12th Main Defence Ministry Directorate (nuclear), Voronezh-45.
FSB Border guards at Bugaevka
FSB Federal Border Service of the regional command center for Voronezh region
FSB Border Service at Chertkovo
Unit 7437: RosGvardia Spetsnaz motorized regiment.
Unit 3677: RosGvardia Separate Battalion
Unit 63453: Separate Tank Brigade in Boguchar
HQ from the 22nd SPF (SF) brigade
The last unit mentioned are fighting togheter with the 45th brigade on the Ukrainian front against the Ukrainian counter-offensive, and it is considered as Russias best military unit.
When those units will get purged by Putin it could become a bloody affair, aside from Russia loses some of its best remaining special units. And if those units take up arms to not get slaughtered like pigs - then there will be another civil war. Worth noticing on this list is that one of those units is a nuclear weapons unit.
Putin gave a problem, far larger than just Prigozhins trip over the rainbowbridge to the big potato field in Belarussia. No amnesty has been declared for all the units which have switched side, but only for the troops in the Wagner group. And a large number of special units and entire regiments of the presidents national guard have switched their loyalty, and they will likely not bend down to Putins will
- unless he crush those who have joined the rebellion.
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Concentration camps were bad places, but they were still much better places than the 6 nazi death camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Majdanek, Chelmno and Sobibor). The death camps were hell on earth according to holocaust survivors, and much much worse places than all the other camps. And all the 6 were equally bad, in all their small different ways. Those were places not built for exploiting slave labor, or holding people in a prison... but instead were they built for only one purpose and that was to kill people.
And no one would get any extra kindness or getting away easier just because they were elderly, a child, a woman or disabled... nope, those were the first ones to walk into the gas chambers. Young men was not sent to die instantly, because the Germans could use them as slave labor to help them drag out all the dead bodies from the gas chambers after everyone has died, and then move the bodies into mass graves or into ovens that turned bodies into ash that could be dumped into rivers or used as fertilizer to grow trees with all the tonnes of blood and tears those sad places created.
Slaves could also collect all the clothes people left inside the dressing room, so all the stolen clothes, jewelry and other stuff people had could be given to the SS.
And as soon as the slaves were too sick or weak to work they got killed. And if the nazis had killed all people in one area in Poland so there was no longer any more people to transport to a death camp, then the slaves got killed before the camp was shut down.
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@qk-tb2df "the REAL thing to worry about would be the economic collapse if there isn't a good enough of a transition period for oil"
First we humans used timber as source of energy, then we switched over whale oil, then we used coal, and today we oil and fossile fuels.
During all those steps we went from one energy source over to another energy source that was more powerful. But with oil its different. We have nothing more powerful to replace it with.
It costs energy to produce energy. When drive a drill into the ground you use up energy. When you pump up oil from the ground you use up energy.
And likewise does it also cost energy to produce ethanol fuel for cars. You waste energy when you pump water to grow wheat. You waste energy when make fertilizer. You waste energy when you drive a tractor. You waste energy when you fly a plane to spray pesticides. You waste energy when you use radiators to dry your harvest and so on.
And the most interesting thing about energy is the ratio we get - Energy produced vs. energy consumed. If you can pump 30 barrels of oil up from the ground for every barrel of oil you spend to get that oil, then you get an EROEI value of 30 (EROEI = Energy returned on energy invested).
A good energy source should give you a high EROEI. Oil in the 1800s could give you an EROEI of 100, since oil was everyware and you didn't even have to go down deep to get it. You only had to stick a hole into the ground and a black fontain came up.
But today have the average EROEI value of oil began to sink worldwide, because we have used up all the oil that was easy to get, and now we have to pump up dirty oil from the ground with much sand in it that costs more energy to extract and turn pure.
And even if oil today only have an EROEI of say 30, it is still a superior form of energy compared EROEI from solar, wind, nuclear, and biofuels.
Brazilian ethanol fuel only have an EROEI of 15. Swedish timber have an EROEI of 5. Ethanol from maize and grain even have an EROEI of 0.5 - which means that you even lose energy by using oil to produce ethanol!
So as you see. There is nothing we can replace oil with. The EROEI of other forms of energy is too low to replace oil. And would it even be possible to maintain an industrial society if EROEI falls down to such a low number as 5?
And that is just the beginning of all the problems. Where should you grow all biofuels to produce the large amounts you will need? I mean we humans also needs somewhere to live and we also need something to eat ourselves and not just our cars. And same goes for solar and windfarms. Nuclear power also have a shitty EROEI of about 5 (if I remember correctly what Nicole Foss said). And if we would to replace all oil, coal and natural gas with nuclear then we would need to build enormous amounts of new nuclear plants. And we would get a new problem - How would we be able to find enough fuel for so many new nuclear plants? There is only a limited amount of uranium on this planet. And if we would use it all to replace oil, then the global uranium reserves would be used up in only a few years.
So no, replacing oil cannot be done. Even the nazi scientists couldn't solve Germany's oil dependency problem. Nor could the Brazilian military dictatorship which during the 1970s oil shocks started to run so huge trade deficits when oil became expensive that they felt forced to get off their oil dependency by fueling cars with ethanol from sugarcane. But even 40 yers later are Brazil still consuming enormous amounts of oil.
So many American presidents have promised to get off oil dependency that this statement have just become a joke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNfZeh6oK-c
Our world have been dependent on fossile fuels for 200 years now since the start of the industrial revolution. And it would take decades if not even a century to transform society away from that.
Even if we would tomorrow get the space aliens to hand us over a blueprint of the perfect engine for renewable energy it would still take time to change society. We must produce lots of things before we can replace our old machines that relies on a combustion engine - cars, trucks, ships, aircrafts, chain saws, lawn movers, motorcycles, snowmobiles, leafblowers, diesel locomotives, jetskies, helicopters, air compressors and what have you?
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@qk-tb2df Sure you can power all kinds of tools with electric power. But do you have the resources?
As I said there are many types of machines. And there are millions of them. And there is not even enough Litium and other rare materials on the planet to make enough electric car batteries to replace 1% of the cars used worldwide.
And the next problem down the line is how you should expand the energy grid. And then you need to somehow get enough power to all those machines. Building 10.000 nuclear plants would take decades before they are finished, and would only work until you run out of uranium after some years.
Nuclear power does also do nothing to help us solve the problems we have here and now.
How would it help us get the oil the resources we need to build all the electric machines you talk about?
Today we need enormous amounts of oil for everything we make. Your computer probably consumed oil about 10x its own weight during its manufacturing process.
A car consume tonnes of oil to make, since half of all a car consumes during its life time happens during the production process. Only making a single tire takes 26 litres of oil.
And then we need to find ways of replacing oil for all kinds of things: plastics, toothpaste, medicines, colours, pesticides, asphalt, food coloring and food flavourings, cosmetics, synthetic fabrics, rubber and the list is endless.
Only such a thing as kerosene would be hopeless to find a replacement for, because it is a kind of fuel with unique and extreme requirements:
Energy content per unit volume, energy content per unit weight, freezing point, boiling point, flash point, etc. And not the least must the fuel be possible to produce in sufficient quantities.
Todays aviation fuel is ideal since it works even when it is 55 degrees cold at 11.000 metres.
Todays biofuels for airliners would have to expand unrealisticly much to replace aviation fuel from fossile fuels. Ross Walker, who works as a developer of alternative fuels for Airbus says you would need to grow sunflowers on an area the size of France to provide the French airline industry with all the biofuel it needs. And growing algae on a plot of land of the size of Belgium would be able to provide enough fuel for the entire worlds aviation industry.
This sounds like an unreasonable solution to me. Especially considering that we also need land for other uses. We would need 2 million square kilometers of forrest only to provide fuel for all cars and trucks on EUs roads. We would timber fuel to heat our homes. We would need land to grow food and feed cattle. We need land for roads, shopping malls and mining.
My own country Sweden is blessed with having lots of forrests and not lots of people which needs to be supported unlike more densly populated countries. But Sweden would still not be able to replace all its oil imports with biomass. We import 118 barrels of oil each year, while 96 million square metres of forrest grows each year - which is rougly equal to the energy of 81 million barrels of oil. So even if we burn down all our forrest growth for an entire year would we be able to replace our oil imports.
But of course cannot even countries like Russia, Canada or Sweden burn down all their trees. We need forrests to provide us with paper, and timber for furniture and buildings and things to export.
And trees needs 20-30 years to grow so you cannot just cut down all trees at once. So cutting down 3-5% of the trees each year would be a more realistic goal. And that means that not much biomass can be used to replace fossile fuels can be replaced by fossile fuels.
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@leecooper3852
One reason why I don't consider the Bible a credible historical source is because it cannot keep its story straight about Jesus. For example, what were the last words of Jesus before he died?
Matthew 27:46-50 says the following: "And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?.. Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost".
Luke 23:46 instead says: "And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit: and having said thus, he gave up the ghost".
John 19:30 gives a third suggestion what Jesus said. "When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost."
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1. Good question. I guess that the intent was to give the tank a limited ability to defend itself against other tanks. A short fat gun is good for dealing with soft targets of flesh and blood, while a long gun barrel is good for dealing with enemy tanks. This is because a fat gun fires large grenades that contains large amounts of explosives and therefore kill lots of men where the shot lands. And a long gun barrel gives a higher muzzle velocity, so a gun shot will hit an enemy tank with much more power and speed - and that will make it more likely that the shot will pierce the armour of an enemy tank and kill the men inside.
In the 1930s tanks were still a new thing and people were unsure about its role of the future battlefield. And the tankdesign was not that developed, so engines were weak, the suspension was not that sophisticated, the tracks was not that wide and thus unable to deal with the heavy weight of a tank that well.
And tanks were not broad and could not therefore have a huge gun turret, and the tanks were too weak to carry a heavy gun that was both long and fat and thus capable of both killing tanks and infantry.
2. Germany was forbidden to have any tanks after world war 1, so when Hitler decided do ignore this restriction he had to build whatever tanks Germany could get their hands on. So he started building Panzer1 and Panzer2 tanks....and he hoped that he one day would be able to replace them with better panzerIII and PanzerIV tanks that were better able to fight both enemy infantry and tanks since they atleast had some real guns.
And in 1942 it was decided that the Panther tank that would be able to do all jobs would replace all earlier tanks. It took it barely a year to get the tank from the drawingboard to the battlefield, so of course did the tank have many design flaws that had to be corrected at the beginning.
There was of course other firms that was designing other tanks that competed with the Panther for the contracts, when in 1942 it was realized that the PanzerIII was inferior to the KV1 and even the upgraded panzerIV would perhaps soon become inferior to the next generation of allied tanks.
And some E-series projects were alternatives to the Panther. While other monster tanks, were heavy "supertanks" thought of as "breaktrough tanks" that was able to smash any heavy enemy resisitance.
And the Tiger and the King Tiger was such machines. And they were never intented for massproduction or playing multiple roles on the battlefield. But irony meant that Germany could never use the Tiger for the offensive war it planned for. Instead it fought without air support and had to fight defensive actions instead.
3. I think that all countries had good and bad commanders. But German NCOs had more freedom to do what they wanted without having to ask for permission from their high ranked officers. Indeed, panzer commanders were even encouraged to take their own iniatives on the battlefield and act the way they seemed fit.
A General sitting long behind the front could not know all the circumstances at every place at the battlefield and give rational detailed orders to everyone what to do. So instead the Germans decided that their NCOs should get an order or goal from above, and then they themselves should decide the best way to fullfill that goal.
And usally this tactic worked well. The Germans could use tactical opportunities on the battlefield that a slower clumbsier organization couldn't. And they were masters of speedy improvised warfare.
Their auftragstaktik and their kampfgruppen combined with their good skill level gave them superiority on the battlefield. They could take all men and machines that was available in an area and form an improvised battlegroup to solve a problem that had shown up on the battlefield.
This tactic gave the Germans, and the Israelis the upper hand in their wars. But sometimes it also resulted in disproportionally high losses of NCOs in the fighting.
So the tactic was good. But the higher leadership in Germany was just as incompetent as the worst allied leaders - which shown itself in the great offensives Germany made in terrain totally unsuitable for German tanks such as the ardennes, the marshes in Hungary, the offensive in Normandy.... and the allies also thought that breaktroughs could easily be done in unsuitable terrain, which resulted in the costly failures at Normandy, Caen, Metz and Market Garden.
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@konberner170
" Some things are indeed impractical to privatize"
Okay then was that issue out of the way.
"but roads have plenty of precedent of having been successfully treated this way."
I think of the railroad system. Unlike most other countries did Britain let the private sector built it and not the government. And the result became that overly optimistic investors built roads to nowhere and added unnecessary turns and twists everywhere to the road. So over-investments happened during the economic boom. And then did economic bust come about, and all those railway lines became unprofitable and had to be scrapped. And the left-overs was a railway system that was chaotic because of all turns and twists. And travel time became unnecessary long because of all extra miles of track passengers had to pass.
When governments built railroads they did so between City A and B, without any unnecessary stops or turns. And that made the travel time shorter. The system was better organized than the system with bankrupt companies and abandoned tracks.
Customers also got a better service, since they did not have to buy tickets from 10 different companies with a jungle of different time schedules and different prices. And if you live in a rural area then no private company would like to drive you or hand over your post bag -because such lines were too unprofitable to be interesting.
And people living in densely populated areas with much economic activity would not be certain what their tickets would cost, since private companies want to charge as much money as possible during certain hours of the week when traffic was high.
But with a state-owned system you could even out the costs. Rural and city travelers pay the same amounts regardless where they live, and people pay as much regardless what hours they travel. And thus do travelling by rail become much more reliable and predictable for customers.
The state railroads were also better maintained since companies did not try to cut costs for short-term profits by for example scrapping a snow-plowing locomotive. So there are also more reliable time schedules with state owned railroads as maintenance is better and there are no unnecessary turns and twists.
And while Capitalists only care about their own profits. Do governments have to make sure that their railroads did work properly. The German reichbahn had to make sure that their time tables could be followed during a mobilization for war. And the post service must function properly, and the economy for society as a whole must function, and inputs must be transported to companies and workers must be able to get to work or otherwise would the government see falling economic activity and falling tax revenues.
My own country Sweden was the last country in Europe to build railroads. Politicians back in the 1850s said that the private sector should handle it. But it never did. Sweden was not England. Sweden was poor and not as densely populated, so there was no money to be made to building long lines of tracks and transporting very few passengers. So no roads were built.
Once again during the 1860's did the free market dogma win, and our politicians said that the private sector should build all roads. The government should only involve itself with the military and not fund expensive projects, when they can be funded by the private sector.
The problem however was that still no railroads were built this decade either. And Sweden fell behind rest of Europe. Even Egypt had built railroads by now. And Swedish steel producers were facing foreign competition, while it was unable to built large steel mills like in England because it was unable to get enough coal and iron to make it profitable. Transporting heavy cargoes of wood, charcoal and steel by horse was simply too un-economic to be competitive.
So finally did even free market dogma Capitalists have enough of this nonsense. And the government finally decided to borrow money from other countries and build the damn railroads. And that allowed the industrial revolution to start in my country in the 1870s - two decades later than necessary.
And the government build the railroads in straight lines that connected all of the country (besides from north-eastern Sweden which did not lay railway tracks in a straight line along the coast for military reasons, if our Russian neighbor would invade and take over the tracks and use it for their own purposes.)
So one could say that the government built the highways. And the private sector could add their own roads to it, by building the roads themselves out of their own pockets. So if you wanted to connect your mill or factory to net, then there was no one stopping you.
So the railway lines built became a perfect combination between state and private.
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@konberner170 Your post can be summed up with one word:projection.
"I can see several statements that are historically inaccurate."
And still you fail to provide a single example.
"You didn't address my point that there is no accountability in politics, but very much in the private sector."
1. You never stated this as a point.
2. I did point out that there are no accountability in the private sector either. The bankers in the financial crisis is one such example. CEO's are just as prone to wasteful spending, prestige and wasteful spending as politicians. They need to show other CEOs that they also are equally important by buying an extra private jet that they don't need and hire extra staff to rule over to seem more important than what they are.
American capitalism is inefficient compared to Swedish, German and Japanese capitalism, just because it is unrestrained. In USA do the stock market sit with all the power in how company should be ruled. And the people at the stock market only want dividends and quick profits for themselves, and they only care about the stocks they own and they do not give a flying f'*ck about the long-term well-being of the company.
So what then usually happens?
- The CEO increase the short-term profits by destroying the company. That makes the stock market happy as people can get rich from all the plunder. And as a thanks for enriching the parasites, do the stock holders agree to giving the CEO a pay raise, a large bonus and stock options.
So if you are a scumbag CEO you can sell off your tools and equipment of your company at an under-price. You can steal all pension money and give it away to the stock market shareholders. You can slash peoples wages and fire workers. You can cut the research and development budget by 100% so you will not invent any new products in the future.
And by doing all that cost cutting, you will have short term record profits for your company. The stock market gets happy and you get your bonus.
But the company will of course be deadly wounded. You have treated workers, suppliers and customers like shit and they will no longer feel any loyalty to you and will never volunteer to do any sacrifices for you anymore. Competent people that have taken years to train will leave as soon as they can.
Your cut in research spending will harm your long-term profits and give foreign competitors an upper hand.
Your anorectic slimmed organization will have no extra capacity to fulfill growing customer demand and you quickly run into bottlenecks.
"keep carrying water for your wonderful politicians"
I prefer good politicians before bad Capitalists.
You have a childish black and white worldview "Private always good. Public always bad".
I am prepared to see the flaws in Capitalism however. And when those flaws are being adressed you get a good system that works better than dogmatic socialism and dogmatic free market capitalism.
Politics got flaws. And I believe there are ways to fix them.
It will of course be harder for a large country like USA to do that, since power will always be far away, and the large government apparatus pose an enormous temptation for private sector interests that wants to corrupt it for their own gain at the expense of society.
Getting rid of lobbyism (which is the same thing as corruption) is however a big first step.
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Reminds me of a story in the Bible.
Mark 10:17
As Jesus started on his way, a man ran up to him and fell on his knees before him. “Good teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus answered. You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, you shall not defraud, honor your father and mother.
“Teacher,” he declared, “all these I have kept since I was a boy.”
Jesus looked at him and loved him. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
At this the man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth.
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One can of course not stick with the same plane forever. F16 is getting its airframe exhausted by 40 years in service and modern planes like JAS both performs both better and is more cost effective.
One can of course keep all F16 in storage if a great war would happen, since F16 planes could be handy to deal with enemy planes that aren't 5th generation fighters. And even if the plane would be outdate for air combat, it still could be used for ground support and other missions.
Even in the late 1990s Sweden kept both the old Viggen's and Draken's despite having hundreds of modern JAS39's - which was considered the best fighter jet in the world before F22 project was launched.
Draken was among the best jets in the 1950s and Viggen among the best in the 1960s, and they were both greatly upgraded. But still despite impressive performance I wouldn't say that they are a good idea to buy for an air force to buy in the late 1990s. Because a Draken needed 50 hours of maintance for every hour in the sky, compared to less than 8 for a Gripen. And Gripen is also superior to Draken across the board.
So should one then stick with old planes and constantly upgrade them? nope. Bad for the economy and bad for performance. And with a Gripen you could make 5 times more sorties than with a maintance sucking Draken.
And when it comes A10, im not so sure it would be as important to update it.
The Ju-87 remained a fine plane to the end of the war, and its only drawback was that it was a sitting duck to enemy fighters. The skyraider did a wonderful job in Vietnam despite being an old plane, so I don't think age is as important for performance for attack aircraft as with fighters.
Overall do I think Me109 was a good idea at the start of the war. And then the Germans almost accidentaly started to produce the Fw190 because their BF109 engine factory was running at full capacity, so they tried to find alternative ways of providing Luftwaffe with the number of aircrafts it needed by trying to make a few Fw190s - which quickly became a success.
But the BF109 had its limitations with its short range and began to be outperformed by better allied planes as the war progressed. But the Germans sticked with them, and not only because pilots were used to them and because factories were already in place to build them, and nostaligic reasons and such.
But because of political reasons. Hitler put much more trust in Himmler and SS, than in the German army and industry. And Himmler convinced Hitler to approve the Me109K for production and give it priority over other projects, despite the HE162 fighter already had done all testing with its jet engine and was ready for production. All this was because Himmlers SS-factories were the ones to profit from the production of the Me109 Kürfurst model with the new engine they had designed. So according to Speers memoirs, this was the reason why Germany stayed with the ME109 plane longer than they should had.
They should have looked more inte performance and cost effectiveness. But now a companys own economic self-interest came before the interests of a war effort of a nation.
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@romankovalev7894
Russia have lost so many vehicles that they cannot be replaced. If Russia had lots of modern vehicles - as you pretend they do, then I bet that they would use them in Ukraine by the thousands to more effectivly destroy Ukrainian resistence and to save their own soldiers lives.
But instead have Russia began to use more and more junk weapons. T62 tanks that are easy prey even relativly old and weak anti-tank weapons. And as a result have Russian losses in human lives gone up each month.
And it is not just tanks... but also more and more old and crappy military trucks have been pushed into service. Garbage from the 1960s such as scooby doo vans are now used, along with WW2 helmets and WW2 rifles.
Much of those garbage weapons will be slaughtered by Ukraine even before they get within firing range to their enemy. HIMARS, and BONUS, excalibur and such artillery rounds are slaughtering the enemies from distance.
And even if Russia have more tanks and vehicles it doesn't matter. Ukraine have so many anti-tank missiles that Russian tanks are safe nowhere. There are Stugna, Panzerfaust-3, NLAWs, Javelins, AT4, RPG7, Carl-Gustaf, Matador, MILAN, TOW, Pansarvärnspjäs 1110 and much more hiding everywhere in Ukraine.
So it is no wonder why Russian armor losses have been gigantic despite Ukraines armor forces are lower in numbers than their foe.
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Compare countries with extremely hard lockdowns (ie UK) and compare them to that of Africa.
Have UK performed well?
- Nope. More people have died there in any other European country.
Have 98% of Africas population died in this pandemic due to lack of lockdowns, facemasks, lack of vaccines, lack of media censorship, lack of public knowledge, and lack of government information?
- No. Africa have done well in this pandemic despite being poor and lacking resources.
And that shows how worthless and meaningless government measures have been. The economy and freedom have been sacrificed for nothing good.
Obviously do Covid death numbers have more to do with other things than the magic protection from face masks and face shields.
People in Africa are younger and not as obese as Americans and Britons, so the crisis struck less hard to Africa for that reason. Having people that excercise, not eating junk food and not smoking are things that are good for public health.
And you yourself, and the life choices you make will have a bigger impact on your health than what any doctor or nurse ever will. No matter how skilled and compassionate they might be.
The only countries which truely can be said to have been locking down so hard that the disease have been totally stamped out are Australia and New Zeeland. But it is doubtful that other countries can use the same strategy. Germany have a common border with 9 countries, Swedens border with Norway is 1619 kilometres long. Is it then even possible to do like those islands?
And even if we for the sake of discussion say it would be possible. Then I think it clearly has not been worth it. The price of loss of freedom and economic harm does not stand in proportion with the tiny health benefits that Australia got.
And I would say that there are also debatable if not many measures to stop Covid, could have been given greater health benefits to society if those resources had been used to stop other diseases instead.
And I also think it is extremly cruel to let people die alone because of the lockdown rules. And not allowing all relatives to visit a funeral is also a form of cruelty that cannot be measured as a statistics on a paper.
So if you call the lockdown a cure. Then I will say that the cure is worse than the disease itself.
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@jeremylister89
Covid-19 killed 4 million people.
The Hong Kong flu of 1968 also killed 4 million people.
The 1957–1958 Asian flu pandemic also killed 4 million people.
And we are many billions more people on this planet now than then. And still this pandemic have not killed many more people.
So indeed have the respons to this pandemic been hysterical and disproportional. A fat man in his 30s have a 1 out of 200.000 risk of dying from Covid-19 if he catches it - according to Oxford university.
And even with the most deadly variant of the virus in 2020, did not more people die from Covid than from an ordinary seasonal flu year - and that according to Anders Tegnell (Sweden's doctor Fauci).
So if a country like Sweden who did minimal lockdowns that year had those numbers.. then I don't think this disease would have been that catastrophic elsewhere either.
Its a virus that kills elderly and fat people with comorbidities. And excuse me for sounding harsh, but thats things that happens all the time. Its not hard to kill those types of people. There are many viruses, bacteria, parasites and mykosis that can kill fragile persons with weak immune systems.
If this was a bio-terrorism weapon like conspiracy theorists claim, then I would say it is extremely unimpressive. Its deadliness is extremely low, unlike anthrax. Its not so good at contagion as say measles or the bubonic plague. Its a virus that easily gets killed by alcohol - while the Calici virus cannot be killed by hand sanitizer and can only be killed with soap and water.
Other microorganisms can survive out in nature for thousands of years and then infect and kill people - like tuberculosis or anthrax. But this virus cannot survive even a month outside a living body.
Some viruses can trick the immune system in advanced ways like HIV. But Covid-19 is once again unimpressive in this regard.
Some microorganisms can transmit from animals and cause massive death - like rabies, malaria, and birdflu... but Covid19 does not have a 80% chance of killing you like birdflu... according to BBC is there rather a 98% chance you will survive the most deadly variant of Covid-19.
And while the disease have been found in reindeers and such, its not like in medieval Europe and medieval Egypt where you saw dead cows and horses everywhere who had died from the bubonic plague.
So I am not at all concerned about this virus. Its unimpressive as a bio-weapon in almost any metric one look at it.
The only thing unique about it I can think of is its ability to affect multiple organs simultanously and give people a variaty of symptoms - muscle pain, fever and freezing, sore throat, diarrea, loss of smell, sneeze, cough, bloodcloths, heart problems, headache... or no symptoms at all.
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The nazis had a state apparatus and Germanys industrial might behind them to help them do their killing. They tried all kinds of methods of killing people. And they managed to kill a lot of people. But in the end did they end up with a very simple solution of killing people - they transported thousands of people to top secret camps with barbed wire and guard towers with machine guns. And then they lied to people and told them to take a shower. And once everyone was inside they "shower room" they locked the door and threw in poison gas. Once everyone inside was dead they did throw the bodies into ovens and burned them into ash - ash which then was thrown into rivers or used as fertilizer.
Every victim would be dead so there would be no eyewitnesses left to tell the truth, and all bodies would be eliminated so no evidence would be left behind..
But many mistakes were made by the nazis. A hundred thousand victims managed to survive the horrors at Auschwitz and could tell the world about the truth. The camp Majdanek was conquered before it could be destroyed, so now the world know what a German gas chamber looklike. A recording from the Wansee conferance was unsuccesfully destroyed, so now people know about the German plans. And many photos from the holocaust were taken despite the German state had absolutly forbidden any photos from being taken inside the death camps. And a few nazis have testified how the mass murder were taken place - most of them in an naive attempt to save their own life from the gallows, while a rare few others were perhaps struck by some regret, shame, and guilt and tried to repair a wound that can never be made undone...
Today we know a lot about the holocaust. But there is also a huge amount that we do not know. Only 2 people survived a place like Belzec where half a million people died. Same goes for Chelmno.
And it would not surprise me if there are thousands of mass graves in eastern Europe that few are aware of. We will not know how many reacted the last minutes of their lives when the gas was pumped inside the room. Or what people thought about as they worked as the first Sonderkommandos and was forced to carry out all the innocent dead bodies of children
and women from the gas chambers and then burn them.
How would one feel after seeing foreigners gassing your own people to death? The Tattooist of Auschwitz said that he passed out after he saw the Germans force a large number of jews inside a bus with , and then they locked the door. And a guy climbed on top of the roof and threw in some poison into the bus... and heartbreaking scream was heard...
And the man witnessed this passed out, and was a mental wreck for the coming two weeks and unable to work and had to be kept hidden by his friends for that time.
Personally I think I would feel sick an vomit 🤮🤮 after seing such awful evil sh*t being done.
I think killing people with gas is just an unnecessary cruel way of killing someone.
Cruel to the victim to spend minutes in pain. Cruel to the slave who have to despose the dead body. And cruel to the killers who have to hear all screams.
But for Germany who needed ammunition, morphine to treat injured soldiers, and fuel for trucks, and had a large chemical industry that could produce large amounts of poison gas from chemical waste products it was perhaps a logical economic choice.
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@SlavShovel He is exaggerating. But the main point remains true. If you are a sane russian who loves your country, then the best way to save it is to remove Putin and end this stupid war. But realisticly speaking, are your best chances to survive the war probably to avoid getting drafted in the first place, and you are drafted, then is surrendering to Ukraine is the best option if you have the ability to do so.
Otherwise is going to jail and survive the war a good option, but the russian state will of course try to bully, beat you and pair you with rapists in your cell, to break you down so that you will sign up to a suicide mission in Ukraine.
And if you don't think you can survive this mess no matter what you do, then I think that killing your russian officer and at least getting some revenge and satisfaction there of is the best option. Of course you will pay for your life for this, but if you are going to die anyways, then it doesn't matter does it?
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Brexit is what one make it to be. Personally I think it is a good thing. I think so because I think so because I like democratic decisions made in public instead of non-transparent Commission making all the laws for my country.
The British politicians probably knows better what is good for Britain, than what French or German does - who does not care one bit about that island.
EU also stands for economic neoliberalism. All alternative economic models is forbidden by EU law. You cannot nationalize the railroads or nationalize anything else for that matter. Your government is forbidden from subsidising certain industries, prioritizing low unemployment over low inflation, or promoting the grow of new industries through tariffs with the infant industry doctrine and import substitution. Capital controls are also banned according to EU rules and then you got the convergence pact, and you cannot limit foreign ownership over your domestic stock market companies in order to prevent deindustrialization of your country.
So yes. EUs economic model is a disaster for Europe. No leftwinger or nationalist in his right mind can support the EU project. It is undemocratic and an economic disaster for Europe. And I am being proud over my own country and is not willing to erease its history simply in order for the EU project to come true, where all the history and national pride is removed so no road blocs will standing away for creating a new state: United States of Europe.
I want Britain to be ruled by britons, and Sweden to be ruled by Swedes. And Germany should not rule over anyone since they too incompetent, selfish and naive to having the rule as the imperialist power in Europe dominating over all the smaller countries. They steal facemasks and energy from their neighbours and let USA pay for its defence and acts ungrateful and arrogant when someone points that out. Their idiotic and selfish relience on Russian gas have been criticised by many - including Trump. That has put not just USA in danger but also EU and Nato countries and particulary those in Eastern Europe.
So now do the EU have its hands tied because of Germany that is overly reliant on its trade with Russia. And have Germany now learned from its mistakes? Not one bit. They are now selling out their harbors to Communist China.
Can't we all just agree upon that the idea that "trade prevents future wars" is a stupid idea that did not work? 🙄
It didn't work with Putins Russia. And the entire stupid EU project is built on the same idea.
I say that we should let governments get back control over their economies again. We do not need any free market and free trade fundamentalism. And don't come with some stupid strawman argument that we will become poor like North Korea if we abandon the EU.
Europe in the 1950s and 1960s were extremely prosperous and that was a time period when all countries had strict capital controls so money could not flow across borders, and countries had high tariffs, state owned companies, and the central banks prioritized low unemployment and high GDP growth over low inflation.
And sure economic development back then was better then than what it is now. GDP growth was higher and unemployment was lower, tax evasion was lower, income inequality was lower, and the rate of innovation and investments was higher, and households were not overindebted.
Today when EU have taken over control over Europes economy for the last 40 years has everything instead turned into 💩
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That problem is already here. Russia now lacks counter-battery radars and skilled crews, skilled artillery observers and they doesn't seem to bother sending up drones to direct their artillery fire. Their gun barrels are wearing themselves out so they put old tanks like T-55 and T-62 into service to fill the role of artillery when there is a lack of artillery pieces.
In the past one could see a battery of four guns lined up on a field in Ukraine firing on one and the same target. But now that it no longer the case. Now you only see 1 gun on the field. The Russians are spreading out their guns for an unknown reason. Perhaps to avoid getting hit by artillery as easily? Regardless is this tactic extremely ineffective from a logistical standpoint when you have to transport artillery ammunition to 4 different locations to feed your guns with ammo.
And a single gun firing a shot at a target every 45 seconds is not effective either. Preferbly one wants to fire all guns at once at a single target, but not the Russians. They only use one gun at one target independently.
And nor do they bother to correct their artillery fire when it misses, by say 200 meters. But instead it fire again and again at the same spot, like they are more interested in hitting a spot on the map rather than targeting a specific enemy object on the ground which they want to destroy.
So not only are Russian guns firing 5 times less shots per day than the last summer - 12.000 today vs. 60.000 shots per day last summer. Their artillery fire is also more inaccurate. And the heavy losses lately suffered in counter-battery radars have rendered the Russian artillery unable to now fight off the Ukrainian artillery.
The Ukrainians have since a few months back in time become very relaxed with positioning their own artillery and have been concentrating many guns at the same spot and have been sitting on the same place for weeks. And Ukraine got counter-battery radars like Cobra sent from Germany, they got better guns (Archer, Caesar, Panzerhaubitze, HIMARS, M270 M777), more high precision ammunition such as BONUS rounds sent from France or Excalibur sent from Canada. And they correct their artillery fire with drones. So their artillery is very precise and deadly and got a better range.
Russian losses in armor have been heavy. Both for their tanks and for their APCs/IFVs.
Their usage of old T-55 and T-62 tanks can reflect upon that fact as well. And they lack tank skilled crews, or at least that is the impression I get from their stupid noob mistake manouvers in the minefields around Vuhledar. Russia does also not seem to possess any mechanized infantry that are trained to assist their tanks. So if their armored offensives was a failure last year and got slaughtered by the Ukrainians, then I think this year and the coming year will be worse.
Now Russia use older crappier tanks with even less survivability against modern weapons. Its crews are even more unskilled than the troops used last year. And the Ukrainians have learned a lot from the fighting last year how to deploy their anti-tank weapons. And now they got more options to choose among. They can now kill tanks with BONUS rounds from artillery, German anti-tank mines, and western tanks.
And you don't need a javelin, Panzerfaust-3 or NLAW to kill those older crappy Russian tanks that are now used. You can probably just as well kill them with an AT-4, RPG-7, TOW or even the old PV-1110. But Russian tankers also have to fear drones and other anti-tank weapons that Ukraine uses, such as Matador, MILAN, Stugna-P, Carl-Gustaf, and Soviet made anti-tank guns.
Ukraine got a broad spectrum of anti-tank weapons with all kinds ranges, penetration power, attack modes and production costs. They can easily rip even T-14 armata tanks to pieces with DPU ammo, javelins and panzerfaust-3 if the need emerge.
While lighter APCs are food for Leopard 1's, French armored cars and CV90.
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I think people underestimate men like Frederick the Great, Gustavus Adolphus, and Leonardo da Vinci.
Those mens brains would have been of great usefulness regardless in which European country they would have been born into. Adolphus and Frederick were more than just warrior kings. The former spoke a half-dozen languages fluently and was a gifted administrator and a great speaker who could get his solidiers to follow him everyware, and he was a loved husband, and even the lowest ranked finnish farmers in the Swedish Kingdom loved him for his fairness, as he stamped out the plunder and opression the Finnish nobility caused their people.
And Frederick the Great was revolutionary with his ideas of religious freedoms and freedom of the press. He saved thousands of lives by introducing potatoes in Germany against the protests of superstitious farmers who thought they spread syphilis. Frederick built canals that improved trade, and he built up the first modern school system in the world. He was also a gifted flute player and a man who enjoyed the company of gifted men like Voltaire, Kant, and Bach.
So Frederick are one of those few men which I would consider to be a timeless genius. And he would still have remained a great man even if he had lost the seven years war. Just the same way as men as Hannibal deserves to be remembered as one the greatest Generals in history despite he ended up with losing the war despite his three masterpieces at Cannae, Lake Trasimene, and Trebia.
And now another topic. It is possible that history could have ended differently and that no one would have heard about our celebrities in history had they failed at a critical moment. George Washington could easily have lost the battle of Yorktown, and then USA would never have been created. Had the weather just been a few degrees warmer in 1658 then there would the ocean have not frozen into ice so that the Swedish army could have moved their forces to the island with Copenhagen on top of it and forced Denmark to sign the most humiliating and disasterous peace deal in their history.
Instead would the situation have been the total opposite. The Swedish army would have fallen into the ice cold ocean water and entire regiments would have drowned or frozen to death. And Charles X of Sweden would have been remembered as a reckless gambler who destroyed the Swedish army by throwing it into the ice cold water
while the country was at war with Poland, Russia, the Netherlands and Denmark at the same time, and while Austria and Brandenburg were also acting very hostile.
He won the war against Denmark and is now remembered as a great conqueror King and brilliant strategist. But in hindseight can we say that he was a gambler and unfit as a king when he took such large risks that could have totally destroyed the Kingdom. The Swedish navy was too weak to sail the men to Denmark without getting sunk by Danish and Netherlandic ships. So starting a winter campaign in the small hope of getting some ice on sea was a crazy gamble that easily could have gone wrong.
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@indulgencerofindulgence5970
Thanks for taking your time to comment.
"And you shouldn't elevate any form of government this way, you shouldn't have to believe in democracy or any other form of government"
I think it is important that we don't kill political opponents for only having a different opinion. And no political leader should be able to take away fundamental human rights, whether it be freedom of speech, equality for the law, or whatever.
Brazil have had a long period of problems long before Bolsonaro. A few years ago it for example made the incredibly silly decision to make political satire illegal - which is a decision worthy of Erdogans dictatorship more than a western style democracy. No one should stand above mockery and criticism.
But I understand that political leaders in Brazil are both dumb, thin-skinned and corrupt.
Things are not perfect where I live either. Democracy is on decline in Europe as well. The government here in Sweden wants to make fake news illegal, and make it forbidden to say negative things about the Swedish nation. In Austria its illegal to mock or criticise religion. Germany wants to ban fake news. Britain wants to forbid porn and "hate speech".
We are with other words building a hell looking like Orwells 1984 where you are not free to speak or to think. And this is not a society in which I want to live in.
I want everyone to have their freedoms, so that I can be free, even if it would mean that stupid people can spread their stupid information and mislead others.
Democracy is certainly not a perfect system, but I prefer it over an Orwellian dictatorship any day of the year.
And there is nothing that guarantees that a country gets competent leaders with dictatorship or monarchy.
So what I want is a system with a large degree of free flow of information so there can exist enlightened citizens that make informed decisions.
And if a rich elite just wants to take over the government and steal money from the people to enrich themselves, then this behaviour can be countered with direct-democracy, where the people can just demand a referendum and smash the will of the corrupt ruling class.
And if you share the burdens and benifits of being a citizen in your country, then everyone would have an self-interest in making your economy and country to work well for everyone - instead of just having one group of people trying to get rich at the expense of another group.
So I want a society where everyone pays taxes, everyone serves in the military, everyone follow the same laws, everyone gets free healthcare and education and so on. It should be a society where everyone is equal and no privilegies exist.
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@MrMadSNAV I just conclude that I hate almost everything that Germany stands for.
You like censorship (article13, laws against flag burning, arrest people for having anti-immigration opinions in closed forums on facebook, you have government that wants to censor fake news, and Austria says that blasphemy is not allowed). Am I clear enough?
You are the most politically correct insane people in Europe. The green party is communists, AFD is a useless reactionary party born out of Germans very conservative values regarding family life and such - which is another retarded thing about your country... rape within marriage only became illegal as late as 1997, which says a lot. Merkel have been pushing for censorship all over Europe, she pushed for the "chock doctrine" all over Europe, she hates even moderate forms of patriotism (her throwing away of the German flag comes to mind) and she saved the Lisbon treaty and pushed it on all countries on Europe despite people had voted upon it and rejected it.... so the Conservatives in Germany are retards.
And the Socialdemocrats are even worse... they wish to destroy all independent countries in Europe and erase all their history with their "United States of Europe” by 2025".
With a German led Europe is my own country at great danger. You destroy other countries economies. You like to take away other people their independence for the stupid EU project, because it all fun for you when you sit in the driving seat, but as soon as another country makes claims on you - like USA - then you feel butthurt like the hypocrites you are.
You expect us other EU countries to side with you, but we don't. We don't like your values. We don't care about a country that is arrogant and don't care to listen to smaller countries. And we don't like hypocrites.
If Germany cannot follow its budget rules, then it have no right to complain when Greece doesn't do so either.
The EU now stores user data on every webpage all "citizens" (aka "serfs" and "subjects") visits thanks to Angela Merkel because she is fun to spy on people even if they have not commited any crime...(its a typical German nazi-DDR tradition I guess).... and then Merkel gets upset like the hypocrite she is when the USA does the same thing to her as she does to others when CIA taps her phone calls.
She got no right to complain as long as she is pro Orwellian bullshit herself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
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Well that was 27 minutes of blah blah... and no you did not prove the Jesus have existed.
The only evidence for Jesus existence you provided besides the Bible was that of the jewish historian Josephus.
Otherwise is your video based on a silly "An argument from authority" argumentation by refering to some guys gut feeling, as if Bart D. Ehrman never has been wrong on anything 🙄
Well I am not impressed. Ehrman do claim that the Bible is a good enough evidence in itself that Jesus did exist. But personally I think that this is as silly as to claim that Batman have existed because he is mentioned in a Comic book. A comic book which were written decades after Jesus death, and most parts of it even more than that. Some parts of it are even from the 1300s as Ehrman claims.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2E570xiEB4
And besides do the Bible constantly contradict itself. What was Jesus last words before he died?
Well the Bible gives you 4 different answers depending on which chapter you read because each of them have different authors.
To me this undermines the credibility of the Bible as a useful tool for anything.
So then I have to stick to a non-Bible source to find out about the truth about Jesus if he did exist. And you mention Josephus.
Well the problem is that what the Bible says about Jesus of Nazareth, does not fit well with Josephus historical works.
Jospehus did write about the geography of this part of the middle east during the time period in which Jesus is claimed to have lived.
He was making a list of the 30 biggest cities and towns in Israel/Palestine of that time period. But the problem is that nowhere is the city of Nazareth mentioned in his text. So did this city even exist?
Archeological evidence from that time period shows no evidence that not even a town did exist back in Jesus days. At best was this place just a tiny village, and almost unpopulated until the medieval times.
So the credibility for the claims of Jesus existence falls apart even more and more.
Personally do I not even care about this issue at all. If he did exist or not does not matter to me.
The Bible is filled with thousands of contradictions, and it is therefore impossible for me to follow the word of God even if I would try to. And if Jesus did exist, then I believe that the Gospel of Mark to be the most historically accurate of Jesus - since it is the oldest Bible text and the one written most closely to the time of Jesus death, and it is also the Gospel in which Jesus most comes across
as a real living person in my mind.
However, eventough the Gospel of Mark portrait Jesus as a person who is sympathic person with good heart, I still feel that I cannot follow that man because his beliefs are dumb, stupid, nonsense. The man promotes Communism. And I also feel deeply unimpressed by a man who says that washing your hands is unimportant. For me that is the no1 most important thing one should do at a hospital, and it is also very important stop the spread the disease outside a hospital as well and to prevent oneself from getting sick - something which would have extra important back in Jesus days, since being clean and avoid getting sick in the first place would have been important in an age without penicillin, oxygen gas, respirators and so on.
The Jesus in the Bible also states the belief that disease is caused by demons and such, and not by bacteria, viruses, parasites, fungi, prions and so on. He did for example tell 500 demons to leave one mans body and jump into a herd of 500 pigs standing nearby, and they all agreed to Jesus suggestion, and they all took over the souls of the pigs and ran off a cliff so that all those 500 pigs died.
A typically dumb and strange episode of a roughly 1700 years old book.
I can forgive people from believing that crap over a millenia ago. But to still believe in this nonsense in this day and age.. is incomprehensible.
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Swedens military is weak but still very costly. So everything is not an issue of money. It is also how that money is being spent.
In Sweden did we have a clown as a Commander-in-Chief who came from the Airforce, and he was a fanatic that believed that air power alone would win all future wars. The traditional Swedish military spending of the cold war was 1/3 of all money were going to the army, 1/3 was going to the airforce, and the navy and the staff would share 1/6 each.
With the new commander in chief was the army slaughtered, while the airforce was expanded. He lied about the militarys view of the threats from the outside world just so he could push through the JAS-39 Gripen project so the politicians would invest in an expensive plane that the country didn't need, since Viggen was still a good enough plane for the coming 20 years.
However, he got help from special interests in Swedens military industrial project to push through Gripen.
And this plane was so costly that the airforce could not afford it and had to reduce the number of planes. The unit costs of this plane didn't become any lower by exports since neither Norway or Finland bought it. And with the military budget overloaded was more cutbacks on the army required.
The next idiotic move by Sweden was to sacrifice the idea of military for self-defence of the country, for an army for rapid deployment for military operations for the EU - with idiotic projects like Nordic Battlegroup. To have professional officers always on alert instead of conscripts that could not be sent anywhere in the world in a short notice meant that Sweden lost the ability to defend itself if the country was attacked. And stocks of supplies was destroyed and no more conscripts was trained to carry arms. To defend the country and democracy was less and less seen as a duty of the male population. Instead with the EU army with had an army fighting for someone else.
For France colonial projects in Africa, for Nato or for whatever... but surely not for our own country.
Another idiotic project that was a big waste of money for a small country was to try to become a great power in cyber warfare on the internet. Money was wasted on this garbage instead of being spent on the real military. And while America was impressed by Swedens abilities in this area, was it still very much clear that Sweden did not have the economic muscles to compete with major countries in this area - atleast not with an anorectic defense budget and a military with other more urgent needs.
And lastly did our EU memebership also mean that Sweden like all other EU countries now have laws that says that a country must have a balanced budget. The old days of the Cold war when the budget was adopted to the needs of the military was gone. Now the opposite was the case, when economics stood over the military. And the budget must be balanced every single year. This did of course lead to a dumb short-sighted view on the miltary. When money was missing, then the military had to improvise economic savings. And money was saved in places where it was easiest to save money economically - and not in places where it would have most sense to save money from a military standpoint. But that is what the idiotic EU budget rules gave my country.
So yea, most of the blame for destroying our military is sitting on the shoulders of the Commander-in-Chief Owe Wiktorin.
And on the 2nd place I blame the EU. The destroyed our military for self-defence and replaced it with an army for killing black people in colonial wars. And EUs idiotic budget rules have also caused much problems.
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@shovelhead2155 Had Sweden had the same Cold War army today then it would have equipment to spare.
The country would have been able to deal with the Covid pandemic (like Finland was which had copied the Swedish system and not abolishing it after the fall of the Berlin wall). We would have had gas masks and field hospitals.
We would have been able to deal with forest fires on our own as thousands of concripts + equipment would have been available.
And this crisis in Ukraine would have been a non-problem. Our food stocks and high degree of self-sufficency would have made Putins caused global food crisis a non-problem for Sweden part.
We would have thousands of helmets, rifles, anti-tank weapons, sets of body armor and millions of rounds of ammunitions available for shipment to Ukraine on day 1.
Ukraines wish for heavy equipment could be met instantly as stocks of old Bandkanon, pansarbandvagn 302, Pansarvärnsrobotbandvagn 551, and Stridsvagn-103 could have been given away on day one.
Our airforce could start training Ukrainians on day 1, as we would have hundreds of jets and could easily spare 50 or so for Ukraine.
The logistical footprint of Gripen is minimal, a Swedish military blogger said that he as a single person on his own could do all the maintance on his plane after it had landed, he refueled it and were up in the air again after only 15 minutes.
This plane normally only needs 1 mechanic and 4 conscripts to do its maintance. And it only needs like 7 hours of maintance for every flight hour - while Eurofighter, F35, Rafale and other such planes needs the double that or three times more... and those planes also needs a larger ground crew and more specialists.
And if Russia decided to bomb and destroy every airfield in Ukraine it would not be any problem. This plane could take off from highways instead.
And since the plane is easy to maintain and multirole, you could fly a crazy high number of sorties per day with this plane and doing all kinds of missions - air combat, ground attack and reconnaissance.
The pilots and the airframe of the plane will of course get exhausted very quickly if you fly 5 missions per day, every day for 2 months. But that is what a plane should be able to do with a war with Russia.
You should be able to compensate the Russian airforce large numerical superiority by flying more sorties per day.
And if your planes have broken airframes and is unfit for service after the war, then so what?
This is what military aircrafts are built for - they are built for war. After the war is over they can be scrapped.
You can build new planes after the war. Maybe Gripen, or maybe something even better once that plane has been invented.
We also used to have large stocks of hundreds of Draken and Viggen available that also all could be sent to Ukraine.
Draken is a bit outdated altough Finland and Austria kept theirs it in service to the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Viggen is an attack aircraft with good air combat capabilities. Its easy to maintain with civilian ground crews and can use short highways for take off just like Gripen.
So to sum up, I think Sweden should go back to having a massive conscription army. Scrap all this specialist this or that bullshit... we do not need to spend billions on failed fashion trends in military thinking like cyber warfare and EU/Nato battle groups. Our military should be for self-defence as its prime purpose.
We should look what is happening in the outside world. What are the major future threats that we see for Sweden?
- And after we have analyzed and concluded what those threats are, then we build military capabilities to face those
threats.
And military spending should be adopted to fulfilling that need. Sometimes we need to spend more money on the military than other countries - which makes sense, since other countries face other types of threats and problems that we do.
So using comparisons of military spending with other countries like Socialdemocratic politicians who wanna cut military spending is simply short-sighted and idiotic.
By having a military built for a purpose you waste as little tax payer money as possible. That has been missing in Sweden the last 30 years. Special interest groups have their say in matter of military spending, like industrial interests and local social democratic politicians who with to keep their provincial regiment and all jobs with it - instead of looking at how the country is best defended.
International operations and cyberwarfare are stupid fashion projects that Sweden can do without. I do not care about gaining popularity points with politicians in Brussels by sending Swedish troops for peace keeping missions in Africa.
Politicians abolished the ability of the Swedish military to defend the country with that bad argument that no threats to Swedens independence existed after the Cold war, and that therefore peace keeping and stability would be the main mission for the Swedish military. This was proven to be bullshit long ago when Russia invaded Georgia. But the politicians refused to change their analysis of the world. They knew what they wanted - they wanted to gain popularity in Brussels and didn't give a sh*t about defending the country. So no change of course happened.
And meanwhile have Putins Russia become more and more aggressive.
I as a tax payer rather have no army at all than paying for a Colonial expeditionary force for the EU.
I want to keep my money. I don't care about EU. And paying for a kindergarten for all unemployed officers and giving them jobs after the politicians have abolished the Cold war mass army we had is also not something I am interested in. The military should be about defending the country and nothing else.
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@gustav331
There are many things I agree with you with and some where you are just wrong. With Torstenssons war you completely ignore that Denmark was the warmongering part in this war that constantly tried to stab Sweden in the back because it hated to see Sweden being succesful in the 30 years war and Denmark constantly offered to join the war on the side of Swedens enemies. So to neutralize that threat did Sweden invade Denmark at the first good opurtuinity to destroy the Danish enemy in the rear that threatened Swedish supply lines in Northern Germany and threatened Sweden with a land grab.
"The Scanian War was started by the Swedes when they invaded Denmark's ally"
Sweden did not want a war, as its army was in a terribly bad shape because the nobles had given themselves tax cuts that left the army underfunded. Instead did the Swedish corrupt nobles hope that Sweden could gain security by an alliance with a powerful country like France that no one would dare to go to war against. And so would peace be secured.
But that plan did not work out well. Because France had a warmonger King that dragged Sweden into a meaningless war against its will.
Sweden had a reputation of being impossible to defeat on the battlefield after its victories in the 30 years war, Russia, Denmark and Poland. But now was that reputation by a silly tiny unimportant battle at Fehrbellin where a "Swedish" force (that consisted of 2/3 Germans) was defeated.
And that propaganda victory encouraged half of Europe to declare war on Sweden when they saw that Sweden was possible to beat on the battlefield.
The next disaster was that half the navy was lost in a big storm.
Everything seemed lost, until the Swedish King took the bold decision to take all power back from the useless nobles and won the battle at Lund - and that in turn doomed all Danish attempts to retake Scania.
"it was Sweden that declared war and re-invaded Denmark in 1658."
An excemption from the rule. And yes Charles X was a warmonger King and quite reckless. The march across the belts could just as well have ended with a disaster for Sweden if the weather had been slightly warmer and the entire army would have fallen through the ice and drowned while Sweden was at war with entire Northern Europe.
"The Great Northern War was a Danish victory."
The King of Denmark betrayed its promises of friendship with the Swedish King and declared war on his cousin. But Denmark was knocked out of the war in just a few weeks after the Swedish landing at Humlebäck. Then was a peace signed.
But in 1710 did Denmark break that peace deal, due to lack of honour, and much cowardice to not dare to attack Sweden before the Swedish defeat at Poltava.
Anyways the Danish army was defeated at the battle of Helsingborg in 1710 by a Swedish force that half consisted of poorly trained reservist units.
So even after Poltava was Sweden still a superior force to other armies in the world. It would also prove that in Gadebusch in 1712.
Denmarks army was not so good. But its navy was. And Tordenskiold did with his victory at Dynekilen doom Swedens 1716 invasion of Norway.
Sweden tried again in 1718 and would probably have won if not Charles XII had died at Fredriksten.
But don't take my words for it. This is what Geir Pollen wrote in his book about the siege of Trondheim, and said that the Norwegian troops only had 2 weeks of food left when the Swedish troops abandoned the siege after the Swedish King died.
And the fortress at Fredriksten would likely have fallen after 3 days due to food shortages if the Swedish King had not died.
And once Fredriksten fell would there be nothing that stood between the Swedish army and the conquest of Oslo and western Norway. And with the additional fall of Trondheim would that be the final nail in the coffin for Danish rule over Norway.
Denmark would have been forced to make peace on Swedish terms and hand over Norway or parts of it to Sweden.
But the new King of Sweden was a German who did not care about the war. He just wanted to be King so he abandoned the Swedish invasion on day 1 at the throne.
And that stupid move only prolonged the war and gave unfavorable peace terms for Sweden. But he did not care. He was a lazy King that cared more about sex and pleasure than doing his job as a King.
"Denmark was clever enough to not involve itself in more wars in the 1700s, unlike Sweden, which had the most incompetent and corrupt government in all of Europe between 1721 and 1772."
Here I will actually agree with you. And I hope more Swedes would share this point of view. Because you are absolutly correct.
It have wrongly been seen as a period of peace and progress. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Sweden did start two stupid wars (against russia and prussia) and lost them both and ended up with a national debt that was worse than that after the Great Northern War. And while everyone complains about Charles XII's costly wars nobody criticise the wasteful stupid spending by our useless noblemen republic.
The Great Northern war at least a necessary war and an existential defensive war. While the two wars that our nobles started was dumb offensive military adventures. Charles XII was no warmonger
because he never started any new war. But our noblemen on the other hand did set the world on fire and started new wars.
Had our noblemen had one braincell should they have learned the lesson from Denmark in 1658 - DO NOT START A NEW WAR WHEN YOUR ARMY IS IN TERRIBLE SHAPE.
But our nobles never learned. The disasterous Scanian war was their fault. So was the war against Russia in 1741. And the war against Prussia.
The war against russia in 1788 started like a success story but ended with a failure because the noblemen who were officers in the Swedish army did mutiny and commited treason against the Swedish King.
So the war never became a victory because of their fault. And it was also the noblemens fault that Sweden lost Finland to russia.
I also think Denmarks downfall should much be blamed on its nobles unwillingness to allow the creation of large standing army consisting of Danish farmboys. But instead did Denmark quickly recruit German mercenaries for the wars it fought... but that army lacked the cumulative experience of a standing army that had gathered knowledge from decades of war. And the fighting morale was also low in such regiments, as everyone in this quickly mobilized and poorly trained unit did not know each other. While the Swedish troops all knew each other within the regiment after years of combat training and drills togheter.
This is what made standing armies like the Tercious in Spain and the Swedish army so superior.
Denmark would later on try to correct this error but by then it was already too late and it had lost many provinces to Sweden.
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@benoitbvg2888
Strong economies benifit from free trade, while weak economies needs protectionism. Britains economy is in the latter category, so it would therefore need say no to the common market and protect its own industry and build it up to fit for fight again.
Reality is that all countries all countries are strong in some areas and weaker in others. Not even China that is the largest exporter in the world wants 100% free trade - because it is weak in some areas and wants to protect those specific industries from foreign competition.
Britain have a potential in many areas. And instead of importing materials from foreign producers, it could just buy things from British firms instead. This is a strategy called "import substitution", and it succesfully turned poor countries like Japan and Korea into some of the richest countries in the world.
Britain could also do this and create its own cement and military lorries instead of importing it from abroad for roughly the same price.
This would in turn provide British producers with a secure home market, and the negative balance of trade will turn around bit by bit. And instead of letting British industry die, it will have a chance to grow at home, and then in the future it could be strong enough to take on competition from even the best foreign producers.
"Why on Earth would anyone build in Britain when building in the EU is just so much simpler and gives you access to a much bigger market, without currency fluctuation???"
Britain is still one of the largest markets in the world, and it would be foolish to say no to all profits that could be made there.
You also don't need a big home market to be able to export things, and there are many historical examples of this... Sweden is just a country with roughly 8 million inhabitants but it became the richest country in the world in the late 1960s many decades before it joined the EU.
And Sweden despite its size became one of the major players in producing mobile phones, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, drilling tools and Industrial machinery, military equipment, civilian nuclear power, paper, steel, and timber.
And Sweden is by no means unique. Switzerland, Finland and Singapore have also gotten rich without any EU.
And having your own currency is a good thing. It enables you to create money to grow your own economy. It can be a tool the UK can use to help save its companies and jobs when the country is doing badly (as it have been doing the last decades).
The Euro is a badly constructed currency. The central bank refuses to print money to fund government spending - unlike the Federal reserve in the USA.
And that means that the economy will stagnate from permanent deflationary spiral.
And the EU rules for member countries to have a low national debt and a low budget surplus will only make this problem even worse.
And the ECB only cares about the goal of low inflation, and caring about low unemployment or high GDP growth is not in its mandate.
And my final point would be that it is better to have a central bank that cares about Britains needs, than Britain should have a central bank that only care about the needs of the German economy.
Germany and Britain are not the same country. So it would simply be idiotic to have the same rate of inflation and interest rate.
"One size fits all" would be a stupid idea if you would try to have the same size of clothes for 28 randomly collected persons off the street. So why would any one then think that doing the same with 28 different countries economies would be a good idea?
Only a stupid politician would believe in such stupid shit. Because more than 90% of all economists agree that this is an extremely stupid idea.
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Trump is Russia boy. We know that from his rethoric.
1. He wanna create a divide between Europe and USA, and thus making the alliance against Russia weaker
2. He use unnecessarily inflammatory rethoric and he create conspiracy theories and lies non-stop to create more division in America, while a more healthy political debate would seak to reach compromise even with the political opposition and preferbly work togheter to find common ground on specific issues whenever possible.
3. Trump and his buddies have blocked military aid to Ukraine for months. This had nothing to do with any border wall, as they even downvoted Bidens proposal to give the harshest border checks in American history in exchange for military aif for Ukraine - but the Republicans refused that, which shows that they just hate Ukraine and is even prepared to sacrifice the border they say they care so much about, in order to help Putin.
4. Trump says that USA needs to care about its own people first. Which is just ridiculus that he takes this issue to be upset about it, when the aid to Ukraine only makes up 0.2% of USAs GDP. And if Trump truely cared about the poor, then could have shown that while he was president. He gave 1400 billions in tax cuts to the top ten percent richest americans, but giving 60 billion dollars to Ukraine is too much according to him 🙄🙄
And let me remind you that 90% of that 60 billion dollars stays inside Ukraine. So we are really more talking like giving 6 billion dollars to Ukraine. Which is peannuts for a country like America. He is barking under the wrong tree. He can focus on those 1400 dollars I talked about earlier instead - just to take an example.
5. Trump is not working on deterance when he says that he will let China do whatever they like to Taiwan and Russia do what the hell they like to certain European countries.
6. Trump is allying himself with Orban against the EU just to throw sand into the machinery of helping Ukraine. I hate the EU myself, but even I would never try to sabotage the EU from within to help an evil empire far worse than the EU. But if you have no ethics, then it is of course easy.
I think it would just be easier to just kick Hungary out of Nato and the EU instead of keeping this trojan horse. As an anti-EU sympatizer I also think it is an enormously hypocritical stance by Orban to say you are against the EU, but want to stay inside it at all costs despite your country vetos more decisions than all other member countries combined.
Then you are just more of a burden than an asset for the union.
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Sweden have sent CV-90, Archer, Stridsvagn 122, NLAWs, Robot-70, AT-4, Hjälm 90, KSP-58B machine guns and Kpist m/45 submachines and lots of other stuff to Ukraine. And lots of Swedish made equipment have been donated by other countries, like Bandvagn 206 from Germany, 40mm bofors and PV-1110 from the Baltics, Carl-Gustaf from Canada, BONUS from France, Pansarbandvagn 501 from Czechia. So why not Gripen then?
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@LK-jl3pc
I think that is excellent. I think the corporate tax should be high, but then should most companies be able to negotiate it down a bit. And some should not have to pay any tax at all. Back during the 1960s did countries like Sweden, USA and most other countries like Britain and Germany have a 60% corporate tax. But thanks to excemptions was it rare that most companies paid that much.
And the idea here as I sees it is that we want to kill some companies and help and grow other companies.
Ineffiecent companies needs to die off, while new high tech industries and well runned profitable companies should be helped to grow.
We like competition on the market because that forces companies to stop being lazy and charge over-price from consumers while offering shitty products, and with competition you get an incentive for technological innovation, better products and better prices for consumers.
So for that reason should governments help this process even more by killing off old industries. Not all jobs is worth trying to save. Of course its sad for people who lose their jobs selling ice blocks when people start buying refridgerators instead. And it is sad for all in the horse and buggy industry that lose their jobs when people chose to drive cars instead.
But I do not think these jobs can be saved. And the only way to save them is to steal money and resources from the healthy parts of the economy to keep these old dying parts of the economy alive.
What I want for my country then is to be a world leader in high technology instead. By being the first country in the world that are able to build a new super product - an Iphone, a super weapon, a miracle medicine or whatever... then everyone in the world wants this product so we can sell gigantic amounts of it, and we can charge very high prices for the products we sell as there are no competition as no one else knows how to make this product.
So stealing money and resources from dying industries like newspapers or analog cameras and giving it high tech firms makes perfectly sense to me. That can help the country build new industries that are winners, while losers are killed off. We might lose horse and buggy drivers when the first cars are invented, but on the other hand do we get well paid jobs in the car industry instead. And jobs that provide car related products - such as glass and rubber manucaturers, we stimulate the steel industry and the mechanical tool industry, skin for seats, roadside motels, drive in resturants, road construction workers, traffic police, gas stations, etc etc.
We are speeding up evolution in the economy helping the winners and punishing the losers. And one day will also the car industry get old and get replaced by spaceships or whatever. So the system is compeletly fair. Everyone part of the economy gets and easy going when it is young, and suffer discrimination when it is no longer needed.
"I dont generally agree with your views on the EU. Liberalisation and globalisation has been a driving factor of wealth creation all over the world, imho."
I think global trade is useful. That can allow a small country to reach economies of scale by exporting stuff to a hundred million consumers in other countries. The small country is a winner of this making lots of money, while other countries benefit from good products they otherwise wouldn't have.
However that doesn't mean that I want all trade to be totally free. As I said earlier global speculative capital flows can do more harm than good by creating economic crashes. And if big countries buys up all your high tech industries before they have chance to grow and become global stars... then of course will your country become much poorer as a result and get reduced into a vassal state of other big countries.
And more economic crashes and lack of technological innovation is in my opinion not only bad for Denmark, but also bad for the world as a whole. Crashes creates poverty and suffering, an lack of innovation leads to slower economic growth.
The periods of much free trade and liberalization have been periods of slow economic growth. Like the period 1870-1914 or the perio 1980-2023. While the period of much protectionism, capital controls, high taxes and government controls after World war 2 was a period with the strongest economic growth in history. And the EU has been struggling economically the last 30 years despite all promises that liberalization would make us all richer. Instead have we seen the Euro crisis - a thing we never had during the years of strong protectionism 1945-1975.
We can compare liberalized Europe today with the protectionist Europe 1945-75. And here I see slower economic growth (0,5 - 1% GDP growth per year vs 3% per year when EU was small and protectionism was strong). Unemployment is higher today than it was back then, most countries had around 1% unemployment while today it lies between 5.7% (for Germany) to 28% (in Spain).
We also see growing wealth inequality today compared to back during the protectionist years.
We also see less investments into innovation, Swedens rate of investments have fallen from 25% of GDP to below 8% for example. We also see more economic crashes today than we did see in the period 1945-75.
Household debts are at record levels in Sweden and Denmark today, because governments are forced to run budget surpluses according to stupid EU rules an because wages have been supressed in most western countries.
So neoliberal dogma have been very harmful to Europe.
China on the other hand does not care about having a free market. It have its capital controls, state owned companies, do nor respect copyright, an forces foreign companies to share their technologies with the Chinese befor they are allowe into the country. So it is not a free market economy.
However it is an economy that unlike the EU have done very well the last 30 years thanks to its mercantilist policies it have copied from Japan an South Korea.
I am not saying Chinas economic model is something we should make a 100% identical copy of.
My point is rather that free trade and liberalization is not always good, and we need to be pragmatic and have a balance view on things. Capital controls is a good thing - it allowed China to be the only Asian country not suffering from the Asian crisis in 1997.
China is exporting much stuff and importing very little. Which is understandable as it is a poor country that wants to get rich and not waste their hard earned money on bubble gum and sugary water as soon as they get some savings.
However as China gets richer it will make sense for them to import more stuff, and become a more open economy. Free trade is only fun when your country is the strongest in the world. And poor countries are usually not strong and good at producing any high tech products. So they need to do like China an protect their own companies from foreign competition and from being taken over by foreigners. And that will allow them to grow into large and succesful worldwide companies like Nokia or Toyota.
That is how you lift millions of people out from poverty.
We both like world trade. But I think that companies needs to be able to grow behind protectionist trade barriers first. And when they are so strong that they can stand on their own feet without parents supervision.
Then all protection can be removed and there can be free trade.
However, new industries are invented all the time. And such new technology firms needs protection. Had the Japanese government not supported Toyota its first years, then there would have not been any Toyota becoming the worlds largest car producer. And had Finlands government not supported Nokia all its first 17 years that his company was running at a loss, would that company never have grown into becoming the most succesful company in Finlands history and one the most succesful phone makers in the world... and creating tens of thousands of jobs and bringing in billions of profits to Finland.
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Martin Luther - Killed a man in a duel
John Knox - Is said the have been a real motherf***er
Pope Sixtus IV - Is known for constructing the Sistine chapel and for having children with his own sister.
Pope Alexander VI - Killed lots of people and rumor says that he had an incestuous affair with his daughter
Pope John XII - Turned the Lateran Palace into a brothel and had sex with his sisters. He died when he had sex with another mans wife.
Pope Benedict IX - Married his cousin, and murdered, robbed pilgrims, committed adultery and bestiality in daylight
Pope Anacietus II - Took a whore for his mistress, enjoyed incest with his sister and other relatives. Raping nuns was one of his hobbies.
Pope Boniface VIII - Was a rapist who also loved sodomy with animals
Pope John XXIII - A pirate who obtained the papacy through force, was charged by the Council of Constance for piracy, murder, rape, sodomy, incest and another 50 charges.
Nicholas V - Authorized the King of Portugal to war on African peoples, take their property and enslave people.
Pope Paul II - Died from a heart attack while he had sex with a young boy
Pope Sergius III - Enjoyed sex with underaged girls
Pope Benedict XII - Was such a hardened drinker that the expression "drunk as a pope" became popular in his lifetime.
Pope Pius II - A well known author of erotic literature, and had fathered about 12 illegitimate children
Pope Julius II - Commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the the Sistine Chapel. He was a paedophile and liked wasting church money so he could have his male prostitutes
Pope Paul III - Enjoyed an incestuous relationship with his daughter. He killed two cardinals and a Polish bishop to settle an argument over a theological point. Paul III was probably Rome's biggest ever pimp - he kept a roll of about 45,000 prostitutes, who paid him a monthly tribute.
Pope Julius III - Sodomized young boys, of which one was his own, illegitimate, son.
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@Dreachon As I said I think the term is vague, dumb and useless.
Both a M-1 Abrams on 73 tonnes and a Russian T-80 on 40 tonnes are MBTs according to most people despite they are very different tanks intended to be used in very different ways. People like to call Hetzer and the S-tank for tank destroyers, but to others they are called tanks - the S-tank was intended to be used as a tank by the Swedish army (whatever that means) and Hetzer got pressed into a tank role the last years of the war when there was not enough real tanks to fill all Germanys needs.
As I sees it did the Panther fulfill all the data requirments people have have on a MBT. And it was also used both to fight heavy tanks, medium tanks and to deal with infantry. Its wide tracks gave it the ability to use all kinds of terrain which gave it more flexiblity than other tanks including the lighter panzer IV which more easily got stuck in snow and mud. The only real disadvantage it had compared to them in terms of mobility was its weight which could prevent it from using many bridges.
Anyways, I think the concept of one tank doing all tasks on a battlefield is incorrect. If that was true then we would not see the development of AMX13, Bulldog, or Sheridan I guess. And when abrams weights over 70 tonnes I don't think one can say that heavy tanks have left the battlefield either.
It is however true that medium tanks have taken over much of the roles that other types of tanks previously hold. But I guess that some of it have to do with budget constraints, priorities and logistics. Maybe developing a new heavy tank was not as much a priority as during the war.
And the need for turretless tanks (like SU100, Jagdpanther) have totally disapeared after the war. But I guess that have to do with the preference for building tanks instead of trying to build powerful turretless tanks whos big advantage lies in mass production, short production time, low costs and powerful guns.
I do however think this type of tank could make a comeback if a major war with China or Russia was started and something like a modern ISU-152 monster would be needed to take out the heavily protected Armata tanks until the west could come up with a compareable tank of their own.
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The Russian Tsars were wasting lives equally ruthless as Stalin. Ordering "enemy at the gates" styles of attacks in world war 1. And soldiers were wasted in large amounts in the pointless Crimean war the same way as they are today.
Ever since Russia became a great power during the Great Northern War have Russia wasted lives in the most pointless and stupid of ways. Can someone explain to me how the hell its even physically possible to lose during the age of muskets and bayonets when you have a 6 to 1 advantage in manpower, and manage to get 1500 of your own men killed and only manage to kill 40 enemies? (like Russia did in the battle in Saločiai in 1703.)
The Russian military have always sucked and been incompetent and the rulers of Russia have been cruel and tyrannical.
And sure this tactic did often pay off. Russia could defeat Swedes, Persians, Prussians, Finns, Nazis, Chechens, and Georgians with endless human wave assaults and destroy the opponent by attrition and win despite having a terrible kill ratio. However Russia today with its low birthrates can no longer expect to win with such tactics. Ever since the industrial revolution has the country been lagging behind technologically after the rest of Europe. In the Crimean war for example could not all russian troops be properly armed. And many was forced to wear muskets from the mid and early 1700s when they were fighting against France and Britains modern weapons.
The Russian military was of course technologically backwards also long before then, but the technolocial gap was less serious back in the early 1700s. The Russian and the Swedish armies were the last European armies to employ pikemen, and both used heavy outdated muskets. But despite that was the Swedish army still consider the best in Europe, as it have superb tactics built around those old weapons and having a heavy musket was considered an advantage in bayonet fighting as you were less likely to have your musket stuck inside the ribs in some enemies body - which would render it unusable if that happened.
I think birthrates was an important factor behind the tactics European powers employed in the world wars. In world war 1 did Russia have the largest army in the world, and not only that, it also had a gigantic manpower reserve of 26 million men.
No other country in the world could ever hope to defeat such a big army on its own. Not even Germany which also had a large army and the 2nd largest manpower reserve in the world numbering 6 million.
But fortunatly for Germany, was Russia a 3rd world country with no industrial base so it could not produce much weapons and ammunition, so Russia was unable to transform 26 million men into soldiers. The allies hoped that they could sail through the black sea and handover tonnes of French and British rifles and ammunition. But the failure to cross Turkish waters and the failed battle at Galliopoli put an end to such dreams.
I world war 2 was the lend lease help more succesful. And Russia could afford to lose over 20 million lives and still be able to defeat Germany. Much of the high losses was due to bad leadership of course. But Russia could afford to pay that price for victory, and Stalin was ruthless enough to try.
Hitler was also a bloodthirsty dictator, but he knew that he did not have as many people as Russia to waste in a power. So he could not afford to be equally reckless as the Russians if he wanted to win. But on the other hand was Germany fighting a war against the clock, and time was not on Germanys side so risk taking and acceptance of losses was therefore higher in the German army than in the western allied armies. Germany also had a large population and high birthrates in the late 1800s and early 1900s so it had more men that it could afford to waste in a war than say France.
And after catastrophically high losses France suffered in 1914, was the consensus in France that the country never again wanna go through the same thing ever again. So the Maginot line and digging in and keeping losses at a minimum by well defended fortified positions therefore made sense.
USA did have much industrial might backing its military so it could afford to beat its enemies with firepower, and in a war of attrition did America have the upper hand so it did not feel any hurry. Nor did it fight outnumbered like the Germans who had to hurry defeating one enemy, so it could quickly turn to fighting another one before it would be stuck in war at all fronts and lose the iniative to the enemy, and the enemy would choose the location for all the future battles.
America did however fight a world war, and an existential struggle during the world wars so the tolarance for human losses were much higher than it was in more limited wars that came after it such as the Korean war and Vietnam.
And since those wars were not about life and death, were the publics acceptance for human losses much lower. But on the other hand could America compensate for this to some degree with technological superiority and massive firepower.
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Discussing machineguns feels irrelevant. Partly because it is debatable if it was the best weapon of its role (just ask Lindybeige). But even more so because we are talking about how well equiped the Armies was overall. And the Americans and the British there had an enormous advantage.
Their solidiers were well fed. They had lots of trucks and fire support. While the Germans didn't.
On average did an US Army Division consume 800 tonnes of supplies per day, while a German Division only consumed 400 tonnes.
Germany was badly equiped overall. With little oil, ammo, food spare parts. Their truck cabins was made out of wood to save metal. Their jet engines only lasted for a week due to shortages of rare materials. The steel quality in their tanks deteriorated when they ran out of rare materials for the production process of high quality steel. Germany also ran out of chemicals to cammo paint their tanks at the late war.
So Germany couldn't provide for its troops.
They lacked everything. And instead of building real tanks they had to resort to using old czech tank chassis and using captured Russian guns to build tank destroyers such as Marder. Only because they didn't have enough real tanks. So shit equipment like marder was what Germany usally had to use in combat because real tanks was so rare and could almost never be seen.
And the first half of world war 2 when Germany conquered Europe, it did so without any big Tiger tanks or Panthers. In fact, Germany had worse tanks than their enemies. And France also had twice as many tanks as the Germans in 1940.
And to make matters worse, so was tankproduction painfully slow in 1940. So almost all of Germanys tanks were older tanks, while just a tiny tiny portion was the more modern panzer III and Panzer IV.
And when Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Germany still used mostly old bad Panzer II and pz38t tanks. While Russia had tanks of equal quality such as T-26 and and BT-7, and tanks of clearly superior quality such as t-34 and KV-1. So Germany didn't have the best tanks in the world.
In 1940 it was the french, and in 1941 it was the Russians. And it is debatable if Germany even had best tanks in 1944-45 since the Russians also had monsters such as IS2, ISU152, SU152, SU100 etc.
So I cannot see any clear evidence that Germany was best equiped overall.
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The resources you have at your disposal do determine what kind of objectives you should have in a war, and what way you should go to reach your goals.
Germany should have taken a strategy of a fast victory due to their limited resources. And they should have tried to knock one country out of the war before attacking the next. Because Germanys resources were limited, and winning a 5 front war (in the atlantic, in the air, in Africa/italy, Russia and the west) was hopeless.
And the allies knew that they had more resources at their hand and planned their war effort accordingly, unlike Germany who made a missmatch between their strategy and resources.
The Allies could also have tried to build over-engineered weapons like the Germans and not mobilized their women for their industries. But they choosed another path.
And they choosed to force Hitler to fight a war on multiple fronts so their resources would be thinned out. And the japanease had their supply routes cut off, so the japanease island garrisons didn't have be fought down, but could instead just be starved to death as no supply ships provided them with food.
And in Russia, did the Soviets launch offensives on a broad front simultaniously. And Germany was always facing a dilemma where it would put its resources to stop to stop the Russian forward thrusts - North, Center or South?. Germany simply didn't have enough manpower to fight everyware at the sametime. So they were facing attrition and was losing the iniative on the Eastern front.
So the Allies played their game right, while the Axis played foolishly and opened up multiple fronts and didn't make sure that the war got short.
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if the so called better grand strategy of the allies is a product of the military genius or the inherent strategical situation?
They used common sense in military matters. While Japan and Germany made foolish strategic decisions.
Japan never had the resources to defeat USA. Nor the SU. And not even China.
And Germany as I sees it only had one way of winning the war. And that would be to postpone Operation Barbarossa to 1942 or 1943. And meanwhile should Germany take control over North Africa and mediterranean, and build up their industrial capacity, train new regiments, stockpile supplies such as small arms ammunition and artillery shells, and then luftwaffe should get resources to replace losses from the battle of Britain.
So when Germany invades Russia they can go in with full force before Russia gets time to mobilize all their resources and before lend-lease could effectivly supply them.
And instead of fighting a costly battle for Moscow should Germany instead target Southern Russia directly, which would be a terrible loss to Russia even in the short run.
And with Southern Russias resources in German hands Germany would get stronger by the day while Russia is starving to death. And USA would of course not be provoced into war until Russia has fallen and the conquest has been consolidated.
if the allies hadnt had the industrial capacity of the SU or the USA, the allied strategy would have been therefore fundamentally flawed.
I don't think you can separate strategy from economics since they are linked. And if the allies did not have the industrial capacity they had, then I think that they also would have had another type of strategy of war.
Building liberty ships faster than they could be sunked would for example probably be replaced by another naval strategy.
The allies had during the entire war an strategical freedom the axis could only dream of, even the best axis strategy would be by default be bad considering the odds simply because the strategical situation dictated it.
I don't think Germany played foreign policy rational. No one forced them to attack USA, and no one forced to attack the Soviet union when they did. And they had a choice what their factories should have produced - strategic bombers, tanks, uboats, tactical bombers, offensive weapons, defensive weapons. They could have taken Malta, but they didn't. They could have supported Arabian uprisings in the middle east. They could tried not to make themselves enemies of the slavs. If the Kriegsmarine had joined forces with the Italian navy and the Vichy fleet, then the battles at sea could have become interesting.
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@ChucksSEADnDEAD
F35 fanboys love to talk the cost per plane. But then they forget that one does not buy just an empty shell when one buy a plane. One also needs to include all equipment, sensors, electronics, the engine, flight simulators and so on to the price tag. And then do F35 cost more than Gripen E. And the cost over time gets much worse.
It costs 31000 dollars per flight hour to fly a F35B or F35C. While A Gripen cost 4700. So maintance costs are much lower with Gripen. F35 is even more expensive to fly than the two-engined Eurofighter which does only cost half as much per flight hour.
"Wing loading is misleading, because the F-35's body is a wing"
It surely doesn't look like a wing to me. With Su57 you could make that argument. But with a plane like F35 what is shaped like a McDonalds Apple pie I do not buy that for a second.
"The F-35 has an excellent thrust to weight ratio"
Okay lets compare the thrust-to-weight ratio (with 100% fuel and air-to-air weapons)
F35: 0.87
Gripen: 1.06
Eurofighter: 1.07
Rafale: 0.99
Super-hornet: 0.93
"The Gripen has shorter range and less capabilities."
Okay lets compare.
Combat Radius:
F35: 1,100km (internal fuel only)
Gripen: 1,300km (with centreline 290 gallon tank)
Ferry Range (with external tanks):
F35: 2,220km (internal fuel only)
Gripen: 4,000+km
So no, F35 is not the better plane in this regard. The opposite is the case.
And Gripen does have the same amount of hardpoints as F35 and carry almost the same weight despite F35 being a bigger plane that weights 3 times more and should therefore be able to strongly outperform Gripen, but fail to do so.
"Rafale first tranche costs over 200 million per aircraft"
Yes the plane is expensive. But on the other hand does it seem like Rafale outperform F35 in most things.
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@ashfox7498
The Russian economy continues to bleed from the war and sanctions, and now the harvest and autumn sowing are threatened by a diesel shortage. It may seem counterintuitive that mafia-run gas station Russia would suffer a diesel shortage, but the country needs every ruble it can sell its primary source of income for. The export of diesel together with a lack of spare parts and maintenance, as well as of course the dynamic effects of the war means that the harvest and autumn sowing in Russia are threatened. The Russian propaganda agency Interfax has even concluded that the export of oil products (diesel, gasoline, aviation fuel, etc.) to agriculture needs to be re-directed.
At succesful farming you can read an article about this topic, with the headline:
"Russian farm minister says fuel shortages threaten harvest and sowing"
And the article text begins:
"Russian Agriculture Minister Dmitry Patrushev said on Wednesday that fuel shortages threaten to disrupt autumn harvesting and sowing and urged a suspension of petroleum product exports, Interfax news agency reported."
and lower down the text you can read:
"Traders said the fuel market has been hit by a combination of factors including maintenance at oil refineries, bottlenecks on railways and the weakness of the rouble, which incentivizes fuel exports."
So all those Soviet nostalgics now seems to get what they all dreamed for, as breadlines are coming back to russia.
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""State budget" Is actually something that was literally invented during the 18th Century"
Fair enough. But fact still remains that most countries/states or whatever we should call them, were mostly focused on warfare back in the days. The state was a military state. And military spending was the main purpose of having a government.
So was total war in that sense a new thing invented by the French? not really.
If one looks at for example the industrial revoultion in Germany (or Prussia to be more precise) one could see that their manufacturing sector was largely based around military industry such as textiles, ironworks and cannon foundries. And Prussia was far from alone. Sweden also prioritized the iron and copper mines for both military and economic reasons. And it had also copied the Navigation acts that Cromwell in England had introcuded (which was a law that said that goods could only be transported on ships with 25% foreigners in the crew or less), so the maritime policies were both protectionist and helping the military needs of a nation.
Since the need for transport ships increased, and as the merchant navy grew, more ships could be converted into military warships in times of war. And more experienced sailors stood at the disposal of the navy. And the civilian shipbuilding industry could be used for making warships.
So in a way, was most countries kind of military societies.
"Also conscription was something practised not super uncommonly by minor powers, Florence did it too for example, when people (and I) talk of "Modern State" and "Total War" they are talking about the Power of the State to coerce people into doing it's willing, even Frederick II's Prussia couldn't achieve the power of the French State during the revolution and the Empire. (To this, the higher calling of Nationalism was crucial.)"
France was the most populated and rich country in Europe, so duh, of course no other country could compete with it in terms of military strenght. Would Poland be able to win a war against China today? nope. And it doesn't matter how effective they would be using their resources, because they would never be able to field an army comparable to the Chinease.
But what we are talking about here is innovations. And the French conscription was in my opinion nothing revolutionary. Other countries like Prussia had it too before the French did.
"To this, the higher calling of Nationalism was crucial"
It is true that solidiers will probably remain more loyal when they are fighting for something they love, rather than being coerced into something. Just like conscripts in western armies were less likely to surrender than Russians during world war 2.
But in the end I would say that conscription is the same thing as coercion to a certain degree. And the loyality of the troops could take many other forms than simply nationalism. Fredericks solidiers might have been fighting out of love and loyalty for their monarch. Some might had religious reasons to fight for their protestant king against catholic Austrians. Some might have fought for their comrades in their comrades in the regiment.
And Frederick and many other monarchs liked to crack down upon the opressive noblemen, which might have given him love from the poorer classes. So I don't think that all monarchys was the same.
If you had a country ruled by opressive noblemen, then of course the average solidier couldn't care less about fighting bravely to protect it.
The French of course had their nationalism and their "freedom, equality and brotherhood". So it might have seen like an more appealing alternative to the opressive serfdom regimes in those days.
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"Total war is not a government developing all of it's resources towards a military goal, that is rather common in history. Total war is a COUNTRY developing all of it's resources towards a military goal, every citizen, every artisan."
There is not much difference in my opinion. The military state was pretty much the norm, with most of the taxes going to the military.
And as far as I know would not a single regime in history fit into the latter definition if it would be strictly followed. Not even nazi-Germany would spend more than 80% of its GDP on winning the war, while poorer farming economies would have been much less able to reach anyware near that high number due to the low productivity in agriculture and industry.
There is always dilemmas to be done should a man go into the army, or should he make food for the army?
Should the limited supply of nitrates be used for explosives or for fertilizer to feed the army and workers?
The closest example I could think of reaching this criteria would be Paraguay which lost 90% of its male population in a war. But since its not 100% I guess that not even that extreme example would count.
"The power to coerce people, to obtain legitimacy, and rally a country around a single goal. Prussia was actually in the process of developing this kind of Power, but it REALLY only obtained it through the struggles of the Napoleonic Wars."
I don't see why Napoleon was an innovator in this field. He built large armies but so did the Austrians, Prussians, Russians and Ottomans. Even the greedy corrupt and hated Mughal government of the 1600s could mobilize armies of hundreds of thousands of men with fire arms and war elephants. And China also had a huge army.
And when it comes to legitmacy, I would say that a King only responsible to God would have much higher status than a non-noble simple italian in France who only made a succesful career thanks to the political caos. No one would rival the crown of Frederick or CharlesXII. But Napoleon had many rivals and backstabbers.
There was much civilian reforms and collection of data under Napoleon. But on the other hand were Gustavus Adolphus and Frederick the Great also way ahead of their time when it came to building modern effiecent buraucracies.
And the industrial revolution and nationalism were just in their early stages in the early 1800s, and would have to wait until the late 1800s before they could bloom. But nationalism also existed before Napoleon as well, and many letters have been preserved of Swedish solidiers in the 1600s and early 1700s talking about their worries about their fatherland - a hardly uncommon feeling among other European countries.
And a french style mass army were considered a wonderful idea by the democratic nationalist movement in Germany which wanted to transition to a huge Landwher army. But the Conservatives were skeptical, not only were they not unskeptical towards democracy and pan-Germanism, but they were also opposed to the idea of an army of badly trained idealistic German students for other reasons. And the Prussian military disliked the idea since they thought that it would be a very ineffective force on the battlefield and take high losses.
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"Modern State, Check, Nationalism, Check ... Administrative Efficiency is also another pre-requisite to conduct total war, but you absolutely need Nationalism, and France was the first country to weaponize Nationalism."
The motto "Pro gloria et Patria" were written on Prussian military flags also before the Napoleon age. Why? Because nationalism was weaponized even before the Napoleon wars.
And what defines a modern state with effiecent administration is a subjective opinion. And one could argue that Napoleon created a modern state with his law code (code Napoleon) that is still used in many countries (in an updated form). But on the other hand could one say that Frederick's government was more revolutionary and modern in many other ways - he went very far in freedom of speech and freedom of religion. He created the modern bureaucracy which were upheld as the ideal by Max Weber and it was also admired by non-Germans. And the Prussian education system would out-live Frederick the great and it would be copied by America, Sweden, Japan and other countries, and one can say that it was a pre-modern system not much different from the one Finland have - which is considered the to have best education system in the world today.
"On German example, by rallying to a common goal, it is not meant to mean that 80%+ of a countries economic activity is military production (Such a country would probably starve). But that all economic activity is geared toward the war, peasants eat merely what is absolutely necessary and send the rest to the army, rations are instituted, shops are closed, scientific research is all geared toward war, every aspect of civilian life is engulfed by War."
And once again we are then seeing that the governments of the pre-Napoleon times were military states.
Why did Sweden suffer from terrible famines in the late 1600s that was so severe that it would kill large parts of the Swedish population including a third of the population in Finland?
Professors in economic history like Lars Magnusson, argues that this was because the Swedish government had taxed so hard throughout the 1600s to pay for all wars that people had no money left for investments in agriculture. Every economic surplus no matter how small had been confiscated by the government. So when a bad harvest struck there was no resource reserves which could be tapped.
So if turning all the resources towards the war effort is the definition of a total war. Then Sweden of the 1600s would certainly qualify. The 1600s was a violent terrible century and I would guess that most other countries had the same problems.
"Is less persuasive than, telling the same man, that he is the inheritor of a glorious imaginary history, part of an imaginary group of people, that are intrinsically different than other groups, and that that group needs his service... But again, the French Revolution was the very first time this idea was used to conduct something like Total War."
Patriotism perhaps played a larger role in the Napoleon wars than in most earlier wars. But the differences with other ages should not be exaggerated either. Nationalism had existed before the French revolution. And nor did people stop fighting for other reasons (like God or serving the emperor of Habsburg) with the arrival of Napoleonic nationalism.
Furthermore was Nationalism was still far from a finished product during the Napoleon age. For example only a few percent of the Italians spoke pure Italian when the country was unified in 1861. And General Lee identityfied himself more with his own home province Virginia than his own country USA.
And it probably reached its peak in the first world war, and the decades before and after it. It was not until the the 1860s and 1870s Germany and Italy was created. And it was not until this time that most countries began using their current national anthems. And child labour was not abolished until the late 19th century and replaced with public education that would teach kids to be proud of the glorious past of their country and learn them all stories of benevolent kings of the past. And the race to colonizing the world took off with a speed like never before as North America, Asia and Africa fell under western rule.
And it was in time period that people had consumed so much nationalism by litterature, music, flag waving, military parades and propaganda that they got drunk and crazy and felt joy about joining the first world war - a totally unnecessary war, which could have been avoided.
But neighter Russia or Germany could accept demobilizing and seem weak in 1914, because that would hurt the national prestige too much, so a war with millions of dead instead became the result.
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"I actually have no idea why you mention Napoleon specifically. I include Imperial France because to a large extent it continued the policies implemented during the Republic. It was the Republicans that "first surrendered go madness".
I call it all the Napoleon age simply for the sake of simplicity. I know that the Napoleon wan't just there to take over same day the French revolution happened and that many other men ruled France before he grabbed power.
"I think you have the misconception that you need to be rich to institute Total War. You dont. The USSR pursued total, by abandoning the cosmopolitanism of Marxism and embracing Nationalism."
A poor country can never mobilize its economy for war to the same extent as a rich. That's a fact. If you have many tractors on the farms and machines in the factories you send more men away to the frontline. That is simple to get.
So a poor country that is waging war and trying as much it can to win the war, will still not be very effective in turning its resources towards fighting the war.
Tsarist Russian in the first world war is an example of this, just as Sweden during the 1600s. Both those regimes were trying to fight a total and it ended up with huge costs for the home front.
And since Sweden and other countries could wage a total war before the 1800s, then that concept is very old indeed. The 1600s was a brutal age with 30 years war and the deluge in Poland. the English Civil War, the Fronde, the English Civil war and so on. Sweden 66 years in war that century against Russians, Danes, Poles, Austrians, Brandenburgers, Spain, Bavaria, Norway and probably much more places. And the French list are probably not any shorter since Sweden and France were allies.
So its not strange that not only economies, but entire societies of this time was built around the needs of the military.
"France emerged after the Congress of Vienna as powerful as before the Revolution... It was Nationalism as an idea that become enemy"
France wasn't slaughtered because revanchism and destroying the balance of power in Europe would probably just have created more problems than it would solve for the victors. Metternich was a true consvervative and in his dreams France would become and old feudal monarchy again.
The old nobility and kings and such didn't like the new popular nationalist ideas that much, because they created problems. Slavic nationalism created problems in Prussia and Austria. And peoples demands for a unififed Germany would mean that the German states would have to unify under one monarch. But neighter the mighty Prussia or the mighty Austria would accept to revoke their claims to the leadership of this new empire. Another problem with the nationalist movement was that it was democratic, while the Conservative junkers wanted to keep the old order. The nationalists were also disturbing the public order and beahaving badly and intolerant towards minorities - which they thought should be forced to assimilate. While the Conservatives were more tolerant.
And much of this inner struggles were kept alive after world war 1. The German officer corps were mcuh Conservative and prefered the old monarchy over the democratic Weimar Republic. While nationalists were whiny about the bruden of the Versaille treaty. And then came Hitler and merged the worst the worst parts of those movements - the contempt for democracy he got from the junkers, and the intolerance towards minorities he got from the nationalists....
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@herrwagnerianer1739
"It was a nation that had borders"
People seemed unsure if the Netherlands and Switzerland would be included into that great empire. France and Italy had also been holy Roman land. And the Baltics had been a part of the Teutonic order.
So what should have been German, and what should not be? I don't think there was much of a consensus back then.
" a citizenry"
People spoke their own dialects and local patriotism was strong. I would not be surprised if many considered themselves to be Bavarians or Saxons first and Germans 2nd.
"common institutions"
Yes, but very weak ones.
"And all the sovereignty lay with the Empire"
The ruler could not centrally plan everything, and especially not in a country as large as Germany. So much power therefore had to be handed over to local rulers.
"No German prince, however powerful, not even Frederick II, ever denied that."
Frederick the Great frowned upon the idea of a unified Germany and denied such a thing existed.
"only Prussia proper was a sovereign country whereas all other lands were not sovereign but subject to imperial authority."
After the Swedish victory in the 30 years war would all small lands be able to determine their own religion and rule themselves to a small degree. They had their own armies and their own currencies.
And foreign powers were able to meddle in the affairs of the German parliament and making it less effective.
With the conquest of Pomerania was Sweden given a seat at the German parliament and thereby had a saying in how Germany would be runned.
And countries like France and Sweden stood outside Germany and guaranteed all small German states (electorates) some degree of independence with military force.
"its inhabitants recognised the existence of a German nation"
Not Frederick the Great as I said earlier. And Voltaire shared his opinion, as his famous quote tells us:
"The holy Roman empire - was neither holy, Roman, or an empire".
*"It appealed to the Emperor, to the princes of the Empire, and to the citizenry, all of whom existed in political reality, and asked them to defend the interests of the nation against Roman interference."
Some Germans were more loyal to God than to their Emperor. The Investiture Controversy was not an easy affair for the German emperor even if he theoretically was the most powerful wordly ruler in Europe.
"The German nation was just as much a political reality in the 16th century as the French or the English nations."
Parts of the country broke lose and declared independence (Münster). And the country was in turbulence after the reformation and parts of the country was fighting each other with more or less violent and peaceful means.
And in the 1600's would things go so far that Saxony and Brandenburg was in open war with the German emperor.
And later would Prussia under Frederick the Great also clash with the Holy Roman empire, despite Brandenburg was a part of it.
"He never thought of the German Empire of 1871 as the foundation of the political German nation but rather as a reorganization after its previous dismantling during the Napoleonic era."
Napoleon had done much to unify Germany. Baden was an unknown unimportant place in Germany before Napoleon, but after Napoleon took over Germany he gave much land to this province and over night its population grew multifold as well as its land mass.
And the hundreds of German mini-states got reduced in numbers and merged into larger states within the German reich.
But not everyone liked this new idea. Some local patriots did not like the idea of suddenly becoming Prussians, inhabitants of Baden or whatever.
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@j k
"Doctrine? UKs was a full mechanised force with infantry support. German tanks were mostly breakthrough but USSR didn't have infantry support and were doctrinaly not efficient during the reearmiment."
No. Most German tanks were NOT breaktrough tanks. Germany only had very few Panzer IV tanks in 1940, and even fewer in 1939 while most of the tanks in the panzer divisions were crappy light PanzerII tanks.
And even after the fall of France and all the leftover tanks the French had that the Germans could use, the Germans still choosed to use mostly old panzerII tanks when they invaded Russia in 1941.
And in late 1942 did the Tiger enter service, but only 1300 were built compared to 6000 Panther medium tanks.
Otherwise I think you are somewhat correct in the other things that you said. Germany had much to learn from the Russians about tank design for winning wars. It is pointless to make high quality components that will have a much longer lifespan than the average lifespan of a tank... I mean why use expensive building material and waste hours on building a super engine that will last for 30 years, if the tank is 90% likely to being destroyed within the coming two years?
The Germans were over-ambitious, and the result was that tanks took a long time to build and they were expensive and difficult to manufacture and needed skilled workers. And therefore very few tanks were built.
And since Germany built so few tanks of their own, they had to steal tanks from other nations. Like the Marder tanks that used Czech or French tank chassis and stolen Russian 76mm anti-tank guns.
And when Germany used so many different tanks at the same time, then of course logistics became a nightmare for those who had the job to fix spareparts and repair damaged vehicles. And of course didn't things get any better when Germany was fighting over long distances in Russia, where the roads were bad and machines breaked down constantly.
I mean, the other logistical problems were already as bad as they could get. How would standardization of spareparts be possible if Germany uses stolen military trucks from France, England, Netherlands and Belgium along with all their own trucks of different types: Opel, Ford, MAN, Hanomag, Magirus, Büssig-Nag, Hansa-Llyoyd Goliath, Borgward, Phänomen, Henchel, Krupp etc.
And think of all the logistical hell it would be to transport all the right type of ammunition for all rifles, pistols, anti aircraft-guns, mortars and howitzers that the Germans, Hungarians, Romanians, Spaniards, and Slovakian armies needed.
I think that the Axis made things unnecessarily hard for themselves by not trying to standardize parts, and reducing the complexity of their tank designs, and by not using more low quality components when there was no need for something top notch stuff.
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@Paciat Panzer IV was getting inferior to the allied tanks in the end of the war, and the panther had a more powerful gun that allowed it to deal with monsters like IS2 from a safe distance, while panzerIV could not - with its weaker gun and armour. The other allied tanks was overall better, had sloped armour, thicker armour and were more modern while pz4 was a tank made in the mid 1930s. And 17 tanks used by the 2nd world country Syria does not change that fact.
Put yourself in the Germans shoes. The panzer IV still had a chance against m4 and t34, but what about the next generation of allied tanks coming down the pipeline?
"You dont need mountains of spare parts unless your tanks are in many different units"
I exaggerated a bit just to drive home the point of what I meant ;-)
But fact remains that you don't want to have big stocks of supplies, when you are going to switch production models often. And Germany did just that, as many of their tanks quickly became obsolete. They started the war with pz1 as their main tank, and it quickly got replaced by pzII. The Germans had intended to one day replace their pzII with pz3, but panzer3 could not be upgunned so they had to let pz4 become the main workhorse of the German army instead. And later in the war was pz4 becoming a bit obsolete and the panther was brought forward to replace it.
And I think the situation was unsubstainable. Quickly phasing out old tanks and focus all production and all spare part production on the modern tanks only had been the sensible thing to do. But Germany could not go down that route since they did not have enough Panther tanks yet to get rid of all Pz4 and pz3.
And even the old shitty pz38 and and pz2 had to be kept (atleast in their modified TD or SPG form) because Germany was so desperatly short of tanks. And old German tanks were dumped on other axis countries.
So of course would the logistics continue to be a mess no matter what the Germans had done.
They could of course have gone with making more spare parts instead as you suggest, but that on the other hand would also have meant fewer modern tanks.
I think the Germans had painted themselves into a corner by 1942, and from there onwards were they stuck in a messy situation they could not get out of. Speer tried to simplify weapon designs to allow mass production and easier logistics - but in 1944 that was too little too late.
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@Paciat Panther was a step-ahead of the enemy in tank development. So when the enemy comes out with the T-44 tank you got something to meet it on an equal footing. The panzer IV unit would however be crushed.
"As for the stock of supply, you do want to have a large one since that equipment goes to secondary duties"
Everything is about priorities, since you cannot both have the cake and eat it too.
The best thing would have been if the Germans had done as the Americans and built their own M4 Sherman and used the chassi for tanks, tds, spgs, flame throwers, mine-clearing, bridge laying, recovery, command, etc.
Then the Germans could have used the same spare parts for all of their tanks, and the logistical footprint would have been minimal.
But the Germans never did that. They had their pz1,pz2, pz35, pz38, pz3, pz4,pz5, Tiger, King Tiger, Elephant, plus all their exotic variants of those tanks. And on top of that did they also press in captured foreign tanks "beutepanzers" into service and used French and Czech tanks with Russian guns for Marder tds.
So the German logistical system was a mess, and spareparts were needed for all kinds of different tanks instead of using the same types of spare parts for all tanks - like the M4.
What they needed was fewer tank models. But on the other hand did they also want to keep up with the technological race with their enemies, because no one else in the Axis would be able to help them out if their best tank became obsolete.
Fighting the war with Panzer I, Panzerjäger I, and Sturmpanzer I Bison simply wouldn't work in the long run.
There is a reason why the old Mk.IV tank from the first world war isn't still in active service. Sometimes you have to let go of old shit.
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One could divide up the economy into consumer goods, capital goods and military goods.
Russia have always screwed over the consumers, for the sake of the other two. I know that other people don't have the same goals and priorities as me, I see that every time people vote in an election. However I think that is unhealthy and harmful to never throw a bone to the consumers and let people enjoy life. And exaggerated military spending harms the economy in the long run.
Consumers needs to enjoy life. That gives them an incentive to work and to wanna live in the country. It makes people happy - and that is important as we only live a short time on this planet. And sure could one argue that investments into capital goods and long term productivity is better for creating a better life for future generations and will make life better for the country in the long run. But I do however think that we should not forget to also make life better for people who lives on this planet here and now. Taking the entire budget for healthcare and not curing patients today and instead investing all that money into research to find cures for all possible diseases in the long run might benefit endless amounts of people of the future generations. However I think that we also needs to take care of people who live here and now. Otherwise would I not wanna live in a country that sacrifice all human happiness for the greater good and for the future.
I also believe that investments in infrastructure and capital goods will last forever. It will rust, get destroyed by wear and tear, and computers will become old outdated and useless after a few decades. And if there are no demand for the products produced because consumers are opressed - then there are no incentive to produce any goods as there are no buyers for them. And it doesn't matter if the government subsidise production, and minimize production costs by lowering taxes down to 0% and forcing state owned banks to give loans at 0% interest. If there are no demand for the goods, then nothing will be produced by the companies.
And then no one will get employed, and no tax money from the companies will be gained. And the economy dies.
Soviet leaders don't like to hear this, but maybe the people should have more consumer goods instead of trying to invest as much as possible and build weapons. Sure will people buy dumb junk for their money.. USB-toasters, devices for bleaching backholes, books about silly conspiracies, fashion, green ping pong balls and good who knows what.
But if that is what makes people happy, then I think that those things have a value for human happiness.
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One cannot just assemble a million men at the German border and punch through it within a week. But atleast France did a try, and had they been succesful they would probably have expanded their offensive into Germany while most of the German army was fighting in Poland.
But the French got stuck and didn't seem to have much faith in the ability to break trough well prepared defenses. And all this was contradicting all the military wisdom that existed back then which said that a huge tank force could always punch through any defences. Just like the bombers would always breaktrough into enemy territory and terrorbomb a country into submission. And the Allies also did several bomb raids on Germany in 1939, and to their own surprise did they not have any effect at all on their enemy.
So what one can conclude is that Fuller's "breaktrough doctrine" was just as faulty as the fashionable Dohuets theory about bombers as a war winning weapon.
Fact is that tanks usally don't do well against a well prepared enemy or in unsuitable terrain. Tanks and airplanes are not wonder weapons. Just as fortifications is not just some medieval nonsense. Great military thinkers like Erich von Manstein was one of the proponents of building fortifactions in pre-war Germany, even if those projects competed with funds and steel with other defensive strategies.
And the Westwall was an improved copy of French Maginot line, but it had somewhat shittier guns than the french version. Nonetheless was it a formidable defensive position.
And defensive lines came to play an important role in the war, such as the Gustav line which the allies couldn't breakthrough for 6 months despite their superior numbers. And even old shitty defensive lines could prove to be hard nuts to crack. The Mannerheim line was not as well equiped as the continental defensive lines, since Finland was the poorest country in Europe and its population was tiny, but still their defences proved difficult for the Russians, who got utterly humiliated by the finns both in the winter war and in the continuation war.
And then we have the case of Metz, with old forts from the 1870s guarded by a dozen understrength Divisions mosly consisting of troops dubious quality - militia and such . But nevertheless could it hold back some of the best units in the American army, when they held back the well equiped Pattons 3rd Army for over 3 months.
So no, I certainly do not consider fortifications to be a joke like you do. And I think tanks are more suited to flanking operations and attacks on open ground than attacking fortifications. And considering the hell of the first world war, I would say that attacking a well entrenched enemy with barbed wire and minefields ahead of him is indeed a very costly operation.
The Siegfried line was no joke, and it existed for real. And it would have been a tough nut to crack.
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You don't need that expensive weapons to shot down a helicopter. A gunshot or a RPG are usally enough.
Helicopters during the Vietnam era only needed a bullet into their hydralic system for them to crash. Furthermore did they lack any warning systems that told them that they were taking hits from enemy fire and needed to take cover, so it was often only after other helicopters in the unit saw gunfire that anyone could react.
Todays helicopters are much better in so far that the pilots are more likely to survive a crash.
However, the limitations are still much the same. They can only carry a limited amount of weight, and therefore they cannot carry much armour. They cost much money and they got limitations on range, how much weight they can carry, and they cannot take much damage, and most helicopters in Vietnam couldn't take survive long in the harsh climate since the rotorblades got destroyed by wood and rocks it threw up, and Iraq 2003 British Helicopters also suffered from a short lifespan to all sandydust it threw up.
And helicopters in Vietnam was also limited in their capabilities to operate at night and in bad weather.
So helicopter warfare got its limitations. With a limited number of positions on the map suitable for helicopter transports of men, it was easy for the Vietcong to make ambushes on American helicopters.
So protect the transport helicopters, some helicopters was starting to carry rockets and machine guns. And those huey gunships would later lead to the UH-1 Cobra, the worlds first attack helcopter.
So do I think attack helicopters are obsolete? Not yet. They got much firepower and can take out enemy tanks. And they can provide protection for other helicopters. But on the other hand are they weak, and would probably get replaced by drones in the future.
Few armies got the luxury to move large numbers of troops by helicopter, so I think the transport helicopter will mostly be valuable as an ambulance.
And the Air Cavalry Division in Vietnam had limited firepower since everything had to be transportable by helicopter. And the troops were vulnerable to ambushes when they landed or lifted. And also resupplying the troops by helicopter could be dangerous under enemy fire. And just one single bullet could be enough to down an expensive helicopter with all onboard. Later on would troops be dropped by rope by helicopter so they could clear a landing zone with chainsaws. Or Planes could drop mega bombs in the middle of the djungle, so helicopters could land in the crater.
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This war is not about Russia and has never been about it. Right now it is about Putin. If he lose this war, then his career is over and he might get a trial as a war criminal, get forced into exile, or get murdered by a russian bloodthirsty shark like himself. So he wants to avoid that.
He also have this ideological view that russia must be strong and never allow it to be humilitated. Dictatorships like Russia and China don't mind being seen as evil, and what scares them is to be seen as weak and unsignificant.
A Chinese bot gets more offended about a "Made in China" joke about junk quality plastic toys, than he is about fact based arguments and moral indignation about severe human rights abuses against the Uighurs. And the same goes for Russia.
The worst thing that could happen in their view would be that the west laughs at their incompetent outdated military and
mockingly do not take their nuclear threats seriously. Being seen as bad guys making nuclear threats and terror bombing civilians on a daily basis are things that bothers them much less.
Hencefourth do I think we should aim for a historical humiliation of Russia.
Make them accept the unaccepatable: A humiliating defeat.
Let them know that any attempts of Russian imperialism could lead to Russia getting worse off after the war than before it.
That will make them think twice the next time they consider starting a war of aggression.
The little child needs some spanking so it learns to know its place. It can do whatever it wants within its countries own borders. But if it tries to steal things from other kids, then it should have its teeths kicked in.
And since empathy and sympathy are arguments which have obviously not worked on the Russian people to make them stop - as 90% of the Russians still supports this war of aggression and genocide. Like 90% of the Russians supported the war of aggression against Chechenya and theft of Crimea...
So is my suggestion that we replace argument of sympathy and empathy with something else since they don't work on bullies. Empathy and sympathy works on normal people, but not on psychopaths like Putin who is prepared to make nuclear threats, a man who lies and breaks international laws, kidnaps childrens, and makes a hitman list over the Ukrainian intelligentia which he wants to murder to destroy Ukrainian opposition to Russias illegal occupation.
So my suggestion is simple:
We should not try to convince Russia with sympathy and empathy. We should force them to abide by international law and make them respect international borders by *fear*. Our superior military, economic strength and our diplomatic influence and soft power should be 100% dedicated to totally destroying Russia unless they back off.
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Sorry but this video was not one of your better.
The German doctrine was better auftragstaktik gave the Germans superior flexibility to adopt to new situations on the battlefield.
The Germans were masters of this, and this is also the reason why the war lasted so long despite overwhelming odds. The German NCOs professionalism was the biggest reason to Germany's military victories and it was the strongest card the Germans had on their hands. Many NCOs died during the war, and because of German tactics were their losses disproportionally high within the German army compared to other armies.
The German army could show surprising levels of skill even into the end in 1945 despite shortages of everything and a high proportion of badly trained teenagers within its ranks. A few of the men were combat veterans and/or highly trained and skilled men who were able to lead their newbie recruits through the hard times - and sometimes did their hard resistance cause huge problems to the allies
despite they being heavily outnumbered and underequiped. The fighting around Normandy and Seelöwe heights are a proof of this.
Germany were the master of tactics throughout the war. Their sniper tactics training videos are still very usable for modern snipers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNHeGrojUjg&t=1585s
Their auftragstaktik have inspired the Israeli army, and led to victories against overwhelming odds against far superior Arab army coalitions time and time again.
The use of radios in communication between tanks, and the use of radios to coordinate air support with the army did revolutionize warfare in the 1940's.
The German air force positioning of airbases close to the frontline did allow them to fly more missions per day than the allies, and thus also allowed them to get local air superiority as they could have more planes in the sky over the battlefield at any given time, while allied planes had to fly long distances from their base to the frontline and then waste an equal amount of hours flying back home to their well protected base far behind the frontline...
This might have helped the allies from getting their planes destroyed in ground attacks from German planes, but on the other hand did the allies lose air superiority over the battlefield and troops at the frontline were left to the mercy of the Luftwaffe which could hammer them relentlessly. German planes needed only about 20 minutes to get to the frontline so they could therefore fly many bombing missions in a single day. While allied planes would need 3 or 4 hours to get to their targets. So the ground troops saw many German planes and rarely any allied planes to help them... which was indeed demoralizing in 1940 during the fighting in France and the Benelux countries.
The Luftwaffe were also experts at other tricks. Their finger four formation they learned in the Spanish civil war gave them an upper hand against the British fighter wings with 3 planes, or even against a larger formation of 5 British planes. https://youtu.be/52YOKT_O10U?t=3887
And in North Africa did the Luftwaffe planes also get the upper hand by using the cover of the sun behind them as they did dive down upon allied planes which failed to spot their enemy in the strong desert sun during the day. And time and time again would German aces use this tactic with deadly effect on their enemy, and when the allied pilots discovered a German plane diving down upon them, then it was usually already too late to start defend themselves.
The allies did usually have weapons equal or superior to the German ones. But superior German tactics did for a long time allow the Germans to compensate for their inferior numbers or weapons. The American troops were typically better equipped than the German ones, but the US Army was amateurs compared to the Germans in 1942. USA learned lots of lessons from its mistakes, but it would never come close of showing the same brilliance as the German army had when it was at its best.
The US military did have many serious flaws even after the war, and they would also later on contribute to the loss of the war in Vietnam, as the stupid body count doctrine were the result of shitty thinking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFvcuuS5eUI
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This Russian documentary says that the Swedish army was the Greatest in Europe
https://youtu.be/NGYLOYd9Pt8?t=19m52s
And Voltaire are describing Charles as a bright, brave, idealist and a great military leader and said that he had no flaws either than being too brave for his own good and too generous which led him to waste money on giving away expensive gifts to others and make the state coffers empty. He was described as the almost the perfect ideal monarch.
https://archive.org/details/voltaireshistory00voltuoft
And I think both those foreign views are wrong, while Swedish historian rarely exaggerate abot King Charles nowadays. In the past it was common with rightwing nationalists describing him as a young hero King who gave his life for his nation. And pathetic leftwingers (like Ernst Brunner) tries to make the case that he was as bad as Hitler.
However, most modern Swedish historians are somewhat fair regarding Charles. He is seen as a simple human. A young boy who became king over a mighty empire - which is a job which would be a heavy burden on most peoples shoulders in times of war against a mighty alliance that threatens the existance of this Kingdom. This young teenager did as best as he could to do the job, and he stood with a sword in his hand and fought along side his own men and led them in battle and shared their risk of dying.
So he was brave. But he was hardly any perfect monarch like Voltaire claims. And while I think that the Swedish army was the best in Europe in terms of quality, training and tactics, I still wouldn't call it the greatest in Europe like the self-glorifying Russian documentaries do.
Austria, France, Russia, the Ottoman empire and maybe even England could field armies with 100-200.000 men.
But Sweden didn't have the manpower for that. The main army that invaded Russia consisted of only 40.000 men, and even if it was among the best troops in Europe, it is still not a force near as strong as an army of 100.000 men.
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@Quatra112
"Russia is fighting against Nato artillery to a point that many Nato countries are depleting their stockpiles."
Far from it. France is sending 20 out of its 70 Caesars. Germany is sending about half a dozen of its little over 100 pieaces to Ukraine. And some countries are not sending any artillery at all like Sweden.
So as you see... the majority of all guns in the west have not been used. And it is usually also the oldest guns that have been sent to Ukraine, while newest versions of Caesar have the French kept for themselves. And the 777 guns sent to Ukraine are old used guns that USA planned to replace soon anyways.
And the Paladins sent to Ukraine from Norway are artillery pieces that are so old that they saw service in the Vietnam war.. so its no wonder that the Norwegians gave them away, as they would soon be replaced by modern SPGs anyways.
So your comment is just nonsense 🙄🙄
"Russia uses tactics that ain't from call of duty and are killing more than 100 Ukrainian soldiers a day"
Russia have done nothing but lying throughout this entire war. No one outside of Russia believes them anymore.
If Medvedev said that the sky was blue and that 1 + 1 = 2, then even then would people have a hard time trusting him given Russias track record of lying. Its stastistics is a joke and its not even worth any consideration.
Personally I much doubt that 100 Ukrainians died today as only 300 Russians died today, and no Russian tanks was destroyed and only 4 APC - which is a sign that the the fighting has very much calmed down right now.
"At this rate Ukraine will run out of ammunition and tanks before Russia does and than it will lose this war."
The free world can easily outproduce Russia in anything. Its 155mm ammunition stockpiles are endless. And production can be ramped up if needed to. Europe got a 22 trillion GDP, USA got 21 trillion... while Russia only got 1.4 trillion. And Russia is also more technologically backwards, its GDP per capita is also much lower, and the productivity of American workers are much higher - in some sectors can 1 American worker do as much work as 4 Russian workers in a day.
So nope. Russia is losing its stockpiles. And all it really have is old Soviet garbage. And once the Soviet stockpiles are gone, then will Russia lose its position as a major military power.
Its best tanks have already been lost in Ukraine. They are burning wrecks now. Thousands of APCs have been lost, and that will take years to replace for a poor 3rd world country.
The west have not even flexed its muscles. All it have given Ukraine is some old decades old junk and a few anti-tank missiles, and yet is Russia losing so hard.
Not a single Leopard2, Abrams, Leclerc, Ariete, Challanger2, Stridsfordon 90, Rafale, Eurofighter, Gripen, F35, or F22 have seen combat in Ukraine... and yet is Russia doing so pathethically badly in Ukraine.
Nato is not depleting itself at all. It have merely just lifted a finger.
Russia on the other hand have thrown in 85% of its army into Ukraine, and it have still failed to conquer one of the poorest countries in Europe.
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@XScorpionXful I don't think it is surprising, I mean countries loves to read and talk about their military victories but not so much about depressing and humiliating defeats. To me as a Swede is it a bit funny when I listen to Norwegian military podcast, and the Norwegian wars in the 1600s and 1700s are just quickly passed over while the Napoleonic war is much more talked about. Probably because thats the only war with Sweden it did do well. The Norwegian military history is sparse.. it does not have much military glory, its more of a country of great explorers that found iceland, greenland, america... and travelled antartica.
Likewise do the French love to talk about Napoleon, but the 1700s does not get much love from them. And here in Sweden is it not much written about Pomeranian war that went badly for Sweden.
After 1613 have Denmarks military history only seen defeats. Torstenssons war was a disaster for Denmark, and the war of 1658 was the worst catastrophy Denmark's history - its like when Germany lost Prussia or when Hungary lost two-thirds of its territory in 1920. The Scanian war was unsuccesful in taking back all lost lands from Sweden. And likewise was the Great Northern war. The country easily got bullied into submission during the Napoleonic wars. And 1864 was it time for Denmark to get beaten up by the Prussians. And the country lost to nazi-germany in just a few hours of fighting.
So from having been a great power during the viking age and medieval times and a pretty powerful Kingdom also under the Kalmar union... have Denmark faded into a tiny plot of land without much power. So I can understand if a Dane think the historical trend have been depressing.
Another reason for the lack of Danish literature is probably the fact that Denmark have historically been more of a naval power, unlike its Swedish neighbour which was a land power. Like England did the strong Danish nobility probably feel more comfortable with a strong navy than an army that the King could use to supress rivals for power. And Denmarks borders in year 1520 was much different from today. Not only did Jylland and Själland need a sea connection. But so did also the connection between Denmark and Norway, Denmark and Iceland, Denmark and Gotland and Denmark and Scania, Denmark and Bornholm. And Denmarks imperialist ambitions in the Baltic sea and its attempts to take Saaremaa also required a navy.
Denmark was also had a big merchant navy. And it was also the most succesful colonial power of all the countries in the Baltic sea, and its possessions in America, Africa and India needed a navy.
Its navy had a much higher quality than the army, and could score many victories against the Swedes even later on. So its not much surprising that the navy gets more attention than the arm.
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@toms169
But couldn't that be because German industry is dependent on russian gas and therefore want to go back to buisness as usual as soon as possible and is fearful to burn all bridges with russia? And then there are German politicians who (probably?) are in the pockets of FSB... like Schröder, Wagenknecht, AfD, the socialdemocrats and so on.
So of course are they against a hardline against russia. And then you got a million strong russian decendents who are pro-russia. And many east Germans have this confused views on Ost-Politik, appeasement, admiration for Putin/Orbans anti-LGBT conservatism, and so on. And then you got stupid pacifists, and women who sincere uncontrollable fear of a nuclear war.
So a consensus is hard to reach. And it is hard to combine new policies with old German political tradition.
And this could explain why Germany is hesitant to send Taurus.
However Germany is not the main problem in Europe. I think the Italian and French indifference to Ukraines fate is more worriesome right now. And Slovakia and Hungary are openly hostile to Ukraine, and USA have even recently held a Nato meeting (togheter with Sweden) where the issue of Hungary was discussed, as there are a concern that this country is acting like a pro-russian Trojan horse inside Nato.
Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia and a few other East European countries do care more about their own farmers than helping the wartorn Ukrainian economy to stay afloat.
I also think that russian FSB have infiltrated our media and is pumping out russian propaganda talking points: "The war is over", "Ukraine cannot win", "Ukraine is forgotten now coz Israel", "The counter-offensive was a massive failure", "Ukrainian losses are heavy and unsubstainable", and such nonsense.
Especially New York Times have pumped out pro-russian garbage throughout this war, with all kinds of lies. They claim that USA destroyed the Northstream pipeline according to an anonymous source. Or that allies are trying to force Zelensky to make peace right now.
Personally I think Ukraine has done pretty well this year. Russian artillery have been dealt a severe blow with losing 5000 pieces this year. They have lost their most modern pieces and now more and more use old D1 artillery pieces from WW2 as a replacement. Ukraine now almost have a monopoly on counter-battery radars. And Ukraine now fires more artillery shells per day than russia despite EU have failed to give more than 30% of the 1 million artillery shells it have promised to give to Ukraine. And now russia also lacks experienced artillery crews.
This is devestating I think. A much more hard blow to russia than if they had lost Kherson and Zaporizhia provinces this year. Think about it. This is an artillery war. And russian artillery is nearly extinct because of Ukraines systematic hunt for their artillery pieces. And imagine having to fight this war for 10 years without artillery. That would be devestating for russia. You cannot fight defensive war effectivly without artillery, and even less so can you make any attacks.
So I think russia is doomed if we keep on supporting Ukraine.
Russian industry only produce something like 200.000 artillery shells per year (according to Ukrainian sources) or 1 million (according to russian sources). But when russia consumes 17 million artillery shells this year and 22 million back in 2022... then I think russia no longer can keep on fighting the war next year like they have the previous years. And 1 million artillery shells imported from North Korea will only shortly delay the coming starvation of artillery shells.
And without artillery shells will more infantry die and losses starts to go up. Ukraine knows what this hardship means, and soon will russia also begin to feel it.
I also suspect that the russian propaganda about their economy doing fine is just nonsense. Having a 15% interest rate is not what I call a healthy economy. When people have to pay more money to the banks for their homeloans, credit card debts, car loans, student debts and so on.. before they can start buying food, books, cinemas tickets and furniture.. then I think that the russian economy will slowly starve itself to death. If no one can afford to buy stuff anymore will factories be forced to shut down, or to lower wages or fire workers. And when people no longer get a wage, then they will be even more unable to buy anything - so factories have to downscale production even more and lay off workers.
And that means less taxes coming in to the government, and more people that needs unemployment benefits and welfare to survive when they cannot work and support themselves.
I also think it is difficult for companies to earn a 15% profit per year so they can afford to both repay their loans and make a profit. And on top of that they also need to pay for wages, repairs for machines, and for material inputs for production.
So I think the desperate measure of raising interest rates to prevent the ruble from falling will become very harmful to the russian economy. And they will probably have to raise interest rates even more in the future.
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@charlesgrant-skiba5474
"Owning a radio and listening to foreign stations was forbidden"
That doesn't mean it never happened that a few listened to it and could have informed their countrymen.
"The Gestapo even chased people for telling political jokes."
The nazi state did not have the muscles to opress the entire German people all of the time. It was a weak state which had to listen to public opinion. If the regime became too unpopular among the german people for being so opressive that every minor joke and criticism gave a ticket to a concentration camp, then it would quickly fall. People would not just accept that everyone is getting a family member killed over a petty thing.
Heck even the Rosenstrasse protest could not be beaten down out of the fear of public backlash. So if more Germans had protested like those women, the holocaust would have been stopped from doing further harm.
"Who in such a situation would be able to believe the enemy even if he had access to information other than the Nazi ones?"
German soldiers wrote home to their families stories about mass executions the had witnessed in the east.
"Besides, not only the German society, but also other nations (e.g. French, Italians, Hungarians, Slovaks, Poles, Lithuanians, Czechs, Ukrainians, and others) also claim that they did not realize the scale of the crimes committed against Jews (despite the fact that Most of the extermination camps were located outside Germany, mainly in the east)."
That was in the age before google and free translation. And the six death camps inside Poland were top secret installations so it was of course impossible to know exactly how many that got killed. Even to this day there is a debate on the exact number as the nazis did their best to hide their crimes as they burned documents, killed people who knew too much, and burned bodies into ashes and death camps had their gas chambers destroyed and trees were planted over area where places like Sobibor once stood so no one would know what had happened there.
However there was no secret that people murdered by the hundreds of thousands. Babi Yar and such events had many visitors that could see what the nazis were up to. The progroms in Lviv can you google images and see for yourself what the nazis did in open day light towards jewish women in 1941. Or you could see things that happened in Latvia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mroRsZ5ygUY
The holocaust was an ill hidden secret.
And the German gas vans quickly got the nickname "murder vans" by the local population everywhere they came, as people could hear the screams and people banging on the walls inside the truck as they were being gassed to death and then dumped into a mass grave.
Finally would I say that even many nazis opposed the holocaust. They may have liked Hitler and his policies in other areas than his genocide stuff. Oskar Schindlear was for example a member of the nazi party and he traveled to Poland to exploit cheap slave labor, but ended the war as a great hero and savior of jewish lives. Karl Plagge
Helmut Kleinicke and Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz were also members of the nazi party and saved large numbers of jews.
And even men at the Wansee conferance tried to limit the harm the nazis were doing to the jews by suggesting sterilization instead of mass murder, and trying to save half-jews from the gallows. Kritzinger and Stuckart were no angels - they were bad people as well, but at least did the have the decency to oppose the worst proposals of other nazis during the conferance.
And if even nazis could oppose the holocaust, then I think that the German public which were even less entusiatic about Hitler should have done more to oppose this stupid genocide-race policy crap.
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Yes there are differences between models of the same tank. An Iraqi Abrams is quite shitty compared the latest upgraded tanks. Just as there are differences between the Russian T-72 and the thinly armoured export version of the T-72 M(onkey model) in Iraw that you in just in one earlier post mocked as an example that Eastbloc armour sucks.
Furthermore is it ironic that you celebrate the old Soviet tank design of relying more upon earlier combat experiences than modern technical solutions as the western powers did during the cold war. T-34/76 and T34/85 was a great tank, so why change a winning concept they thought?
So then the lower profile version came - known as the t44 - which looks quite similiar to the T34.
And then came the T55 which also got much in common with the earlier tanks.
And same with the T62, and then with the T72, and then with the T80 and the T90.
Armata is a step away from the old Soviet tradition. And its true that usally not everything will go perfect, but one has to start the next generation of tanks somewhere - and the Russians are early into the game. And the country who have the next generation of superior weapons will have the upper hand on the battlefield. And I must say that I am impressed by this poor country for not just putting out one weaponsystem better than everything in the western world - but many!
America got a GDP 17 times larger and an average American worker makes 4 times as much stuff as a Russian worker. And America spends more on its military than the other 8 largest military spenders in the world combined.
And yet poor Russia makes better planes, better tanks and better attack helicopters.
T-50 is soon becoming the worlds best fighter (the best today is SU35), and today Armata is the worlds most modern tank. And Ka-52 is the best attack helicopter.
Anyways, back to the tank-talk.... I think the old concept of a tank is dying out with technological progress. In the future will computers&robots handle things better than any human can. No pilots or tank crewmen needs to be trained. Fighter jets would be able to make aggressive turns with a computer than what a human body could endure in terms of G-force. And the human body is quite limited compared to the sensitivity of sensors of all kinds... optical, thermal, noise sensors, sensors that can detect the smell of chemical compounds - yea, your name it....
And all those sensors can be made with a precision a human is incapable of. Already today there are common with air combats between planes where the pilots cannot see each other with the naked eye because of the large distances.
We have GPS-guided Tomahawk missiles, and self-driving cars.
So I think the temptation of replacing humans with robots will be large in the future.
And sticking with the old ways of doing things could just lead to a dead end. Just like the castles in Europe that was built with tall thin walls so no one could climb over them, but then someone came with the gunpowder and ruin everything...
And then all well trained knights had their expensive armour pierced by peasants with cheap fireweapons. And in the first world war things like Cavalry, colourful uniforms and marching in formation on the battlefield quickly dissapeared.... as new deadly weapons had made all the old ways of making war obsolete.
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I guess expensive equipment dies off just like the battlehips did. It quickly became obvious in World War 2 that those dinosaurs with big guns and thick armor had no chance against planes, submarines and torpedos.
So after the war did navies build ships the size of destroyers or smaller that could carry torpedos, as big artillery gun platforms had become obsolete. Faster, cheaper, smaller hard to hit ships with torpedos became the new prefered weapon at sea. And in the 1960s did those torpedo boats start to become obsolete as USSR began building the worlds first small fast boats armed with anti-ship missiles.. and Russia shortly spammed out over 200 of those small ships.
I think that was the final nail in the coffin for battleships and cruisers.
And it now seems like drones are eating up more and more of airplanes and helicopters roles. They are cheaper and you do not risk getting pilots killed. And you can get instant images for correcting artillery fire with them so you do not have to risk the lives of pilot flying a piper cub to correct artillery fire like in World war 2.
Helicopters were vulnerable already in Vietnam, but if there ever was a war in which they should have been succesful, then it should have been there as anti-helicopter counter-measures were in its infancy there and the 3rd world country Vietnam had very limited abilities to challange US airpower on its own.
The huey Cobra became a cool new addition to the US military and could bring much fire power to escort transport helicopters and support ground troops. But they were still of course fragile things with no armor. And against an opponent with lots of anti-aircraft systems it would result in a bloodbath for the helicopters - like what happened during the invasion of Laos when the military insisted on support from helicopters rather than fast moving aircrafts with bigger payloads and which were faster flying and harder to hit.
I think that the helicopter airmobile division concept became a dissapointment in this war. People dreamt that it would revolutionize warfare as troops now could quickly move in 3 dimensions and get behind enemies and quickly close encirclements or reposition artillery pieces.
But this helicopter unit was weak as helicopters could not carry too much heavy equipment and supplies. And helicopters were easy to shot down and they needed landing zones to drop the drops, and in the early years in the war did the US military lack ideas in how they quickly could create new such. So this unit became handicapped and a dissapointment that could not live up to the high expectations and dreams people had before the war.
However, during the war did the helicopter prove itself as enormously valueable as an ambulance for wounded soldiers and as a troop transport alternative to paratroops. And in those roles I still expect helicopters to be valuable in the future.
But aside from that will they probably get more and more replaced by ugly drones, and the diverse flora of cheap and expensive anti-aircraft weapons of all ranges and types will probably make helicopter landing attacks dangerous and suicidal. So stealth, suppression and the element of surprise will probably be important if you wanna land troops with helicopters.
So small cheap massproduced drones are replacing expensive more expensive weapon systems like A10s, attack helicopters and such.
And the artillery duels in Ukraine seems to have become a competition about which side got the most long range artillery and most counter-battery artillery radars. If you can destroy your enemy from more far away than he can shot back at you, then you will be able to sooner or later dominate the battlefield. The enemy troops can then afterwards be wiped out, and leave the door open for your own troops to launch your own offensives.
World war 1 was partly a defensive war because of barbed wires, indirect artillery and machine guns was barriers too difficult to penetrate. And enemy troops in trenches was hard to destroy. And barbed wire was difficult to destroy and could only be cut through with either massive rains of high explosive artillery shells or with battle tanks.
However often did offensives manage to punch a hole into enemy lines.
But the lack of radio communication made it impossible to coordinate your troops once you had pushed deep into enemy land. Your artillery could not see the enemy, and without radio communication with the frontline troops there was no way they could hit targets that the artillery men could not see themselves. It was also difficult and took hours to get situation updates from the frontline to the Generals headquarter... so deserate calls for reinforcements from the frontline troops usually arrived too late.
So when the enemy counter-attacked he had the advantage of knowing the terrain, having shorter supply lines, and being able to have more instant contact between the troops and the head-quarters.
So the defenders thereby always had an advantage and could easily beat back an enemy attack as it had not yet dug it, lacked fire support, and reinforcements had not arrived to support the weakened troops and protect their flanks.
So before the invasion of the radio and the auftragstaktik was World war 1 doomed to be a stalemate.
Today however we do got the ability to communicate over very long distances. Far beyond the range of say 30-50km that the human eyes can see. So the coordination problem of world war 1 does no longer exist. So I don't think we will see the exactly the same type of war as world war 1 being fought again.
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@qinby1182 "WHAT YOU MUST UNDERSTAND EU IS NOT AN ORGANISM WITH A WILL OF ITS OWN IT IS A UNION REFLECTING THE WILL OF THE MEMBER COUNTRIES"
The will of the ruling elite in those countries. Not the will of the people.
But I guess this difference doesn't matter to middle class champagne socialists.
"what is with you and the fish fixation??"
I like cods. Both on the plate and in the ocean.
And I hope future generations also will get the chance to taste its delicious low fat white meat.
*"Should also add … that Sweden did not have a war for 182 years is a very stupid comment…
all the neighbors are smaller and who wants to conquer Sweden???"*
Nope it is your comment here that is stupid and display ignorance of history. Sweden had Russia as its neighbour until Finland became independent in late 1917. Sweden was also much targeted for its iron and Britain planned an invasion of Norway and Sweden in 1940 to take control over that vital resource, but their plans had to be abolished when Hitlers troops attacked Norway in April.
And during the cold war was the Soviet union a serious threat to all countries in its proximity.
"Anyway EU is a peace project"
It is a project for European imperialism now when the old colonial empires are dead, and the big countries sees this as a chance for revenge and to retake the global influence they have lost since France and Britain failed to retake the Suez canal in 1956.
Why else would it want its own army? Why else would it have its warmongering rethoric towards America?
Why else would it want a small rapid response force that can be deployed anyware in the world with a short notice, when a large conscription army is a better option if the goal is to defend Europe from a foreign invasion?
I have no interest in having my country being part of a military pact. Especially not with warmongering imperialist countries like France that only invaded Libya in 2011 so that their oil company Total could steal their oil.
Why do the richer countries in EU give money (GIVE, not borrow) to the poorer"
Because Eurocrats wants their own power and prestige to grow, and bribing the people Eastern Europe is a cheap way to get public support there for the EU project.
And as the economist Guglielmo Meardi says so have the EU only made the poor worse off in those eastern countries.
"BUT AT LEAST THERE IS A FORUM TO DEAL WITH IT"
As I said earlier, there have been international cooperation before the EU. And unlike the EU have they also been able to function. While the EU only have produced failures in immigration, in economics, in research (like the outdate galileo project), in fighting crime, in enviromental policies, in democracy, and in fighting corruption.
So if some countries want a military pact, then fine they cant create their own alliance while Sweden keeps its long tradition of neutrality instead. And if European countries wanna help each other fight crime or sharing firemen, planes and helicopters to fight wildfires then there is nothing that prevents them from doing so even if an EU doesn't exist.
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Overall do I think this global "one size fits all" suits the world badly.
What we need is more national democracy and solutions more suited for the situation for a specific country.
Another important reason why I reject globalism, is that poor countries almost always needs protectionism to industrialize so they can get out of poverty.
In todays world order all countries are forced to have free trade regardless if they like it or not. And that might not be much of a problem for advanced economies like USA, but for uncompetative less developed countries like in Africa this is devestating.
And most of this "Washington consensus" ideology also have close ties to fascism - as we have seen in Chile under Pinotchet, in Iraq under George W Bush and Russia under Yeltsin. And TTIP, TPP and CETA are also globalist institutions that are highly anti-democratic in their nature.
The track record of international institutions like the World Bank, IMF and WTO during the 1980s and 1990s is not pretty, unless one likes genocide of ordinary people in 2nd and 3rd world countries.
And todays unnecessarily harsh copyright and patent laws only serve to enrich an elite, while innovation is slowed down, internet is censored, people in poor countries die when they don't get access to cheap copies of medicines, and developing countries get it harder to aquire foreign modern technologies - which are needed for poor countries to be able to increase their productivity in their economy so they can get out of poverty.
Todays globalist world order sucks and needs to be destroyed.
The WTO should throw all modern treaties into the trash and go back to the 1960s GATT agreements, which offered poor countries more policy freedoms to implement protectionist policies. And the banking sector was better regulated.
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I hate the "climate argument" since it stinks enviromental determinism. And David S Landes is just as guilty as Jared Diamond in this when he tries to explain away all other factors with this...
He says Europe had the best climate, and USA the second best. Europe never had any hurricanes. It wasn't so hot that it was exhausting to go outside like in tropical countries in India, Arabia or Africa where it was increadibly exhausting to work an hour outside in the sun. And the cold winters effectivly killed off many diseases, that otherwise flourish so much in tropical climates like malaria in Africa.
Europe also have a relativly steady flow of rainfall, while in the Agra region of India, for example, the rainfall exceeds the current
needs of agriculture for only two months in the year, and the excess held in the soil in those wet months dries up in only three weeks.
And about rivers in Africa Landes writes this: "The Volta drains over 100,000 square kilometers in West Africa—half
the area of Great Britain—but when low, averages at its mouth a meager
flow of only 28 cubic meters per second, as against 3,500-9,800 at the peak. Drought in the Volta basin comes at the hottest and windiest time of year, and loss of water to evaporation is discouragingly high."
And about rainfall did Landes write this:
"Water is another problem. Tropical areas generally average enough rainfall, but the timing is often irregular and unpredictable, the downpours anything but gentle. The drops are large; the rate of fall torrential. The averages mean nothing when one goes from one extreme to the other, from one year or season or one day to the next. In northern Nigeria, 90 percent of all rain falls in storms of over 25 mm. per hour; that makes half the average monthly rainfall at Kew Gardens, outside London. Java has heavier pours: a quarter of the annual rainfall comes down at 60 mm. per hour.
In such climes, cultivation does not compete easily with jungle and rain forest"
And Landes argue that unfree labour and slavery was more common in hot climates because it is hard to get any free person that is willing to do the work. So who do you pick for picking cotton or harvesting sugar when it is 40°C?
-You of course let a lave do the job, because that is a person who cannot say no.
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@ВячеславСкопюк I see China, North America and India as roughly equal to Europe when it comes to natural resources. Unless you see the world as I and Jared Diamond do and see domesticated animals and plants as a “resource”.
And how do even value a resource? Industrial and technological progress always changes and one precious resource can be totally worthless the next day.
Salt was precious resource in the past needed for preserving food and essential for fielding large armies. But today this resource abundant and cheap - so cheap that it is even used on icy highways.
Incense was the most valuable commodity in antiquity in terms of value of the trade in a particular commodity. But today there is no longer much need for it.
During the bronze age was copper and tin extremely important strategic resources which Ancient Egypt and Sumeria saw as vital national interests, the same way as USA today think their oil supply needs to be secure at all costs. The bronze age ended however, and the iron age and iron age superseded it.
And in 1677 it was perhaps seen as the Netherlands made a good deal with England when they exchanged a valuable island in the pacific in exchange for New York. But today the Banda islands and the global nutmeg trade is no longer much valuable to the global economy. New York is a precious hub in the global economy, while the island Run is a place most people never heard of.
Well what I guess what I am trying to say here is that innovation can overcome much of the resource scarcity. So I am more interested in institutions and good governance and innovation than what I am in resources.
Only backwards shithole countries rely on exports of natural resources, while modern economies relies on making high-tech products that no one else have the knowledge how to manufacture. And thus you can charge other countries high prices for your products and make high profits. Natural resources on the other hand only gives you a shitty terms of trade.
There is more competition, and why should I as a foreigner wanna pay any extra to get coal from your Germany when I might as well import coal cheaper from USA, Russia, Australia, UK or China?
Another problem with relying on only selling natural resources instead of manufacturing products is that you can run out of your resources. What should Saudiarabia do when there is no oil left in the ground? And what should countries do when they have cut down all trees and brought all fish up from their waters? Then they have nothing more to sell, and they will have to starve to death.
Another danger is that innovation makes natural resources worthless. What would happen with Saudiarabia if a new better energy source gets invented?
Western countries have now invented food substitutes for sugar and vanilla, and those products have replaced some of our use for those products so the demand for sugar and vanilla has fallen along with the market price - which have harmed many poor countries in Africa that have nothing else to sell.
And likewise have the invention of fiber cables decreased the need for copper worldwide, and big countries dig up old telephones wires and dump that copper on the world market which depresses the price of copper and harm copper exporting countries.
So new technologies have the potential of destroying the entire economy of a country - like what happened to the countries in Central America that relied on selling paint made from insects (cochineal). In the past this was a precious resource. But when a British chemist named Perkins got the job of experimenting and finding out any use for coal tar (which was a waste product that England produced too much of and wanted to get rid of) he found out that this material could be used for making synthetic dye.
And this is quite typical of the chemical industry - what is a waste product one day, often becomes a resource another. Perkins became a millionaire and England’s chemical industry had now been born. But for many American countries was this invention a disaster to their economy.
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Bryan McBeth have made a video explaining why USAs military budged is not overbloated. USA is a much bigger country and therefore have a lot more territory to defend and many more likely threats from here and there. Many European countries do not have such problems, as Finland, Sweden and the Baltics only have to care about the russians. Spain and Ireland are not exactly close to any military threats as France is a part of Nato and Britain does neither have the political will to take Ireland or being willing to pacify the population there for decades while taking criticism from all over Europe. And Ireland is also part of EUs military alliance.
And nor do I think that the Netherlands are worried that the pacifist Germany that they are allied to with will invade them.
I see USAs defence spending as wise as long as it do not involve itself in stuff like Iraq and Libya and only stick to taking out terrorists and fight russia and China. Then no money will be wasted. And much of the military spending will help USA economically. First by denying land from being taken over by unfriendly countries (ie preventing Ukraine from being taken over by Russia). Secondly by countries buying american weapons through exports, and getting used to buying American - like Ukraine is doing now.
And thirdly by inventions of military technologies that becomes enormously useful for civilian use later and help to create new gigantic companies based around those new ideas. And that means hundreds of thousands of new jobs and billions of profits flowing into America. Think about the internet and how companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook have uplifted america. And how the military has invented the GPS, microelectronics, modern food (the father of almost all modern food in grocery stores, Howard Moskowitz worked for the US Army), semi-conductors, the touch screen technology, airbags, new materials for dentures etc etc.
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It costs nothing to threaten. Like a company threatens to move to another country if it don't get tax cuts, deregulation and so on. They have only upside by threaten and no downsides.
And the same goes with Russia here. But its empety threats. They know that we will exterminate them if they do something stupid. Their pathetic 3rd world country cannot win a war against USA and Europe. It is guaranteed to a conventional war and it is guaranteed to lose a nuclear war.
China is a real super power unlike Russia, but it have falling birthrates and an ageing population which will give it economic problems and problems with finding manpower for its military. And when you have fewer and fewer young people its harder to fill the ranks in the military. The military and the companies will compete with each other for the young males, because there is not enough men to go around anymore.
And I also think that you will see much a repeat of European power balance politics in Asia if China becomes too powerful and threatening. Just like European countries came togheter to fight against the Habsburg family in Spain and Austria when it became too powerful. Then you had the thirty years war, and an unholy alliance against them with German protestant princes, Dutch independence fighters, France, Swedes, Danes, Brits, Russians Swiss and Italians and Portuguese fighting against Spain and the Austrian holy Roman empire.
And likewise would countries gang up against Napoleon.
And China have many enemies in the pacific. And no wonder why after its occupation of Tibet, its genocide on Uighurs, its broken promise of respecting Hong Kongs democracy, its theft of fresh water from the Mekong river which now destroys life in Indochina.
China have a history of invading Vietnam and is still fighting over some coastal islands with them. They invaded India a few decades ago and they support Indias arch-enemy Pakistan - a country which no other country in the world likes.
China is also having border disputes in the pacific ocean with Japan and the Philipines. And they openly aggressive towards Taiwan, and they back up North Koreas dictatorship which is hostile to South Korea.
And China is a country also involved with bullying western countries such as Canada and Sweden.
So building a large anti-Chinese coalition should not be difficult if China becomes too powerful and too arrogant and warmongering.
You will be able to create a Nato of the Pacific.
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@someonesomeone25
"Even if more people die through suicide or negligence"
I don't care about suicides either - their body their choice.
And hunting accidents can happen with a rifle. And if you are on the countryside, then there will of course be a higher risk of bleeding to death before the ambulance can take you to a hospital. And a rifle does cause a much bigger wound than a pistol, which is another reason why its so deadly. But even so I defend hunting.
But when it comes to parents not handling their weapons correctly so children dies in accidents, then I see a strong reason for gun control
"I still consider it a fundamental human right to be able to effectively defend oneself and others and your property"
I see that as the job of the police. The only time I consider extreme violance acceptable is if someone opens the window and enters your house without permission. Using extreme violance is now a form of self-defence and the aggressor only got himself to blame for everything happening to him.
But aside from that, nope. Shooting a kid to death for stealing an apple from your garden seems disproportional.
And catching robbers of a gas station is the job of the police.
In general do I think a society is better off if the only guns people use are hunting rifles. And if those weapons are also used to defend ones own home or used to commit suicide (the typical method of white men aged 70+)
then I do not mind. Those weapons too can of course also be used for murders and robbery, but it is still possible to have extremely low crime rates despite a widespread use of those weapons.
Selling automatic weapons to young black Americans is however a recipy for gang violance, murder and crime.
And when you make them more accessible you make crime rates go up. Cowards use those guns when they are unsure if they can punch down rival that done something bad. And the respons then become gun violance.
Multicultural ethnic tensions, and drug markets makes those areas more violent.
And it is in those areas where nearly all shootings occur. That is the situation in America, and its mostly the same in other European countries. 70% of all shootings in Sweden happens in the 3 biggest cities - and more specifically, in the poor ghettos with high unemployment and much drug sales by criminal gangs.
More and more submachine guns are used.
And those weapons are more deadly than a single shot by a pistol. And culture is now also changeing. In the past you did beat up a rival to send him a signal to change. Then did gun violance become popular, and shooting someone in the foot became more popular instead. But today it have become more common to fire directly into someones stomach or head - with more deadly results.
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But have this calculation taken into consideration if improved production methods have changed the price of the car? What about the prices of raw materials, maybe the prices was different in war time Germany than in peace time in the 1960s?
Prices change for other reasons than inflation you know. And maybe thats why it is so damn hard to calculate what things costed in the past.
The price of bread, gold, iron, silver, copper, fish, corn, horses have always gone up and down in price throughout history. And inflation is about the general average price level.
And prices could change for all kinds of reasons, wartime shortages, more effiecent production methods, increased demand, lack of competition, technological progress that makes some products outdated (ie typewriters and analog cameras) that falls in price while modern products is more valuable.
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@frankhusel5033 The Wehrmacht was tactically excellent, and it was strategically capable of understanding how to conquer for example a city. Germany did some stupid grand strategy mistakes - but that is another matter.
And the German troops were willing to fight, while the russian military have always been plauged with mass surrenders. And while the SS behaved like swine on the eastern front, would I still say that the Wehrmacht were much more civilized. More civilized than the red army which were always firing on ambulances, and had the habit of gangraping little girls, killing wounded soldiers at hospitals and mutilating captured enemy soldiers, beating them and starving them to death - a tradition which Putin seems to have preserved.
The Wehrmacht did however by contrast usually obey the Geneva convention. At least on the western front.
The Clean Wehrmacht is a myth, but on the other hand is it a myth that all men in the army was evil bastards. Most of the men who served wanted to treat russian civilians well and captured red army soldiers with the same respect as soldiers captured in the west.
But because of the commisar order from Hitler did the German army also partially participate in the killing of communists and jews.
However, I will still say that the red army was worse and did more war crimes than the German army.
And from a historical perspective is the russian army the most barbaric of all. With warcrimes against Swedes, Finns, Poles, Germans, and brutal occupation of Czechs, slovaks and Hungarians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and more warcrimes and terror bombings in Syria, Chechenya, Georgia, Dagestan and Afghanistan. Genocide on hundreds of thousands of jews during world war 1.
And warcrimes by the Wagner group in Africa.
Warcrimes against civilians is built in into the Russian way of war. That differs it from other European armies who do not deliberatly kill civilians and use rape as a war tactic.
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I want to end the wars, and get my democracy back. I want to end NSA spying on its people when they are not suspected of any crime. And I want freedom of speech back. Copyright laws should be weakened.
And the fascist trade deals should be scrapped, and poor countries should be freed from the shackels of IMF and WTO rules.
I want the left to deal with inequality, and rebuilding the safety net, and let the government involve itself in the economy again to make industrial policy. Full employment should be a national priority again.
There should be a strong government that can bring the financial sector in order. And some areas of public life should not be runned for the sake of profit - like the military, the police, prisons, schools, and basic healthcare.
And the government should look at other succesful models of managing housing so it can benifit all of society instead of just the rich - like South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Germany.
Those are some of the issues that I care about. Your hobby horses can you keep for yourself.
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@umaddude3808 More than half of EUs transports are done by ships. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=File:Value_of_extra-EU_trade_in_goods,_by_mode_of_transport,_EU-28,_2002_and_2016_(%25_of_total)_GL17.png
And I am sure that some types of goods can be replaced by trucks, planes or railroads. But I am also certain that many types of goods cannot be replace shipping as the way of transport.
Sea transports are superior to all other forms of transport when it comes to cheaply transporting heavy bulky goods such as iron ore, coal and grain.
And that is the reason why almost all global trade in those goods are done by ship.
And replacing gigantic harbours as Hamburg, Rotterdam, Antwerpen with trains and trucks is simply nothing one can do over a night.
It is nearly impossible to overstate the importance of sea transports for global trade. During the roman empire was it chaper to transport a ship full of wheat from one end of the mediterranean to the other (from Syria to Spain), than to cart it 75 miles over land.
So it was probably no cincidence that Athens became a great power with its many islands and that Greek became the first global world language, the same way english became so after the creation of its huge naval empire.
Rome depended on the mediterranean for its empire. Same goew for Genoa and Venice. The hanseatic league and the Swedish empire relied on the baltic trade instead. And Portugal, the Netherlands, Britain were great naval empires as well.
So the military and economic importance of sea transports have been great. And its superiority to land transports were overwhelming in speed and cost effiency up until the creation of the railroads.
And even today does air transports only represent a tiny bit of all global trade. And airplanes are mostly used for transporting goods of light weight, high value and high price - such as microships that needs a fast delievery.
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I think the Swedens largest blogger on economics and defence formulated things well:
"Ukraine is currently taking the brunt as a defender of the prosperity, welfare, freedom and democracy of the EU and NATO countries, by taking the fight against Russia on its land and it is Ukrainians who are killed, murdered, tortured and raped by Russian troops, while large parts of the country are laid in ruins by the Russian attacks and terrorist bombings. As a bastion of Europe's freedom, it is the EU's and NATO's damned moral obligation to finance Ukraine's reconstruction, but also to take care of refugees and the injured. The alternative to a Ukrainian victory in Ukraine is that Russia continues and attacks further against EU countries such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Finland and Sweden, possibly also Romania, and of course Moldova (which iofs as Europe's poorest country is neither in the EU or NATO). Ukraine is bleeding and saving us from the same fate, so we must be prepared to finance reconstruction and until the victory receive refugees and injured."
https://cornucopia.se/2022/04/eu-och-nato-har-en-moralisk-skyldighet-att-finansiera-ukrainas-ateruppbyggnad-efter-segern-och-ta-hand-om-flyktingar-och-skadade/
(translation made with Google translate)
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@serhio250381 Швеция не является частью НАТО. Поэтому Швеция не бомбила Сербию в конце 1990-х годов, и Швеция не участвовала во вторжении в Ирак в 2003 году.
Швеция, однако, участвовала в войнах в Афганистане и Ливии. И наше правительство поддержало «демократическую оппозицию» в Сирии. И каким-то образом шведские ручные гранаты оказались в руках ИГИЛ.
Так я горжусь шведским империализмом? Нету. И надеюсь, вам одинаково стыдно за российский империализм и воровство Крыма.
Я хочу, чтобы моя Швеция осталась вне ЕС, и ее глупый военный союз. Я предпочитаю мир, нейтралитет и хорошие отношения с другими странами, включая Россию.
Швеция теперь является марионеточным государством ЕС, и после того, как мы подписали Лиссабонский договор, наша страна теперь имеет военный союз с другими странами ЕС, и мы обязаны помочь другой стране, если они подвергаются нападениям - например, Франция после террористической атаки ИГИЛ в Париже. Так что теперь Швеция официально воюет с ИГИЛ, и большинство шведов слишком неосведомлены о ЕС, чтобы даже знать об этом.
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This guy is shitty and cannot even make good criticism of clowns like free-stuff-Cortez.
Printing money is not a problem as long as you use it for productive investments instead of spending the money on useless consumption. If you borrow the money to start a buisness or getting a good education that allows you to make more money in the future, then there is no problem with borrowing money. And the same thing is true for the government - you can create money (aka "borrowing money") and use the money to improve the economy by more money for research, education, job training programs for workers, infrastructure etc.
When you use your money for good things, then creating money is substainable.
But if you spend your borrowed money on things that doesn't improve the economy, like the upkeep of the useless EU parliament in Strassbourg, or money for printing up EU propaganda, or wasting billions of money on airport nobody uses... then of course will get the value of your currency destroyed in the long run.
And the system becomes unsubstainable.
And here is my problem with MMT. It cannot work when politicians lie and rebrand 𝗰𝗼𝘀𝘁𝘀 as 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀.
That will harm the credibility of MMT in the long run just like Epstein says. And todays left is simply too immature for having a reason to exist. When immigration of millions of low educated, highly criminal, not-easily-assimilated groups of people come in to your country you have to realize that it is a problem. It is a 𝗰𝗼𝘀𝘁 and NOT an 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀.
And as long as the political establishment refuse to tell the truth, then the idea of MMT will be doomed to never succeed.
You cannot make a clownish wishlist of open borders, closing down all nuclear plants today, and then demand an univeral basic income of 30.000 dollars a month for everyone. This shit will not work. And as long as my leftwing party is allied with clowns that propose this, then I will continue to vote for other parties.
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I think countries did not have much of choice. You cannot just change your doctrine in the middle of a war or just a few years before it. Because then you need to produce millions of new rifles. Your men needs to be trained to handle a new weapon and new tactics.
Germany could not provide all their men with a sturmgewehr even if it had wanted to. And also MP-40 was a weapon that was in short supply and same goes for MG-34. But Germany did have a plenty of Mauser 98k and MG-42 which were not bad weapons, but they were things that had many flaws and it could be argued that the M1 Garand that the Americans had were better a rifle than 98k. But it was also a new design unlike the German mauser 98k, which had been in use already from the mid 1800's as a hunting rifle.
So I think one can say that the US infantry had better equipment than the Germans. Better uniforms, better rations plus more luxuries such as cookies, chewing gum, coca-cola, Nestle chocolate bars, better healthcare (penicillin), and better rifles, more ammo and more vehicles, radios and artillery and air power support.
Germany did on the other hand have more combat experience (atleast during the first half of the war). And Germany had tried out and perfected their military doctrines in two world wars, and in the long tradition of the Prussian army.
So German tactics and training were top notch.
Germany could often defeat stronger opponents thanks to their skill fulled leadership and excellent doctrines. Things like Auftragstaktik, kampfgruppen, and stosstruppen tactics gave Germany the upper hand with speedy decision-making and more flexibility of the battlefield. Thanks to this was the German army was the fastest on the battlefield, despite it was less motorized than the British and American armies.
On a tactical level could the German army show brilliance until the end of the war. But it made many strategic blunders and lost many armies. And the enemies were more plentiful and often better equipped so German losses did of course pile up throughout the war. And Germany lost many of their highly skilled NCOs - which were the backbone in the German army. And without their experience and good leadership, it became more difficult to upheld the same level of talented fighting skill on the battlefield.
And the Americans and Russians had learned to improve their armies the hard way in the middle of the war. And less noob mistakes were done by them during the last years of the war.
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@ulrikschackmeyer848
They have been fighting a war and maybe they are fully busy with that. So maybe I don't blame the pilots as much as I would blame the Ukrainian government for not thinking a single step ahead. This language problem was completly predictable and could have been foreseen and solved months ago. Realizing that they need to learn english in the middle of the summer of this year seems a bit dumb 🙄
I mean the west have talked about giving Ukraine fighter jets since at least january.
Ukrainians take credit upon themselves and blame the lack of aid from the west for all military failures instead of being honest and admit that not everything is the wests fault.
Dumb incompetence like this do certainly cause some problems fighting this war as well.
Ukrainian propaganda is extremely dumb sometimes. They say that they will continue to fight regardless if the west helps them or not, and take the last years succesful defense of their country as an example of that.
But that are lies. And I demand honesty and gratefulness to its allies instead of using them as scapegoats for ukraines dissapointments on the battlefields.
Fact remains that Ukraine would have lost this war by now if it was not for the west. Without western artillery would the stocks of 152mm shells have runned out and the ukrainian military would have been forced to fight without artillery support - which would definatly made Ukraine lose the war regardless how brave their soldiers may be.
Javelins, stingers, HIMARS, Patriot, Gepard are also system which Ukraine could not have done without.
And the economic aid from USA and EU have been vital for propping up an economy suffering from enemy occupation, sea blockades, destruction, refugees, young men in the military, landmines on farmlands, energy blackouts, rationing...
So giving west blame for everything is unfair. I sympatize with the Ukrainian cause as my web history the last 1.5 years bare witness of. I think it have taken 8 full months for just the training to get started. That is poor performance by both Nato and Ukraine.
We should have started training instantly. Which aircraft would be delievered, in what amounts, with what modifications and what nationality of those planes and such details could be sorted out later while the pilots are training. But for some reason do people at Nato to be very inflexible in their line of thought 🙄
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I say that Britain have the stronger hand here, but May is playing her cards so shitty that I suspect treason. After all, asking a remainer to make a Brexit is like asking a vegan to make a meat dish.
Historically speaking has trade wars usally been won by the side with a large current account deficit, so a large importer like Britain have much less to lose from a trade war than a large exporter like Germany. And that is a strong on British hands.
UK is still one of the largest economies in the world by far. A GDP roughly equal to all 46 countries in sub-saharan Africa combined except South Africa. Or roughly as large as all states in Confederate states of America except Texas. And it is also a world financial centre and the home country of many large corporations.
So therefore are foreigners very keen on making trade deals with Britain because there are hundreds of millions in profits that can be made there. Even without the EU it is still a huge market.
So say that Germany is stupid enough to shoot themselves in the foot and ditch a trade deal. That will only mean billions of lost exports for them. While UK could just import cars from USA, Japan, and South Korea instead.. and all of them would be more than happy to fill gap left by Germany and create thousands of jobs back home and earning billions by growing their share of the huge British market.
So as you see, once again do Britain got the upper hand.
Furthermore do Britain play a big fiscal role in the EU. And the Union need her tax money very badly. And when Britain leave there will become a budget hole within the EU. So there is no coincidence that the EU demands money from UK to fix the hole. And without UK will the EU become much weaker in every sense of the word (militarily, economically, diplomaticly etc), and the centre of power within the Union is moving from North-west to South-East.
And the union is filled with lots of fighting and fragmentation, and hostility to USA and Russia. So if the EU wanna make life easier for themselves they should offer Britain a fair trade deal, and thereby end the war on the Brexit front.
UK is the banking centre of the world. And admittedly do I not think that this is not only a good thing. But since there are so much doomsday propaganda about all banks leaving the country and move to the EU, I will remain extremely strongly skeptical.
First of all are all financial contracts written in English - because it is a practical thing to do, and I do not think French or German would become the next world language in trade anytime soon.
And most contracts are written in British common law (like in America), and not in the German Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch or French Code Napoleon. So a movement to the continent would probably be very unpractical.
And the EU as an economic project is doomed to fail. Governments are no longer able to get cheap funding from the central bank -like England - after they joined the EU and they will be unable to smoothen up deflationary or inlationary shocks as Bank of England can do to help its own country.
Southern Europe is still in bad shape after the Euro crisis. Too much gambling by banks that were too big to be allowed to crash (because of all the terrible conscequences that would mean) created theEurocrisis, since all the goverments themselves got too much indebted after all hundreds of billions the pumped into the banks.
So have the EU tried to regulate gambling or downsizeing the banks like in the USA after the financial crisis? The answer is no.
So we all know that crash will happen again, because nothing has been done to prevent another crash like the previous one. And next time it will be much worse. Banks are bigger than ever - more than twice as big American banks, and they also take more risks.
And before the last crisis was France, Spain, Ireland and Portugal in great shape with low national debts and low unemployment. But today things are the total opposite and there are no money left in the piggybank for extremely expensive hobbies like bank rescues.
So the EU will probably explode and one can only guess if the EU could survive when the Euro currency project falls apart.
So I fear a dark future ahead. And leaving the EU is probably better than being dragged down with the failing Euro countries. Perhaps Britain will be left as the strongest country in Europe after this disaster, and EU countries will have to grow their exports to England and other places to pull themselves up from their own mess.
I believe Europe will survive this. But the Euro project in its current fom will definatly not.
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I think Germany had some scientific advantage over their opponents, but it could not in itself help bring Germany to victory.
Those who (unlike me) love to speculate about "what if" scenarios could of course argue if Germany maybe could have a realistic chance to win the war if Germany somehow had killed the Normandy landing, avoided the Bagration disaster, and been able to use all panzers lost at Falaise, the Ardennes, Arracourt and other places in the west and thrown them into the east instead to retake the Romanian oil fields, and to inflict heavy manpower losses on the heavily exhausted red army.
Germany had a good education system ever since Frederick the Great and his system was later on copied by countries all over the world. And the heavy investments done by the German Kaiser helped to create many high tech industries in electricity, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Germany had the best educated people in the world. And Hitler would later on inherit this
fantastic science base.
And the rest of the world could not even catch up with Germany, even after the Versaille treaty had forced the country to share its secrets in the chemical industry with the Americans.
It is no surprise that Germany invested so heavily into creating new super weapons that would change the outcome of the war.
In both World wars were Germany fighting a war against enemies with much larger resources, and Germany could simply not win a war of atrittion. Germany needed a fast victory so it tried all kinds of methods to get a speedy victory even if it sometimes
meant using methods that would upset the global world opinion.
During WW1 did the Germans try to break the stalemate with poison gas, flame throwers, and unrestricted submarine warfare.
And in world war 2 was Germany also forced to gamble on new technologies since it did not have manpower or industrial production capacity to compete with the allies on equal terms.
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Nonsense. The Socialdemocratic leadership have always been globalist, pro-EU (and thereby anti-Sweden).
For a long time have they wanted to join globalist clubs like EU/NATO and such but the problem was that the Swedish people felt no entusiasm for that. So how then would they be able to push Sweden into those clubs against the will of the people? If the Swedish military was strong enough to defend itself, then people would not have felt any need to join Nato and sacrifice some of our souvereignty to a globalist institution.
So the Socialdemocrats then decided to destroy our military with defence budget cuts, and disbanding some of the oldest regiments in the world to kill our national pride and connection to history. And then after that they would say: "Our military is too weak to defend ourselves on our own, so now we have to join Nato".
That is how those globalist traitors have acted.
For decades then they took small baby steps towards EUs defence pact and Nato. Mass conscription was abolished in favor of a small professional army which was more focused on international small scale operations and totally useless for a large scale war of self-defence.
Our military budget was wasted on military operations abroad like Mali, Afghanistan, and hunting Somali pirates. And money was laid out to build a Nordic Battlegroup togheter with other Scandinavian countries, because the EU have imperialist ambitions and wants a small military force that can rapidly be deployed somewhere in the world for EUs colonial ambitions. And the Swedish air force also participated in the bombing of Libya.
Another step towards Nato was to allow breeches of our neutrality by allowing our military to do training togheter with Nato forces.
And now the Socialdemocrats presents the Ukrainian invasion as a bullsh*t reason for joining Nato. But in reality this have nothing to do with that. The socialdemocrats planned a membership long ago, and lost their love for independence many decades ago. Now they just made their hidden ambition to join Nato public. That's all.
It is treason. It is treason because joining Nato have been in a very undemocratic way behind the backs of the Swedish people..
The people were not even now after decades of indoctrination allowed to vote if we wanted to join Nato or not.
The correct way of joining Nato would have been to have a public debate on the issue instead. We could have had that debate in the 1990s. One side would stand for neutrality, independence, a strong military, and preserving centuries of proud military traditions.
And the other side would stand for a full EU/Nato membership, colonial wars, selling off our defence industrial base to other countries (SAAB and Hägglunds to England, Kockums and Scania to Germany, Bofors to USA etc). And our military will cost large sums of money despite it is downsized and incapable of defending anything. And our national self-determination would be demolished.
And had the Swedish people been able to vote on the matter, then they would have choosen the former alternative.
So to hell with the socialdemocrats and all other right-wing traitor parties.
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No George, this was not the strategy that the German used.
The idea behind a flexible defence in depth was to let the enemy overextent its supply lines during an advance, while your own troops are shortening it. And then you launch a great counterpunch and encircle and easily destroy your undersupplied enemy. This happened at Kharkov both in 1942 and in 1943.
But Hitler didn't like the idea because he was a man of the first world war, and his beliefs was that every man should be in the frontline instead. And all retreats should be forbidden. Not a step back would be allowed.
1943 started well for the Red Army: after the victory at Stalingrad, it had crossed two major rivers and driven 500 miles into the vast open spaces of the southern Soviet Union in a very short time and had become overstretched.
And the Germans had just evacuated the Caucausus with Army Group A, and the 1st and 4th Panzer Armies (which Hitler didn't wanna evacuate at first until Manstein convinced him, and had Hitlers initial decision been kept would probably had been left in the Caucausus and destroyed).
And few people assumed that the German army had any strenght left after the disaster at Stalingrad. And the Russian had pushed forward in the middle of february to try encircle and destroy what was left of Army group South, by coming from the north and pushing towards the black Sea.
And contrary to what you claim did the Germans have any mobile defence. On the contrary, Hitler strongly opposed the idea of retreating from the Donbass region - which Von Manstein wanted, in order to shorten his frontline and thereby get more men available for his counter-offensive in the north towards Kharkov.
Von Rundstedt had lost his job after outraging Hitler by suggesting the same thing a year earlier.
Hitler and Manstein argued against each other for 5 hours, and Hitler said that it was absolutly vital for the war effort to defend the area for the Ukrainian coal mines and the diplomatic relations with Turkey.
Manstein knew very little of the economic aspects of the war, but he responded that Hitlers choice was now to lose the Ukrainian coal mines with or without Army group Don.
And surprisingly did that argument finally convince Hitler to allow a retreat. And Manstein moved back and created a new frontline behind Mius river, and used the rest of his forces to launch a counter-offensive in the north around Kharkov. The overextended Russians were completly taken by surprised and the got outflanked encircled and destroyed.
And this battle gives a vital lesson of the importance of being economical with your forces. If you try to be strong everyware you will also be weak everyware, as Sun Tzu said. And it was Mansteins retreat and shortening of the frontline that gave him enough forces available for his succesful counterattack, even when the situation was dire.
And Germany could never hope to win a defensive war with Hitlers tactic of letting all troops sit at the frontline along the entire Russian front. Because the Russians were numerically superior and could counter the German all along the frontline and still have enough troops over to concentrate for offensives in certain areas - where the German defensives would probably the weakest.
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Fortifications was not useless. The Siegfried line did a good job of defending Germany against a large scale French attack during the invasion of Poland. And Patton and his superior forces failed to take Metz for months, despite their opposition was made up by some volksturm in old fortications from the 1800s.
And the unimpressive fortifications of the Mannerheim line served Finland very well during their wars against the Soviet union. And the many defensive lines in Italy prevented the allies from taking the country before the war ended.. and the Italian campaign was a failure for the allies in that sense that it didn't make the allied landings in France easier.
Instead the contrary was true, the allies had to commit disproportionally large amounts of troops to the fighting in Italy so less resources were available for the campaign in France.
So are fortifications a bad idea? no.
They are not that useful in themselves, but only an idiot would use fortications and minefields in that way.
No minefields, barbedwires, dragoon teeths, anti-tank mines, boobytraps, trenches and bunkers are best when they are used togheter with defending troops.
And they can tie up disproportionatly large enemy forces for a long time and thereby giving the defenders time to organize a defence or a counterattack. And meanwhile will the prepared defensive positions keep the own losses low, while they can inflict disproportionally high losses on the enemy.
Just ask the German machine gunner Heinrich Severloh, on Omaha beach. He killed 2000 Americans on D-day.
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The demographic structure of Europe makes a civil war unlikely. You will not see old grandmas go out with an AR-15 here. Old people are not like that.
And its good that old people die off and their outdated worldview. Most old people here in Sweden still believe that Russia will invade us and that we are living in the cold war and that we Europeans need to stick togheter in the EU to have a chance... and that a new world war would happen if nationalism replaces the EU.
And the younger generation are too young to remember the days before the EU and therefore believe in the stupid pro-EU propaganda that says it is thanks to the EU that you can travel, work in other countries, and trade with them.
All of this is of course lies. I traveled 3 times to Italy, 1 time to Spain and 1 time to the UK before Sweden joined the EU in 1995. I knew lots of people who worked in other countries before Sweden joined the EU. And I had no problem buying Swiss chocolate, English computer games, Japanese Nintendos, Made in Taiwan toys, or French glass if I wanted to.
If the EU stays alive another half a century they will start telling us lies that the EU makes it possible for us to get bread from our grocery stores and that life would be impossible without it...
The EU is useless and I hope it gets abolished soon. But I don't think people here will like it. I guess Sweden is very typical as an EU country more than Britain. Britain have always been proud over their own country and over their own traditional ways and have therefore always stood in opposition to the Franc-German alliance within the EU. They are known as the boring naysayer among the Europhiles.
Sweden on the other hand is a cucksucker. Our government always sucks Macrons globalist dick. Sometimes our Swedish political class are happy to do so, and sometimes its not. But the people don't like it. The people like the EU, but they hate that the EU takes power over more and more areas in our lives. Since the early 1990s have the EU expanded its powers enormously.
The union is no longer just about trading goods with other European countries and throw up a wall of tariffs against the non-EU countries.
Now the EU decides over countries economic policies, their border controls (and thus immigration policies), their foreign policy, their banking system, their legal system, their agricultural policies, their fishing policies, their legal system and so on.
And now the EU even wants more power. It wants to force all countries to join the Euro currency. It wants to take control over the internet. It wants its own military. It wants to take over the role of taxation and spending from the member countries. It wants a common healthcare policy. And it wants to also force down a common carbon tax down everyones throat and all countries should be forced to take in immigrants.
And people are stupid, but they are not blind. They underestimate the power the EU has, so they therefore fail to point where the problem is. But they have started to have a small feeling that the EU have too much power already, and that some of it needs to be rolled back.
Germany and Sweden are the most Europhile (or should I say "Eurotard") countries in Europe. But even here in Sweden our biggest Europhile party nearly got wiped out the last election because people think the EU has gone too far. People are half assed cowards, they don't wanna abolish the EU, instead they want to reform it. But the EU cannot be reformed so its just a waste of time... and all waiting for it will only cause frustration and create pain.
More people will then probably become tired and then either join hardline Brexiteers or liberaldemocrat EU uber alles groups.
One thing is for sure, Europeans are not ready for accepting a common policy for everything - which the EU dreams of and tries to create without the consent of the peoples of Europe.
And this point I am so tired of the EU and I rather wish that Trump dropped a nuke over Brussels and got all this thing over with.
I used to be a moderate, but then I became a Euroskeptic. But when the EU started to wanting to destroy the internet in the early 2000s I became hateful towards the EU. And now I am so radicalized that I just want all this shit burned to the ground at all cost, and I am prepared to let my own country take a heavy hit to get things done.
I have absolutly no trust in the corrupt incompetent leaders in Brussels. I refuse to serve in an EU military to fight for French colonial interests in a shithole country in Africa. I refuse to see my taxes increase to pay for welfare and retirement of Romanians, Greeks and other peoples I have never met.
I will never accept to have my internet censored because it is inconvenient to the EU elite, and because some retarded old media dinosaurs are too lazy to come up with new buisness models to make money out of music or movies.
So fuck the EU. Nothing good have ever come out of it the last 25 years.
Only censorship, economic problems, hollowing out of democracy, and importation of criminality and foreign diseases from other EU countries. And thanks to EUs (frontex) mismanagement of the border controls did the so called "refugee crisis" happen.
Loving the EU is like loving cancer. It is very hard to see anything positive coming out of it.
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Russia lost the cold war. Its an economic midget and its army is piss-poor in every possible way and have embaressed itself in Ukraine where it have lost battle after battle. And the harder you try to push back against the west, the harder do the recoil come back and slam you in the face.
You could have given up this stupid war in April when it was obvious that Kyiv was not going to fall. Traitors like Kissinger and Macron would have allowed you to keep some of the land that you had stolen, and much of the sanctions would have been lifted by the west. And a rift between the western allies would occur, and meanwhile would Russias military losses have been kept at a moderate level.
But Putin was greedy and evil, and wanted more so he rejected all peace proposals and escalated the conflict instead.
And thereby did we get to where we are now, when Russia have lost 11.000 tanks, APCs and trucks. And more Russian soldiers have died in a few months than American troops died in 15 years of fighting in Vietnam.
Russia is now under harsh economic pressure. Macron and Scholz have been forced to side with Ukraine more and more.
Putin has burned all bridges with the west. His destruction of the north stream pipeline is the ultimate symbol of that.
As if stealing 500 airliners, nationalizing foreign firms, and nuclear threats wasn't enough...
Russia is losing the war. And with it all the territorial gains. The Ukrainians are effectivly destroying everything that is left of the red army. And General Patton is smiling as he looks down from heaven and seeing Russia being utterly destroyed and humiliated.
The sanctions, the dead and wounded soldiers, the PTSD along with crimes and mental problems and alcoholism will create long term economic problems for Russia. Refilling the military weapons depots will take decades. And the global demand for Soviet military junk has fallen now when the delivery times have gotten so much longer because of the war, and
besides who wants to buy a crappy low quality product that proven itself outdated and useless in Ukraine?
Russia have millions of draftdodgers and a painful braindrain on top of all previous demographic problems.
So Putin have effectivly destroyed the long term future for Russia regardless if somehow manage to keep a few ruined and stolen Ukrainian provinces or not.
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@somedude5951
"In fact, Catholicism is still prohibited in the British parliament today."
If for say the Swedish monarch would break Swedish law by changing his religion, then I think that the Swedish law would lose. Politically correct politicians would think it would be the most extremely important thing in the world to change that law as soon as possible. And even if they for some reason refused, then would the media and the general public demand that this stupid law would be abolished.
- And so it would.
So its not like it is dangerous for a Catholic to travel ot England, Sweden or the Netherlands today. I think laws are still on the books only because law makers are too lazy to remove them.
"King Henry VIII of England had a lot of interest in theology"
Well he didn't exactly live like God's best child, so to speak with his 6 wives and his habit of beheading them.
"Martin Luther"
Luther also changed his views on the Communist peasant rabble that claimed to follow him. He despised them. And rightfully so. Luther himself murdered a man in a duel while he was an university student and he felt much psychological pain after that. So the man was not behaving like a saint.
"This "divided the church" is nonsense."
That is not how Luther and many Kings looked at it. John III of Sweden sincerly wanted to create a middle of the road church that both Catholics and Lutherans could accept. Just as many Catholic and Orthodox christians wished to unify christianity again.
"Benito Mussolini, Joseph Mengele, Pol Pot, Francesco Franco, Adolph Hitler, and many more like that. Catholic power today is greater than ever, and Hitler has never been excommunicated."
True. But protestant christianity is hardly free from mass murders either. It have Cromwell who killed Irish. You can say that Charles IX was something like Swedens Cromwell - he fought a civil war and afterwards he murdered the pro-Sigismund Catholic nobility in Linköpings bloodbath. And afterwards he instated a military dictatorship with religious fundamentalist principles.
And the Anabaptists reign of terror in Münster was pretty awful even by the standards of the 1500s German civil war - which you can hear about in an episode by Dan Carlin.
And just like many popes were perverts, pedophiles, decadent, gambled, and were corrupt and wasteful... can the same be said about many reformers.
Luther as I said was an anti-semite who killed a man in duel. John Knox is said to have been a real motherf*cher.
And Jan van Leiden was a sexually obsessed pervert and massivly decadent, bloodthirsty and enjoying torture.
Southern Europe would go however go more full reé-tard than the north in religious matters. Spain shot themselves in the foot by kicking out all muslims and jews - and those talented people sought refuge in protestant countries - like Spinoza's family who fled to the Netherlands or the family of the economist David Ricardo who fled to England.
And Prussia would save French huguenots from murder and prosecution.
France and Spain lost some of their most highly educated people, while north European protestant countries benefitted from taking in those entreprenorial skilled people. Many Waloons from Belgium also moved to Sweden to escape religious opression from Spain.
So if the Catholics had been more tolerant towards other religions, then they would have kept protestant Europe poorer, while the Catholic countries would have kept their most talented workforce. And controlling the Indian ocean would probably have been easier if the Portugease had not over-extended themselves by declaring war on anyone who wasn't a fanatical catholic. They managed to make themselves enemies with everyone: muslims, protestants, hindus, arabs, europeans, indians.. and sure the Portugease were great sailors and had modern ships that could sink enemies at far distance. But even superior quality would not be enough for a country with a million people... if you are going to fight a world war with everyone who have the wrong religion. They made themselves too many enemies.
And while Spains crusader spirit perhaps helped to drag the country into exploring America, it also hampered the country by dragging the country into religious wars, and making educated people flee the country. And the Netherlands began to revolt against religious opression and demand independence. Had Spain not tried to tax the Netherlands and force catholicism upon them, then they would likely have been happy to stay under Spanish rule and undisturbed making lots of money from trade in the Baltics.
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If you think that statistics is the same thing as reality, then you are frankly not very smart.
Young men are more often victims to street violance than women and elderly. Why?
Because women and elderly knows that they are not as capable of defending themselves so they rather stay
at home and don't take any risks of getting hurt. So if eveyone then stayd home, then crime statistics would show low numbers, but would that mean that crime is not a problem? Of course not. Crime is so serious that people would stay home because they are afraid to go out.
So if people don't go out and make suicidal attacks against barbed wire and machine guns, that doesn't
mean that they are increadibly effective weapons on a first world war battlefield.
On the contrary. They were the driving force on how tactics were formed at this time, and all war-winning strategies had to adapt to this fact if there would be any hope of getting any success.
First world war was not a war mainly about artillery duels. It was a war when armies desperatly tried to find ways to silence enemy machine guns and pass through barbed wire... and solutions of all kinds were tested to fix this problem, like bomarding an area for an entire week with a million artillery shells.
"The way they got around the lack of communication was by massively pre-planning their artillery bombardments,
and by using extensive pre-registered defensive fire plans that could be initiated by the infantry simply firing a group of flares."
Armies tried these solutions, and they almost never worked.
Sometimes they failed because the enemy was sitting behind the front line or deep underneath the ground,
and the infantry would therefore not take any serious losses and could easily repulse any infantry attacks after the bombardment had started. You could of course keep on firing with your artillery once your own infantry had started attacking, but that would also lead to more losses among your own men as your artillery would accidentaly hit your own men.
Furthermore was timing of a bombarment very difficult to get right, as you don't know all the factors in the fog of war about the future weather, the enemy strength and such. So if your men attack too fast they get crushed by their own artillery, and if they cannot keep up with the time schedule then the artillery would be uneffective as well.
And in the early war years did Generals have to learn those lessons above the hard way. And gigantic battles with hundreds of thousands of men lost also failed for other reasons. Like the lack of High-explosives to destroy the barbed wirse in no mans land. And barbed wire was a huge problem. It is not just something you can fix with a little scissor. It was something nearly impossible to get rid of. And entire armies could stuck in front of it an not get through, while enemy machine guns ripped people apart.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hQ-otfHZx8
And even if your attack was succesful, then your biggest still lie ahead. How would you repulse an enemy counter attack?
In the first world war was a counter-attack the most powerful force on the battlefield. More powerful than defence or assualt. And the enemy was not stupid. He would see that you was about the breakthough at one part of the frontline, so he would concentrate more forces to the area.
So once your men had punched through the last line of defence, then he would swiftly launch a counter-attack before your men had a chance to rest and organize or dig yourself into the ground and get reinforcements.
He would bombard you with arty and then attack you. And your own artillery would be too far away behind to be of any help. And nor would you have any way of communicating and directing your artillery fire from such far ranges. And moving artillery up through the no-mans-land moonland scape was difficult and time consuming, and it would not be able to keep up with the attacking infantry.
So once the offensive had been done, there was really not much plans what to do next.
So the enemy always had all the good cards at his hands. And it was these counter-offensives that made the first world this war of largly static frontlines that it is known for.
Because every progress usally was destroyed as fast as it had been created.
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Russia only got itself to blame. Back in the 1990s there was still lots of people in eastern Europe with a rosy view of Communism. Had Russia treated its neighbours as friends then then they would be more likely to joined team Russia than team EU. But instead did Russia bully, threaten, sabre rattle, intervene in other countries, invade caucausus, and behave like a bum. So it is no wonder why its neighbours turned to Nato for help.
So yeah, Russia only got itself to blame. If you don't want Finland to join Nato - then how about giving it oil for half the price instead of threatening to nuke it? But I guess people in Moscow are not that smart 🙄
You are here defending the Monroe doctrine of Russia. Chomsky and other traitors do also do that, but when USA does that then you scream "IMPERIALISM!!!! USA IS EVIL!!!"
Russias invasion of Ukraine was about stealing land and economic resources and to make Russia look bigger on the world map to boost Putins ego and nothing else. It was never about Nato expansion. That is just a bullshit lie to justify the invasion just like all talk about Ukraine being led by nazis, biolabs and genocide on Russian speakers.
If Nato is horrible to have on its doorstep, then why did Putin yesterday say he was cool with Finland and Sweden joining Nato and that it was no big deal?
Russia just needs to stop acting like a bully and things will be fine for both Russia and its neighbours.
Today Russia is acting like this butthurt dumped ex-boyfriend who cannot get over that that his ex-girlfriend is dating someone else. So he goes out and harass her, like he harass Ukraine. And angrily screams to her that she cannot see someone else, and reminds her that they had it so good togheter in the past.
She does however have a different view of a past relationship filled with abuse. She want something else. And she thinks she deserves something better. And that makes her ex boil with rage.
Never have he reflected upon his past behaviour. Never have he even tried to consider why she doesn't love him and what she sees in the guy she dates.
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@dimdimych253 Vissa av de ryska T-55 och T-62 tanksen har upgraderats lite grann. Det är sant.
Men det är också sant att många ryska T-55 och T-62 tanks har skickats ut i strid utan några som helst uppgraderingar alls. Vilket gör att jag inte alls betraktar dom som jämbördiga med M-55S.
Såna här gamla fordon hör inte hemma på ett modernt slagfält. Möjligtvis att M-55S kan användas som understöds stridsvagn, men annars så tycker jag inte att vagnar äldre än så bör användas alls.
Jag är mest förvånad över att så många Leopard1 fortfarande finns kvar. För på ett modernt slagfält mellan två moderna arméer har de ingen roll kvar att spela. Pansaret är för klent. Kanonen är otillräcklig mot moderna stridsvagnar.
Leopard1 i Dansk tjänst gjorde förvisso bra ifrån sig på Balkan för 30 år sedan. Men det var då.
T-55 var också en bra tanks på sin tid, men det var för 70 år sedan. I dag är vagnen hopplöst föråldrad. Jag tror till och med att enklare gamla pansarvärnsvapen som mest bara används mot lastbilar, pansarbilar, stridsfordon och bandvagnar kan slå ut en T-55.
AT-4, MILAN, PV1110 och TOW skulle nog vara dödliga hot. För att inte tala om Carl-Gustaf, Stugna-P, Javelin, NLAW, Panzerfaust-3 osv.
Detta gör att fordonet inte ens går att använda som infanteriundertöd i exempelvis en gatustrid.
Det billigaste vore nog bara att ta kanontornen och flytta dom till bunkrar som försvarar stränder och flygfält. Och chassit får användas för att bygga bärgningsfordon, ingenjörsfordon, artilleripjäser, broläggare eller luftvärn.
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Unemployment went down thanks to military spending. Military contractors did have a nice time building weapons for the Fuhrer. And people in general was happy to have a job after years of economic hardship. The wages was bad, but so what? After a depression and a hyperinflation were people not so picky like they normally would be, and most people were happy to have any income at all even if it was low.
So the economy was not impressive. Every shitty government red, blue, brown, green - can get economic growth by spending money on the credit card and using up all years of saved foreign currency reserves to import things from abroad.
But most of us realize that this is not a sustainable model of running an economy in the long run.
One day you will run out of dollars and rubles to buy imports. Wasting money on the military does not improve quality of life that much, and it doesn't make investments for the future.
I am not against borrowing money for investments, but I am against the idea of borrowing money for pointless luxury consumption. Buying a flat screen TV with borrowed money because you cannot afford it otherwise is a stupid idea.
But if you borrowing money to invest in the future so your country will become richer in the long run and get a better economy to pay off old loans easily, then I support the idea. A good government should invest in research, education, infrastructure.harbors, a better energy grid and so on.
While tanks and battleships only begin to rust over time and does not improve the long term strenght of a countrys economy.
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@jamesoconnor5908 I disagree. The proofs of Jesus existence are non-existent aside from the Bible - which is a worthless source with zero credibility in my mind. The oldest parts of the New Testament is written many decades after Jesus death, and the other parts of the Bible was written even centuries later, and some parts even 1300 years after his death.
So no, I do not consider that to be a credible source.
There are lots of evidence that Julius Caesar existed. But none of Jesus existence from the time when he is said to have lived. For 2000 years have millions of people been obsessed about proving his existence.. and failed. Many consider him to be the most famous person who has ever existed. And yet nothing is left. No cups or clothes that he owned, no texts mentioning him from his day and age, and no Roman/jewish state apparatus documents. Even the city Nazareth did not exist back then, or at least was it not a city or even a town back then. It was not even a village... it was a small village at most. Josephus does not even mention the place among his list of towns and cities in Israel. And no arheological evidence has been found that confirm that it was a city.
And the New Testament is not a credible witness as it constantly contradict itself. If a witness contadicted himself constantly as much as the four evengelists, then I strongly doubt that any court would accept his testimony as credible and holding any value in a court case.
And nor do I think that a witness account written 70 years after an event hold much credibility in a court case either. It was common that people did not even become half that age before they died back in those days, so 70 years would be equal to two or three lifetimes today.
That is hell of a time gap before someone decides to write a story about Jesus after he supposedly lived.
I don't think that I am being unfair towards Christians. On the contrary do I think that I just put the same standards for proofs of Jesus existence as I do with any other big worldly leaders of roughly the same time period, like Caesar, Nero and such. And the proofs for Jesus existence is extremely weak.
And given that Jesus performed strange miracles I assume that he would be pretty well known and heard about in the region.
Finally do I also think it is reasonable that we take a higher bar of proof of Jesus existence than other historical figures.
Extreme claims demands extreme amounts of proofs. And the burden of evidence lay on the shoulders of the believers in Christ to proof that he existed.
The burden is not on the skeptics shoulders to prove that he never existed.
It is an extreme claim to that a guy who performed miracles lived. Even more extreme is it if he also claims to be the son of God.
Lastly will I add to the defence of Christians zealots who believes in virgin birth, the repeal of the eternal sin, miracles, resurection and all that... that their view of Jesus makes more sense than the view that he was a normal man.
And that is because the entire point of Jesus existence falls apart if you ignore those things. The entire message of what Jesus preached was that he would die and take all sins in the world upon himself and remove them with his death, and that would make humanity free from the eternal sin.
If you ignore all that, then there would have been no point at all for God to have a son in the first place.
If you remove that from Christianity, then what would Jesus have left to preach? - Nothing.
Furthermore believing in evolution and also believing in Jesus is also extremely stupid.
Adam ate the forbidden fruit in the garden of eden, and for that was humanity punished by the eternal sin, and the eternal sin was repealed by Jesus.
But if you believe in evolution, then you don't believe that God created earth and the garden of eve, which led to the eternal sin, which later on was repealed by Jesus.
So if you believe in evolution, then you no longer have any need for any Jesus.
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I don't think the skin is much of a source of infection (unless you got Aids or undergo chemotheraphy to treat a cancer and therefore have an extremely weak immune system).
I think wood and clothes would be worse sources of infection - especially if you got such things pushed into your chest or stomach. Either you die from a bleeding or either you die from a sepsis resulting from the infection.
In land warfare did cannon shots fly into a line of men and usually instantly kill a few men that the cannon ball flew into. And those men standing near those poor bastards would likely be injured from all skeleton bones, muskets, swords and other things flying around in the air from cannon ball victim. So you will have a few who die instantly, and you will have a bunch of wounded people. And you might have 20 persons who are deeply chocked after what they have just witness and totally paralyzed as a friend just died and now his remains cover their uniforms... all hit blood and brain substance and whatever is now on their uniforms.
And this is just the effect of one cannon ball. Imagine then the effect canister shot fired at close range... one such shoot would be enough to delete an entire infantry company out of existence.
Most people on a battlefield of the early 1700s would probably die from musket fire however, since one side would probably start fleeing as the swords and pikes were drawn up for a melee fight. Once again does the location of the wound matter much for the chances of survival. Just as it do today.
And small bullet flying at low speed like a bullet from a pistol or a submachine gun will do less damage than shot coming from a more powerful weapon like a hunting rifle or an assault gun. When you get hit by large bullet flying at high speed you will get a bigger hole into your body, and the shot will penetrate deeper into the body and often come out on the other side.
Sometimes will the bullet travel a long way through the body at a strange angle and drill through multiple organs and thereby cause large damage. The bullet can also hit a skeleton bone and make it fly around inside the body and make almost as much damage as the hard bullet that is flying around.
And while I can admire many ancient doctors, I would still say that it is strange how primitive and worthless medical care was up until the 19th century. And this despite people around the world already in the 1600s knew one thing or two that could have allowed them to - atleast in theory make a sterile operation to remove objects from wounds. But strangely they never used any such methods.
Arabs knew how to make knives and other tools sterile before an operation to not cause infection, and they did so by leaving them over a fire and let all bacteria on the knife burn away.
The Romans used honey for desinfect wounds since honey got anti-bacterial properties and is still used in treatment of certain types of wounds to this day. The Greeks used wine containing alcohol to clean the skin around a wound to lower the risk of infection by letting alcohol kill bacteria. No painkillers did exist back then so they had to rely on alcohol and opiods to reduce the pain of cutting in someones body. Another way to reduce pain was to work extremely fast and a skilled surgeon could finish an operation in perhaps only 20-30 seconds... but of course, when you got a patient who wildly bends around in pain its very difficult to operate, and when you work fast its a high risk that you make dangerous mistakes.
So if someone was taking a serious damage into the middle of the body I do not think the surgeons would be able to do much in most cases.
Most doctors did, as I understands it, not use any of the methods I suggest pre-modern doctor could have used to minimize the risk of infection. Germ theory was unknown, and bloodletting was still believed to be a miracle cure to all kinds of problems.
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No because the problem is not Germany, but the EU that have made Germany into an European problem and not just a German problem. I would hate the EU even if another nation was in charge of the EU. Indeed I would want to abolish the EU even if it pushed for all my ideas in politics and economics, because it is fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-national independence.
Btw, Germans are a stupid people, but if they like to be stupid in their own country - then good for them, I guess that I am happy if they are happy.
Personally I think their ideas about economics, immigration, nationalism, freedom of speech are retarded. Not everyone in Germany is like that of course. But most are.
Sorry, but that is the harsh truth. Just like my own country, Sweden is the 2nd most stupid people in Europe.
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I think German thinking also have been poisoned by liberalism and anti-militarism.
It sees power and military force as something inheritibly bad. But rerality could not be further from the truth.
Power is in itself not evil. Power is the ability to do things, things which could either be good or bad. Just like a knife can be used for killing people, or saving peoples lives when it is in the hands of skilled surgeon. Cars can kill people in traffic accidents, but they can also be used as ambulances to save lives. Everything depends on how they are used. And the same goes with power, and military force.
Germany is scared of holding so much power in its hands... because it did not end up well when Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler had a powerful force in their hands.
But as I see it can the western would just choose to give up all its economic and military power if it wanted to. That would however not create peace and a better world. If we abdicate our leadership role and hand over the position as the worlds most powerful country to for example China and Russia, then they will certainly create a more evil and opressive world.
That is how they would use their power. They would use it to redraw borders and force people to become Russians or Chinese or being put inside concentration camps to die like Uighurs and Ukrainians.
The only thing stopping those evil regimes are western military and economical power and soft power.
Evil people in this world will not give up their power just because we do that.
So what is the least bad option, should we have the power, or should evil dictatorships have it instead?
I think that democracies have more self-restraint to use its power more responsibly, while dictators happily abuse their powers whenever they think they can get away with it.
Furthermore do I not think violance in self-defence is wrong.
There are evil people in this world. And just because you leave them alone, does not mean that they will leave you alone.
Jesus fed the hungry and cured diseases and preached love and never harmed anyone, but he ended up being nailed to a cross anyways. Using self-defence to protect oneself from unprovoced aggression is not wrong. Nor is it wrong to use violance to kill a crazy person that are killing innocent people left and right in a mass shooting.
Often times can the person not be talked into stop doing what he is doing, and then is force needed to protect innocent from being killed. And if the choice is between all good people dying nailed to a cross, or to use violance in self-defence to prevent evil people from taking over the world, then I pick the latter option.
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@yalassa1 In the modern times. You can talk with people on game chats with people from all around the world, like for example in the game World of tanks. And sure do you have more in common with many foreigners than you have with that nasty bitch in her 50s who is at your job and always complain and is being sour. It is funnier to hang around people with common interests - like tanks and world war 2 in this case.
One can also realize that people around the world are not that different. People in other countries can still enjoy your jokes. And even in far distant places like India, Japan, Indonesia, Algeria and such do people also laugh at those jokes, and they also feel and think much like we do and they value their family, they experience bullies at work, and they feel love for a person of the opposite gender and so on.
However do I feel more in common with Europeans than with other people?
Not really. I feel I have more in common with people from USA, Iceland, Australia, and South Africa than I do with Serbs, French, Bulgarians, Greeks and Turks and Russians.
And I am not opposed to European *cooperation*. I am opposed to the idea of *union*, and being one and the same country, and that all European countries must destroy everything that makes them unique to fit in into a new super-state.
My sympathies with other countries mostly also lies with countries such as Iceland, Norway, UK, Switzerland and USA - which are not part of the EU. So they are more logical allies for my country Sweden than the EU.
And I do not see a world government as desireable.
Nor do I share the EUs racist worldview which it have displayed in commercials made with out tax payer money
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKN67ImpO4k
I do not look at other continents as a threat. But I am however dissapointed in other parts of the world when they don't support a country (Ukraine) that is a victim of an unprovoced foreign aggression and genocide. But instead do countries like Brazil, India, Iran and China and rather side with evil.
It is also remarkable that China, India and Indonesia doesn't care about this world that we share by stop polluting the planet, as those 3 countries are responsible for something like 80% of all plastics in the world oceans.
And China spits out more CO2 into the atmosphere than USA and the EU have done combined... and they do not feel any problem in that.
So yea, the values of the rest of the world are very different from western values sometimes. And that is why it is important that we countries in the western world sticks togheter so we do not get bullied and taken over by evil countries like Russia or China. And so we get more leverage with India and Brazil to take care of their own enviroment and not exterminate tigers, cut down rainforests and destroy the world oceans with plastic.
We need to keep our friendship with Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, and North America.
We cannot do as EU leaders like Macron and throw America under the bus, and rather try to build closer ties with dicatorships like China that throws uighurs into concentration camps and have territorial conflicts with nearly all its neighbours.
Have the idiots in France and Germany learned nothing from what recently happened when their two countries got overly dependent on Putins Russia and betrayed their allies USA and other European countries?
If this is the kind of Europeanism that Europe stands for... then so to hell with not just Macron and Scholz.. but also the entire EU project.
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@manishdyall4779
It includes shells that are built this year in Europe, and it includes ammunition stored up on shelves in ammunition depots around Europe which can be used until ammunition production have been ramped up suffiecently to keep up with the demand from the frontline.
That is what I got out from the EU press conferance in Stockholm, and my own interpretation and reading between the lines of what they were saying.
Japan have also openly said that they will begin giving deadly weapons to Ukraine. So I take that as a sign that Japanese 155mm shells might be available in the future. I also know that USA have been buying South Korean ammunition and been giving it to Ukraine. And given how Switzerland have given Germany Leopard2 tanks, and Germany in turn have given their own Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine.. I would not be surprised if "neutral" countries would act a bit in the same way regarding ammunition.
And I think that the example of South Korea highlights that.
Also countries in the middle east is of importance to gain access to more rockets for the rocket artillery, and Egypt is an example of that.
152mm Soviet ammunition is rare and difficult for Ukraine to get their hands on because it is made in Russia. East European countries have given what they have stored and ammo has been bought from Arabia. But demand still outstrips supply. So ammunition factories in Ukraine and Bulgaria is producing what they can to supply Ukraine with soviet shells.
I don't see artillery shells as an acute crisis anymore. Because Ukraine does not have a large stock of western artillery and a steady flow of ammunition.
Russia on the other hand is consuming shells at an unsubstainable rate. Their artillery fire is more inaccurate and that problem is only getting worse. It now lacks counter-battery radars. And it lacks modern artillery pieces, modern ammunition, good crews, good artillery crews and good intelligence and they do not even seem to bother sending up drones to correct their artillery fire after a miss.
So Russias artillery is getting weaker and weaker each month. While Ukraines remains about the same as before. It might even become better as crews earns more skills, and as effectivness is not reduced by counter-battery fire anymore when Russia have no counter-battery radars.
And a future shipment of another hundred extra M109 artillery pieces from Italy will strongly boost Ukraines capabilities even further.
And if things continue down the same path as for the last one and a half year of this war, then would I not be surprised if Ukraine gets ATACMS missiles for their HIMARS - something which would make it impossible to make large supply concentrations 300km near the frontline. It would nearly become hopeless to make any organized resistence when your logistical system is in such ruins.
To me it seems more likely that Russia runs out of artillery fire first. There are many signs that Russia is running low on ammunition. The Wagner group complains about the lack of ammunition. Old T-55 tanks are put into service as artillery pieces - and perhaps because Russia is running low on ammunition of other calibres so they resort to using 100mm tank guns instead of 152mm and 122mm Howitzers.
And lastly do russia convert anti-ship missiles and air-defence missiles into attacking ground targets instead - and that makes me suspect that Russia is running low on ground attack missiles. Because why else would they convert an expensive missile and waste it in that way on a job that its not even designed to do?
If Russia had a plenty of cruise missiles for attacking land based targets, then why aren't it using those instead?
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I think it is the duty of economic professors to be useful to society and talk about things that matter to the public instead of sitting locked inside their buildings and just drawing lines on a papper and doing maths. Personally I think that macroeconomics should be fun, and economics should be rather focused on problem-solving and giving people a general idea on how the world works so you as a citizen can make enlightened decisions and defend your own interests...anyways, I am getting off topic here
, so lets go back.
Economics of war is not a popular topic, maybe because it is a no-mans-land that no one wants to go into. This subject is too economic for historians, and too much based around history for economists.
But I don't think we should give up. I think all aspects should be covered so an attempt to a general understand of the war can be gained.
"Somehow economy science was able to study GDPs and other indicators through decades and centuries and to compare them between different states, despite "funny monies"
To pharaphrase Max Keiser, I would say that economics is not a hard science like physics, but more of a soft-science like psychology without any hard clearcut answers. The economy is based around humans, and humans are unpredictable things unlike atoms in a bottle.
Most numbers in economics are just arbritrary. How do you count inflation? How do you count unemployment? How do you count GDP? How do you measure poverty?
I mean some economists say you should include housing rents and energy into your measurement of inflation while other say you should not. Unemployment statistics also have lots of flaws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulu3SCAmeBA
And how do you measure poverty? when does someone count as poor? when they live on 1 dollar per day or less? or 2? or 5?
GDP comparisons between countries does never get perfect because of uncertainties surrounding exchange rates and purchasing power parities. And countries with private healthcare and school systems can seem to have higher GDP than countries, when those services provided for by the government and not counted into the GDP by some people. While others tries to do a guess work of their value to GDP - which is arbritrar as I said.
So to conclude do I think all numbers needs to be taken with a grain of salt, and not be taken to literarly to be the truth. And any economist that does think economics is a hard science is an idiot with hybris.
So does that mean that numbers are all useless? Not at all. They can often give you rough estimates about things. Like that USAs GDP is roughly 20-25% of the world economy, and that the income per head for the average American is about 20 times higher than an African, or that the standard of living in Africa today is about the same level as Europe in the 1700s and perhaps a little better. Just think about it, even poor people in rich countries have access to better healthcare than Roman emperors did in the past. When King Charles XII of Sweden nearly died from a cold in the late 1690s his doctor told him to piss in cup and put an egg in his urine and then eat the egg, and that was supposed to cure him from his disease. If that was the best healthcare a mighty King of Swedish empire could get when the country was at its hight of power, then
I definatly say that healthcare today for poor people today is much better.
So to conclude, do I think that GDP is good for rough estimates for things. Like comparing the size of the German economy with that of USA is like comparing the size of Jupiter with Saturn. And comparing the size of Swedens economy with Polands is like comparing the size of Mars and our planet and see that they are roughly similiar in size, eventhough the average pole is poorer than the average Swede.
And when comparing USA with Ghana, is like comparing the size of Jupiter with that of Pluto.
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@waynearribas930
"if Ukraine did not blow up daughters in a car in front of her father."
Well her father was a great warmonger, and so was his daughter who was a great supporter of this war on Russian tv.
So I don't feel sad for any of them. Just like I don't feel sad for Reinhard Heydrich being killed in an attack his car.
He should have thought about that before he decided to support murder of thousands of innocent people.
"If the Nazis did not kill their own in lock up."
Ukraine is ruled by Zelensky, a man who got jewish blood in his veins. Most of his family got killed in the holocaust.
The only ones behaving like nazis in this war are the russians.
"And murdering Russian people in eastern Ukraine."
That is a made up lie. Cannot find a single credible western media source providing any evidence of such a thing occuring.
But the last months have I seen Russia murdering lots of Russian speaking Ukrainians and turning Russian speaking cities like Mariupol into ash and dust.
I also don't believe your stupid russian propaganda that Zelensky would have any interest in killing russian speaking ukrainians - as Zelensky himself is a russian speaker.
"Russia by not honoring the Minsk agreements."
Given how Russia have dishonored the Budapest agreement from 1994, I see no reason why the west should honor any treaties at all with Russia since they do not give a damn at keeping their word on a damn thing.
How can you see when a Russian person is lying?
- You see it when they move their mouth.
"If he was he would not fear those Nazi organizations and get rid of of those types of things"
You cannot denazify a country by sending in neo-nazis into that country (The Russian Wagner group, which is led by a man with nazi tattoos on his chest and who is a close personal friend to Putin).
Once again do I have zero reason for taking anything said by Russian propaganda seriously.
Only a fool, or some dishonest liar would proclaim that there is some truth to the things coming out of the Kremlin media.
"I do support Russia for saving those peoples lives."
Terror bombings of innocent civilians. Concentration camps in Siberia filled with Ukrainians. A war of aggression that kills people on both sides.
Threatening the world with a nuclear war, and blackmailing the world with global starvation and holding 800 million hungry people hostage when they block black sea ports is what Russia is doing and demanding a lifting of sanctions - sanctions which Russia by the way claim are doing no harm what so ever to the Russian economy.
There is the Russia that you love.
Its a psycopathic genocidal warmongering regime willing to kill billions of people if it believe it helps them to fulfill its gains.
This war made me change my opinion of Russia. Before this war I was only slightly negative towards Russia.
Now I feel like humanity would be better off wiping that country off the face of the earth. That "Russian" is a synonym for evil and barbaric.
And that Japan, Norway, Finland, Germany Poland, the Baltic states, China, Ukraine, Turkey all should just carve up the country between them.
Its childish leadership are not grown up enough to handle nuclear weapons responsibly.
It does not give a damn about promises and written agreements such as the Budapest agreement. It does just steal 500 passanger planes and have no respect for property rights and contracts. It is simply a criminal rogue state.
It have no moral boundries as it is willing to starve or nuke billions of innocent people.
There is therefore no reason why we in the west should have anything to do with Russia in the future.
We should kick Russia out of Ukraine to punish their bad behaviour and steal all their money that is frozen in western bank accounts and give it as war reparations to Ukraine.
If Russia does steal our stuff, there's nothing wrong with stealing theirs.
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@liberalegypt
"There are 6 major blocs within the European Union. Do the 6 blocs, whether the far right, the far left, the center right, or the center left, all of them do not intersect with your electoral interests?"
That is a question that I do not have to worry about since I don't vote. But you can of course question yourself that thing.
The Socialdemocrats in Sweden are a bit different from the Socialdemocrats in Denmark that is more anti-immigration, and many of the Socialdemocrats in Germany are very friendly towards Russia, while here in Sweden are they very hostile towards Putin. And I bet the socialdemocrats in southern Europe have many different opinions than their Scandinavian counterparts, and they focus on completly other issues.
And the same goes for most other parties I guess. Which makes the concept of party groups a complex web that most voters of Europe do not understand. Voting on your favorite party might not be your best choice, as it might sit in a political group that forces it to sacrifice all the important issues that you hold close to heart, while implementing all the dumb crap in the party program that you don't want instead.
I think that power should be located close to the people that are impacted by it. Swedes know best how to take care about their own forests and not some foreign politician that lives many hundreds of kilometers away and knows nothing about this country.
I also think that direct democracy is better than non-transparent indirect form of indirect democracy that the EU stands for. And when leftwing politics is basically forbidden by EU law - then I believe that nothing can get better until we leave the EU. Only then are we allowed to nationalize our railroads, run defecit spending to grow the economy, prioritize economic growth and low unemoployment over low inflation, subsidize poorer regions of our country, and let the government support infant industries so we can become a world leader in high tech industries again.
The EU has literarly made all my political opinions illegal to implement. So no wonder why I am looking forward to leaving the EU.
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@liberalegypt
How would you feel if I wrote into the law that all of Johan Norbergs ideas was forbidden? You would not think that would be much democratic I guess. You would see the voting as pointless and the see the system as a fake democracy. Like I view the EU.
The four freedoms, the convergence pact, the ban on nationalization of failed sectors of the economy, the excessive laws that regulate government purchases of weapons or locomotives from the private sector, the ban on capital controls, EU mandated minimum tax rates... all this have forced neoliberalism upon all of Europe regardless if we want it or not.
Not even if 100% of the people in one country in the EU wanted to say nationalize the railroads or lower the corporate taxes down to 0% would they not be allowed to do so because of some stupid EU rule.
To me that shows that the EU and democracy cannot coexist.
I lived in Sweden before we joined the EU and that was not long ago. And everything was better then before the EU screwed things up. Our military was among the strongest in Europe, we had more multinational firms, lower crime, better controlled migration, lower unemployment, our railroads was not garbage, our schools was among the best in the world, we had more hospital beds per capita, we did not have the EU censorship or absurd copyright laws that says a dude owns a piece of music 80 years after his death.
We did not have a chaotic energy market that the EU created that forced us to export away all our energy to Germany so our energy prices did go up so high that pensioners couldn't pay their bills and bakeries had to shut down. Instead was cheap hydro energy one of Sweden's competative advantages over other countries.
And nor did we have the EU screwing up our housing market.
So yes the Sweden 30 years ago was better than the Sweden we have today in many ways. And Sweden today would have been much better if we never had joined the EU. And it is infant industry protectionism that creates new high tech firms. And without it you cannot get new invent new technologies and build new industries. So there is no wonder why Europe has stagnated economically because of the EU.
I think that is the main reason why USA have high tech firms like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook while we in Europe got absolutly nothing. And the only thing the worthless Euro currency gave us was the Euro crisis in 2008. Sweden and England tried the predecessor to the Euro currency which was called the ECU, and that resulted in gigantic painful economic crisis in both countries because of the EU.
Contrast that to the period when countries were running their own buisness without EU interference. The years 1945-1975 was a time period with strong economic growth and no big economic crashes. And unemployment was just 1% and in some places even lower. So that time of strong state control, extremely high taxes, harsh capital controls, and heavy protectionism was quite a succesful period for Europe.
It is also interesting that many times have the world record holder in highest tariff rates also been the country with the worlds fastest economic growth. Like England 1780-1820. Or USA 1860-1890. Or Sweden 1890-1914 which had the highest GDP growth per workhour in the world during that time period. And today are China doing pretty well despite harsh capital controls, much state owned firms, government directed investments, subsidized loans from state owned banks and such.
USA handled their economic crisis much better than Europe did where Greece and Spain still not have not fully recovered.
Which shows that austarity and balanced budget dogma is an inferior, stupid and counterproductive way of handling an economic crash. And that the neoliberal dogma governing Europe is dooming Europe to forever fall behind USA and China.
We are unable to create any own high tech firms. Our population is ageing unlike USA. We do not have any oil, gas or phosphorus like USA. We have instead painted ourselves into a corner because of this stupid EU project.
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Truth has been sacrificed for the sake of simplicity and in the cause of healing some wounds. In war movies are there often stereotypical caracters like the good German (Thomas Kretschmann, von Stauffenberg etc) and the bad German (ie Hauptmann Haller).
Not all Germans were bad was the message, and clean Wehrmacht myth and the myth of the South only wanting "a little more freedom and the fight had nothing to with slavery"... are maybe a bit of an attempts to heal the wounds and hatred between USA and Germany, and the North and the South.
But reality was however more complicated. The Wehrmacht was mostly clean, but there was also elements who committed crimes against humanity. And even if the SS, the police and gestapo deserve 95% of all the blame for the genocide, would I still say that it is bad enough if only 3% could be blamed on the German army for their cooperation and assistance with bullets and trucks to kill people. Looking the other way and say nothing when millions of innocents die is incredibly weak by an organization that managed to conquer Europe.
I do however not think that the German army otherwise did much I can complain about. A few war crimes happened like in any other army, captured American paratroops in Italy got tied to trees and then got a bucket of gasoline on them and being set on fire, but as one paratrooper said did the Americans do equally horrible things in the fighting there. Overall was the war in North Africa seen as civilized and both sides even had secret radio contact to help each other to save men who had been lost in the middle of the desert. And soldiers who had raped a woman in France got severely punished.
When it comes to the South and the lost cause is this story incredibly silly. The South was the bad guys, and the purpose of the war was the preservation of slavery... and all other factors for the war were of little importance by comparison. CSA also committed treason so there is really no need to romanticize the South.
If I would present the South in a good light I would not do so by lying, but rather by saying that abolitionist activist caused dangerous riots in the south - which was both an undemocratic method of doing things, and a thing very provocative towards the south... and it radicalized the issue of slavery and made it difficult to compromise a stepwise solution towards abolition. The war was a tragedy that could have been avoided, and it did end up costing more lives than any other more in US history.
The war was unnecessary and it created bad blood between the North and the South for decades to come... indeed some even see conflicts between GOP and the democrats to follow this line of conflict. The protectionist policies that made imports of British machinery more expensive for southern farmers were also an unfair provocation to the south. Northern cities benefited by southerners being forced to buy their overpriced products and helping them to industrialize, but the South did not get any compensation for this.
And the burning of cities in the South did put salt into the wounds in the relation between north and south.
"Nazi iconography is banned in Germany, many hate groups over there have taken to using the Confederate battle flag in its stead."
The best thing would be to forcing them to wear ugly Picasso painting logos instead of good looking symbols :P
Jokes aside.. I do think that hate groups will use whatever that is available to them. So banning the nazi flag is pointless. The neo-nazis in Germany then only use the old black-white-red Bismarck tricolour with an iron cross
instead - which have in turn made a historical German non-nazi symbol associated with far right extremism.
Which I do think is idiotic.
To a foreigner it is a bit strange that the stars and bars are still used as much as it is in state flags, given its historical use in the racist oppressive Confederate states.
But on the other hand could you see this flag being used also here in Europe by groups with no ties to KKK... such as rockabilly fans, motorcycle drivers and people who drives American cars fromt the 1950s and 1960s. So it have become a strange cultural icon.
"Winners do not always write history- only those dedicated to writing history write history."
True. So if one person repeat a lie. Then will I repeat the truth over and over and over again until it sticks.
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Well I respect that man. He introduced freedom of speech, freedom of opinion and meritocracy long before anyone else did.
He made the Prussian economy into the strongest in continental Europe, despite his country was a tiny piece of land with no natural resources in abundance. His military fought alone against 3 of the strongest armies in the world for several years without going out of the war with a loss, and he won many battles against armies twice as strong.
He was a gifted flute player, a thinking philosopher in an age of religious dogma and lack of thinking. He introduced the potato to Prussia and thereby saving thousands of lives from famines. He created the worlds first modern school system. He took on the bullying Habsburg empire and wrecked them and humiliated them, by conquering the rich province of Silesia which stood for 25% of Austria's tax revenues.
While other Kings motto was "I am the state". Did Frederick instead say "I am the first servant of the state", which implied that he was not a man free from duties and obligations, but instead would he work hard just like the rest of his subjects. A typical day he woke up early at the morning and read 30 letters, and afterwards he wrote a respons to all of them one by one. And he traveled around his Kingdom and talked to ordinary people and listened to their concerns and he suggested ways how to improve the economy. He was a man who never cared to glorify himself in art or improving the stories told about himself, like the propaganda of other monarchs, but instead did he let his actions speak for themselves.
His fate was in many ways a sad one. His childhood consisted of severe bullying from his father. His heart was crushed when his dream of marrying the beautiful princess of England was rejected, because his father wanted to further humiliate Frederick by marrying an ugly girl he didn't like instead. He was also forced to watch the execution of his friend Katte. And the seven years war did not seem to end well for Frederick despite his brilliant victories at the battles of Rossbach and Leuthen. And Frederick thought of committing suicide, as the war seemed lost and he seemed to have ruined his family's generational project, and his Kingdom was nearly wiped off the map.
He would however get of the war unharmed. But his psyche had some scars after the hard life he had been through.
He never married the woman he wanted, and people who he thought of as friends were often times only people which wanted money, high positions and favors from Frederick once he became King. And they became disappointing as he preferred meritocracy over nepotism. Later on would he say that he preferred his dogs over humans because "they are always loyal and never ungrateful".
Fredericks life would probably have been better if he had married the girl he wanted and without the bullying from his dad. Perhaps he could have created a few good off-springs that could have become better replacements for Frederick than the useless Frederick William II that managed to in just a few years waste all money that Frederick had saved up. And then he would also go to war against Napoleon and suffer a humiliating defeat.
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I consider FA50 more as a jet trainer than a fighter. And as such it is okay I guess. But as a fighter it is very much handicapped by the lack of long range missiles. In Ukraine will the enemy be able to shot at you before you have the range to shot back.
This plane have much that I like about it however, like its low radar signature, its low cost, and a better wing-loading than F-16, and the plane only needs 5 hours of ground maintenance per flight hour.
But compared to Gripen E all I can say is that you get what you pay for. No long range missiles. A jet with a poor range half that of Gripen E. The plane is not good at climbing fast. Its bombload is small (4000kg) and the hardpoints are few (7). The radar signature is twice as large as that of Gripen E, the service ceiling is slightly lower and so is the top speed. The thrust-to-weight ratio is also lower than Gripen E. And the wing-loading is also inferior to Gripen E which means that it cannot turn as sharply - which is a big disadvantage in air combat.
Its can be rearmed and refueled in less than 20 minutes, which is good, but not as good as Gripen which only needs 5 to 15 minutes depending on the mission.
It would also be interesting to know how long runway that plane needs, and if its maintenance could be done by low skilled personnel. I am also wondering how much this plane cost per flight hour since Gripen is an unbeaten champion in that regard.
FA50 cannot compete with Eurofighter, Gripen, Rafale, and F15 in performance... but against North Korean MIG-15, MIG-19, and MIG-21 it would be fine. If I want a jet trained then can FA50 be an alternative. However I am not surprised that South Korea also flies F15 and F16 fighters since FA-50 is not really up to the task of fully replacing a modern fighter jet.
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@callmeari6254
Keeping old equipment in storage costs much money. You need to drive around tanks and aircraft engines atleast once a month, and you need to fix oil leaks, filters and change rubber coating on cables that dry up and gets destroyed as they age.
So then question becomes what is better? Keep old junk equipment that are semi-obsolete and cost money, or buy new equipment that does not cost as much to upkeep for the same amount of money?
My answer is that it is better to buy new equipment. Keeping old weapons like M113 and Leopard1 in storage is more of a burden to military budgets and Natos defence capabilities, than sending them away to Ukraine and buy something new.
And airplanes are only built to be able to fly a number of hours, say 5000 hours. And when you get close to that maximum number its becoming more dangerous to fly the plane as it might fall apart due to metal fatigue.
It also becomes more time consuming and cost more money to keep old fighter jets flying. So often times do airforces prefer to buy new planes instead of trying to upgrade old planes that are less capable and cost more money to upgrade.
It might be possible to upgrade old J-35 Draken or Viggen for modern air combat - but that would be extremely stupid because old planes cost money to upkeep and old Draken from 1955 needs 50 hours of maintainence on the ground for every 1 hour it is flying up in the sky,... while modern Gripen only needs 5 hours of maintance on the ground and is a more capable plane and costs less to upkeep.
Acting like a hoarder and keeping old junk is stupid and it is not what the west needs. Therefore is it good that we send away old weapons to Ukraine and renew our own stocks of weapons. We have waited for 40 years to make the necessary purchaces of modern military equipment, so I think it is good that we finally decide to make that step now, and get rid of old junk that is a burden on our economies.
And meanwhile are we fighting against evil. So it is a win-win.
Russia have tried the model that you suggest and it have keep all old musuem pieces in storage for this war. And let's just say that I am very unimpressed by russias laughable pathethic performance on the battlefield.
This war is not making Europe weaker. On the contrary is it making Europe stronger compared to our eastern enemy.
And the economy will benefit from not having to upkeep old junk. There is of course some small costs related to this war, but the risk is only that we get more wars in the future if we do not act now.
If we just let russia annex Ukraine unpunished, then China might take notice and feel the lust to make a similiar land grab in Taiwan.
And russias was not satisfied with annexing chechenya, stealing land from Georgia and occupying Ukraine. It wants to dominate all of eastern europe - so one can feel sure that more wars are to come if russia is not stopped now.
So helping ukraine is a small price worth paying.
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@evgeniya7853
Explain how Russia is a great power then?
Is it the size of the population? No because Bangladesh, Nigeria, Pakistan and Indonesia and Brazil all got more people than russia. And none of those countries are a super power.
Is it because russia got nuclear weapons?
No, because North Korea and Pakistan also got nuclear weapons.
Is it because Russia got an aircraft carrier?
No. Thailand, Spain, Turkey and Italy also got weak aircraft carriers like Russia and none of them are considered a Super power.
Is it because the Russian economy is strong?
No. Because Brazil, Italy and Canada all got a higher GDP than russia. Russias standard of living is low. Its manufacturing is weak. The country have no Fortune 500 companies that are not related to oil & energy, or banking related to energy - and to me this is great sign of economic weakness.
I would not even rank the country among the 20 most important economies in the world. Add to that all problems that harms long term economic growth such as corruption and enviromental pollution that destroys public health, kill fish stocks and wild animals and plants and trees.
Is russia a super power because of its military?
Not really. Given the levels of corruption, outdated doctrine, ineffiecent logistics, outdated equipment, poor training and lack of dicipline would I feel much more afraid of going to war against Japan, South Korea or India than I would be against Russia.
Is Russia a great power because of its global cultural influence?
No, I have never bought anything made in Russia, aside from some IKEA glass that said made in Russia. But IKEA is a Swedish company and I am a Swede.. so allow me to not be so impressed.
I cannot say that Russian culture have left much impression on me. Its not like I watch any Russian TV series like I do with CSI from USA or Black Adder. I buy Nintendo from Japan and Heineken beer from the Netherlands, drive French cars, listen to ABBA from Sweden, play with Danish Lego. But what everyday item do I get from russia? I dunno.
So for that reason do I not regard russia as a cultural super power either.
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You contradict yourself non-stop. You say you don't complain, but you complain non-stop. And you say that no one apprechiates quality anymore, and say mass produced crap will take over. But as I sees it do a day only got 24 hours, and we humans will not be able to consume everything that are being produced. So quality will beat quantity. So if what you say is true, that humans produce superior quality over AI... then you should be able to beat them.
Personally I only see AI as a tool and nothing else. You can use to mix your art with that of AI. Just like a rock band can mix guitar rock music with melodic synths of electronic music like the band dragonforce. You can create something unique, that AI will be hardpressed to match on its own then.
And making a mediocre piece of art with AI is getting easier, but hammering out a masterpiece requires skill, craftmanship, talent, and creativity. You get an ugly stone block, that you will carve out and turn into a statue.
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On the other hand would better planes result in more military victories which in turn would result in more resources.
Maybe jet fighters and SAMs would be able to prevent some american bombers from destroying factories so more planes could be built. And with more jet fighters it would be possible to protect mines, and prevent railways transports from being bombed - which would lead to more resources to Germany.
And maybe a few jets could make a difference to cling on to important strategic locations a little longer so Germany could get rare earths from Norway and Ukraine, metal from France and oil from Romania.
The problem for Germany would rather be to produce victories in the long run. USA had hundreds of thousands of planes and airmen ready to fight. While Germany didn't have huge amounts of aluminium and high quality oil like USA.
The technological development was speedy during this time period. Only 13 years after the war ended did F4 Phantom and F105 Thunderchief enter service. F4 is a plane capable of flying mach 2, and landing on aircraft carriers, and with upgrades this plane could still be a worthy opponent in air combats of today.
And F105 was almost a stealth bomber built in 1958, and despite it only had a single engine it could fly twice the speed of sound and carry a bombload twice as big as of a B17.
And in 1955, only 10 years after world war 2 did Sweden also develop Draken which was a fighter which also was capable of flying mach2 and it would remain in service with several nordic air forces until the late 1990s, and Austria kept their last Drakens in service until 2005.
All of those three planes would be able to outclass any early war allied or axis aircraft. And not only that. Every plane in service in 1945 would be slaughtered in an air combat against F4, F105 or Draken.
Compare that to today, when upgraded versions of old planes (like F16 Viper, Gripen NG, Eurofighter) still are deadly opponents to even the most advanced fighter jets in service - like F22 which is usally considered the best plane in the world. We are talking about planes which are 40 years old.
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Karl är en av de största kungarna i Svensk historia och den bäst kända kungen i svensk historia. I alla fall här i Sverige.
Tyvärr har det blivit kontroversiellt att prata om honom. Svenska nationalister höjer honom till skyarna som en hjälte konung, medans en del vänsterfolk kallar honom för en galning som älskar krig och sket i sitt eget folks lidande. Att han var som en Hitler eller en Pol Pot.
Men naturligtvis var han inte något av det där. Han byggde inga utrotningsläger och han krigade för att han inte hade något annat val. Invasionen av Norge är väl ett undantag.
Han befann sig också tillsammans med sina soldater i stridens hetta.
Han var en krigarkung. Men man kan inte beskylla honom för alla krig, då det var Danmark, Sachsen-Polen och Ryssland som angrep Sverige... och senare anföll också Preussen och Hannover.
Sverige fick mobilisera varenda sista reserv av manskap och pengar för att överleva, och vi lyckades ha tur att vinna många slag. Så landet klarade sig.
Han startade ett anfallskrig mot Norge. Men det är ju knappast något unikt med anfallskrig på den här tiden. Det var något vanligt bland Europas kungar på den här tiden, och Danmark-Norge låg länge i luven med Sverige. Så i fall man en gång för alla krossade den Danska arvsfienden så skulle det underlätta för Sveriges ställning som stormakt.
1718 hade många år av krigande gjort att många svenskar var trötta på krigande. Många soldater hade dött och mycket pengar hade fått tas ut i skatter. Och många män hade fått vara borta i från sina hem i åratal för att vara ute och kriga.
Så kanske var det då en svensk som sköt Karl. Men det kan också ha varit en Norsk kula. Eller så kan det ha varit en politisk konspiratör, som ville ha en ny kung på Sveriges tron.
Hur som helst tycker jag att det är synd att många svenskar skriker "nazism!". För de svenska soldaternas kamp förjänar att minnas. Hela landet deltog i försvaret av fosterlandet.
Och våra soldater förtjänar att hedras. Men i landet Sverige så görs inte mycket sånt just. Vilket jag tycker är synd. Jag tycker att man kunde göra några filmer om hans krig i stil med patrioten, och ge ut någon skiva med svensk militärmusik från stormaktstiden, då det finns gott om svenska marscher med hög kvalité av Bellman och andra. Svensk historia är inte bara vår egen historia, utan också hela nordens, så kanske vore det intressant även för andra länder att veta lite mer om svensk historia.
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Warthog is important because he shows us what war means. Abstract numbers of russian losses doesn't tell us much. We don't know if they are real or fake. But with all new drone footage each day on Warthog you realize that russian losses are real and that they are huge. Even if Ukraine might exaggerate the russian losses, are they still enormous. The number of tanks, artillery, soldiers, helicopters, generals, armored vehicles and 8-wheeled armored transports are simply enormous.
This makes us realize that Ukraine can win this war.
Another realization is that russia is more pathethic than ever imagined. We misunderstand our opponent if we project ourselves upon him. Russia is not a high tech army that is sensitive of high casualties. They are the opposite. We see all videos with pathethic beggings for help to the Tsar. All videos of museum piece equipment in use in Ukraine. And sometimes we see just things for laughing in a war of ukraine context - which is important as we need to keep the attention on Ukraine while not burying people in boring, dry, depressive stuff.
Maybe some people like me can survive on a dry fact based diet, but many (most?) people can't. So humour is important.
And it is also an important weapon against Putinism - Darth Putin, is an excellent propaganda tool for example.
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@alexnderrrthewoke4479
"beating French legionaries all over the world"
I think google translate must have played a joke on you :P
"Ukraine is desperate for weapons and cache of munitions"
And so is Russia. There is a stalemate and a war of attrition has started. Can a sanctioned 3rd world country (Russia) win such a war against all the biggest economies in the world at the same time? - USA, Japan, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Canada, South Korea, Australia etc?
Nope.
Russia is running out of smart bombs and cannot easily build new ones because of the sanctions. It cannot repair tanks because of the sanctions.
Some sources say it is start running out of dumb ammo as well.
The Russian army call upon 50 year old beer belly dudes to serve in Ukraine - that is how desperate the manpower shortages are. You have begun to use T-62 tanks there - which are tanks which were considered outdated already back in the 1980s.
To me it seems like Russia is losing this war of attritition even before it has began.
Ukraine now gets MLRS and Leopard2 tanks - so time is rolling in their favor.
My advice to you is to pull out of this war while you can. You can lose this war with another 1000 destroyed Russian tanks or you can lose the war with no more Russian losses.
The choice is yours.
I used to think you Russians at least had common sense, unlike fanatical ISIS warriors and suicidal Japanese world war II soldiers.
But I am starting to have my doubts when you prolong this war and your unavoidable defeat.
You only cause suffering to yourself and doing yourself a big disservice.
Why are you even still in Ukraine? Is it because of pride? Well then I only got bad news for you.
You are going to lose the war anyways. I think you should just cut your losses and go home. Then you can start repairing the mess you created.
And why do you need more land? You already got 11 time zones of it. And even more of it will become useable thanks to global warming which will benefit Russia.
You are the largest country on the planet. You can lay your imperialism to rest.
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Russia will not have a happy economic future after this war regardless how it ends. Its santioned. The military needs to be completly rebuilt - which is not cheap. Its foreign assets are stolen and used for war reparations. The country will never fully recover from the past brain drain. The country have lost 200 thousand young men, and twice that number if you include men who have been severly injured and lost arms, legs eyes and so on.
And hundreds of thousands of men will become alcoholics traumatized by their war experiences and having PTSD and having problems with their work and their marriage. And along with alcoholism and drug problems comes criminality. Birthrates will also go south - not just by all deaths, and all injuries, and russians moving abroad in the braindrain,... but also because of all men who have to spend their years in the frontline instead of making kids.
Many men will never experience fatherhood, and many women will never get married because there are too few men left.
So Russia will continue to battle with falling birtrates and an ageing population.
Furthermore can Russia no longer keep much of its manufacturing base alive because it cannot export to western markets anymore, and russian consumers are too poor after the war. And foreign friends like India are less interested in buying russian military equipment after it have proven itself to be outdated worthless garbage. It was that in the six day war and in the wars in Iraq 1991 and 2003. But the Russians said that the Iraqi losses were terrible just because they had the old T-72M model of the tank, and if they had the better Russian version of T-72 then they would have fared much better.
Well the war in Ukraine did poke a hole in that myth, as even the most Russian versions of all their weapons are easily blown to pieces by western weapons.
And even if India have locked themselves in to Russian equipment thanks to a "sunk cost". Might they still wanna reconsider moving away from a dependency on Russia. Partly because the country is a weak loser and not valuable as a geo-strategic ally anymore. And partly because Russia now cannot import western components so it can build many advanced weapons anymore.
Russia have lost most of its car makers. Its airliners are facing hard times as their stolen western aircrafts are running out of spareparts - and after that do they no longer have any planes that they can fly passangers with from one part of Russia to another.
China and India is taking advantage of Russia and its cheap oil that generates only a marginal profit for russia.
And that is all that Russia can get from a resource that makes up over half of russias GDP. And just like with the economic problems Russia had in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, will Russia once again be extremely short on cash - and especially foreign cash.
Russia can try to sell more of its best high tech weapons to countries like China and India.
But just like China did reverse engineer and steal all technologies in how to make SU27 fighter jets, will they once again steal technologies from Russia and reverse engineer everything and steal every technology until there is nothing less to steal. And then will China eventually become more skillful and knowledgable than Russia in every field of technology and being able to build better things themselves, and then no longer feel any need to buy anything russian in the future.
And what can Russia do about it?
- Nothing.
- Oh well you can try to go to war with China of course with your badly battered army against a country with a 10 times larger population and the worlds 2nd largest economy. But I doubt you will win that war.
And with the economic problems will Russia more and more fall behind the rest of the world. China is building its own stealth fighters. And other countries are making their 6th generation fighters. But Russia is unable to even produce a 5th generation fighter. India have lost patience and have pulled out from their funding of that failed SU57 project. And nor are they interested in any T-14 Armata tanks.
And I cannot blame them. Had an American F22 used a F15 engine and put bolts and rivets on its wings then I would not call it a stealth fighter, and for the same reason do I not think that SU57 is a good stealth plane as its radar signature and generated heat is a joke for a stealth plane.
And the T-14 Armata tank lacks turret armor and can be penetrated there by just about anything, and it completly relies on cameras for the crew to see anything outside so if the tank gets its cameras knocked out by artillery fire it will become blind and useless on the battlefield. And its engine is old and weak, which is why its top speed is lower than Abrams and Challanger despite being 20 tonnes lighter.
Russia is falling behind the rest of the world technologically and its negative birthrate does further contribute to making this country very poor for decades to come.
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World war II was a bit special, America had its great depression and lots of unemployed, and women were outside the labourmarket, so it was possible to smoothly move workers into new jobs.
In a future war I do think the west still got much to give in a war effort. The post-industrial society is largely a myth. Fewer people work in the industry today and more people work in the service sector for two main reasons. Firstly because there is a trend that companies wanna specialize in their core activities, and back in the old days a car manufacturer, for example Volvo, could hire people to work as cleaners and having people handling all the bills. But now those same cleaners and finance experts could do the exactly same jobs as before for Volvo, but now they work for a separate cleaning or finance company that works for Volvo.
Nothing has changed in the real world, but in statistics things seems to have changed because the cleaner and banker no longer works in an industry company but are now instead classed as service sector workers.
Another reason why less people are working on the factory floor is because industrial robots and machinery can do the job more effective oftentimes. You don't have any worker strikes, no paid vacations, no maturnity leave, no sick workers staying home, and no gossip.
And robots can also work in enviroments too dangerous for human labour, they can work in noisy dirty enviroments, and they can lift things that weight many tonnes, and they can make things with greater precision than a human surgeon.
So I wouldn't say that the industry lacks capacity, in fact I think the contrary is true. And in terms of money that are going into the government by taxes, we still see that the industry still plays a huge role in most western economies.
And if a world war with China starts, then I think people would consume less and money would instead be used for investments in more industrial robots and new production plants.
And labour-intensive production methods would be replaced with capital intensive production methods, since we got lots of money and techological know how, and little manpower.
And China would do the opposite since they got much people that can become workers, but they can not afford many machines.
So the west would be able to send a larger proportion of its male population to war since fewer people are needed to produce a tank than what China would need due to its lack of robots.
We still have high unemployment today today, and most people do work with bullshit jobs - marketing/advertisement, tourism, selling financial products of no use to society, genderstudies proffessors, making goldplated toilets and luxury yachts for billionaires, salesmen of anal bleaching, public relations executives and management consultants....... yep there are lots of people one can pick and either dressup in a military uniform or put to work in a factory to make that uniform.
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USA is still the largest economy in the world and most of the highly productive Fortune 500 companies are stationed there, and the country holds a technological leadership. And Britain is still one of the largest economies in the world despite their shrinking importance of their manufacturing industry, the country still produces a lot of things, but if we divde up the industrial production with the number of citizens, then country produces very little nowadays and needs to reindustrialize.
And Germany, Japan, Scandinavia are still making things.
I would not go so far as to say its decline has been a statistical illusion
To some extent it is. And it can explain atleast some of the decline. People always say that we live in a post-industrial society, but I would say that manufacturing is still the most important sector in an economy.
Neighter farming or the service sector can make the same productivity increases.
We are 400 times more productive in making cotton clothes than we were in the early 1800s, and while a skilled worker could make 2000 cigares per day in the early in 1800s, there are now machines that can make 5000 cigarettes per minute.
So could a farmer do the same and increase his harvest 400 times bigger than his ancestors? nope.
Can a service sector person make two hundred more haircuts per hour than a barber in Rome? no.
Can a chef serve a hundred more meals? no.
Only manufacturing can also bring in foreign currency into the country to pay for all the imports. So I would say that manufacturing still plays a key roll in the modern economy. Unfortunatly it has often been neglected by modern intellectuals who say that a service based economy and banking is the future.
The US will be fine, lots of cash protected by two oceans, the worlds biggest navy to keep supply lines open and an abundance of most resources. Europeans, Japan, Russia ect. I might be alot harder for them.
Germany and Japan could build a huge military, but they have just choosen not to do so. And if they were to spend more on their own military - as America wants - then they would get some substantial military forces, as West-Germany had during the cold war.
And Britain and France still got some of the most powerful armies in the world. And the German, South Korean and Japanease airforces are still quite large, and relativly strong compared to the Chinease airforce which still uses ancient garbage like MIG-17 fighter jets.
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"we have the most iron ore of any European country, not counting Russia. This was a main driver of the Swedish economy during and after WWII and it could be argued that it was because of this, we had the resources to eastablish the welfare state"
Iron is not that important today, in fact have many large mines been closed down - such as Grängesberg, or being bought up by foreign mining companies, especially Finnish mining companies for Sweden's part. And the post world war II economic boom was rather driven by the car industry - with Volvo as the biggest company in Sweden in terms of people employed.
Sweden is not like a third world country that only got raw materials to sell. And countries without a manufacturing sector cannot afford a welfare state - so you are clueless about how both the Swedish economy works as well as the global economy.
"there's a huge shortage of qualified teachers and nurses"
This is because our country have been infected by market fundamentalism, which led to the idea called "New Public Management". The idea with NPM is that the government should be runned the same way as companies in the private sector in order to become more efficient - which is of course a retarded idea.
You can of course on paper double the "efficiency" in the school system by letting a teacher teach twice as many school kids in her class. Then you get twice as much education for every dollar spent.
But this does on the other hand create a hard work load on the personnel, and a lower quality of the service they provide. The service does NOT work like the manufacturing industry where you can increase production 100 fold without a reduction in quality.
But you cannot expect a chef, a nurse, a teacher, or a hairdresser to do 10 times more per work hour without expecting quality of their service to fall.
Swedish politicians like to brag about how efficient Swedish healthcare is. That we get most healthcare per dollar spent in Europe. But I rather see this as something to be ashamed of. Mothers get kicked out hours after giving birth because hospital beds needs to be used for other patience. Nurses are underpaid and overworked. Hospitals are understaffed - which does not only harm the workers, but it also pose a systemic risk to Swedish society as the country thereby lacks the extra capacity needed to deal with unexpected large disasters - such as terrorist attacks or train wrecks when there are no extra nurses or hospital beds to be had.
http://mikaelnyberg.nu/2017/01/23/sa-tog-vardplatserna-slut/
And all those private healthcare companies have also created a need for more regulation and overseeing - which have increased the bureaucratic burden and costs in the healthcare system. And all
increase in bureaucracy following the trend of internal invoicing is another result of the commodification of the healthcare sector.
And the cherry on top is all corruption which have come with all plunderers entering the healthcare sector.
Sweden recently built the Worlds most expensive hospital thanks to the corruption of the right-wing government in Stockholm.
New Public Management have been a disaster everywhere it have been tried out. Running the military like a Toyota factory is another retarded example. It is of course most cost-efficient to not create unnecessary large stocks of things in a warehouse if you are a car maker. But the military have other needs than money.
The point of having a military is not to make money, but to win wars. And the side with better supply flows will have a huge advantage of the battlefield, while a country with the best tanks in the world and the best soldiers will be useless if it cannot fix any food to eat for the soldiers and fuel and ammunition for the tanks. An army of soldiers who have starved to death and tanks without ammo will not fight well.
Therefore is it idiotic to not have any stocks of supplies before a war. The needs from the battlefield for ammunition can grow faster than what a factory can produce it, and without ammunition can the battle be turned into a loss.
https://kkrva.se/anvand-medarbetarnas-tid-battre-med-uppdragstaktik-istallet-for-new-public-management/
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@rayk0516 UK have been an EU member for decades so I think Britain got the know-how how to make products according to the standards of the EU market. I doubt this will be all totally forgotten by january next year.
"I remember how eastern european countries like poland, czech, hungary, looked like after they joined"
The EU might had some positive impacts regarding democracy and economic aid. But I also think it would have been possible for those countries to perform even better without the EU and neoliberalism.
Poland have been better performing than the other economies probably because it never joined the Euro.
The chock doctrine implemented against Latvia have destroyed that countrys economy. An entire generation of youths have left the country because their homeland offers no future for them. People are indebted to the banks and there are no jobs. And the Euro makes it impossible to devalue the currency to inflate away the debts and help exports.
Latvia used to be the silicon valley of the Soviet bloc where all the high tech computering and aviation industry was located. But now its economy is in ruin.
Countries like Latvia and Bulgaria had seen a demographic catastrophe the last two decades as young males have left their country to work in western Europe. And women cannot form families to keep the population numbers up, and without young workers does the tax base fall and it becomes harder to take care of the elderly.
"same happened in Spain, Portugal, Italy after they joined"
Only Romania got higher levels of poverty than Spain after all the austerity the EU have imposed on Spain.
Only Zimbabwe and Haiti did have crappier GDP growth rates than Italy the last decades (according to "The Economist"). And youth unemployment have still not recovered from pre-crisis levels in the Mediterranean countries. It is therefore no wonder why most youths in those countries have become Euroskeptics.
"The EU is not only FR and GE"
Well to be honest it is only FR and GE. The EU doesn't give a sh*t about smaller countries.
"it is historically proven that it is the longest peace period on EU grounds (Wars in 1864, 1866, 1878, 1912 etc.)"
This is one strange statement. What do you mean?
Europe have seen one conflict after another also after the EU has been created. Ireland, The Basque conflict, coup d'états in Greece and Portugal, The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Cyprus conflict, the Balkan wars, the Chechen wars, Dagestan, Georgia, the Civil war in Ukraine etc, etc.
So if you say the 1800's was not a peaceful period. Then by the same standards you cannot argue that the period 1956-2020 have been any peaceful either.
Indeed. I think that the 1800's was much more peaceful than the 1900's.
And that in turn shows us that you do not need any EU to create peace.
"Cameron´s comment i do not know, never heard of. But i guess he was afraid what he started with the referendum leaving to a brexit that he did not want. It does not mean that his comment was literal."
Cameron was neither the first or the last person to use this argument to argue for the need of having the EU. Thunderf00t also said that Brexit would lead to another world war. So I don't know. Maybe there are people who actually do believe in this nonsense.
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@rayk0516
"i will continue to see the positive effects"
EU is positive in the same way as a positive AIDS-test.
"Enjoy hating the EU"
I was a guy who just wanted to play video games.
But the EU decided to f*ck with me and my country and could not just leave us alone. So reluctantly have I got involved in politics, with just one aim: Let the EU leave us alone.
"the crappy comment about smaller countries it does not make any sense"
I come from a medium sized country and I know that the EU is only following the will of France and Germany. Not even Britain had much say. And Spain and Italy have not much say even if they are nearly as big as France and Germany.
Sweden deserves better than just being treated as conquered province for resource extraction in the Merkel reich. This is a country of innovators, composers and great soldiers who took Moscow, Prague and Poland.
Germany is hypocritical. It demands that every other country must follow the rules no matter how dire the circumstances are. It talks about solidarity and demands that Sweden give EU more money. It demands that Sweden hands over its electricity production and natural resources and destroy its nature to show solidarity with the EU (or the German industry to be more precise). Germany demands that Sweden gives up its 200 year old tradition of peace and neutrality in foreign policy and joins a military alliance under the leadership of Merkel and Macron.
And Germany demands that Poland takes in refugees despite their country have been depopulated by all young men moving to the west. And now Germany wants to replace the Polish population with non-poles - and that is making people upset. Perhaps you think that Poles have the wrong opinion in this matter. But I ask you, do this really matter? It is not up to you and me to decide over Poland's fate. It is not our country.
This is a thing which only can be solved democratically by the Poles themselves.
Anything else, would just be German imperialism and fascism.
Germany's treatment of Greece is also beyond cruel. And it is also hypocritical. Germany did cheat on the EU budget rules just as much as Greece did before 2008. So Germany got no right to point fingers.
And demanding austerity while an economy already have 25% unemployment and starving children and a dramatic rise in suicides among Greek citizens show us that German leadership is both cruel and idiotic.
Germany demands stuff from other countries all the time, and gets what it wants. Even Sweden had to bailout German banks during the Euro crisis despite Sweden are not a member of the Euro currency.
Germany also demanded that all countries sided with her in the trade war against USA. Despite the other EU countries do not have any reason to fight with the USA. It is only Germany that have a large trade surplus with the USA - and that is the reason for the fight. Germany is dumping wages and playing unfair and stealing jobs and economic growth from other countries: USA and southern Europe.
French and Italian car producers sells nearly no cars at all to USA, so they have no reason to care about this tariffs on car imports. That is a German problem, not a European one.
So Germany and France puts gigantic demands on other EU countries to work on her behalf. But what do Germany and France do for the other countries and her allies?
- She steals their hospital equipment which they have already paid for. And they are doing so in the middle of a national emergency. Thousands of Italians died because of Merkel and Macron.
Germany also acts unwilling to help Eastern Europe to put sanctions on Russia to signal that Europe is not okay with Russian military aggression on its neighbors - because Germany cares more about doing business and make money than helping her East European EU friends.
- Germany also don't give a crap about following the same convergence pact budget rules that it says that all small countries have to follow.
- Germany cries and are being angry on Trump for him demanding that the country do honor her part of the Nato treaty and paying her fair share - which she have not done since the 1970's. Germany has been a parasite that has been free riding on the Nato military protection from USA...
And not only that, Germany does also refuse to help her Nato allies USA and UK in their sanctions against China when they break international treaties and crush every human right that exist. Because Germany do care more about making money for Germany, than helping her allies or serving any moral principles that doesn't mean economic benefits for Germany.
The list goes on and on...
I think I have been clear. EU is only ruled by the hypocritical, morally corrupt, and idiotic country called Germany.
Never have I been more proud of being a Swede than now. I wish I could go back in time to the 1600's so I could follow Gustavus Adolphus on his military campaigns and burn that damn country down into the ground while we occupied all of it.
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Even with this definition of victory Japans way of acting still remains increadibly retarded. I can understand japans feelings of frustration and anger over unfair treatment from the west. But that doesn't change the fact that Japans decision to start a war with USA was stupid and suicidal.
Yamamoto knew that this would never end well. But the rest of Japans leadership was naive and thought that all what was needed was a hard punch to knock out the American fleet and the war would be over, because America would just be okay with a sneaky suprise attack from a country of an inferior human race.
As I said. This was just wishful thinking. America would never accept such dirty tactics, and especially not in a time period when racism was mainstream. There would also be too much national pride and prestige loss to surrender to a developing country in Asia.
Pearl Harbor would never be forgotten or forgiven.
And this idea the japanese had that combat experience against shitty armies in Asia, and fanatical combat morale could fully compensate for Americas industrial superiority is also naive.
The japanese racist stereotype of Americans as materialistic and afraid of death were also far from true. Just like Hitler and the nazis did the japanese leadership know nothing about America and its industrial might. And the consequences of that would become equally devastating.
The war Japan started was just a mess of miscalculations on so many levels. And the lack of a Plan-B seems typical for the caotic japanese regime. They just started wars everyware and landed troops on islands everyware even if they didn't have any logistical capabilities to support small garrisons on every goddamn island in the pacific.
They were nowhere near victory in China, and yet they started new wars with France, the Netherlands, Britain, Australia, USA and New Zeeland. As if the problems with China and Russia was not enough. And they also managed to piss off the local population in every land they occupied, and they lacked any economic plan on how rule their many stolen colonies so the local economies took severe damages and suffered from shortages of everything, higher prices and massive inflation.
The war could never have ended well in the long run - as you said. But the war didn't even run well in the short run. The turning point of the war came only half a year after Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor.
And the battle of Coral Sea was an indecisive small loss for Japan. And the battle of
Pearl harbor never became any knockout punch, but instead could many ships be repaired and brought back to service within a few months.
And if Japan could not do better the first months of the war, then what says that they would do better the next coming months and years when America would get more modern planes to combat the Zero fighters with?
The next big disaster for Japan came only months after Midway, when the battle of Guadacanal costed Japan hundreds of aircrafts and enormous amounts of transport ships that it would never be able to replace.
And after that did Japan lose the iniative in the pacific theather over to the Americans.
And the massive sea battle at the Philliphines in 1944 could at best only have won Japan a little time before defeat. Japan was at that point starving and the merchant navy laid at the bottom of the ocean. And the industrial production was stopped by the lack of raw materials.
And even if the resources had been there so would the japanese production been too little to save the country. America was producing more aircrafts in 1943 than Japan did during the entire war. And Japans aircraft designs were comparably outdated and the pilots was badly trained.
And with the end of the war in Europe would any prospects of peace on good terms be over with as Britain, USSR, USA and China would gang up on Japan. America had never even used their industrial muscles 100% during the war - and yet were they able utterly outproduce rest of the world.
And one can only imagine what would happen if America full hearted attempt if Japan somehow managed to win some battles in the pacific. The US Navy even canceled the orders of new battleships after the victory at Midway in 1942. So had the battle of Midway ended differently then the Montana monster-sized super-battleships could still would have been under construction.
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I think the German assesment was largely correct except the underestimation of the fighting morale of the Japanease troops.
Japan did not have the industrial capacity needed for a big war against modern military powers, and it is surprising that the country actully could do as well as it did the first months after pearl harbour with its many surprise attacks and amphibous landings.
The enemy was unprepared, and badly supplied with manpower and modern weapons while Japan had its battle-hardened military and element of surprise to throw at their allied enemies. But they would eventually run out of luck, as they were doomed to do sooner or later... and luckily for America did Japan lose their best card at their hand only a few months after the war started when Japan lost their many carriers at Midway in 1942. And after that the war was doomed to end badly for Japan ever after.
The only other 2 strong cards Japan had at their hand, one was the large concentration of force it already had in the pacific, while America still was chocked after the declaration of war from the Axis and was trying to gear up its military/government and industry for war. But that advantage was soon lost as well in late 1942 when Japan lost hundreds of aircrafts and transport ships in the battle for Guadacanal, which severly restricted their ability fo move troops and control the skies for the rest of the war.
And the last major trump card was the super-battleships that was lost in 1944 in the Leyte gulf battle.
In the end was Japan doomed to fail no matter what they did. It did not have any large population or industrial base that could come anyware near their enemies. It did manage to steal recource rich areas, but it did lack the transport ships for transporting it to Japan. And the technological gap between Japan and USA was huge, and the Japanease army was also pretty easy to crush for the Russians in 1945, even after the red army had been fighting bloody battles in Europe for years.
Japans resources was too small and fighting a land war in China and the pacific, while also getting involved in their air-sea battles was really too much for a poor backwards country. And the country would probably had been crushed much earlier if the war in Europe didn't get the much higher priority for the allies.
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Harsh words from one jew to another jew.
And well yeah, Kissinger is probably not going down well in the history books. The Nobel prize winner who helped creating Pinotchets dictatorship...
He did stand for a hard line towards North Vietnam. And understandbly so. But now when Ukraine is under attack he does not give that country the same hardline a backing. From my year of studying law I will say that one important word sums up 80% of what laws is all about: Precedent.
Either you upheld a law and apply it to everyone. Or the law falls apart and it apply to no one.
If Russia thinks it can ignore the rules based international order and ignore all laws, invade countries and commit warcrimes... and they get away with it - then surely you will get more people who wanna try to do the same thing.
And it was not enough to give 20% of Georgia to Putin. It was not to give him Crimea. And it surely is not enough to give him Donbass and Luhansk. He wants to take all of Ukraine.
Everyone with an IQ above 60 realize this. Next on the line is probably Moldavia.
And I bet that Putin would wish he could take Finland, the Baltics and Poland as well.
I say we have to stand up against Putin. And if we don't stand up against Putin now, then when should we do it?
Ukraine was a too big country to eat up in one chew for Putin. So I suggest we arm Ukraine. It got a brave army with a great fighting spirit. And even those cynical scumbags not caring about Ukraine, should realize that giving weapons to Ukraine is a way of good self-defence. Russia gets weakened without us having to waste our own blood in order to do so.
Personally I think it is a bit shameful to not fighting ourselves... but it is better than doing nothing I guess - just ask the Ukrainians what they think...
And I don't cry about all Swedish surplus weapons that are being used up or destroyed in combat. We can build more of those. And we got time to do so. And those weapons were built to fight Russians... and the only difference is that AT4 is now fired by an Ukrainian pair of hands instead of a Swedish pair of hands.
Personally I think it is beautiful that Swedish steel are used to defend freedom, the independence of one people, and fighting evil.
We build long term friendships with other countries - in this case the largest country in Europe with 40 million people. We gave them help when they were on their knees. And one day when independent Ukraine thanks to its large resources become a rich and very powerful country in Europe, we do have a big and powerful grateful friend by our side.
I think other countries should be reasoning in the same way.
I also think it is time for the non-western countries to stop licking Putins butt. They might dislike the west for a mix of good and bad reasons. But this war is not about EU and USA. It is about if one think it is acceptable to start an unprovoved war and commit war crimes.
3rd world countries need to realize that Russia is not their friends. Now Putin is willing to murder hundreds of millions of people with starvation by blocking the Ukrainian food supplies to Africa, Asia and elsewhere. It is now in their self-interest to stand up against Putin and unite to get those damn ships with wheat transported without being attacked by Russian ships and planes.
Or you can be okay with sitting down quiet and doing nothing and let 200 million people die from hunger.
That is more than 3 times more than Hitler killed. That says a lot what scumbag Putin is. Not only do he murder civilians in Chechenya, Georgia, Syria, Ukraine and possibly also kills Russians in false flag attacks. He also threatens with nuclear war that can kill a billion people.
If that is the man that countries like India wants as their friend, then I must ask what the hell is wrong with the moral compass in your country?
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@storyspren Kind of. Before the war was France and Britain rivals that wanted to dominate America, and Sweden and Russia had fought each other for centuries. But the war began when Prussia's King invaded Austria to steal its richest province: Silesia.
And as a bad excuse to have the right to do so, did Prussia say that Austria's new ruler Maria Theresa was not a justified to rule her country because she was a woman. And other countries said the bad excuse as they tried to steal Austrian land, and French troops also began fighting against Austria. And Bavaria and Saxony also joined the war against Austria.
And soon did you have large war with many of the largest countries in Europe involved. And troops and warships all over the world fought each other in Europe, North America, West Indies and in India.
The big winner of the war was Prussia who could keep Silesia. While France did not do any important conquests, and Sweden who had started a war against Russia would not accomplish anything.
And the war ended up making Austria angry. Silesia was her richest province and it had paid 25% of all tax revenues for the huge Austrian empire. And Austria wanted to take back her lost province and destroy Prussia as a revenge. And France also was also angry on Prussia, because Prussia had signed a military alliance with France and had then signed a secret peace deal with Austria which had left all the burden of fighting the war into French hands. France felt betrayed. And France and Austria became friends after the war, and the women ruling both those countries hated Prussia and liked to see it crushed in the next war.
Prussia soon realized that she was alone.
And three women ruling France, Austria and Russia wanted to see her destroyed. So Prussia then signed a military alliance with Britain...
And then was the Seven years war ready to begin. And Austria tried to take back what she had lost. And Britain and France would fight each other again in America, India, Europe and elsewhere. And this war would cause the economic ruin of France. While England took over control over north America and India and laid her hands on French land.
England had now overtaken France role as the most powerful country in Europe and the world.
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I never said all guns should be banned. I think hunters can have their guns, and those guns should not be automatic. And bump fire stocks should be illegal. And magazine capacity should be restricted. And background checks should be harsh. The government should also make a rifle-by-back program so people can sell their guns to the government for a market price in order to reduce the fire arms in circulation in society.
With all those measures we can limit the harm a shooter can do. And the police can quickly outgun a normal criminal. Which in turn makes society safer and the police doesn't need armoured vechiles like in America.
Its true that the market price goes up, and I cannot see why that would be a bad thing. In the past (say the 1950-1990s) when Sweden was a closed economy there was hand grenades or military guns in circulation. And the only deaths by fire arms was caused by non-automatic rifles for hunting.
But since Sweden joined the EU and opened up its borders to other European countries weapons have been flooding into the country, and especially from surplus ex-Yugoslavian army depots by criminals who have bribed Generals to sell their stocks of arms.
So now the price of weapons in western Europe has fallen like a rock. And a hand grenade can now be bought cheaper than a milk package. And now most gun violance is done by drunken persons with imported Yugoslavian arms.
And as weapons get cheaper more thugs can get their hands on them. And the Swedish police is fighting an uphill battle against heavier and heavier armed opponents, which are getting bolder and more aggressive.
I can have some symphaty for the American position though that closing the borders between each state is not a desireable solution. So doing as I wish to do with Sweden is not possible. And too many guns are already around in American society to get things under control.
So I guess things has to go stepwise when America is slowly de-arming.
I would also just trying to close the border with Mexico since I'm not a believer in legalization. Neighter in guns, drugs or anything else. If money is the problem, then the solution would be to provide people with other ways to earn an income, like for example selling food crops instead of weed.
Most large criminal gangs now also makes their income from a broad range of activities - smuggling mexicans, prostitution, selling drugs, blackmail, kidnapping etc, so just legalizing everything would do nothing to get rid of any criminal gangs.
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I think the mentality was formed of this time period. When you look at old peoples homes you always see them save up things, including total garbage. They truely embraced the 2nd hand trend so to say. They rather kept things and tried to repair them than throwing them away. And in old peoples homes you can see old ugly butter packages being repurposed after the butter is gone, and becoming used as boxes.
Compare that to the current day mentality of throwing away things and buying something new. Its often cheaper to buy a new computer than repairing and old lap top that is a little bit broken.
I think that says a lot. Resources was scarce during the great depression and people had to make do with what ever little they had. And even if some people did get rich and succesful later on, would their values and habits still live on long after the economic crisis was gone and economic growth was strong.
Its also clear that people have their worldview stuck in the past. People who had their worldview formed in the 1950s often have an over romanticised view of free trade, the EU and an obsessive fear about inflation leading to Hitler.
We who was born in the 1980s see a society without any progress like more vacation, shorter workdays, better healthcare, better pensions, full employment. But rather a failed economy without affordable housing where it is hard to form families and have kids.
I think there are pros and cons with those worldviews and values. One thing I think we should however avoid is to let these biases of the elderly generations getting too much power over decision making. I think outdated beliefs are harmful. Just like using tactics that worked on the battlefields of the old days do more harm than good on a modern battlefield. The worldview must constantly be updated.
Just like the military. Walking in line formations and wearing colorful uniforms and letting flutes and drums play is not very effiecent if you fight against an enemy with minefields, machine guns, barbed wire, and HIMARS artillery.
Many laws of economics from the past are still valid today, just like some general principles of strategy and logistics.
However the world today is not the same as in the past. And that needs to be taken into account.
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Your post was boring, off-topic, and uninteresting so I decided to block you. I don't know if you are a troll, or simply a lamestream thinker incapable of seeing things from outside your own dogma. Anyways, this just feel like a waste of time arguing with someone who is like that.
"Ships are useless without seamen to sail them, mate."
I am not going to argue against someone who posts empety clichés - Fuck you idiot.
"There aren't any brilliant flanking maneuvers that can be carried out with poorly-equipped ships and there aren't any hills to defend. The history of fleet engagements is rather devoid of upsets. The smaller fleet may win, but the inexperienced fleet never does."
Yes, if we do like you do and choose to ignore the evidence of the contrary. I just mentioned the battle of Svensksund 1790 where the Swedes won an amazing victory against a superior force thanks to a schoolbook example of an double envelopment.
If Cannae is the ideal of an double envelopment which all strategists at land warfare tries to emulate, then Svensksund is the ideal for admirals at sea.
"France had not actually defeated an English battlefleet in generations. The Chesapeake was a tactical draw that enabled a victory on land, nothing more."
Once again, we can reach your conclusion if we do like you and close our eyes to the facts that proves the opposite. Fucktard.
Bantry Bay, 1689
Beachy Head, 1690
Lagos, 1693
St. John, 1696
The Lizard, 1707
Minorca, 1756
Sadras, 1782
Providien, 1782
First Algeciras, 1801
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I think most improvement reforms in history have taken place after disasters, and when people are angry and will not take it anymore and the working class and middle class demand for example the right to vote and universal healthcare and veterans benefits in exchange for fighting for the capitalists against USSR or Hitler.
In France it was 1789 that led to the French revolution and the end of the ineffiecent parasitical feudal state. The disasterous
defeat of Denmark in 1658 led to the end of the corrupt rule of the nobles, and a strong Danish state was created with a permanent tax system that could support a standing army. In the past did Denmark not have any peace time army since the nobles did not wanna pay taxes for it. And as a result did the Danish army not have any well trained regiments, and the armies were quickly put togheter in times of war against Sweden who had a well trained army with men who had trained togheter with each other for years and therefore knew each other well and would fight and die for their best friends. That team spirit did not exist in the Danish army before a new army was created that existed both in times of peace and war.
Likewise did Swedens military setback against Poland at Kircholm in 1605 force drastistic military changes to how the military was organized. And the defeat against Denmark in 1613 forced Sweden to make drastic changes to its tax system and resource mobilization. And the result of these changes made Sweden the strongest military power in Europe of the 1600s, capable of conquering Moscow in 1610, defeating Denmark twice, occupying all of modern day Germany in 1630 and defeating the might Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
And the rise of corrupt nobles that put self-interest before national interest and refused to spend taxes for a strong military led to the disasterous Scanian war for Sweden in 1679. And the result became strong public anger, and the King, the people, the clergy and the mechant class united against the nobles and forced them to resign much of the wealth they had gained the last decades. And the result became good government finances and a strong military.
The catastrophic defeat of Japan 1853, forced the country to make drastic changes to its society. It modernized it military according to German model, its navy according to the British model, its education system to the american model and later on German model, its banking system and legal system was modelled after Belgium and France and so on.
And soon would Japan rise as a great strong economic power and a military power.
So necessity seems to be a mother of innovation.
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Sounds like the "Age of liberty" in Sweden. The power of the King was strongly limited. It was also a nobleman democracy. Foreign powers also bribed the political parties. Foreign powers played the game to keep this system in place so that Sweden would remain weak and dysfunctional. The Swedish speaking nobility in Finland began lusting for Finland to break off from the country and become independent or fall under Russian rule instead.
The Spanish empire had some of the same problems too. Only Castile paid taxes, which is of course absurd when you see that not just Castile but also all of Spain needed military protection, and so did Italy, North Africa, South America, Belgium, the Netherlands and other places of the empire. The nobles in the rest of the empire refused to pay their fair share. And the King backed down from confrontation, the wars was not so costly to begin with and American gold could pay for them.
But then more and more wars was started. And war debts grew. And the gold and silver was not enough to cover the costs. So King was forced to raise taxes to avoid bankruptcy. Holland hated taxes and religious opression so they declared independence. And a war in Holland sucked more money. Taxes had to increase even more. But the nobility in Italy and Spain refused to pay anything unless they got more independence from Spain.
So Spain fought wars on foreign countries, Holland and Portugal declared independence. The economic problems were huge and parts of the Kingdom became more and more independent from Spain in exchange for the right to Spain to tax those lands. And finally was the Spanish monarchy as weak as it was before the empire was created.
Also France, Denmark and the Austro-Hungrian empire was left dysfunctional because of their strong nobility.
Denmarks nobility refused to pay taxes or to let their farmers join the army. So Denmark could therefore not build a professional standing army. And that made them instead rely on mercenaries which in the long run gave them an army less effective than that of other countries which had a standing army (like Spain and Sweden). So the country got badly beaten in some wars with its neighbours. And once the country had learned its lesson and forced the nobility to loosen their grip, then it was already too late. Half of the country's provinces had already been lost to foreign powers.
One country would however have serfdom and remain succesful - and that was Russia.
A country where the nobility was so strong that it would be more fair to call people slaves instead of serfs. The country would however remain much backwards in the 1800s and 1900s.
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@meteorknight999
Sweden, Brazil, South Africa, Hungary, Thailand, Phillipines, and Czechia have bought Gripen. And the latest version have recently just entered into production so not even the Swedish air force have begun to deploy E yet.
But you do still shy away from the fact that Gripen E is an overall better aircraft to all planes russia have despite Sweden having a smaller economy.
Gripen E have better stealth, it is easier to maintain, it have better sortie rate, its cost per flight hour is lower, its turn rate is superior to everything russia have, its range is better, its thrust-to-weight ratio is about similiar or better to all russian planes and when some sources claim its slightly better for some russian plane do this statistic ignore the fact that Gripen does not not need as much thrust-to-weight ratio as the plane is smaller and more aerodynamic and therefore got less air resistence that slows down the plane.
The plane can carry a very big bombload despite being a small single engine plane. It can carry more than twice as much as the twin engine MIG29 and have more hardpoints. And compared to more modern planes like SU57 which are bigger do it still perform well with the same number of hardpoints and can carry almost the same amount of weight despite only having 1 engine. But Gripen can on the other hand be reloaded and rearmed in just 5 minutes which in my opinion makes it a superior attack aircraft.
The plane can also use highways for take off. And it have advaced Electronic warfare capabilities and it is equipped with some of the best weapons in the world like the meteor missile.
So I consider this plane to be superior to everything russia got at the moment.
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@sandrakostic5998 I have actually studied feminism at one SJW-clown university (Södertörns University) so I feel confident that I know what I am talking about. You speak as if you hold the true version of feminism in your hands - but you don't. No one holds the monopoly over deciding what feminism is - and neither do you.
A normal person would not be offended by what I said. But then we have people like you...
As I sees it are the only people who gets offended of what I said idiots. Because it is appearant that many women are not good people. The woman in this video is one example of this. I guess most people think I sound like Captain Obvious when I says this, and that is because for normal people this is obvious.
But for some types of feminists its not for some reason. They are lying to themselves that only men could be evil, and that all women are good somehow.
Women and men are almost completly similiar in most ways, for good and bad. Nor do I believe in male Conservatives or female feminists that makes baseless claims that men and women are biologically programmed for this or that.. as if all men are born socially competent, and women are born with the skill how to know how to breastfeed a baby.
But the truth is that most of that is not true. Many men are just as socially awkward and introverted as many women, and neither women or their babies knows how do a breastfeeding, but instead do the baby accidentally bite the mother at the first times, and the mother gets red over all the chest from all bites and inflammation, and it is an unpleasant experience for many that they had no knowledge about before or gotten any pre-warning about.
Personally do I think that feminism is an useless and outdated concept in the western world. Instead of focusing on gaining undeserved priviligies for one group of people and discriminate and hate another group of people just because of the way they were born... do I think it is more productive to have an ideology that is promoting a society witout priviligies and which treats everyone equally. For that reason do I not consider feminists as my allies, but as my political enemies.
Feminists don't care that most homeless are men, or that most suicides are done by men, nor do they care that men gets harder sentences for the same crimes as women, nor do they care that men do not automatically gets recognized as a parent of their own child the same moment as when it is born - like women are here in Sweden.
So I like women, but I do not like feminists.
I like equality and a better life for both genders, unlike feminists.
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Don't worry, the Russian military have been the same for centuries. It simply cannot help itself.
Its problems are so many and so overwhelming that only a small portion of them can be fixed within a decade in peace time. But Russia is not in peace time. Its best troops are dead since half a year ago, and you will need years before you can replace them. Much of Russias best equipment had been destroyed - and that Soviet made junk is something that Russia neither has the ability to produce and there are no one who knows how to build those advanced weapons anymore.
And then on top of that are they struggeling with all the sanctions....
Their top down military doctrine has been idiotic and led to massive losses and defeats every war they have fought. But transitioning over to Auftragstaktik is so far fetched from traditional russian military thinking that a transition can never be easily done soon - and especially not in the middle of a war.
The major flaws in the Russian military are so many that you cannot name them all.
Their crappy logistics, their lack of coordination, their lack of personal iniative, the corruption, the crappy planning, the lack of professionalism, the lack of sequenceing , the mismatch of equipment and doctrine of the old Soviet military which could focused on winning over its enemy by quantity while Russia today is a country with severe demographic problems with falling birthrates...
You have Putin who interferes in military operations by for example telling his tanks to rush towards Kyiv without infantry support in the beginning of this war - and the result became ambushes and catastrophic tank losses.
You have soldiers who spends more time trying to find food and fuel by looting because of the crappy logistics in the Russian army, than they are spending time on preparing for battle. So this makes this unprofessional army ineffective in combat, and it destroy the good relation it wished it had with the civilian population which was supposed to see the Russian military as liberators.
And stealing mobile phones not only makes an army hated - it have also allowed the Ukrainians to track down the same stolen phones and listen to Russian soldiers phone calls back home. And this allows them to hear about fighting morale among the Russian military and society, what the conditions are like, where the Russian troops are positioned, what the plans are and so on...
And then are the russian military also relying on western tech like civlian GPS:es in their aircrafts.
And the idea of forcing Ukrainians to become Russians by taking away their Ukrainian passports and force them to use Rubles and a Russian passport instead is about to backfire. Now you got a large russian speaking Ukrainian population that is very hostile towards russia which now have a russian passport and which can blend in perfectly with the russian population everywhere in Russia and can make sabotage behind enemy lines against military, political and industrial targets.
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bruce parka
"Many Danes"
I never offended any Danes. I only offended people who identify themselves as Europhiles/ EUians/EU citizens or whatever.
Their feelings could I not care less about. Those are people who are disloyal to their own country. People who wants to sell out their independence and hollow out their democracy. People can vote how they want - that is democracy... But I will not respect idiotic opinions, this decision only got downsides and no upsides at all for Denmark.
Fundamentally do this decision go against some fundamental principles:
- Decisions should be made as close as possible to the people who they affect. It would be absurd for someone in Copenhagen to rule over Bulgaria or Greece, since the typical Danish politician knows nearly nothing about those countries, their situation, their needs, their problems, the peoples wishes, their traditions, history, their values and such. And equally absurd is it if a Greek politician would rule over Denmark or Sweden.
Swedish politicians only make up 2% of the EU parliament - which means that we got almost no power at all to rule over our own country. It becomes foreigners with no interest in Swedens well-being that rule over us. And the situation is the same for Denmark (and perhaps even more so since it is a smaller country than Sweden).
The only logical decision is therefore to move back as much power as possible from the EU back to your own home country.
If you believe in democracy - like I do - this is the only standpoint which makes sense. If all power over the Danish state should come from its citizens, then must Denmarks government have more power over its own country than the EU. Simple as that. Otherwise it is not Danes who rule over Denmark - instead it is the EU who rules over Denmark. Politicians from foreign countries which you have never voted for. People who you cannot remove like your own democratic leaders if you think they cause catastrophically harmful decisions over your country.
So yeah, these are the things Europhiles like. I call those things for anti-democratic and anti-Danish.
So no I have not offended any Danes. I have only offended anti-Danes.
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@jeffmorris5802 Your spelling is terrible for being an american.
1. I think you are mostly correct.
2. Nope. Hamas got 20K-25K members. While the russian military could probably field 1-2 million men or more if they wanted to. Russia got submarines, fighter jets, tanks and weapons of mass destruction while Hamas don't.
Russia spams the west with corrosive propaganda, bribe politicians, media figures and Generals. They manipulate university research to prevent military bases and training for western armies for "enviromental reasons" and other BS.
They do make cyber attacks and use their global influence to smear and spread lies about the west. That is what the 3rd largest oil producer in the world do with its income. Its not giving its population tap water, increasing wages for teachers or building libraries. It use its money on propaganda in foreign countries instead and wasting it on the military.
3. USA promised to help Ukraine secure its independence with the Budapest agreement. So it is obliged to help Ukraine.
Breaking that promise will have far reaching negative consequences for trust in America and her allies for decades ahead.
And as I sees it can both Ukraine and Israel be helped. Israel will mostly need bombs dropped from airplanes, and not so much artillery shells. While the opposite will be the case for Ukraine.
4. Ukraine have a close cooperation with western militaries. And they have won battle after battle in this war so far: Hostomel, Kyiv, Sumy, the 4 battles at Siverskyi Donets, Charkiv, Snake island, Khersun, Vuhledar, Avdiivka and so on.
Ukrainian troops do get too little weapons and too late, but still have they managed to kick russian ass in battle after battle.
So your comment is simply based on complete ignorance and is towing a false russian narrative.
And that is another reason I do not think you are an american. Because americans do not like to listen to losers. Russians are losers 😂😂
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Sweden also had Lasse Gathenielm, its own naval "hero" ("pirate" is probably a more fitting term) of the early 1700's.
His job as a privateer was to attack merchant shipping of countries which were at war with Sweden or supported Sweden's enemies. The difference between a privateer and a pirate was that the government had given permission to attack ships of a certain nationality.
Lasse was very successful in plundering and stealing enemy ships. But he did do his job because it made him rich, and patriotism was not something he cared about.
He also plundered ships of neutral nations, and did so often that Britain and the Netherlands started to escort their merchant ships not only in the Baltic sea but also in the Atlantic because attacks had become so frequent.
Britain alone lost 136 ships to Swedish privateers on the Swedish west coast. And many many hundreds of ships fell victims to Swedish privateers. So the royal navy gathered 300 warships in a great projection of power to show their disappointment with Sweden's aggressive naval policies during the Great Northern war. It was a sharp signal of threatening Sweden with war if it did not stop attacking British ships.
But the privateers felt no reason to stop. They got rich from stealing ships and selling their cargo. They even plundered Swedish inside Stockholms harbor, and they changed public opinion in favor of Sweden's enemies as they dragged the Netherlands and Britain into war against Sweden - which was already having enough problems with alone fighting for its own survival against an enemy coalition of Denmark-Norway, Poland, Saxony, Brandenburg, Hanover and Russia.
The Swedish King saw the diplomatic problems in all this. This was a 1700's version of Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare during World war 1. But the King also feared that his chances of getting back the Baltic provinces that the Russians had stolen from him would diminish if they could start benefitting from the trade income they generated and all war materials that could be transported from their harbors.
And the war at sea had been successful in many ways for Sweden. Privateers had nearly brought Denmark to its knees as trade between Denmark and Norway had been nearly totally destroyed and supplies to Danish troops in Norway had been cut off. Denmark was a sea empire, and its merchant navy was sinking at a fast rate and would things continue at this path, then all of Denmark's merchant fleet would soon being laying down at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean.
So so far had Lasse Gathenhielms adventures been successful.
He did even make up plans to join forces with the largest pirate fleet in the world in Madagascar, and getting the famous John Norcross and his thousands of pirates and 60 warships to join the great Northern war on Sweden's side, along with the Swedish navy and the 150 warships of Swedish privateers. Negotiations were made to station them in city Göteborg. But the plans ended when the Swedish King died in 1718 and the war came to an end.
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"we don't wanna meet the slightest Russian demands in order to obtain peace"
Did giving Crimea to Russia in 2014 give us peace? No it didn't. Can the Putin clowns stop being so historically ignorant?
You are tiresome. We should not give anything to a criminal terrorist state.
Crimes and terrorism should be punished, and not rewarded.
If you reward this behaviour, then you will only get more of it.
Russia have invaded neighbour after neighbour the last 20 years. Its time for this to stop.
And I prefer Zelensky and Boris Johnson over Putin any day. Putin commits genocide in Bucha, Irpin and other places. He deliberatly bombs kindergardens schools, maternity hospitals, and civilian homes. He let his troops get away with rape, torture, murder, and looting. His troops kidnap civilians and use them as human shields. He steals 500 aircrafts from other countries and threatens to steal buildings and machines from foreign companies.
He threatens innocent people with nuclear weapons. He tries to starve 800 million people to death in his game of blackmailing the world to lift the sanctions on Russia. And he starts unprovoced, unjustified, illegal wars. He kidnaps Ukrainian women and children and transport them to concentration camps in Siberia. He commits genocide. He spread lies. He pay for internet trolls that spread lies and tries to poison the public in foreign countries. He have utter contempt for democracy and throws people in jail for barely calling the conflict in Ukraine for a war - something that a hypocrite like himself does not have to go to jail for. And Putin ignores promise after promise and treaty after treaty that Russia have signed in the past... everything from the Budapest agreement to the promise to not use nuclear weapons as a way to disturb world peace, or when he fired missiles on Ukrainian cargo ships the day after the naval blockade in the black sea was lifted.
I think that you should just leave the western world. You simply does not belong here. Go to Ukraine and fight in the mud for your genocidal Russian Hitler. I happily pay for the ammunition that the Ukrainians will send in your way.
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@williamzk9083 Nope. The Ferdinand tank had the best kill ratio and that was an incredibly crappy machine with excessive weight, an unreliable underpowered engine, horrible gun traverse, ineffiecent use of armor with lack of sloping, an overcomplicated design that made it difficult to repair and to build those tanks.
StuG3 was on paper an unremarkable vehicle. It did not have the best gun, best armor, best mobility or best optics.
It was a vehicle that cheap and easy to mass produce and allowed germany to fill up the frontline with armored vehicles as you could get 3 stugs for the same cost as 2 tanks. And this vehicle also turned out to have a kill ratio 3 to 1. Which was good but perhaps not good enough for winning the war given that allied tank prouduction was so enormous that the germans would have needed a kill ratio more like 10 to 1 to win.
The StuG also became more and more underpowered as the war progressed. Had the war rolled on for another 1-2 years, then I believe that StuG would been unable to penetrate ISU152, IS3, and have much difficulties with Centurion, Pershing, T44 and such.
I think was mostly liked because it was a vehicle that could easily get mass produced and it had a good gun and frontal armor by say 1942
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Some points that I think are interesting regarding this topic are:
1. Russian missile attacks against hydroelectric powerplants, which could signify a repeat of of the Novo Kahovka dam collapse. That was a defensive action, but perhaps is it also a move russia want to make to save troops in one are to move to another area for an attack.
2. Russia do not care about training, or smart use of their resources. They rather just wanna create a flow that they hope somehow would push the Ukrianians back and make them lose ground and manpower. This is of course not a smart way of using resources. But Putin doesn't seem to care. Trading land for lives is something that he is willing to do. He do not value the lives of convicts, ethnic minorities, mercenaries, and Ukrainians forcefully conscripted into DPR and LPR amies.
So he happily continues to make meatwaves.
3. Putins strategy is winning the war by Trump. And if Trump wins, then he hopes that Europe just gives up and throws in the towel as well.
And that is possible, and especially so if rightwing populists wins seats in the EU election. Putin is therefore not hoping the counter-offensive to break the Ukrainian defensive lines. But rather just to keep the pressure up to show the world that he holds the iniative to demoralize people in the west that are sitting on the fence, and to give a morale boost to the pro-russians around the world.
Russias real offensive will not come now. It will come after the west have given up their support for Ukraine.
And when Ukraine lose their access to patriot missiles and 155mm artillery shells, then will russia attack with full force and force Ukraine to sign a catastrophically bad peace deal.
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@Fang70
But after having seen hundreds of videos with drone strikes its undeniable that drones have inflicted heavy tank losses. And Ukraines own losses have also been heavy due to drones, all archer artillery have been damaged due to drone strikes.
And that both sides use cope cages can be a symptom of drones being a bigger threat than in previous wars. Hamas destruction of an Israeli Merkava could also indicate that a new threat dimension have entered into the battlefield even for the very safety minded israelis.
The effectivness of top attacks has been known since World war 2. But when Sweden created the first top attack missile known as BILL56 did a new family of top attack missiles get born out of the same idea - such as the Swedish NLAW and the American Javelin.
Sweden also started the development of smart artillery rounds like BONUS and Excalibur that with the combination of drone artillery observation have wrecked devestation on Russian tank forces.
It is also a well known fact that the Soviet tanks have a weakspot in the top hull armor in the area around the turret. The armor there is very thin, and just under the thin skin lay the large auto-loader full with explosives. So one RPG hit there from a FPV drone could make the ammunition explode and send the turret up into space and leave the tank as a burning wreck with no survivors.
So it is common to see Ukrainian drones target this area just in front of the turret or behind it.
In the past was artillery not very accurate. There was no special precision ammunition, drone observed artillery and high quality guns capable of hitting targets so far away. Especially not moving targets. So tanks had a bit of safety in their mobility in the past. But not so much today as precision artillery have become a much more dangerous threat.
FPV drones are also capable of hunting moving targets in a way that artillery never have been able to. And a cheap drone of 400 dollars is capable of destroying a tank by hitting the weakspot near the turret for example. Its said that the Ukrainian drones have little over a 50% hit rate. I guess that some drones hit and makes no damage, or just blow a track off so another drone easily can kill a vehicle.
But still is this a very cost effective way of fighting a war. And one does not put ones own soldiers at risk of direct enemy fire.
So I think the drone threat needs more consideration now. There are even disgusting videos one can watch how individual soldiers are hunted by fast drones that rams their victims with a RPG grenade.
Even I have to feel sympathy for Ivan in that situation. War has become a dystopian nightmare with killer robots that can outcompete us humans in every way. That russian soldier I saw blew up had no chance to defend himself or run away - because the drones are much faster, nearly impossible to hit, impossible for a human to see in the dark, and now they are so cheap that they no longer just attack vehicles or troop concentrations but also individual soldiers.
And the future will probably become even more horrible as AI, better sensors, and lowered costs for mass production will make those weapons cheaper and even more effective than today.
The very fact that the Ukrainians have been able to hold the line this winter shows that drones are a powerful weapon. Holding the line would not have been possible when Ukraine was only able to fire 1000-2000 artillery rounds per day against a foe that fires 10.000 and have twice as many troops and much more armor.
FPV drones have been an artillery substitute. Perhaps a bit like Stuka bombers and artillery partially could replace each other during world war 2.
Of course can they not completely replace each other, as they both have strengths and weaknesses compared to each other. Drones are like I said more effective at hunting moving targets. But artillery is more reliable to use on rainy and windy days. And there is probably a reason why Ukraine desperatly begs the west for more artillery ammunition, and not only for more drones.
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USA, NATO, and EU wants a military force that can be used for rapid deployment anywhere in the world with a short notice.
Sweden wants a military for defence, for self-defence our country instead.
And when those two interest clash, and you don't the money for both, guess which one our EU-loving Sweden hating politicians will choose?
Yep. Our big conscription army is gone. We waste billions of tax payer money on a nordic battlegroup instead which the EU hope could become the embryo of its future rapid respons force they can use for offensive operations worldwide.
And an army of citizens defending their own country and democracy, should be replaced by a small professional military loyal to its pay masters. And with mercenaries, foreign legionaries, black water, Gurkhas and such can the western world wage unpopular colonial wars abroad and people will not protest so much because it is not their own sons that dies in those wars but usually a small number of mercenaries and such.
And other countries have an interest in destroying our military industrial complex and force us to pay expensive money for their foreign products instead. France is lobbying very activly that EU countries should only buy weapons and ammunition made inside the EU.
And do you think that France would want Sweden to succed?
- Of course not. We are their competitor.
So they say that EU should only buy weapons from companies in the EU, and with that Macron means France and nothing else.
Do you think Sweden will make big money out of weapon exports to the EU?
- Of course it will not. Macron will say that our companies are not part of the EU and thus not able to seek the same cozy special treatment as French firms. Hägglunds and SAAB are part of BAE systems which belongs to Britain which is no longer part of the EU. And Bofors is partly owned by America, so of course should it too not get any economic support in France point of view.
That you considers SAAB and Bofors to be as Swedish as ABBA and meatballs doesn't matter.
Swedens old military will dissapear. And our military will be used for military adventures to steal natural resources from brown people. Because that is what this project is all about. France and Britain created the EU just after the failure to take the Suez Canal, because they realized that they were too weak on its own to remain great powers with colonial ambitions, but with the EU maybe some of that global influence could be preserved.
And let me just say it. I have no interest at all in using my hard earned tax payer money to fund Macrons silly colonial dreams. I want a military for self-defence only. I see the wars in Libya 2011 and Iraq in 2003 as shameful imperialist adventures. And if Americans are dissapointed that our military cannot be used outside our own borders, because it is a big slow conscript army... then I guess that we should make people in Washington sad or irritated.
This small mini army of proffesional troops have furthermore shown itself to be useless at defending Europe from foreign aggression. Swedens army of 2000 men would probably not last more than a week in Ukraine. Even big Germany would run out of all its ammunition in just 2 weeks with the rate of consumption Ukraines artillery have.
And the proud home tank building, and the industrial revolution: England, only have 200 tanks. Which is a tiny force considering that Russia have already lost nearly 4000 tanks in Ukraine.
What more evidence do we need as a proof that our leaders priority is not the defense of Europe?
Seems more like they only want to feed the military industrial complex with money, pursuit colonial interests or throw away money on enviromentalism, cyber warfare, space forces or whatever else that is fashionable for the moment.
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@lorenzbroll101 Many of them were. However the nazis 30.000 established camps. So I guess that the needed at least say 200.000 men to guard those. And they also needed lots of men in the Einsatzgruppen driving around in russia, Ukraine and the Baltics and taking all jews to a forest where they would be forced to dig their own graves, before their lives were taken away.
And then there was lots of men working in other ways to help the nazis kill millions of people - like people in the secret police who collected information so jewish families could be found in their hiding places and arrested, train drivers that transported the jews to the camps, the salesmen who gave the nazis gas and ovens they knew would be used for horrible things. There was men in the military that provided landmines, barbed wire and machine guns for the camps. There was diplomats talking to other countries and negotiating with them so they would hand over all their jews to the germans.
All in all would I not be surprised if many hundreds of thousands of Germans were involved in this death machinery. And I do not think that all of them were psychopaths. Many were just idiots, cowards and men without moral compass, and cowards who just obeyed orders.
Men motivated by fear, peer pressure, greed for stealing belongings from their victims, men who wanted to make career in the nazi state's hierarchy, men and women driven by hatred...
And the nazis also put much effort in trying to relieve their killers counciousness, by doing their best to tell them that they were just following orders, and therefore had no personal responsability.
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@thearisen7301
"Gripin uses an American engine & others systems so the US isn't gonna complain."
US much rather want to sell its own aircraft. Not just because of national pride, and military gains, but also because it more profitable to sell the end product than it is to be the supplier of components.
This is basic economics.
"F35 is pretty cheap to buy actually."
The biggest cost with that plane is probably its operating cost which is ridiculous 31,000 dollars per hour - which is 8 times more than Gripen. 3 times as much as F18 Hornet, and twice as much as Rafale.
And the more money it cost to fly a plane, the less hours of training do the pilots get.
And remember, what Top Gun says: "Its not the plane, its the pilot". And that holds true usually it is the plane with the better pilot that will win an air combat.
And when F35 is so expensive that Gripen pilots can get 8 times more training then my money will be with the Gripen pilots in an air combat.
"The Swiss for example chose it over Typhoon & Rafale because not only was it more capable, it was cheaper too."
Their cost per flight hour is lower than F35. And those planes have better thrust-to-weight ratio, better wingloading, better top speed, better range, they have more hardpoints... so yea I don't buy your bullsh*t that F35 is more capable.
Rather it seems like F35 is the crappiest plane in the club.
"then came crawling back when they realized it was the best deal, better than Gripin."
Its called Gripen, and not Gripin.
At first did Switzerlands military have Gripen. But the issue was put to a vote and the Swiss people did not want to buy Gripen. So they bought another plane instead.
And now they get a more expensive plane instead that is probably less suited to Switzerlands military needs than Gripen.
Seems like people in Brazil, Thailand, and the Phillipines made a better choice.
"Sweden doesn't have the same industrial base as the US either so you can get an F35 faster than a Gripin."
That is more the fault of Sweden than the plane itself. But it is good that you admit that Gripens sales would have been far larger if Sweden had been a country with 300 million people and had a GDP of 23 trillion dollars.
This have everything to do with politics, and not the capabilities of the plane itself.
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@mikaelpetersen3331
I live in Jämtland a former Norwegian province and I have no desire to become a part of the Danish-Norwegian Kingdom again. Furthermore was Scania orginially a Swedish province that Denmark took by force during the middle ages, and then was it retaken. Same could be said about Gotland which never really was Danish, but more of an independent island during the middleages, but with more ties with Sweden than with Denmark. Jämtlands status during the middle ages was unclear, but it belonged to the archdiocese of Uppland in Sweden.
So the core provinces of Denmark was just Sjaelland and Jylland. And Norways borders are roughly what they suppose to be, with perhaps Norway owning a small bit of Bohuslän and Sweden owning small pieces of Norwegian lands elsewhere.
So enough of your bullshit. Btw, I do not for a second believe that you are from Denmark.
You are most likely a russian pretending to be from Denmark. But that is just my own personal belief.
And your arguments about other places is just "might makes right". Which is an immoral attitude which if it is not abandoned will condemn this planet to wars forever and bloodshed.
And therefore should we put a stop to it by supporting Ukraine.
But your russian view also opens up an interesting possibility. With your view do Russia have no right to complain once the world gets fed up and gang up on her and take back all the historical lands she have stolen, like Karelia, East Prussia, Kuril islands, St. Petersburg and so on.
And I am a strong supporter of this idea. Given that russia is an evil empire that never seems to learn from history.
The country should be carved up between its neighbours like Poland was and be wiped out from history.
If wars and genocide it all it has to offer the world, then it is no loss if this culture gets lost.
And your talk about "Ukraine can't win" is just propaganda that no one outside the russosphere believes anymore.
Fact is that Ukraine is scoring won battle after won battle, their kill ratio is strongly in their favor, they retake piece by piece of their land while russias military and economic strength gets depleted.
You argue from a historically ignorant position by just assuming that russia cannot be defeated in war. But that axiom is just utter nonsense.
If modern history tells us anything, then one can surely see that russia is a country of worthless losernoobs when it comes to war. They lost the Crimean war, they lost the russo-japanese war, they lost WW1, they lost the polish-bolshevik war, they got humiliated by Finland in the winter and the continuation war, their incompetence led to the worst losses of manpower and tanks, guns and planes in history when Hitler invaded the country. And in the end did the country only survive because Germany had to fight a 5 front war, while russia only fought a 1 front war and had massive help from lend-lease.
Later on would russia lose in Afghanistan. And despite enormous material superiority did it lose the first Chechen war.
So russia can be beaten on the battlefield for sure.
And with wests massive technological and
economical superiority do the vodka maffia terrorist state in the east not stand a chance.
Their tactics was already outdated in 1917, and they haven't changed since. So russia cannot win this war on the battlefield.
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Foreign subsidies were of limited importance. For example did the large subsidies France paid to Sweden during the 30-years war only cover 20% of Sweden's war expenses when Sweden was desperate for money to pay for an army of 200.000 soldiers. And France was also unwilling to pay Sweden anything, until the war with Spain started to go bad for France and Paris became threatened by Spanish troops in Belgium and the French came to Sweden begging desperate for help. Sweden was desperate for money and agreed to relief pressure on the French in exchange for money, and an alliance was signed.
The Swedish army in Germany was probably the largest in Europe at that time. Spain with her many territories and American silver "only" had 80.000 men.
So how did Sweden pay for its war? Swedish tax payers paid about 30%. French subsidies 20%.
And the rest was paid by Sweden's German allies (who often sometimes threaded by Swedish aggression if they didn't joined in and paid up for the war). And plundering enemy lands was also important.
So not even when Sweden had its largest army ever did foreign subsidies cover the majority of all costs. And the 30-years war is an extreme example since most wars where not fought with so large armies or with such a high proportion of mercenaries.
And that means that the financial burden was much easier for Denmark and Sweden, and that the influence of foreign money was even smaller than that in the 30-years war.
And also, while the Danish army often used German mercenary troops, was the same not possible for Sweden.
There was no large market for mercenary troops in Eastern Europe like in Germany and Italy.
So the wars with Poland and Russia had to be fought with Swedish troops.
But Sweden and Denmark was very militarized as you say. Denmark did spend more money on its navy, while Sweden took more interest in fielding a large army. The efficient state apparatus and a clever conscription system allowed Sweden to mobilize large armies that stood out of proportion to its small population. The country was thus able to punch above its own weight and even beat huge empires with populations 20 times larger such as Austria, Poland and Russia.
Mercenary troops importance would also diminish in the 1700's. They were important for Sweden in the 1500's when the Swedish King fought the Danes and crushed Swedish farmers rebellions. And in the 1600's they played an important role in for example the invasion of Poland and Denmark in 1658, and in Sweden's involvement in the 30-years war.
Sweden could of course have used much more Swedish troops to fight in Germany instead. But instead of wasting Swedish blood in fighting battles, were the Swedish army units sent to the Baltics or to southern Sweden to guard the border against Russia and Denmark.
So was mercenary troops important? Yes and no.
They were important in the 1600's, because they offered experienced soldiers and large armies which you could put together very fast. But on the other hand were those troops badly disciplined, unreliable and costly. They did however offer a strategically important advantage to country. If Sweden would be attacked by many countries at the same time, then it would be difficult to get enough troops to fight on all fronts, but with mercenary troops this problem could be solved.
So it was therefore important for a King to show the world that he was able to pay his mercenary soldiers. Sweden could of course have told its German mercenary to throw themselves into a lake and refused to pay them when the war was over. That would have saved the Swedish state enormous amounts of money equal to a large chunk of the country's GDP:
And doing so would have been devastating.
Sweden would never again be able to get mercenary troops to fight for her. Because what soldier who only fight for money would ever accept fighting for a King who tell mercenaries to fight for him and then refuse to pay them? No one.
All Sweden's enemies would be able to gather huge armies. But Sweden could only rely on its own army, and would not get any help at all from any mercenary troops if it got a reputation for as a scammer who didn't pay mercenary troops.
So here you can see why Sweden was did not demand so much land in its peace terms with Germany in 1648. Sweden wanted money to pay for the war most of all. And despite Sweden had won the war, and conquered all of Germany... it was not so much interested in taking German land. It was more important that the losers of the war gave up money instead, so Sweden could afford to pay for all mercenary troops it had used. So Sweden's reputation would not be damaged, so Sweden could use mercenary troops in future wars if needed.
together
In hindsight, one could of course say that Sweden made a dumb decision. Mercenary troops would stop being important in the 1700's. So why spend so much energy on becoming popular with mercenary troops?
The Swedish army during the Great Northern war 1700-1721 consisted almost entirely of conscripted farmers and almost no mercenaries at all. And yet could Sweden field an army of 100.000 men.
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They did not fail to notice it. France was more worried than Britain and wanted to go into Germany and stopping them from breaking the many agreements in the Versaille treaty. But Britain had a half-assed attitude towards Germany, and many Brits sympatized with the Germans and thought that the Versaille treaty had been too harsh. And France felt that it was too weak to act on its own, and such an act would not be much popular with public opinion in France either, since the country had suffered gigantic losses in ww1 and therefore had a strong anti-war movement. And the rise of fascism in France didn't help either.
When Hitler occupied the Rhineland in 1936 did the allies also overestimate the strength of Germany so they feared that a war would become very costly if they would punish Germany for such a minor thing. So the allies overestimated the effect of Hitlers rearmament, since the German army was still pretty weak.
Germany did what it could to scare people into thinking their army was stronger than it really was. During military parades did troops often march twice down the same street, and stretched out military formations made the on the column of vehicles and men longer, and thus if gave the impression that Germany had more men than it had.
The allies had reacted to all this. The French had already built their Maginot line so they were safe. But as an extra insurance did they also build as many panzer divisions as Germany, and they did also have so many tanks over that they could also give the infantry many hundreds of tanks. And the French tanks were not only more, but they were also better than the German ones.
And Britain had also started to re-arm, but they were doing it at a slower phase than Germany. But on the other hand did both Britain and France have bigger armies than Germany to begin with. Britain did reintroduce conscription in 1939 (four years after Germany). But that didn't matter if it was little late - the allies still outnumbered Hitler by 2:1 in 1940
and had twice as much tanks and planes.
So the allies were hardly any fools. Many French generals had also predicted the route Germany would take during their sweep into western Europe in 1940. So much of the failure of the allies in 1940 had more to do with politics, and better tactics of the German air force and auftragstaktik than it had to do with bad preparations on behalf of the allies.
As I said earlier - France did have just as many tank divisions as Germany plus a Maginot line.
Had I been a German General in 1939 I would had advised Hitler to not start the war, because Germany lacked oil and rubber for wheels on trucks and tank tracks, and silk for parachutes. And much of the soldiers in the German army divisions only had 2 months of training. Germany would also be outnumbered by the allies and have a weaker navy, and France would have strong prepared defensive positions in the Maginot line.
The armaments industry was getting priority over the rest of the German economy, but still it was unable to produce enough tanks to replace all tanks lost in Poland before the invasion of France in may 1940. The German army also relied much on horses, while the British army (BEF) was one of the most motorized armies in the world, while the French army was consider the best army in the world by that time.
Even if I like boldness in warfare and know that a weaker force often beats a larger one if it have better leadership and training, I would have felt very uneasy with Hitlers proposal to start a new world war.
All the odds were stacked against Germany.
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@krisinmcirvin782 I've read the book. And I think Mitchell's reflections are useful and extremely important and some of the best designs for a post-EU policy for a country.
And I would add "Reviving British Manufacturing" and other such books to the most read list for to the post EU project.
I do however think that Mitchell takes things a little bit too far in his book. I think small countries needs to be careful about their money printing and national debt, even if I am far from a debt-hawk but rather the opposite. I think debts are mostly just a tool to scare people into submission, and that countries can pile up more and more debts without a problem if the economy is strong - as Mitchell himself mentioned with Australia case.
But a country like Sweden is not USA. And with the shitty state of our economy right now I would try to be careful even if we already have our own currency.
We cannot just print up money and expect foreigners to accept our money as they were US dollars.
A 2nd problem with Mitchells theories is that of the green new deal. I love his job guarantee programme. And I am sympathic towards the idea of building railroads and creating new green jobs - as in for example the biotech industry to create enviromentally friendly substitutes for different materials we use.
But on the other hand do I not think this green new deal ever will become a hugely profitable buisness. And I think we lie to ourselves if we claim it would be.
Planting trees might be good for the enviroment, and it might be necessary, but it is not creating any growth in our economy but I rather look at it as boring maintance.
Its just boring shit we have to do.
Taking a shower and washing our clothes might be good things to do, but it is not really making us excited and enriching our lives and feel like we have gained any extra in our lives.
And this is also why I think people are so reluctant to pay for this. There is no economic growth to be had.
And same goes with green energy. No energy source will ever be able to replace oil. Uranium is a limited resource which would only last a few years if it was used to replace all fossile fuels consumption in the world at the current rate.
We don't have enough rare earth metals for highly effiecent solar panels, and we don't have neodynium for magnets for windturbines. Hydroelectric power cannot be built unless you have rivers, and geothermal energy is not very effiecent if you have to dig too much far into the ground... which means that it is only practical in vulcano countries like Iceland and Indonesia.
And biofuels demands large areals of land and they have a too low EROEI to even replace a fraction of a country's oil demand - not even Brazil's military dictatorship with its ethanol cars or Hitlers regime of evil scientists could bring their country's out of oil dependency... so I highly doubt anyone can find a good replacement for oil this day either. And this will not change no matter how much money you throw at throw at the problem.
So believing that a green new deal would ever be a hugely profitable affair that manage to replace fossile fuels is nonsense in my opinion.
The goals are just as unrealisticly optimistic as Mao's great leap forward which ended in a disaster. I like the idea of MMT, and that is also the reason why the last thing I want to is to let this idea fall into the hands of unicorn fairydust clowns like Occasio Cortez that says everything is for free.
You can get rid of oil dependency, open the borders, give everyone UBI, a job guarantee program, free healthcare and education and a new green deal all at the same time.
Sorry I cannot support that. This will make me and all other MMT supporters looklike idiots. Because these proposals are idiotic and overly ambitious and not thought-through.
It sounds like the great leap forward 2019.
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@krisinmcirvin782 To a large part do I agree with you and Mitchell. But even Mitchell himself said in the book you refer to that France could not defend its ambitious economic programme even with capital controls.
So the government is not almighty. And especially not shortly after a Brexit, Grexit or Swexit.
Putting a new industrial policy and central bank policy in place will take time, if we are going to be realistic.
So the tools of controlling our own economies will be limited at first so it is important to not create too much capital flight and crashing the value of ones own currency and making imports more expensive and thereby destroying many domestic industries.
So even money can have an impact in the real world. But once a country gets its souvereign policy tools in place and have a stubbord support for its own national key industries, then the country can play much more aggressively and print money and spend. And economic growth will make the debt-to-GDP ratio to fall and the spending increases will kill off unemployment, and the rapid increase in production will make the amount of stuff grow faster than the amount of money chasing it so inflation will not be a problem.
On the contrary, deflation will instead grow, and that problem can easily be fixed by more inflation from more money printing. And then can the government create even more money, and it will not result in higher prices since people will use it to instead build up their own household savings instead of using the money in the economy to bid up prices at the shelves of grocery stores.
Standard of living will be maximized and inequality will dissapear. And with high wages and a strong consumer base will there be strong incentives for technological development.
A million things can also be done about the fiscal policy, but I am already too longwinded to go into that.
Suffiecent to say that MMT is a great tool in the tool box, but I think weak countries needs to be realistic about the dangers of capital flight and currency crashes.
And capital controls cannot fix this overnight. Because capital controls works best in a preventionary role rather than in the role of curing an already sick and infected economy. Introducing capital controls would only make foreign investors more nervous about more government restrictions or get them even more suspicious that the economy would crash - which could lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy as foreign investors desperatly tries to flee the country.
And when every foreign investor runs towards the exit and tries to sell their stocks and currency they have, then the currency will fall like a rock and the stock market crashes. And the country will be in a big economic mess with crashed companies and mass unemployment, and the interest rates for borrowing money on the international markets would go up as few people have any trust in the ability of the country to pay.
And then the IMF can come in a buttrape the country, when it have a knife pressed against its neck and can blackmail it into any harsh loan conditionalities.
So it is no big surprise that small countries do not like to pile up much debt and invite foreign direct investors so they can cause financial panics like this. The benifits of borrowing money and getting foreign money does not compensate for all damage done afterwards.
It is simply better to play safe and don't pile up debt, and try to limit risky foreign investments into your country.
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@nobodyherepal3292 I am impressed by the German army in World war 1. Think about it. The Austro-Hungrian army was a depleted force after the first 5 months of the war, as it had lost 2/3 of its men by then including all its elite infantry such as the Kaiserjäger. It only took 3 big battles with Russia (which were lost) and a failed invasion of Serbia to cut off the wings of this army for the rest of the war.
The Ottoman empire joined the war a few months later, and everyone expected it to greatly boost the front against Russia by walking up to Ukraine and stand up arms to arms with the Germans and Austrians on the southern flank on the eastern front. But they too were a great dissapointment, just like the Austrians. Instead did Enver Pasha think it was a great idea to walk up the Armenian mountains - which was excellent defensive terrain and difficult to pass logistics wise. 200.000 men froze to death in the winter on top of the cold mountains or got killed by enemy fire.
So by 1915 Germany basically had to fight an entire world war almost completly on its own. But yet it was able to defeat Serbia, and Romania, and Russia. It was at the brink of crushing France in 1914, but was forced to move forces to the east to protect Germany because Austro-Hungria failed to protect the eastern flank as promised.
And then it nearly destroyed the French army again in 1917, as the French had just done the catastrophic Nivelle offensive with enormous losses, and the entire French army started to mutiny and refused to fight. The officers responded with executions of leaders of the revolt, but nothing helped to stop it. Strangely did Germany never get any intelligence reports of the bad state of the morale of the French army - because had it known how bad it was, then it would likely had launched a final big offensive against it to break the camels back.
But in the end would the situation calm down in the French army, after the officers had to give in and promise their men to never again do any offensive operations and stay on the defensive for the rest of the war.
The German army also managed to occupy most of Belgium during the war, and the Belgian army never had the numbers to stand up to the German military in this war on its own.
And the British army was basically wiped out in 1914. And in the battle of Somme it suffered perhaps the worst day in British military history. Tanks won some terrain, but German auftragstaktik and stosstroppen managed to beat back the attack and take back all lost terrain, plus some more land.
Also Italy was beaten back by the Germans in this war.
So almost by its own had Germany managed to defeat all of Europe. One can speculate about the reasons for this
if it was because they were early to learn the usefulness of uniforms with colors that blended in with the enviroment.
Or if it was their heavy emphasis on engineer troops and teaching all its conscripts to often use the spade to dig in.
Or if it was their wisdom to retreat in 1914 and build their defensive line on the best terrain on hill tops and such so they could look down on the allied lines and have an overview of the battlefield and see what their enemies were up to and not having to bother as much about rain flooding their trenches - which was a much more common problem for the allies. Its defence it dept with 3 defensive lines (compared to to two for the French and British) was also harder for an enemy to penetrate and saved lives for the defender.
Or maybe the German success was because of the german industry, and its advanced chemical industry in particular was very innovative. And that the clock was not ticking in Germany's favor if the war turned into a war of attrition so that Germany was forced to innovate new war winning weapons fast to gain victory. So it was an early user of poison gas, flamethrowers, zeppelins and uboats and other morally objectionable weapons. And it also started to experiment with new types of tactics like the stosstroppen. And those men did also bring much firepower to the frontline. And already as early as 1914 did Bavarian units start to use that concept. And the German wisdom of using mortars gave them a devestating superiority in firepower. And BEF was trashed and its chief John French had a nervous breakdown. And the French army suffered enormous unsubstainable losses. The Germans were fighting heavily outnumbered against 3 Europeans armies at once, plus lots colonial troops... and yet were they winning and their own losses were relativly mild by comparison.
So germany did on its own beat Serbia, Russia, Romania, Belgium, Italy, France and Britain plus their colonies before all 4 years of attrition and the arrival of American troops finally wore it down.
And I would say that superior artillery fire power and stosstropp tactics were probably the biggest reasons for this.
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"combat casualties, what causes them (small arms, artillery etc"
In the war on the eastern front did artillery cause 45% of the casualties, 35% was done by heavy infantry weapons (mortars, machine guns), light infantry weapons 10% airpower 5% and tanks/armour 5%.
"percentage killed, wounded or captured, the average death rate for a combat soldier"
I guess that depends on what type of unit you are talking about. Losses among infantry might for example be higher than those for artillery so that divisions become more unbalanced as the war progress.
"The impression one gets from film and TV, even from the more realistic films and series like Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, is seemingly constant death, men falling left,right and centre, which simply isn't true"
Some battles are more bloody than others.
More Swedes died in the battle of Lund in 1676 than Americans in Normandy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lund
2000 Americans died there, while both the Germans and the Russians suffered losses of 10.000 each every day during the battle of Stalingrad.
My guess based on nothing but gut feeling would say that 20% losses would be a rough average for most big hard battles. But I am sure there could also exist extreme cases when the losses could reach 80%.
For example did Paraguay lose 70% of its population in its war 1864-70, and basicly all its male population was dead when the war was over.
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Russia have invaded neighbouring country after neighbouring country the last 20 years. It have used gas as an economic weapon for blackmail for decades. It have launched IT attacks against Maersk and other western companies. It is simply a criminal regime that now recieves a blowback by western countries who are fed up with its bad behaviour and bullying.
Had Russia not poisoned people in England, blown up arms depots in Czechia, shot down civilian passanger planes, done missile attacks against the UN chief, stealing 500 passanger planes from western countries and behaving like a simple criminal terrorist regime... then no European country would have shown much interest in the war in Ukraine.
But now everyone is fed up and wants Russia to stop.
And the rules based international order is about to keep those promises you make - like the Budapest agreement in 1994 where Russia promised to never attack Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine getting rid of all her nuclear weapons. Stealing 500 passanger planes and nationalizing all foreign companies, and breaking gas contracts and change the terms so the gas must be paid in rubles are simple gangster methods.
At this point of time I just wish that all of the EU cut all ties completly with Russia. We should not negotiate anything with them, as they are not a serious actor with any intent of ever keeping any of their promises. The day after they promised to allow Ukraine to ship its wheat they bombed a port just to drive up insurance costs so much that it would be difficult for Ukraine to ship this wheat at a profit. And this attack is definatly not the last.
And this "concession" by Russia is not done by good will either. Its rather the result of Russias weakening power in the black sea after the loss of the cruiser Moscow and all the new anti-ship missiles Ukraine got that made it impossible for the Russian navy to control snake island and the western part of the black sea. And the sanctions are also biting into the Russian economy, so being able to sell food would also help Russias exports. So this trade deal was done out of self-interest and not out of peaceful intents.
And shipping weapons to Ukraine will not lead to any offensives the coming months. Its autumn now and mud season so no side will do any offensives now I think. Ukraine is probably now using the time mostly just to train more troops and inflict Russian losses with their HIMARS. Defensive warfare can be done with low quality troops. But offensive operations needs better troops, and Ukraine does not have those yet, as those are under training and lack combat experience.
But things will change.
And the longer this war goes on - the bigger will the harm to Russia become. Putin was stupid and thought a long war would be good.
But now he discover that the opposite might be the case, if Europe can stand firm this winter.
And after that then, Europe have reached a point of no return - all its ties with Russia will be broken.
Bit by bit are Europe building up alternative energy sources to Russian fossile fuels.
And as the Russian economy falls because of lack of energy exports and sanctions... then its GDP will shrink, and there will be less and less to gain for European companies from going back to Russia and doing buisness. There will not be any people there with any money over to spend on western products, and the criminal Russian government that is willing to steal foreign assets at a whim, cannot be trusted.
H&M, IKEA, and others will not set their foot in Russia for over a decade unless something drastic happens - like Putins removal from power.
Russia complaining about having to respect borders of other countries, just sounds like when Nazi-Germany and Japan was being jellous on USA, France and Britain for controlling the world and they could not have an equally large slice of the pie.
Those were in the weaker great powers that was on the rise, and was self-confident after their recent economic achievements and had become arrogant and was feeling a sense of superiority over other smaller countries like Poland and Manchuria which they thought that they had the right to wipe out from the world map.
Putin carry this the same nazi feeling in his gut towards Ukraine, Georgia, Moldovia and others.
And as much contempt I do have for German arrogance of Imperial Germany and the 3rd reich, I can still see where they are coming from when they had their sense of superiority towards other countries... I mean they had the best military in the world, a strong industry, amazing scientists and a rich cultural heritage with composers, bavarian castles, and such.
Todays Russia on the other hand do I not see any reason for any feeling of superiority... unless drinking more vodka than anyone else is considered an achievement.... Russia is a poor country and technologically backwards, its military history is filled huge losses, humiliating defeats, warcrimes, and its current day military is equipped with outdated Soviet junk. The country lacks any soft power what so ever.
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@jorehir Every economist seems to have their own opinion on this topic. David Landes thinks that Europe always was more prosperous than Asia. While Sinophiles like Kenneth Pommeranz claims that Europe did not get ahead of Asia until the 1800's. Personally I belong to the crowd of economists like Johan Söderberg who claims Asia was more advanced during the middle ages, and then around the 1600's were Europe and Asia on an equal footing, and then did Europe outperform Asia.
I think part of Europes strengths was its ability to import foreign technologies and put them to use - like the compass, gun powder, the printing press, paper, foreign crops, etc.
But not everything was about the rise of the western world either. Other parts of the world did also decline a bit. Densely populated countries like Egypt was much harder hit by the bubonic plague than Europe on average. The Mongols destroyed irrigation systems in Persia and Mesopotamia and thereby caused so much damage that those places could never recover for centuries. And the world metropol, centre of learning and trade center of the silk road - Bagdad was also completely destroyed by the Mongols who slaughtered about a million people there.
But the muslim rulers also had other problems which caused the end of the islamic golden age. Less conquests led to less plunder and profits. And as non-muslims converted to islam was rulers forced to raise taxes on the muslim population to fill the budget holes. Badly maintained terraces meant lower agricultural output, as top soil was blown away with the wind and the ground accumulated salt.
Then many farmers switched over to livestock instead - which were an even worse thing for the ecologically sensitive ground in North Africa and the Middle East. And without irrigation did farmlands quickly turn into deserts or wildgrown tropical wetlands - unlike Europe. And unlike Europe was there no other alternative uses for lands when it had been wasted and turned into desert. And MENA countries have always suffered from a shortage of wood. This gave Europeans an advantage as they had more and cheaper wood so they could lower their production costs of making glass, iron/steel/metal, and building ships, windmills, and terraces etc.
European goods became cheaper, while muslim goods became more expensive due to timber shortages, and got outcompeted. By the 1600's had the Ottoman manufacturing industry that made glass and textiles started to become out competed in the Mediterranean and unable to keep up its lucrative trade with Italy and South Eastern Europe. And the trade in the Indian ocean was severely disrupted by the Portuguese who tried to blockade the Ocean and create a trade monopoly in it. And this, along with the great distances to America did also pose obstacles for muslim colonization.
And when Europeans had found the sea way to India and China did also the volume of trade along the silk road fall - and that meant less trade and less taxes to government coffers.
So the muslim governments faced a shortage for tax money from all directions while their small manufacturing base was declining. And products which earlier had been popular - such as spices, fell out of favor and fell in price and became less profitable to sell as European costumers shifted over their interests to products like sugar, coffee and tobacco.
The Ottomans had been outplayed economically. But they did however remain a great military power throughout the 1600's until their expansion stopped.
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@Bln-f9u I agree. Changing the constitution is too difficult and too time consuming and all member states have to agree to it - and countries, for example France will never give up its stupid and wasteful Strasbourg parliament even if there exist no good argument for keeping it. Its not good for the EU and it is not good for 26 of the member countries and it is not good for the people in Europe. It is only good for France that can act like a parasite on tax payers from other EU countries by keeping this stupid parliament alive.
And indeed, this is the EU in a nutshell.
Member countries seems to have only joined this club to have a vehicle to scam tax payers in other countries.
Of all the thousands of decisions that the EU has made during my life time, have nearly all of them led to a more negative than a positive outcome for me - the average person. Less freedom, less privacy, more taxes, more unemployment, lower standards of living, less well tasting food. Its almost like politicians only seek new ways to
make life miserable for people.
I can only think of 3 instances where the EU made things that I liked. Like giving 155mm ammunition to Ukraine.
Forcing stupid electricians in Sweden to use earthing electrodes - and thus saving 200 people per year from dying from dying from stupid and avoidable electricity accidents. And the time limit on working hours that LapinPete seems to hate. I can only say that the idiotic and cruel schedules used at hospitals are stressing out nurses and nurse assistants and destroy their health with stress, lack of sleep and deprives them of any possibility of having a social life. So it is good that this new rule force hospitals to hire more workers instead of forcing people to overwork and burning themselves out.
However none of those 3 decisions should have needed any EU to make. Sweden could have done those 3 on its own. And I believe that Sweden one day without the EUs help would have figured out that earthing electrodes is a good idea, even our country was stupid and waited 30 years after Denmark to make this common sense decision that saves human lives and does not cost any money.
And the stupid overly idealistic belief in diplomacy and trade to prevent all wars - the very idea that EU is based upon - has been proven wrong. Strong dependence on Russian gas, and strong economic ties with it did not prevent the war in Ukraine. And this idea that everything was fine because we traded and talked with Russia and that a new war therefore would be impossible made us neglect our own military.
To me this shows what a stupid and intellectually lazy foundation that the EU project rests upon. We need to rebuild our own military. And so should other countries in Europe as well. Had we still had a decent military, then there would never have been any ammunition shortage in Ukraine now. Indeed, Russia might never even dared to invade if Europe was armed to the teeth and not so overly relying on buying Russian gas.
And it seems like Germany and France have learned nothing. And do not want to learn either. They are already doing the same mistake with China as they did with Russia, by making themselves too dependent on a warmongering oppressive fascist regime.
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Due to costs overruns, one could no longer say that the F35 is the cheaper plane and the F22 the better more expensive one. The F35 have been a dissapointment - both in performance and costwise.
And neighter is the F35 stealthy according to many top notch aircraft experts. And good aerodynamic planes are beautiful, while this plane is ugly as fuck and suck at aerodynimics, because it is more designed at being stealthy and hiding its weaponary inside the plane... which gives the plane a pot belly and shitty aerodynamics and bad stealth.
The F22 is undoubtably a great plane. Its overpriced in the minds of us living in countries with smaller defence budgets than the USA, but it is a great plane. If price was a non-issue I would pick that plane for my ideal airforce.
But since we don't live in an ideal world with unlimited money and where USA have allowed export of the F22, that option goes out the window.
So if importing Russian planes is not an option either, I would then buy the JAS-39.
Simply because you get a hell of a lot of fighter aircraft for a small amount of money. No other plane gives as much bang for the buck. And while I am an admirer of US fighter jets (F4, P51, F14 and F16 are sexy as hell), I also have to admit that the F35 is a huge fucking failure. Its an overpriced shitty plane... F15E is much better, SU35 is much better, Typhoon is much better, MIG31, and MIG35 is better. And many of those plane are old 4th generation planes.
The JAS39 is ugly and it is tiny and cheap... but it can carry all kinds of modern weaponary (unlike the F35).
And with a good pilot it is a worthy opponent of any jet in service today. Overall do I think aircrafts today are quite overly expensive in relation to the benifit they do to the wareffort.... and that includes all modern planes, but JAS39 is the least shitty plane in that aspect among any other plane on the top 10 list of the best fighter planes.
I can see where other people are coming from when they say they want a better plane if it means a higher price. But that F35 is just overly expensive crap that is getting outclassed by plane after plane as I already mentioned. Planes that are both older and cheaper.
And despite its huge costs, this plane doesn't perform much better than the JAS39. And in many aspects its actully a little bit worse.
I can actully not come up with a single good reason to have the F35 in any airforce in the world.
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I feel respect for the isolantionist position as a person who do not like wars and want to put my fingers into every goddamn jam jar on the planet. But neither am I naive pacifist that wants to avoid every war at any cost - even the cost of evil winning and snatching land after piece of land and threatening and bullying its way towards world domination.
A few numbers of wars are worth fighting. And this war and the war against ISIS are very clearcut examples of wars, with good vs evil.
This war will create a worldwide prejudice, and if we allow big countries to make landgrabs unpunished then more will try to make the same thing.
If USA also betray its promise in the Budapest agreement would it be a severe blow to USAs trustworthiness as an ally for decades to come. Perhaps Ukraine expected help from ground troops or at least a no-fly-zone over Ukraine... but not even the latter was given to Ukraine. Instead have USA just done the bare minimum, by giving shipments of weapons to Ukraine and let them do all the fighting themselves (and perhaps also some hard handed threats behind the scenes to scare Putin from using nuclear weapons).
If Trump would cut off all aid to Ukraine and let Russia win would it be a severe blow to American diplomacy. Right now have Biden been hesitant to provide ATACMS to Ukraine. But on the other hand, things are about to change I guess...
It is easy for me to blame USA for its actions, but it is another matter to be the president and have the responsability over 300 million people and making sure that they don't die in a nuclear winter, or trigger a world war. Biden is playing safe. And probably and hopefully will this game play well and end with a total victory. Ukraine get all its land back. Russia's inheritance of the Soviet unions military arsenal has been spoiled. USA have proven its credibility as an ally and gotten its weapons tested and proven their superiority, and the people in Ukraine are forever grateful for St Javelin and uncle HIMARS. And Ukraines plentiful natural resources will fold into the western world and provide cheap food, coal, iron, oil, natural gas, uranium and other resources to the west. And their supply to the world markets will drive down prices also on russian goods because of competition. While if russia takes over Ukraine, they will charge high monopoly prices over those goods and strangle western industry's growth and economic growth - but with a Ukrainian victory will the opposite happen.
And US companies could make large amounts of money by investing in exploitation of Ukraines natural gas deposits and providing investment capital to the a poor country in desperate need of foreign investments.
With the russian teddy bear laying on the floor with his teeths kicked out, all ribs broken and bruises all over the body... can USA from now on focus all their attention on China instead. Russia as a military threat is gone. It will take russia over a decade to recover their losses of vehicles. And meanwhile will the technological gap continue to grow, as the west are fielding 6th generation military aircrafts while Russia have not yet even been able to complete their first 5th generation fighter.
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Stalin, Gulag, Katyn, Holodomor, Chernobyl disaster, Aral sea disaster, rape of Germany in 1945, the great wrath in Finland 1713-21, The Russian Pillage of 1719–21, Prague 1968, Hungary 1956, to poisoning and enviromental disaster at Tankograd, the use of Buchenwald concentration camp to murder political prisoners, Lenin, Peter the Greats massmurder of Ukranian cossacks... and it backs up murderous regimes like Milosevic, Castro and the Eastern bloc.
the list goes on and on and is endless with bad stuff this country has made. This is a horrible sh*thole country.
And it seems to never learn. Putins idols are evil bad people like Stalin, Ivan the terrible and Peter the Great.
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Putin refused to call this an invasion, and instead prefered to call this a "special operation" of the Russian army. And I tend to more and more see why.
"Special" is just an euphemism for the word "retarded". And that word in turn describes the Russian army pretty well. What else can one say with all heavy losses they have taken? Soldiers stationed in Belarus selling fuel for their tanks so they could buy vodka.
Corrupt officers putting money in their own pockets instead of maintaing their trucks with tires that doesn't break down as soon as you drive off road.
And here we now see this gigantic army that outnumbers the Ukrainians with much more men and machines fail to win. And this also despite their cowardly surprise attack was done when the Ukraine was caught off guard. And despite those advantages could their battle-hardned warmongering regime not win a speedy victory.
Pathetic.
So yeah, I agree with Putin. His troops are a bit "special". Putin himself is also pretty much "special".
He said the fall of the USSR was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 1900s.
Normal people would perhaps have said the two world wars, the holocaust, holdomor, the rise of the Soviet empire, the great leap forward in Mao's China or something like that. But not Putin. Because he is "special". Some do even claim that he is an ass-burger for real.
That can perhaps be true. But I do not want to lump all people with disabilities into the same box as this guy.
Because Putin is an evil man, and his ideas will do nothing good. He will only give asperbergers a bad name - which I think would be unfair to those with disabilities that contribute to a better world. Putin on the other hand bombs hospital and universities, makes people homeless, kill fathers and young men who had their entire life ahead of them for his stupid imperialist dreams. Freedoms are taken away, men are poisoned, Russia's riches are wasted on war instead of lifting that country out of poverty.
So yeah, f this guy.
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I welcome the tecnological development and such. And it is nice and well paying jobs. And wests military dominance is secured in a world where Russia, China, India, Brazil, Egypt and such have proven themselves to be powerful countries without moral compass. So it is important that we in the free world remains top dog even if the price in the short run may be high.
With all that said will I also say that it is for me completly economically unjustified that a modern fighter cost 100 million Euros or more. Not even Gripen the most powerful and price worthy plane is worth that kind of money in mind opinion.
And add to that all maintance costs and pilot training costs, and costs for fuel and ammunition.
One can buy a hell of a lot of other types of weapon systems for that kind of money. If you scrap the air force you might afford an enormous arsenal of tanks or missiles. It is worth thinking about.
For one Gripen jet can you afford to pay for all government expenses in my home county of 5000 people... all schools, all nursing homes, roads, street lights, ice rinks, health centers, libraries and so on. So even if I think Gripen E is a hell of an impressive plane... I still think it is difficult to justify one planes existence against funding all those civilian stuff that I mentioned.
So I bet that air force guys do not like me.
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@REgamesplayer "Getrennt marschieren, vereint schlagen!" - is the motto of the German army.
And it means that armies should be spread out and walk independently from each other. And "vereint schlagen" means that armies should only come together at the last possible moment and combine their forces and strike against a common target.
Helmut von Moltke who said those words this use this recipe for victory when he won a crushing victory against Austria at Königgrätz in 1866. His three Prussian armies did all walk on their own paths so they would not overburden their supply lines. And then did he push against the Austrian army at Königgrätz from 3 different directions - north, north-west, and west - and the overwhelming force in combination with better weaponry and other factors did create a hopeless situation for the Austrian army that day.
Spreading out troops have always been military wisdom. In the pre-industrial age was it easier to feed an army by spreading it out corps over different areas on the map, instead of having the entire army sitting on the same spot on the map and eating up all food in an area in just a single day.
Having armies starving to death and then fall victim to diseases would be disastrous. The catholic forces learned this the hard way in their invasion of northern Germany during the 30-years war. Northern Germany had already been plundered and destroyed previous years of the war when the Catholics started their invasion. And after just a few months had the superior force been so badly decimated that its numbers no longer outnumbered the Swedes, but instead did the Swedes now had the upper hand and was able to defeat the catholic army and drive it back home, and turn around the situation completely and snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat.
The only problem with spreading out forces is of course that they can be defeated in piecemeal by the enemy.
It is always desirable to use concentration of force before launching an offensive against the enemy. Moltke knew this at Königgrätz, and that is also the reason why he did let his 3 armies always stay near enough to each other so one of them could support another, if the enemy would suddenly choose to attack any of his armies.
I modern warfare does supply lines still matter. Only the 6th army used 13 railway wagons of small arms ammunition per day during the battle for Stalingrand. And then would the army also need to get supplies like fuel, food, artillery shells ammunition, etc.
And then the amount of supplies needed quickly grow so large that you need railways to get them, since there are no other realistic way to give the army what it needs otherwise. But the railroads do of course also got limits to how much troops it can support at a certain location, before the transport system becomes overburdened.
So it is therefore a good idea to spread out forces a bit so that each unit more easily can be supplied.
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@REgamesplayer I do not believe in the idea of "punching through the enemy lines". Frontal attacks are costly. Outmaneuver and encircle the enemy and starving an enemy army to death with few losses of your own seems like a more ideal solution to me.
It is however good that you agree with me that railroads, canals are the veins that provides army with the lifeblood that it needs to survive. And if you cut this vein of, then the blood supply gets lost and the army gets strangled to death.
I think normal peoples perception and military experts views on modern warfare differs very much when it comes to logistics. Average Joe do think that roads and railroads don't matter since armies got airplanes, helicopters and halftracks that can cross difficult terrain.
But experts however know that even the best equipped modern armies are just as dependent on roads and supply lines as in past centuries. It is not possible to air transport a tank army with 70 tonnes Abrams or Leopard2 tanks. The transport capacity of planes are very tiny, and helicopters can often only carry half a ton of supplies. So it is simply not possible to supply a huge army from the air alone. Just a single American infantry Division did needed 800 tonnes per day during world war II. And in modern warfare are ammunition expenditure at even much higher levels than that. So it is therefore hard to supply just a single Division from the air today. And supplying an entire army would probably be both impractical and impossible for nearly all military's in the world. So cutting off an armies supply lines are therefore still today a very hard blow towards its ability to fight.
Without ammunition do guns stay silent. Without fuel do vehicles become immobilized and useless. Without food do soldiers starve, no matter how tough elite warriors they may be.
The combustion engine have made armies less reliant on railroads and locomotives. You can load supplies on trucks that hand them over to your troops instead. However, this do have its limits.
Trucks ability to cross difficult terrain is limited, and therefore cannot tanks and soldiers get supplies that they need if they choose to sit in difficult terrain.
And the capacity to move supplies by trucks are limited compared to railroads. Which in turn means that you can only supply a limited concentration of force in an area.
War is still mostly a 2 Dimensional warfare game. It is still not possible to move armies in the air by the 3rd dimension. Air planes can carry too little weight, and they are vulnerable to enemy fire, and even modern airplanes are not good at handling bad weather, night flying, winter, sandstorms, tropical climate, landing zones with rocks and trees etc etc.
Paratroops and air mobile helicopter units can be useful for closing encirclements of enemy armies, do raids and capture bridges and such. But they are worthless when they are alone going face to face against enemy armies. They do simply lack heavy equipment and are too short on supplies to be effective.
Without tanks and heavy artillery do they lack a hard punch.
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@REgamesplayer
"First, you assume that there are unprotected gaps which wasn't the case in last century. Secondly, you assume that enemy will allow you to maneuver around him without taking critical logistical areas. Good luck trying to outmaneuver army size formation of a million men with handful of tanks and men."
D-Day ended as a success despite a tiny number of potentially suitable landing zones for the invasion of fortress Europe. Operation Bagration was a success despite Germany had lots of fortified positions - A hundred German divisions was crushed, despite Germany rushed its armor reserves to the area.
A third example would be Fall blau which also began as a huge success. Stalin was left totally unprepared that Germany had reinforced its southern front so much that Army group south had become the most powerful force Germany had in 1942.
Stalin had expected that Hitler would try to take Moscow in 1942, and therefore saw German Army Group Centre as the most dangerous threat to Russia. Stalin did therefore position 80% of the red army at the centre.
But Hitler did completely surprise him by instead launching a huge summer campaign in Southern Russia instead. So great was the surprise that after the victory at Kharkov in May 1942 did the road towards Stalingrad lay completely open for the Germans. All of southern Russia laid undefended. Most of the Red army was sitting in front of Moscow, and the few men which were supposed to protect southern Russia had been captured following the catastrophically failed Kharkov offensive.
The Germans never learned the extent of their total victory, so they failed to capitalize on it to a full extent.
So the point here is quite clear. You can group millions of men and still achieve surprise attacks.
And it is not strange. You cannot be strong everywhere - as Sun Tzu would affirm.
"Combustion engine had made armies more reliant on infrastructure than before."
Armies have a higher flexibility and tactical mobility than before. However, the huge consumption of supplies - and ammunition in particular, have led to stronger dependency on infrastructure points. Having thousands of winter uniforms do no good if they just sit in a supply depot thousands of miles behind the front line while soldiers are freezing to death outside Moscow.
The flow of supplies to the front - aka logistics - is often times the toughest job that the strategist have.
USA dropped 260 million cluster bombs over Laos. Just think about the huge logistical organization it would take to transport all those explosives from USA to Vietnam, and then to the airports, and then to get those bombs onto planes that fly them to the areas where they need to be dropped. Think of all the millions of gallons of fuel that is needed for all this to happen, and all vehicles that are needed for transporting all that fuel. And all men needed for all those transports with trucks and planes, and all mechanics and so on.
Much planning is clearly needed for such a huge project of dropping all bombs over Vietnam. And all other military campaigns are also just equality reliant on well working logistics.
"Look into Russian paratroopers"
FYI. Don't waste my time.
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@REgamesplayer
My examples of Bagration, D-day, and Case Blue are all successes achieved. Nor do you deny that they are successes. And that does prove my point: You can achieve surprise attacks with huge forces despite huge amounts of force concentrations and logistical built up which in theory should be easily spotted by the enemy, and then should those attacks easily be countered by the enemy and then crushed.
Well, the defenders in all those cases all failed to foresee a huge enemy attack. And counter-measures were only put in place only at a very late stage.
Nor have the element of surprise been eliminated from importance in modern warfare.
It is possible to achieve huge initial success even against enemies with superior strength. Case Blue and the Ardennes offensive did not end with failure on the first day, with German troops failing to punch a hole in the enemy defenses and just banging their horn against the wall until it became bloody.
Nope.
Instead did the Germans win large initial successes. But according to this Lindemann, should this not be the case.
"That is false. Armies before could live off the land."
The combustion engine allowed armies to be less bound by the railroads. But new problems then came with the motorization of armed forces.
Feeding armies is probably easier than ever. Food can be stored longer than ever before. It taste better, so troops therefore eat all the calories they need. And the food can be more easily transported than ever.
And healthcare is also better than ever.
But logistics related to firepower and fuel have become more difficult, as army requirements are huge nowadays.
"Funny fact, this reliance came right back down in 21'st century warfare. It became feasible again like with armies in a past did, supply your army once and forget about logistics and you could theoretically win entire war with just what you packed."
Modern weapon systems do demand much more supplies. But supply lines have always played an important rule in war. Alexander the Great understood the need for having naval routes open for supplying his large army.
And the logistics came to play a key role in the defeat of the Swedish army in 1709, just as logistical problems caused Napoleons Russian campaign to fail.
"You said that we fight in 2D environment and that deployed paratroopers can't do much after being deployed"
I said that their fighting ability is very limited. But they can however be an useful tool to help to encircle enemy formations so they can be destroyed.
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I guess I am a transphobe, but in this case its clear that she should be allowed to compete in womens sport. Period.
And I am also tired of GOPs obsession about this bullsh*t issue. It feels like it is crap directly coming from Kremlin to obsess about nonsense like this, so they do not have to talk about real issues instead. And they can obfuscate their russian anti-western and anti-democratic influence. I feel sorry for transpeople, they need empathy and not a witch hunt. Transpersons will not have it easy finding a partner as they are incapable of making kids. So they get depressed and lonely and often suicidal - and things only get worse when they realize that they cannot undo previous mistakes of sex change or hormono theraphy...
However when it comes to GOP and Russia, do I think its quite clear that the love they have for russia is not shared by most people. People do not admire militarism, fascism, imperialism, backwards religious interpretations based on negativity towards porn, masturbation, womens liberation, tolerance towards sexual minorities and such.
People do not share the love fot that evil cleptocratic racist rule. So the only selling point of russia being better than the west is the lack of "too far gone wokeness". Which I think is a weak argument, insuffiecent for installing russian rule here in the west. We are better off without that crap.
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@Jabbar27.
As long as russia interfere in other countries affairs do they have no right to complain when other countries interefere in theirs. The west have done nothing towards russia. And russia thanks us by manipulating our elections with misinformation trolls and paid propagandists, they do cyberattacks against the west (like that against Maersk), they blow up arms depots in Czechia, they poison people in Salisbury in Britain, they trying to destabilize our societies with immigrants on the polish and finnish border, they shots down Dutch passanger planes, they poison the former Ukrainian president Viktor Jusjtjenko... the list goes on and on.
And since russia do interfere so much in other countries internal affairs, would it not be strange if the west interfered in russias internal affairs. If not, then for no other reason than for self-defence.
I wish all minorities in russia to be given independence from their opressors. Freedom and independence to Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, Kalmykia, Buryatia, Sakha Republic, Tuva, Dagestan, Yakutia, Republic of Mari, Chuvashia, Altai republic, and Chechnya!
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@worldinsights930 Empire means just taking land by force. And that is a bad thing in itself. Of course can plots of land join an empire out of free will like small states in Germany joining Prussia in creating a new country called Germany. Or how small states joined Giuseppe Garibaldi to create Italy.
However things do become problematic with empire when freedom and independence and democracy gets taken away without the consent of the people living in one area. So multi-ethnic empires are mostly just held togheter with the iron fist of a dictator. And if he no longer rules by fear and opression, then do the empire instantly falls apart. This is what happened to Yugoslavia, and to the Soviet union and its dominance over Eastern Europe, or with modern day Iraq when Saddam died which now sees fighting between Sunni and Shia, and between kurds and ISIS.
It ends in a tragic bloodbath.
To avoid opression, lack of freedom and fascism there must be consent by the people that are being ruled over. They must feel like they benefit from being a part of the empire. Having one country just dictating the rules to another country (like Nazi-Germany ruled over Norway) is not a nice way of ruling an empire. And that is not an empire I wanna be a part of regardless of how nice uniforms the soldiers have, or how amazing technologies that country invents or how nice military parades it makes or how popular the leader is in his home country.
So for this reason am I pretty skeptical of the idea of empire. It usually requires someone holding the empire togheter with an iron fist. During medieval times was multi-ethic empires with strange borders often created, like Spain that included the Netherlands, Italy and Portugal, or Austria that included Hungary, Belgium, Italy, and the Balkans.
But today we no longer sees that. Multi-ethnic states like Switzerland, Canada and Belgium exists, but nearly everyone from those places are not much in favor of those artifical states.
I do not think that diversity is a strength but rather a weakness. If diversity was a strength, then I think that africans would rather thank us Europeans for creating such strange artifical borders for newly created African states that just lumped togheter large numbers of african tribes randomly togheter into one country and thereby creating diversity. It turns out that many instead accuse European colonial powers of having created unnecessary ethnic conflicts by doing so, and hampered Africas development instead of helping it.
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@bzztbzztboy Now you did a really good post :)
And I apologize for being rude previously, I have so many online debates keep on going right now that I easily confuse people with each other.
"Diamond's research methodology that's being thrown into question- the way he cherry picks data, takes biased primary accounts wholesale, ascribes native mistakes to technological and cultural differences while failing to bring up those of the conquerors, and overall fails to bring nuanced readings of cultural and political situations to the table"
Most history books contains many of the same flaws as this one. How many history books doesn't say that the Aztecs used cacao beans as money? How many "serious" history books just repeat what other history books says without fact checking if money was really invented in the Kingdom of Lydia or if Herodotos the inventor of this claim just made this shit up from his ass? etc, etc.....
I wish Jared Diamond could have been a bit more concerned to get his facts right. But I think he presents some interesting theories why Euro-Asia would get a good head start compared to the rest of the world, and that was really the point of this book.
And a few errors here and there doesn't invalidates his entire book.
"Just because the points which he raised appear plausible and explained doesn't mean they hold up under close scrutiny"
There are many books about this topic on "why the west would come to dominate the world, while the others didn't".
I have read Samuel Bernstein, David Landes, Kenneth Pommeranz, Xinru Liu, Ha-Joon Chang and others so Jared Diamond is only one among many authors perspective I have used and compared with other "historians" or whatever we should call them.
All of those authors have their own strenghts and weaknesses in their analysis of the world.
Their perspectives are like tools in a toolbox. Some of them are good at one thing and bad at another thing. And thats why you don't wanna throw away the screwdriver, the saw, the spanner and the drill and only keep the hammer for everything. Because a hammer is not very useful for all types of jobs.
And likewise would I say that Jared Diamond could give this perspective about plants and domesticated animals that no other of the gentlemen I have mentioned put forward.
And I think this is an important piece in the puzzle to understand why the west would conquer the world.
"Did you read any of the arguments presented in the links? I'm curious to see what you think of them."
I think they are the typical nagging you always hear about a typical history book. People complain just as much about Oswald Spengler about how he did get a few facts wrong here and there, instead of presenting relevant criticism about the main point he makes in his book.
"I'm not too sure what you mean by "this bullshit issue"
I mean that even if Diamond was wrong about some tiny fact, it still not change much in the bigger picture of things.
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"massive casualties"
No one have denied this. The leaked documents do however talk about less than 30.000 killed Ukrainians. Compare that to Russia that have lost about 200.000 men killed by now. The amount of wounded Ukrainian soldiers is probably around 60.000. While I would guess Russias wounded are numbering about 400.000- 600.000.
"air defences down"
Ukraine is getting more and more of it while Russia is running out of cruise missiles and forced to converting anti-ship missiles and air-defence missiles into ground attack mode to make up for the shortfall.
"And ammunition for artillery running out - artillery having been a deciding factor in this factor."
Ukraine is given 1 million artillery shells by the EU. And the other allies will provide large amounts as well so they will not run out if. But Russia on the other hand is running out of their Soviet stocks. And the Soviet union is not producting any more for them. They now restort to using decades old ammunition from North Korea. And Wagner is complaining about ammunition shortage and artillery shells that are too rusty to be used.
And Russian gun barrels have fired so much that their gun barrels are exhausted and have become inaccurate. And now they have been used to much that they needs to be changed or they will risk exploding and killing the ground crew.
So in desperation are the Russians beginning to use tanks as artillery due to the shortage of gun barrels. But the old 100mm ammunition for the T-55 tanks will not last forever either, and tanks gun barrels have a shorter life than artillery guns. So Russia is running out of rope it seems.
To make matter worse have Russia lost much of its counter-battery radars, and losses have been so heavy that Ukrainian artillery no longer bothers to move around and can sit in the same spot for weeks now without getting destroyed.
Indeed Russias artillery suck now. No fire coordination is done any more. Either because Russia lacks skilled gun crews, or because they like artillery observers, or drones... all because of all those reasons. So the old inaccurate WW2 guns that Russia uses with their non-precision ammunition, and their mobiki crews, and lack of fire observers do unsurprisingly produce meager results. It more seems like they just bomb a GPS location and do not care to follow up their shots so they come closer to the enemy positions anymore.
And on the other side you have an enemy with the most modern artillery systems in the world, and high precision ammunition and skilled artillery crews, and fire is coordinated with drones and counter-battery radars.
"Let's hope the conflict ends soon and the borders are redrawn."
I hope it ends soon, and that the end be very painful for Russia. The best thing would be if Ukraine invades Transnistria and take it back and that Russia is forced to hand back Donetsk, Luhansk, Crimea plus all other land they have stolen the last decades such as land in Georgia.
And then should the country pay for Ukraines reconstruction, and compensation for all aircrafts it have stolen from western countries. And all war criminals should be punished. And all land within 100km from the Ukrainian border will be declared a demilitarized zone and be guarded by a peace keeping force from countries all over the world.
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Tanks have always been limited by the speed of the infantry I guess. In the book "The Blitzkrieg myth" one could read that the German advance into Poland, Russia and France during world war 2 wasn't any faster than the average marched miles per day by the Kaisers army in world war1.
The reason is simple. Even if (some) tanks might be very mobile and not so restricted by forrests, buildings and rought terrain, their movement trough those areas are nevertheless very restricted by the fact that they can't be supplied if they move through such terrain, because even if the tanks can go trough forrests, the supply trucks carrying fuel and ammo can't.
So the advance can only go so far before the tanks run out of fuel, and then the tanks have to sit down and wait for the slow supply trucks to keep up. And if the tanks have punched a big bulge into the enemy lines, then the flanks would be very vulnerable to attacks from the enemy, so the flanks needs to be protected by the slow infantry before the supply trucks can move forward and reach the tanks without the risk of getting destroyed by a tiny enemy force coming in on them from the sides.
The German army wasn't that motorized in world war 2, so the rate of movement was quite limited by the speed of the foot of a man or horse. So the German Army could probably have performed better if it had been motorized to the same degree as the western allied armies. The reason why they nevertheless acted more rapidly on the battlefield than the allies, was because of their decentralized decisionmaking and highly skilled NCOs who were relativly free to act upon their own iniative.
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@neurofiedyamato8763 "Depending on what machinery you are using, the various refining process of the required resources, all change the energy demand to make something."
I still think energy is the best measurement for production effiecency. It tells you how much input you have to give relative to the output you get. And if you use energy wasting machines, then your production effiecency will be lower.
I guess you haven't heard of "Jevons paradox" that shows that energy consumption in an economy increases when more energy effiecent machines are start being used.
This energy measurement per unit produced will also show you the true economic strenght of country. USA had their oil fields in World war II and could afford to waste lots of energy in their production process, why Germany couldn't after it had depleted its pre-war energy reserves.
EROEI (energy-returned-on-energy-invested) is really the measurement on the health of the world economy. It costs energy to produce energy, like when you drill a hole into the ground or use a diesel pump to get oil up from the ground. And EROEI is a measurement of how much energy you will have left to spend.
In the early 1900 you could get 100 barrels of oil for every barrel of oil you wasted to drive a diesel pump to get that hundred barrels out of the ground.
So the EROEI value is therefore 100:1.
But if you try to make etanol from wood like the Germans, then your EROEI would at best only be around 5:1.
So Germany had to waste money and manpower to produce energy than the allies, and still they couldn't produce more energy than the oil fields in Texas.
And all resources Germany had to divert to make coal into oil, also meant that Germany had less men, money and coal they could spend on making military weapons.
Everything becomes possible when you have unlimited amounts of free energy.
But when you resources are scarce, then you have to plan every move you make so you don't waste energy, and manufacturing costs of everything rises since energy used for almost everything nowadays. The world economy would probably fall into a crash as soon as the EROEI value falls below 15:1, when the big oil fields pumps up less and less oil and needs more and more energy to pump up and refine from sand and rocks and impurities.
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google translate..
Швеция продала железо, потому что у него не было другого выбора, кроме как сделать это. Это была бедная страна с небольшим населением, и страна не была великой военной державой со времен великой Северная война.
Если бы страна отказалась продавать железо, тогда Гитлер вторгся бы в страну точно так же, как США вторглись в Ирак за нефть. Шведские вооруженные силы были недостаточно сильны, чтобы отпугнуть Германию, Францию или Великобританию от попыток втянуть Швецию в войну, и это нанесло бы большой экономический ущерб стране в войне, в которой наша страна не заинтересована в участии.
Это, наверное, трудно понять россиянам. Маленькие страны не могут позволить себе отстраниться от больших стран.
Ваше заявление о том, что тысячи шведов сражались за нацистов, - все это чепуха. В лучшем случае несколько сотен идиотов добровольно сражались за победу дивизии СС. Но шведскому правительству нечего было делать. Швеции никогда не нравился нацистский режим. Действительно, страна даже немного надеялась, что союзники выиграют войну в последние годы его существования.
И помощь Финляндии не должна восприниматься как помощь Германии. Финляндия, Дания, Норвегия и Исландия - братья Швеции, которых мы любим и защищаем. Точно так же, как Россия любит своих славянских православных братьев, таких как Сербия.
Финляндия была частью Швеции в течение 560 лет, а часть Финляндии все еще говорит по-шведски, поэтому, конечно, мы бы помогли демократической Финляндии защитить себя от агрессии со стороны своего диктаторского соседа.
Война в Финляндии была справедливой оборонительной войной. В то время как гитлеровские войны были несправедливыми агрессивными войнами. И я рад и благодарен, что Россия победила нацистов за все ужасные преступления, которые они совершили против евреев и славян.
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@purple.rapier
"Во время второй мировой войны деньги на продажу руды, оружие, газовые камеры, а после этого убивали людей"
Швеция вообще не продавала танки и газовые камеры. Это просто ложь, которую ты придумываешь.
* "Во первых по вашей логике, если у вас есть какая-то возможность и шанс, что страна может быть захвачена, и она может быть использована как угодно"*
Конечно, Швеция могла бы объявить войну Германии в сентябре 1939 года. А через несколько месяцев страна будет завоевана, а нацисты все равно получат железо. Так что я не понимаю, чего вы реально можете ожидать от маленькой страны?
Объявлять войну великой державе без причины, а потом убивать граждан и разрушать экономику?
Это звучит как невероятно глупая идея для меня. Это все равно что пойти в таверну, а потом начать бой с более сильным парнем без всякой на то причины.
Швеция действовала, как любая уважаемая нейтральная страна, чтобы остаться в стороне от войны. Нашим соседям не повезло, потому что большие страны просто не хотели бы оставлять их в покое. Россия напала на Финляндию. Германия напала на Данию. А Франция и Великобритания планировали напасть на Норвегию и Швецию, но Германия сначала добралась до Норвегии и могла вторгнуться в Норвегию раньше, чем могли бы союзники.
Так что было много стран, которые хотели уничтожить Швецию.
И Швеция не хотела иметь ничего общего с этой войной.
Я говорю это моим норвежским друзьям, когда они жалуются, что Швеция не сделала больше для Норвегии. Что Швеция могла реально сделать для Норвегии? Немного. Шведская армия тогда была шуткой.
Любой ответственный лидер попытался бы удержать свою страну от войны. И если бы на Норвегию напала Швеция, а не Норвегия, то, я думаю, единственной разумной вещью для Норвегии было бы попытаться остаться в стороне от войны.
Во всяком случае, последней страной, которая имеет право жаловаться на экспорт железа из Швеции, является Россия. Именно Россия помогла нацистам захватить Польшу. Именно Россия продала еду, медь и нефть нацистской Германии в 1939, 1940 и 1941 годах, чтобы ее экономика не развалилась.
А еда и нефть были гораздо более важными ресурсами для Германии, чем шведское железо.
"В заголовках газет в то время встречались заголовки о том, что война развязанная гитлером это освободительная война"
Несколько шведских офицеров сочувствовали немцам первые годы войны. Но остальная часть шведского общества не поделилась своими чувствами к Германии. Оккупация Норвегии и Дании не была воспринята как нечто положительное. Швеция приняла еврейских беженцев из Дании, а норвежские антигерманские партизаны бежали в Швецию и поселились в муниципалитете, где я живу во время войны.
"Во вторых миротворческие отряды это факт и численность их была десятками тысяч. Если интересно, то почитайте подробно"
Я понятия не имею, о чем ты вообще говоришь.
*"Этот отряд также участвовал на стороне финляндии в советско финской войне*"
Да, защита свободы и независимости Финляндии была справедливой причиной. Сталин планировал депортировать все население Финляндии в Сибирь, если он победил. Поэтому, конечно, я счастлив, что советскому диктатору не удалось победить.
Большая могущественная Россия, нападающая на беднейшую страну Европы, - это то, что даже заставит пацифиста думать, что эта война будет оправдана.
"В третьих, финляндия участвовала в войне потому что, хотела вернуть земли потерянные во время советско финнской войны, был подписан договор, финляндия могла просто не участвовать, но тем не менее, финляндия своим участием а войне на стороне германии доказала, что она продажна, и ссср правильно сделал. начав войну с финляндией, с целью отодвинуть границы от главного города севера россии"
Вторая война между Россией и Финляндией была не так морально чиста, как первая (с финской точки зрения). Но понятно, что страна, которая была вынуждена отдать землю, когда ей прижимали нож к горлу, захотела бы забрать у них то, что было украдено.
Финляндия хотела вернуть только свою землю, и они не думали о создании какой-либо огромной финской империи за счет России, как планировали немцы. Думайте об этом с точки зрения оси. Разве не глупо было, что Финляндия никогда не пыталась помочь немцам взять Ленинград с севера?
Я имею в виду, что захват этого большого города был бы важным, если бы ось захотела выиграть войну.
Но Финляндии было все равно. Они вели собственную войну и очень мало помогали Германии.
Мне как постороннему я думаю, что поведение Финляндии кажется очень странным и немного глупым. Но также возможно, что Финляндия побоялась помочь немцам из-за угроз со стороны США. Если бы Финляндия взяла Ленинград, США бы очень рассердились на эту маленькую страну и отказались бы помочь ей сохранить свою независимость, когда война снова обернется в пользу России.
"на самом деле она была полностью на стороне германии и осталось на этой стороне даже после разгрома гитлера"
Еще больше ерунды и пропаганды от тебя.
Швеция прекратила экспорт железа в Германию в августе 1944 года. И страна защитила норвежских борцов за свободу и датских евреев от немецких нацистов. Страна также шпионила за немцами, и «Белые автобусы» спасли тысячи узников концлагерей.
Швеция также продала 40-миллиметровую пушку американцам во время войны. https://youtu.be/7dJDn5F1GQk?t=172 Зачем Швеции это делать, если, как вы утверждаете, Швеция была на стороне Германии?
Вы просто не представляете, о чем говорите.
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Patton could have the same gun as the last generation of MBTs, but it cannot play the role of a 1st line tank with its crappy armor. Maybe this tank is useful for infantry support and anti-tank roles and playing the role as "artillery" but otherwise its not of much use. It will always lose 10 vs 10 fights in the open against modern enemy tanks.
M60 was a mediocre tank already during the 1960s and I don't think upgrading this tank will be a sustainable solution if you want your army to have a strong tank arm 20-30 years from now. This tank is already too old.
I would keep the chassis for the future use as SPGs, bridge layers, tank training, flamethrowers, engineering tanks, recovery vehicles, command vehicles etc...
Or I would sell the tanks to Africa or Latin America, and buy some real tanks for my army instead.
Leopard, Abrams, Leclerc, Challanger are all old. So it is time for a new tank with a 15cm calibre gun with an autoloader and the latest technologies. A gun capable of dealing with Armata would need a high calibre, and that in turn makes it necessary with an autoloader it the guns are becoming bigger than what they are today.
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The jews were lied to and told they were going to take a shower. There were no guy saying to them "hey guys, we want to push you on to train that will take you to your killing location. And there will you suffer a terrible death inside a gas chamber".
Most jews did not know that the nazis planned to kill them until it was too late to resist. So your comment is filled with stupid ignorance 🙄
And besides what did the armed jews in the Warsaw ghetto accomplish? - Nothing. You cannot use old rifles and a few handguns to take on an entire professional army with tanks, artillery and aircrafts and an entire state machinery backing it. How dumb does one have to be to believe that?
If the mighty British empire, France and Soviet Russia could not do well against Hitlers armies despite millions of trained soldiers, and thousands of tanks, planes, field guns, and warships.... then what chances would the jews have?
- a bunch of jews consisting of undernourished, weak, and sick people with no military training. They did not have any heavy equipment, and the jews from all different countries in Europe did not even speak the same language. And elderly, children, disabled and women are not exactly first class frontline troops material.
One can say that the holocaust really begun in january 1942, and 80% of all jews who died in the holocaust died before the end of that year. With other words there was no way the allies could have invaded Germany and ended the war earlier either. On the contrary - the nazis stood at the height of their power in 1942 and 95% of Stalingrad had fallen into German hands.
Polands jewish population was dying off so fast that there were realisticly no time for them to realize that their people were being murdered when they were transported by train to an unknown destination to never be seen again. And once horrible rumours reached the jewish community, they were so horrible that most people could not believe them at first.
But as more and more people got killed, many more people grew suspicious and tried to resist the nazis. And the respons from the nazis were brutal. Unfortunatly for the jews were they now too few to cause any serious problems to the Germans.
So 98% of all jews in Poland could easily get murdered by the Germans. Indeed most death camps in Poland was already being closed down in 1943, because there was no longer any jews left to kill. And the war would continue for another two years.
The biggest problem for the jews was never the lack of weapons. But the lack of information. Most people did never know that the nazis planned to kill their people before it was too late. Had they known that then they would have tried to flee to Israel or other places if they could.
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Russia invaded Ukraine 8 years ago. And they have used the same Soviet tanks for 60 years! If that is not time enough to prepare then how much more time do you need?! Seriously?
Russia have more modern weapons than Ukraine. Russian pilots have more flight hours of training. And Russia have the numerical superiority, more heavy weapons (tanks, artillery, APCs) and they also had the element of surprise. So its not without reason many people suspected Ukraine to fall quickly.
But it turns out that even the poorly equipped Ukrainian army was able to inflict massive losses on the Russians.
Some of this had to do with modern anti-tank weapons provided by the west, good defensive terrain in northern Ukraine, mud season, and the good western training many Ukrainian units had.
But the most important reason for the Russian bloodbath is Russia itself.
Its tanks are garbage, and they always have been. They are all Cold war tanks. And they prioritized low cost to manufacture, low weight, good mobility, and strong armor. But the disadvantages compared to western tanks is that smaller tanks are more difficult to upgrade as there are less room for adding extra equipment and extra armor, and the low weight and good mobility also meant that those tanks had less armor than Leopard 2 and Abrams to begin with. And making armor thicker by making the tank smaller is of course smart - but it will also make life a hell for the Russian crewmen stuck inside a very crampy tank. And if a fire starts inside that tank, then it will be very difficult to climb out fast before one gets burned alive.
So crew safety have traditionally always sucked on Russian tanks. In world war 2 did only 20% of the Russian tank man survive when their tank was destroyed. While 80% of the British, German and American tankers survived when their tank was knocked out.
So one can therefore not explain away all high Russian tank losses by blaming poor tactics. Russian tanks did have many serious flaws when they were new as I just mentioned. Now they have aged 50 years, and even with a small amount of extra stuff added to those old tanks are they still hopelessly obsolete and uncompetative compared to western tanks.
And add to that rust, poor maintance, and people destroying the glass of gun sights to steal precious metal that they contain and such... and you will have a very crappy tank.
And the lack of blowout panels, and the flawed design of the auto-loader with all ammunition stored under the turret have
created the internet memes of tank turrets flying up 75 meters up into the air.
So saying that there is nothing bad with Russian tanks is simply dishonest. T-62, T-72 and T-80 are all old, outdated and kind of crappy.
But bad Russian tanks are of course not the only weakness the Russians suffer from. Their military is totally unskilled at combined arms warfare, and having infantry, helicopters, air power and artillery working togheter and support each other. Their communication is overheard by the enemy, so they easily walk into traps. Their logistical organisation is worthless so they often have to abandon their tanks because of lack of fuel or ammunition. And even if 80 years have past since World war 2 have the Russians still not yet learned to auftragstaktik or even entrust their NCOs with any power for independent decision making at all - which have made the Russian army bad at adapting to changing situations on the battlefield, and their organisation is slow and clumsy compared to their opponent.
The higher leadership of the army did also try to rush their way into Kyiv with their tanks without waiting for supporting infantry and artillery - and the result became ambushes and high losses.
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I guess that one can use any kind of sensor as a trigger. Only human imagination is the limit. A mine that explodes when someone press on it (like when you press a key on your mouse), or a sensor that makes the mine explode when it hear loud noises, or mines that explode from heat, or a mine that explodes from a smell of certain chemicals, from certain color, from heat, from magnetism, mines that explodes from a tripwire, mines that can explode when you crush the glass of a window, you can make mines that sends out a a laser beam towards a sensor and when someone moves between the two and interrupts this laser beam and blocks it - then the mine explodes. You can make mines that reacts to electricity, magnetism, air pressure, the speed of particles moving around in the air.
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@pycckue_u4yt Perhaps. But I cannot go into endless depth into everything. History is about picking what facts that are seen as relevant. Oswald Spengler called all other historians as superficial. But according to me is his own theory about history superficial as well. And he have later on been proven wrong in most things he said. So I guess that what is one persons view, is superficial nonsense to another.
I say as Leo Huberman, history is about picking facts.
And the struggle over the Russian trade across the baltic sea was key for the Swedish empire as I sees it.
Swedens ambition was to conquer all land around the baltic sea and turn it into a whole Swedish sea. And all furs, spices, corn and shipbuilding materials that Russia exported to England and the Netherlands had to pass through Swedish middlemen.
There was this dream of a north-western trade route to Russia people built much hopes around in the late 1500s and early 1600s. But the harbour at Archangelsk was of only limited use, and the rest of that trade route was of no use at all.
So the trade had to be done though the baltics. And Peter the Great therefore wanted to get some coast strip along the baltic sea and make a coast strip.
There was of course more motivations for Russian, Danish, Polish and Swedish expansionism than economics and trade. However in a long term perspective I think that this was the main one for Sweden.. and it was perhaps not so deliberate at first. Swedens beginnings as a country was very humble. No one in 1520 was thinking about Sweden about great plans of Swedish colonies in America or putting a Swedish tsar on the throne, or conquering all of the Polish-Lituatianian commonwealth, or putting all of protestant Germany under the rule of Gustavus Adolphus.
Sweden was fighting defensive wars against Denmark. And sometimes it joined other countries to fight back against the threat of the power of the Hanseatic league. And the many wars against Poland was waged because the Polish king was a threat with his claim on the Swedish throne. And the wars against Austria was done because the holy roman emperor was allied with Swedens worst enemy - the king of Poland. And that the holy roman emperor was a catholic and was about to create an invincible German super-state by conquering and unifying all German states under his rule was a threat so serious that the Swedish king did not think that he had any other choice than to join the 30 years war. It was "now or never" as he saw it 1630.
Sweden happened to be succesful and win all their wars and the Swedish empire was born. Swedens resources and population was small, but Sweden had the most modern government administration in Europe and its army was one of the best. So because of that was it possible for Sweden to expand.
But Swedens expansionism also came in the same time as her enemies were weak. Russia had fought civil wars and were fighting against Poland, so Sweden could therefore take a some provinces from Russia during a time of weakness.
Poland was suffering from a weak leadership where noblemen looked more into their personal self-interest than the interests of their own country, so it could therefore become an easy prey for its neighbours despite it was a huge country with large resources.
And Germany was divided between many states, and each state in turn was divided up between multiple local rulers and aristocrats. So it was a mess. And the country could not offer any unified resistance to Sweden.
And the religious wars and other problems made Germany's fragmentation even worse.
And it could also be argued that Denmark also sometimes had time of weaknesses... but on the other hand was it not so serious, and on the other hand did Sweden also suffer from periods of weakness - like under the incompetent rule under Queen Christina, or after the battle of Fehrbellin, or the period in the late 1690s when the country had suffered from a terrible famine and the Swedish king had died and an immature teenager had risen to the Swedish throne.
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@thegorb2653
"Also you gotta consider automation, the industrial sector doesn't need the human labour anymore it has machines."
Much of that is just a result of re-classification of jobs. In the past did companies include many types of workers.
Volvo cars would have a financial branch of the company giving car loans to customers and handeling the internal finances of the company. And the company had hired its own janitors that cleaned the office and factory. And so on.
Today companies are runned differently.
Today car makers only make cars. And the financial matters are no longer handled by the company itself - but instead it let an independent bank take care of those things. It no longer have its own janitors, but does instead buy services from a cleaning firm to do the same job of cleaning the office as before.
So as you see have anything changed?
No. The bankers are still bankers, and the janitors are still janitors. But in the past they were called industrial workers, because they were hired by an industrial company like Volvo. But today they are not classed as industrial workers anymore despite they do they exact same jobs as before.
And that is because the cleaning firm is now called a "service sector job" provider. And the same goes for the bank.
And a car mechanic makes the same job as someone 40 years ago, but since he now got some electronical tools at his disposal he is called a "technician" and not a car mechanic. And he therefore recorded in statistics as a service sector worker, while he in the past was an industrial worker.
"It has a service and tech sector like all advanced economies that's the new reality for developed nations."
Why do you think that have happened?
I would say its only because industry have become so much more productive that it no longer needs as many workers as before. If better organization of the workplace, better tools and machinery and so on can increase production in a factory 10 fold. Then you will often be able to reduce the workforce and still be able to produce as much stuff as before.
So you can cut down the number of workers and thereby increase profits by getting rid of unecessary workers.
And those workers needs to go somewhere else to get a job. And usually it is service jobs they go to.
So while service jobs provide much or most(?) of the jobs in a country, that doesn't mean that the industrial sector is unimportant. It is the industry that leads innovation in your country. Its there were the productivity growth comes from, and higher productivity enables more incomes for companies and taxes for governments and wages for workers.
It push up wages for your entire country and not just the industrial workers. And thereby do everyone get a higher standard of living. But the same cannot be said about the service sector jobs that shows nearly no productivity growth at all. And every society in human history have produced more stuff than it consumed. It had to. Otherwise would people sooner or later starve to death if you consume more than you produce.
If you wonder what a slow growth economy looklike, then look at medieval Europe. On average the GDP only grew by 1% per 100 years!
With such a slow growth world would it take many hundreds of years for a village to recover if you burned down all homes. And the only way to get rich fast would be by stealing wealth from someone else. Wealth inequality was gigantic, and so also social inequality.
So do I want that? - Hell no.
That is why industrialization is needed. All societies needs a flourishing manufacturing sector. Most countries are also not lucky enough to have all kinds of natural resources within its own borders. And if you wanna import oil, modern American fighter jets, and advanced electronics and machinery then you need foreign currency to do so.
You can get foreign currency by selling stuff to foreigners and the best way to do so is by selling expensive high tech products. The demand is high so prices you can charge is high, and when not many other countries have the skills so make such advanced products, then competition will be limited and you can therefore charge high prices and make gigantic profits. You could for example sell jet engines or the latest generation of nuclear reactors and get enormously rich.
Selling natural resources is usually a very ineffiecent way of getting a good trading balance. As a Greek you will have to sell a hell of a lot of oranges (probably many many thousands) before you can for the imports of 1 single German Mercedes.
And service sector jobs are usually completly useless at gathering any foreign currency at all. Giving your neighbour a massage at your spa will not generate a single Dollar, Yuan, Yen or Euro to pay for all necessary imports your country will have to make.
And without imports, then your population will perhaps need to get used to starving to death from lack of food, or freezing to death during the winter, live in poverty due to lack of oil, and have a military too weak to protect it from foreign aggression.
So yes, the industrial sector is still important. And a service sector job is inferior in value in my view, since they do not generate any increases to a countrys productivity and standard of living.
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The EU will fail by itself economically.
Furthermore is nationalism on the rise and the Merkel pig have lost her job, Macron is super unpopular and the EU parliament election in May looklike becoming another backlash for the Europhiles. The socialdemocrats have lost 90% of their seats in the french parliament the last election, and the socialdemocrats in Germany, Netherlands and Greece have suffered catastrophic losses while nationalists are winning in Italy, Austria, Poland, and Hungary and Brexit will soon happen.
Any unified decision on immigration, military and economics is now hopeless since so many member countries have backed out, that the EUs attempts to become United States of Europe is totally blocked.
The leftwing parties have lost votes all over western Europe, and now there are only 2 countries with leftwing governments - and those are Portugal and Spain. But even in those countries we see the same trend with socialdemocrats losing 10% of their voters the last 10 years. So not even in those countries could the left keep their positions for long if this current trend sticks.
The leftwing globalists is on retreat, populists are increasing everyware - even in countries where they don't have power yet, like Germany, Sweden, France, Netherlands and Denmark.
And in the rest of the world we see the same trend. Trumps support is still incredibly strong. Nationalists recently won the election in Quebec in Canada. And Brazil also recently got a nationalist into power. And countries like Russia, Turkey, Mongolia and India also follow the same trend.
Globalism is dying. The question is rather how it will die. Will EU break apart because of another Euro crisis? or will it break apart because of populist movements?
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Another interesting aspect is that economic growth and population growth have not been going up like a slowly up going straight line. Instead have we seen an exponential growth, with a slow growth in the beginning and a massive sharp upward turn the last few decade.
Its like when you double a number with a previous number you will quickly run up into astronomic numbers after a while... 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8196, 16384, 32768, 65536, 131072... and so on...
A child grows fast the first years of its life and double each weight, and as it reach its late teens it stops growing. But if it would continue to grow and double in size every few years or so it would become gigantic. And the world economy have grown much during the industrial age and now consume resources at a much higher rate than they could be reproduced.
You can see how fast the GDP of a country doubles in size by taking the number 72, and then dividing that number with the yearly GDP-growth rate. So if China have a 10% GDP growth each year, then you can take 72 and divide it by 10, and then you see 72/10=7.2. So here you can conclude that China have doubled the size of its economy in just 7 years.
And then it have doubled its economy again after another 7 years... and then again after another 7 years. So today its economy is about 8 times larger than it was back in year 2000. Its economy have probably slowed down because of covid and the financial crisis and such and therefore not fully become 8 times larger as my simple calcultation here.. but still
its fast growh have had gigantic consequences for the amount of resource extraction in this world, as 1.6 billion Chinease standard of living have improve so drastically.
Today China pollutes more Co2 than Europe and America combined, and Asian countries are responsible for 90% of all plastics in the ocean.
And with this growth rate will China soon have produced more co2 the last 7 years than the western world have done the last 200 years combined. That is the power of exponential growth. Leftwing green climate clowns does not understand this. This is too complex for their tiny brains.
But fact is that China is the elephant in the room now. Cutting back co2 in the west will be meaningless if China does nothing.
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@Defective1313 Russia and China are not buddy buddies. They both dislike USA but have nothing more common than that. China do not wish to get drawn into this war for Russias sake. They have for example refused to provide Russia with spareparts for the hundreds of planes they have stolen from other countries.
And this is not an existential struggle for Russia - they are just wanting to stealing land. And if that fail, then the can just walk home. Ukraine can however not just walk home if they are tired of this war because then they will no longer have a country. Had this war been an existential struggle for Russia like it is for Ukraine, then would the Russian troops have high fighting morale - something which they lack.
Things looks slightly optimistic for Ukraine now. And when more heavy weapons come to use will Ukraine have a superiority in firepower.
Right now do Ukraine have a superiority in fighting morale, leadership, more tanks, better intelligence, more manpower (according to cpt Binkov), and Ukraine also have nearly endless economic and logistical resources at their disposal with the American lend lease act and with all European backing.
Russias military does suck on the other hand and its economy is tiny. It got some natural gas. And some aircraft that are sitting on the ground and being useless for the most part.
Theoretically can Putin call upon reservists to join this war. But if Putins spetsnaz, guards units and paratroopers and best tanks could not crack Ukraine... then I don't think that crappier tanks, less motivated and even more poorly trained Russian reservists would make a better job at taking Ukraine.
Ukraine does maybe not have the superior numbers - but they will have superior firepower.
And Russia cannot compete with the economic strenght of USA and Europe in a war of attrition. And the technological inferority of Russia will cost them blood. Just as their crappy leadership, corruption and incompetence at all levels.
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@Defective1313 China have trade with the west and do not want to be sanctioned. It also knows that it cannot win a world war with the west.. especially not with an ally like Putin that makes Mussolinis army look competent by comparison. Now do Russia have no one else to turn to. It must any price China is willing to pay for their stuff.
China have other options, but Russia does not. So Russia is becoming Chinas bitch.
"love to know what you're basing your opinion on that this isn't existential for Russia"
As I said Russian troops are not willing to fight to the last man in Ukraine. Its not really like they are fighting a desperate last stand like the men at Mariupol or the jews in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942 who knew that they were going to be killed if they were captured.. so fighting to the last man was the only option. If Djenghis Khan besieged my city and was storming the walls then there would be an existential struggle. If the Mongols win then would the entire population in the city be murdered. So win or die would be the only options in this existential struggle.
So every man on the walls would fight hard and never give up no matter how hopelessly outnumbered they would be.
I do not see the same mentality exist in the Russian army in Ukraine.
They are not fighting to the last man like the japanese. They more seems like cowards that rather give up, and surrender equipment without a hard fight.
"This is because of Russian demographics, theirngeographic vulnerability, the waning abilities for Russia to field modernized forces"
The days of being a great power are gone, but so what? Its not like Denmark, Portugal, The Netherlands, Poland and Sweden have died out because their once mighty empires are gone. Life and death does not depend on it. How about just get over it?
Germany, France and Britain also once were large empires. But now they are nowhere near competing with USA or China over world dominance.
"an inept education aystem which is not producing enough highly skilled workers to manage to transition Russia's economy from resource exploitation towards an advanced technological economy."
Read Ha-Joon Chang there is no correlation between education and GDP growth or industrialization.
Switzerland is the country in the world with the highest industrial production per capita in the world. And yet have this country never really cared about providing its people with higher education. The ambition of making everyone an academic like Scaninavian countries have been an economic waste. Now you need a long education even for the most simple jobs - which is stupid and wasting peoples time.
Many of the worlds largest companies have also been created by high school dropouts: Apple, Ford, Bank of America, Microsoft, Facebook, Disney, Google, Hershey, Hobby Lobby, Dell, Standard oil, Coca-Cola, McDonalds...
I think education is good but the beneficial effects on the economy have been enormously overstated.
"As far as how Ukraine is doing now, it matters little but most recent reports suggest they are slowly losing ground. Even if they weren't, though, Russia is reverting to what they do best, which is endless artillery bombardments followed by hard pushes along a line."
Tactical retreats to then counter-attack perhaps? Anyways the Russians are exhausting the power in their assault and extending themselves while the Ukrainians strike against their rear
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I think the biggest bottleneck is the lack of pilots and ground crew. Had the Ukrainian air force had thousands of pilots then I think it would say yes to all offers the west would give - including attack aircrafts such as the A-10 which would be superior to their old Soviet Frogfoot. But Ukraine does not have enough pilots for both fighters and attack aircrafts so I think they stick with fighters since that is most urgent. And preferbly modern fighters (Romania offered MIG-21, which was junk that Ukraine did not want).
I would not rule out F15 or F18 in the future. Gripen is my number one choice for Ukraine. F16 is the plane most like Gripen - single engine (which means less maintance), fast, agile, capable of extremely hard turns, can carry all kinds of weaponry. It have a small logistical footprint and a low operating cost (altough not nearly as good as Gripen, but second best in the world). It is also a plane that is do not need a long runway for take off and landing. And the plane exist in large numbers, so replacing a shot down aircraft will be simpler than with a Gripen.
But its downside is that it is bound to clean airports and cannot carry meteor and needs much more ground maintance.
However I think that a few Gripens or F16 will not be a game changer in this war as the hype says they will be. Its probably over optimistic to think they will win air superiority given russias numerical superiority. Add to that the strong russian air defence that makes it deadly and dangerous to go too far near the frontline.
Maybe F18 Growler and Gripen E could handle that - but Ukraine will get neither of those planes. They will instead get older variants of Gripen and F16 and needs to fly low to avoid detection of enemy radars and the powerful russian air defence or SU35 that have a very powerful radar.
So Ukraine will be at a disadvantage as flying high gives you many advantages. You get better vision and can see further away and you can launch missiles that can fly longer distances when you try to hit targets below. And for the planes flying low will it be more difficult to reach enemy planes with your missiles as they must expend energy climbing upwards to hit their targets - which gives them shorter range.
Eurofighter is plane built mostly for air combat at high altitudes. And that works well when you have the upper hand in air combat - which Nato is assumed to have, but in this war that is not the case. Eurofighter is also a hangar queen that needs a large ground crew for maintaince and having two engines means twice as much work to be done on the ground. And just like F16 do this plane need nice runways with its low air intake. There is also a severe lack of spareparts in both RAF and Luftwaffe so sending those planes is extremely unlikely as neither Britain or Germany have any extra spare parts they can afford to send away to Ukraine as they need all those themselves. They are already using 3D printers as a desperate solution to try to keep those planes flying.
So I believe that Eurofighter is the plane least suited for Ukraine.
F15 exists in more numbers and the later variants of this plane should rank on the list of the top 3 best fighters in the world.
So it is therefore no surprise that this is a plane that many desires despite its high age. It will however need long runways and much maintence so it remains to be seen if those planes will fly over Ukraine. And if there exist any political will for that in Washington before the election. But I would not rule out the possibility that they could serve in Ukraine.
F18 Hornet is an old plane that also exist in large numbers. Many have been replaced by F35. So I think many such planes could be available if the political will exist. Its a plane that lost the competition to become the new light weight fighter for the US Airforce against F16, and it is a two engined plane that will require more maintance on the ground than F16. But one big advantage of F18 over F16 is that it do have some capability to use ordinary highways for take off and landing like Gripen, altough to a lesser extent and demand nicer roads and require larger bases for ground support.
It is a naval fighter and as such it is tough and can start and land on short runways. And unlike Rafale that can mostly just carry French or European weapons, is this an american plane that can carry a bigger menu of weapons.
I think that countries are more willing to give away F18 than F15, because F15 is a better plane overall so they rather keep them than the old F18 which performance is quite unremarable compared to Eurofighter, Rafale, Gripen. Its a plane about to be retired worldwide.
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Western countries still controls 60% of the global GDP. And the superiority in military strength is probably even higher. The Russian military have proven itself to be garbage. And I strongly suspect that the Chinese military to be even more corrupt, poorly maintained, and using even more outdated junk that are bad copies of crappy Russian tanks from the 1950s and 1960s. China have at least built some stealth planes unlike poor crappy Russia, but on the other hand are the Chinese still worthless at building aircraft engines and even Russia is ahead in that area... so the Russo-Chinese military is likely just total crap.
Culturally is the soft power of Russian culture nearly non-existent. There are no manufactured goods aside from weapons that any westerner know is Russian.
So no, there is no multipolar world emerging. Maybe that could be a thing if Asian countries as China, Japan, and India unified. But that doesn't seem to ever happen. China and India hates each other. Japan and China is also having a bad relation with each other.
And I think that is sad in a way. China is a genocidal dictatorship. Japan is a holocaust denying xenophobic country with disgusting cartoon porn. And India is a hypocritical scumbag country, that never takes responsability for anything.. not for the spread of antibiotic resitant bacteria that is caused by them, not uncontrolled population growth and the poverty and depletion of natural resources and strain on the enviroment that comes with it... and they happily fill their motorcycles with blood of innocent ukrainians as their money is fueling the russian terrorist state.
If those 3 crappy countries could start to act decent, and if they could come togheter and offer an alternative to USA and EU then even I as a westerner would welcome that iniative. Unfortunatly I do not see that ever happening.
Asia is fighting against itself, and all those Asian countries are barbaric and hateful of other countries... Indians hate the west for colonialism and refuse to accept the truth that they also got themselves to blame for their own underdevelopment and poverty... and China murders uighurs, and wants to take land from all their neighbours and they are still angry on the west for what happened back in the 1800s... and so much so that they rather destroy the planet with global warming than cooperating with the global community and trying to do their own fair share of reducing their carbon emissions - which are now higher than that of both USA and EU combined.
And Japan is sad and angry of the atomic bombs dropped on them, but feel no remorse for all the terror bombings the Japanese airforce did on Chinese cities or murdering hundreds of thousands of Chinese with biological warfare - such as spreading the bubonic plague.
As much as I am the first person to admit that there are much things to despise with the western world. I will still however claim that it is much much better than the rest of the world. And I am happy for its leadership of the world still remains. And Asians, Africans, Indians, and Latin Americans should be as well. Because things will likely only be worse if China took over.
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@alammutiara8888
The world is always changing. But not in any major ways in any foreseable future as far as I can see.
I am an optimist. I believe that countries can change. And hopefully one day can backwards barbaric countries grow up.
England accepts its dark past with the Boer war, slavery and colonialism. Belgium is not proud about their history in Congo. And so on.
I think that one day that the Turks can just accept their guilt in the Armenian genocide. Japan can apologize to China, Manchuria and the Phillipines for their massive war crimes.
India can accept that British colonialism is not responsible for everything bad, and that colonialism also brought a few benefits. And accept the fact that not all European countries are the same.
And Asians should not try to encourage blacks and other minorities race hatred towards the whites - and especially not when the asians themselves are much more racists towards blacks do things become just hypocritical.
Arabs should also stop being racist towards blacks and pakistanis.. and stop putting the white European race on a piedestal. All muslims should be worth the same. And non-muslims deserves to be treated well by them just like fellow muslims.
And the Russians should just accept that their history is very dark. Its a history of an evil empire. The Mongols were an evil empire - just like the Assyrians.
And it is from the Mongols and the Golden horde that russia came. It contributed to the deluge in Poland. It killed 40% of Latvias population in the Great Northern War. It was responsible for "the great wrath" in Finland, and Russian Pillage of 1719–21 in Sweden.
It was a country with serfdom so harsh that it was worse than slavery. And ethnic minorities and conquered peoples was forcefully resettled far away from home or sold into slavery.
It started wars of aggression against Poland and against the ottoman empire.
It provoced World war 1 into existence and bears a larger responsability for it happened than any other country.
And during the war did Russian troops carry about several episodes of genocide on jews. And the opressive tsarist regime wasted soldiers lives with attacks where 1 rifle was distributed for every 2 men in "enemy at the gates style".
Then did the Bolsheviks take power with lots of genocides as a result - like the great purge of the Red Army, and the holodomor in Ukraine that did cost millions of ukrainians their lives. Millions of people died in Gulag camps in Siberia or during forced labor projects such as building canals for Stalin.
Russia also started several unprovoced wars of aggression - against the Baltic states, and against Poland in the 1920s and against Finland in 1939. Russia also helped Germany to secretly develop tanks and planes despite it was forbidden in the Versaille peace treaty after world war 1.
And Russia also helped Germany to invade Poland in 1939, so without Russia helping the Germans there would never have been any world war 2.
And once Poland was under harsh occupation did Russia start a genocide on the Polish population - such as the Katyn massacre.
In 1941 did the Germans invade russia and the most brutal war in history was started. After much hardship was the german invaders pushed back to their homeland. And the red army started to commit massive crimes against defenceless innocent civilians - 5 million women were raped by russian troops. Everything female from elderly to little girls were brutally gangraped. Homes were plundered or destroyed by rageful russians.
And not just germans were victims of the red armys criminal behaviour but also polish women and concentration camp victims got gangraped by russian troops.
The germans did not play the game nicely on the eastern front either.
But aside from the terror the einsatzgruppen made towards the jews, I think one can probably say that russia behaved even worse than the nazis.
Even the first weeks of the war did Russian troops capture a military hospital and kill all wounded German troops there and torture people to death. And they deliberatly fired on ambulances.
Just like Russian troops still do today in 2022 when they mutilate and castrate Ukrainian troops and fire on ambulances.
And the hell for german women did not end with the war being over in 1945. But all gangrapes, STDs and all horrors continued for another 2 years of Russian occupation before things normalized.
So if you wonder if everyone hates Russians, then you got the answer in the things I have written here.
And the next 40 years of the Warsaw pact and the Soviet union was also coming with more opression. The Hungarian revolt in 1956 was brutally crushed by Russian troops. Same thing happened in Prague in 1968. Poland was also subject to Russian opression.
And not only were Soviet Russia responsible for all Gulag camps. Russia was also responsible for enviromental disasters like Chernobyl and the Aral sea depletion.
The horrible communist dictatorship continued to run Gulag concentration camps until the fall of the Soviet union.
Even former nazi-concentration camps such as Buchenwald was used by the Russians after they had been closed down.
And Russia also supported brutal dictatorship regimes around the world to spread more death and opression - to Cuba, North Korea, North Vietnam, Eastern Europe and so on.
So Russia have a lot of sh*t to answer for.
But so far have Putin and his ilks been too much of a child to accept reality for it is and take responsability over Russias past like an adult would do 🙄
Indeed Russia do still commit wars of aggression, genocide, state sponsored terrorism and state sponsored lies. Money is wasted on militarism and wars instead of improving lives for ordinary people.
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I have lost respect for so many leftwing intellectuals that I at this point don't think I got anyone left (aside from perhaps John Kenneth Galbraith and Thomas Fazi which I do not know much about).
Chomsky, Bernie Sanders, Naomi Klein, Elizabeth Warren, Michael Hudson, Ha-Joon Chang and so many other leftwingers have outed themselves as authoritarian, intellectually dishonest hypocrites.
Chomsky and Owen Jones seems to me like men who have read large amounts of books and have the potential to be great intellectuals, but instead they choose to be anti-intellectuals and spread misinformation and propaganda and tow the line of the leftwing establishment regardless of what facts say. I don't think it would an exaggeration to say that these men have choosen to join the evil dark side of the force.
I don't think any of those persons are pro Brexit. And I think that says it all. None of them are intellectually honest, none of them are leftists, and all of them are pro establishment and the neoliberalism that they claim to hate.
And the same goes with all other garbage on the left: The Young turks, Kyle Kulinski, Paul Mason, Paul Krugman,
Richard D Wolff.
I don't see any difference between those people and Vaush, three arrows and Carlos Maza other than in the degrees of leftwing extremism. All of them are far left extremists, but some are a bit more than others...
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There are evil people who were vegetarians like Hitler. And there were evil people who were meat eaters like Pol Pot.
Some of histories worst mass murderers were Muslims and Christians, while others were atheists. For some of them did religion play a big role in their motivation for killing people, while in other cases had their religion nothing to do with their deeds.
In Putins case, it seems like he is just a soulless person. He cares about himself, and his ideology seems to be russian imperalism and supremacism. He wants a life in endless luxury and expanding the russian empire and he is prepared to walk over millions of dead bodies to get reach his goal.
He knows that what he is doing is wrong but do it anyways. This war was always totally avoidable. Just like his other wars.
Before the invasion 2022 he even manufactured hitlists for Ukrainians he wanted arrested and murdered. Ukrainian patriots and people in leadership position that had the potential to lead a rebellion against the new russian opressive russian rule was to be murdered the same way as the nazis murdered people in Poland as they hoped to destroy Polish culture and national identity.
Professors, teachers, Officers, priests and even boy scouts were killed by the nazis in their 'Intelligenzaktion' and Putin have copied this recipy.
Putin was even so disgusting that he provided his invasion army with crematorium trucks - another idea borrowed from the nazis I guess - so that he could burn all people wanted to kill into ashes. And without any dead bodies in mass graves would there not be any evidence left that could help to prove that Putin was commiting a genocide.
Putins regime has even sunk so low that they built torture chambers for children in Khersun.
And stealing Ukrainian children and murdering their parents is another idea he borrowed from the nazis. Just like all nazi talking points to justify his invasion with "retaking russian historical lands" and "protecting the opressed russian minority inside Ukraine/Georgia".
Truth is that he does not care one bit about the russian speakers in Ukraine. Its not just Ukrainian speaking cities he have destroyed, but he has also destroyed the russian speaking city Mariupol and killing 200.000 civilians in the process. And he have done daily missile attacks against other russian speaking towns like Odesa, Charkiv, Dnipro, and Zaporizjzja.
To me Putin just seem like a childish nazi wannabe ruling a mafia gang.
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Its not. Other countries have similar mistakes. Like the Challenger space shuttle that exploded or the tower at Pisa.
Personally I think it is cool that Sweden have a big warship from the 1600's preserved. It gives historians all over Europe a chance to see what warships of that time period looked like and what life on board such a ship looked like.
This ship is also a great historical artifact of Sweden's time as a great power of Europe, when our country built the largest warship in Europe and had one of the strongest navies in the world despite our country did not have a very large population or any large natural ties to the ocean - as Denmark, Germany and Poland did.
But we anyways managed to build a navy that dominated the Baltic Sea for a century.
Ignorant modern Swedes do not understand our country's history. Because if they did, then they would understand that Sweden was a maritime empire. Almost to the same degree as England, Netherlands and Portugal. The Swedish empire included parts of modern day Germany, the Baltics states, all of Finland, parts of northern Netherlands, parts of Russia, parts of Norway and a few tiny islands in the Baltic sea like Bornholm, Åland and Saaremaa.
So without a strong navy it would have been impossible to keep this huge empire together. A strong fleet was needed to protect trade ships moving between all those territories. A navy was needed to transport soldiers from one part of the country to another part so it could be defended against foreign invaders.
Sweden was also the only country in Europe that could produce all materials that was needed to build its own ships: oak tree wood from Germany and the Baltics, tar from Finland, iron and copper cannons from Sweden, rope and hemp from the Baltics and so on.
No other countries could do that. England and the Netherlands had to buy their shipbuilding materials from Sweden and other countries.
So Sweden's maritime history is an important one from a European perspective.
Its merchant navy was also the largest in Europe during certain time periods, since English, Dutch and French ships liked to sail under Swedish flag when their own countries was at war and their ship ran the risk of being plundered or captured by the enemy. So sailing under a neutral flag of a mighty Sweden felt more safe during the 1680s than it was to have their own country's flag flying on top of their own ship.
So lots of trade were directed over to Sweden, and much tax income was derived. And in just a few years could suddenly the Swedish merchant fleet grow with a thousand ships when England and the Netherlands was at war with each other.
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England and the Netherlands are the exception and not the rule among European powers when it comes to warfare during the age of muskets. They were rich countries that rather put their money to their navies, while their armies were small and unimpressive compared to other great powers such as France, Austria and Russia.
And since their armies was small and the countries was rich, they then could rely more upon their own supplies instead of looting.
Sweden was however a poor country with a small population and could not win wars dragged on for years. Denmark, Poland, Saxony and Russia had 40 times larger population than Sweden, so the only hope to win was to make a blitzkrieg and fast knock them out one by one.
And usally this tactic had served Sweden well, and the country even became one of the most powerful countries in Europe during the 30 years war.
Sweden couldn't substain its own armies, so the solution was to let someone else (the civilian population in enemy lands) pay for the upkeep and provide it with food. All looting and french subsidies allowed Sweden to build an army of over 100,000 men during the 30 years war - which is not bad for a country of just 1,5 million inhabitants to have an army of the same size as France and Austria with populations 15-20 times larger,
And having supplies transported into Eastern Europe is not a simple task- just ask the Germans and the French about that matter. This was in the age before canned food, trucks and railroad transports so transporting anything at all was a hard task back in this age, and the only good way of doing it was by riverboats if there was no ice outside.
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To me it seems like AOC got extremely little power. Biden, Pelosi and their team are the ones who are really in charge.
AOC is just a fake opposition within the DNC to attract votes, but when a real conflict happens between AOC and her party then AOC and her radicals always cave in. She do some talking tough, but in reality she is just a lamb, and an obedient puppet to the DNC establishment.
If she was truely was a sincere radical, then I don't think that she would vote with the Democratic establishment time and time again. She would never fake pose pictures with a face mask and then remove them as soon as the cameras are gone.
She is liar, and she lies because there are too many low information voters who fall for her lies.
Her lies about her upbringing. Her lies about Trump supporters in the white house. Her lies that American border detention centers are as bad as German concentration camps like Treblinka and Auschwitz. She pretends that she is anti-rich and wear an enormously expensive dress for 1-time use, that she wears as she hangs out with rich people.
She have the surname Cortez - The same as a Spanish explorder who conquered the Aztek empire and brought the death to 20 million people. And this is a person who says that blacks should get reparations for slavery that occured over 150 years ago. So to me she just seem like a witch with no principles. She put other standards on others than herself. If a political opponent was named Jefferson Davis or Robert Lee, then I would expect people like her to be the first ones to bring it up and being upset about it.
So to me she just seem fake. Fake woke.
"If people just told her, "Go bite the wall (polite version)!", what could she do?"
She is Bidens puppet so she of course do whatever Pelosi and Biden tell her to do. AOC is young and look forward to a long life in politics so she can earn lots of money by keeping her place in the party. She attracts young dumb radical voters who fall for her hollow talk. And as a reward to the democrats give her money and status. Sometimes they pretend to be each others opposition in front of the cameras, but in real life do they get along well.
And sometimes (but only in unimportant small issues) do the Biden faction throw a bone to the AOC voters just enough to keep them happy enough to not leave the party by thinking that AOC do nothing for them. But in reality is she useless for them. 90% of the time she do nothing for them. And in none of the big issues will she ever decide.
The democrats will never let her lead the party because they know that all centrist voters will leave the party if the insane leftwing radicals in her squad takes over. But the democrats feel that they need to attract far-left voters to win an election. So therefore do they have AOC. She is that girl who will get all the idiots to do simpling for her.
AOC also plays an important role for the party as a test ballon for new policies of the party. She could propose a new idea to the media. And if the idea is popular and wins a massive support among the voters, then the entire Democratic party follows and also starts to promote this policy.
But if the idea turns out to be massivly unpopular and AOC lose large amounts of voters, then do the democratic party stay silent and let AOC take the blow while the party itself will not get harmed for the next election. The party might even win back some lost votes by condemning AOCs unpopular proposals.
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The ukrainian frontline is shorter. Wehrmacht had to mine the entire atlantic coast and the eastern front so of course was there large spots on the map not covered by land mines or other obstacles like barbed wire, dragoons teeths, punji sticks or whatever.
I think this video is useful as it puts yourself in shoes of the bad guys (Nazi-Germany and Ṋạƶì-Ŗǜṣṣḯâ ) and their challanges with their land mines. Their lack of mines that made it impossible to cover all areas with mines. The terrain challanges of putting land mines in certain areas.
Too often do we think of the challanges how to overcome the landmines from our perspective as the good guys. However by seeing the weaknesses in our enemy can we understand the weakpoints in our enemys defensive strategy that is based around mines.
Going through minefields is easy of the enemy does not defend that area, so having artillery and air superiority would be an option.
Another option would be to use amphibous landings to circumvent minefields - like the russians did when they invaded Finland in 1713 when they just landed troops behind every newly established defensive line of the Swedes.
And exploiting an area not covered by mines - where they enemy could not cover the area because of cows or lack of mines - is also an option.
There are some similiarities to old siege warfare in all this, where a fortress is a place where a small troop can hold up a much larger enemy force and inflict disproportionally heavy losses on them when they are forced to fight under unbenefitial circumstances.
Of course you can get cannons and siegecraft to batter a hole in the wall, dig tunnels under the wall, offer bribes, make threats, siege the place, use ships to cut off food supplies to the town.
But the best way to take a place is probably through a surprising coup. A few men can sneak in to the town through a trojan horse and open the gates so that a big army quickly can cross the water and storm into the city.
However with airdropped mines and artillery deployed mines do I think that warfare has become more complex than ever. Now are the minefields no longer just in front of you. But now can the enemy even also quickly deploy minefields behind you to prevent you from retreating and fleeing and catch you a death trap.
And with advanced sensors and drones flying everywhere like CCTV cameras, plus AI bot FPV drones in the future will it be hard to hide on a future battlefield. And electronic warfare and cyber warfare will become very important.
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Rocket artillery only got one strength. And that is that it instantly can deliver one massive wave of fire power.
That doesn't sound much.
But I think this is a tremendous advantage over all other forms of artillery. A surprise attack can blow up hundreds of men in just a few seconds. 80 big rockets hits the ground with a gigantic force. With normal artillery you will hear and see the first cannon shots fall into the ground around you, and you realize that you now fast have to move into cover so you don't killed. And once you get into cover, then the chance of getting killed becomes extremely small. So it is usually only the first shots that are effective. In world war 1 could they fire day and night for a week, and drop over a million artillery shells on the enemy. But the loss of lives was still minimal.
So best effect of artillery fire comes with the first few shots before the enemy can jump into a ditch and take protection from all incoming fire. When the enemy is standing upright with no protection at all and don't know what awaits him.
And rocket artillery do just that. It drops hell of a lot of explosives on top of the enemy before he have a chance to take cover. Trying to running away in the middle of a huge barrage would be suicidal. The explosions and blast waves are gigantic and stones, trees and shrapnel are flying around. People, horses and vehicles are being blown up left and right in just a few intensive seconds. And the survivors would be deeply shocked after they have witness, they might be deaf after all explosions and completely disoriented.
I would be very hard for a Russian troop to keep on pushing with their massive human wave assault after a slaughter from a nebelwerfer battery.
And the same psychological effect of fear was felt by German troops against the Russian Katjusha rockets.
Both sides considered their own rocket artillery to be inferior to that of the enemy. The German artillery had better precision thanks to the rotation that their rockets did while they were flying in the air. And the rockets contained more shrapnel than the Russian rockets which gave a better chance of hitting a soldier.
The katyusha rockets were fin-stabilized (instead of spin-stabilizied) and they contained less shrapnel, but the pieces of shrapnel they contained was larger than that of the nebelwerfer - so while it was less likely that it hit something, it usually did more damage when it finally struck into something.
And the German soldiers probably felt that their arty was inferior because the Russians usually had more artillery massed at their disposal and could therefore make bigger barrages than the Germans. The German rocket artillery was better than the Russian, but it was also more complex, while the Russian rockets were simpler to make (and probably also cheaper I would guess).
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This was not an open speech. Himmler held this speech only for SS members and no one else was allowed to know about it. But it was kind of an open secret what Germany was doing. When you wipe out something like 10-14 million people you have to involve so many soldiers that it becomes impossible to keep everything secret. Nazi-Germany had tens of thousands of concentration camps, so many guards was of course needed. And people involved in all train transports, all people selling poison gas, the companies building cremation ovens, and companies rebuilding trucks so the exhaust gas could be pumped into the back of the truck... all those people also probably knew that the german state was killing people.
But few people probably knew exactly how many millions that lost their lives, and under what horrible circumstances.
However even the nazi state needed support from the German people. The German peoples Rosenstrasse protests against sending jews to Auschwitz to be gassed is a clear example of this.
However most Germans supported Hitler, and they knew their regime was cruel against the jews. That they enslaved them, and discriminated against them. However going the extra step an killing people by the millions was however something that many felt usure if the nazis was capable of doing. But they were.
And sometimes by accident, and sometimes perhaps did the nazis leak out their true intentions to the German people to see their reaction. In a speech in 1939 did Hitler say that if another world war 2 broke out, then it would be the fault of the jews and that the jews would pay the price for it.
And in another speech in 1943 in the Berliner sport palats did Goebbles during his total war speech, tell the german people that it was time to exterminate the jews.
So there was always hints what the real intentions of the regime was.
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It would be wonderful if one could have just one plane for the entire military. That would keep production costs at the minimum when everything could be standardized and massproduced cheaply. And the need for spareparts would be minimal. And mechanics doesn't have to be taught how to repair different planes etc.
But the problem is that planes cannot do all jobs well at once. Some planes are good for air combat, others are good for attacking groundtargets, others are good for transport, others for recon, others for serving or aircraft carriers, others for long-range patrol missions in the North Sea, others are good at knocking out tanks and resisting ground fire.
And if you try to merge all those features into one single plane, its easy to just end up with a plane that cannot fullfill any of those roles as good as other planes can. Your "jack of all trades" simply becomes good at none.
And the F35 seems to have fallen victim to the wishes of becoming good at everything and save costs. But now this plane have long since gone over budget, and despite the F35 program already have consumed more money than the GDP of many rich European countries, so is this plane not at all any impressive in its performance. Actully it is quite bad in comparison with many other planes.
I guess the US military became overambitious, and in hindsight most people would say that it had been better that America had gone with building many types of planes instead of replacing all F18's, A10's, F16's and AV8B's with the F35.
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It would be wonderful if one could have just one plane for the entire military. That would keep production costs at the minimum when everything could be standardized and massproduced cheaply. And the need for spareparts would be minimal. And mechanics doesn't have to be taught how to repair different planes etc.
But the problem is that planes cannot do all jobs well at once. Some planes are good for air combat, others are good for attacking groundtargets, others are good for transport, others for recon, others for serving or aircraft carriers, others for long-range patrol missions in the North Sea, others are good at knocking out tanks and resisting ground fire.
And if you try to merge all those features into one single plane, its easy to just end up with a plane that cannot fullfill any of those roles as good as other planes can. Your "jack of all trades" simply becomes good at none.
And the F35 seems to have fallen victim to the wishes of becoming good at everything and save costs. But now this plane have long since gone over budget, and despite the F35 program already have consumed more money than the GDP of many rich European countries, so is this plane not at all any impressive in its performance. Actully it is quite bad in comparison with many other planes.
I guess the US military became overambitious, and in hindsight most people would say that it had been better that America had gone with building many types of planes instead of replacing all F18's, A10's, F16's and AV8B's with the F35.
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@henriht1147
"If an armored vehicles hull gets penetrated with anything then most of the crew is destined to die either way."
Nonsense.
If an American M4 Sherman or a German Panther got destroyed in battle, then did on average 80% of the crew survive the hit.
Compare that to Russian tanks.
When a T-34 got destroyed, there was a 80% chance that a crewman would die.
So there is obviously a big difference in crew safety from vehicle to vehicle. Are there many safety hatches that the crew can reach? Is the vehicle cramped inside, or is it easy to get out of it if a fire starts inside? How is the ammunition stored inside, is it safely stored like in M1 Abrams or is it stored like inside a T-72 where all the ammunition cooks off and throw the tank turret 75meters up in the air and kill everyone inside the tank in a gigantic explosion?
Soviet vehicles have never prioritized crew safety as much as their western counterparts. They rather want to keep production costs down for making a vehicle.
And sure have Russia been succesful in selling cheap armor vehicles to poor countries that cannot afford much else. But the drawback have always been bad crew safety.
And for that reason am I not a big fan of Russian vehicles. A good tank crew is very valuable in my opinion. More valuable than a tank.
I think Israels obsession about crew safety in their design of the Merkava tank have some merit. While Russias design philosophy from WW2 that views human lives as easily replaceable junk, while equipment is more valuable is coming to an end.
Good crews takes years to make. A tank can be destroyed, but new ones can be built. But a new human soldier takes 20 years to make and needs lots of expensive training. And his willingness to fight will be low if you treat him like a wasteable resources. While a soldier in a democratic society that values soldiers lives will have a stronger willingness to fight.
Russia can no longer behave like it did in the past. It can no longer afford human waves attacks and lose mountains of dead Russian soldiers for every war they win.
Those days are gone. Russias birthrate is going down. And fewer soldiers are therefore available. Russia must now transition away from quantity to quality.
But the problem is that Soviet weapons lack quality and only got quantity in mind. It is junk compared to its western counterparts.
And even the better weapons in the Soviet arsenal have aged and is no longer up to date with the best stuff from the west.
Russia better starts mass producing their T14 Armata and SU57 soon, because will everything they have be outclassed by everything that the west got.
Indeed even if Russia gets the SU57 project finalized... it seems like Russia is in a hopeless situation by now. They have not yet finished their first own 5th generation jet, while USA, Japan, Sweden, UK, Germany and France are already on their way building their own 6th generation planes.
I don't think a technologically backwards, boycotted country, with an economy as large as Spain's can compete with the west anymore in developing advanced weapons systems.
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@marlonalexis3080 It was an empire built on royal marriages between Aragon and Castile, and later on did they inherit Burgundy, and gained Portugal through royal marriage and became allied with the Habsburg Austrians. So it was not an empire mainly built on economic and military superiority. But rather more on skillful medieval style diplomacy with royal marriages.
The country never built a succesful economic model. Indeed, as a medieval country it had much knights and this warrior class had contempt for hard work. They rather wanted to live off resource extraction instead.. using slaves on plantations and working people to death in silver mines.
And then was a few tonnes of silver shipped to China each year, or used for trading spices and other goods in India, and the indian ocean and pacific. This economic model worked well to make Spain rich for some time. But later on would the silver mines not produce as much silver as before... and the global demand for Spanish exports sunk as markets became saturated with all the big flows of gold and silver.
And the overextended Spanish empire constantly failed to balance its expenses with incomes and went bankrupt after fighting Dutch, Turks, English, Swedes, Germans, Italians, Portugease, French, Native americans, north african berbers and so on.
So even if Spain managed to construct Europes first standing army, with superior capabilities on the battlefield... would other countries soon learn to build better armies themselves. And as the Spanish empire started to fall apart, did money become scarce and it was no longer possible for Spain to maintain troop quality, which only made Spains problems worse. Now it no longer was just the Dutch that wanted independence from Spain, but also Italy and Portugal. And the local rulers in America wanted more power for themselves and their Spanish motherlands expense.
And the list of foreign enemies of Spain was long, and it was mostly Spains own arrogance, hubris and extreme religious intolerance that was at fault for those many wars. Spain should have choosen diplomatic solutions to further its interests than trying to use its powerful military as a solution to every problem. When it did that, then did the enemies soon to became too many to handle.
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Ukraina har steg för steg vunnit sjökriget. Ukraina har tagit tillbaka hälften av den mark de förlorade 2022, vilket jag ser som ett tecken på att kriget går dåligt för ryssland. Statistiken talar också sitt tydliga språk att ryssland förlorar. Man kan också bara notera alla dagliga videos på ryska skepp, tanks och flygplan som förloras för att se att ryssland inte har en kompetent militär och att en seger är avlägset för ryssland. Enda sättet ryssland kan vinna är genom lögner och förräderi som blockerar västs militära stöd till Ukraina. Mike Johnson har hittills varit rysslands största militära seger i detta krig, vilket säger en del om ryska krigsmaktens patetiskt usla prestationsförmåga i detta krig.
Att stödja Ukraina är en moralisk plikt. Angreppskrig och folkmord ska aldrig accepteras, belönas och uppmuntras - punkt!
En vapenvila med ryssland är inte heller samma sak som fred. Precis som att Tjetjeniens fred med Ryssland aldrig var en riktig fred, och stridigheterna mellan Ukraina och Ryssland slutade inte efter rysslands aggressiva annektering av Krim. Appeasement
är inte lösningen. Det blir troligtvis bara fler krig i framtiden. Hittills har Ryssland inte brytt sig i att hålla några ingångna avtal, så ett fredsavtal är inget annat än ett värdelöst papper.
De lär bara angripa Ukraina igen så fort de har återuppbyggt sin armé efter alla tunga förluster. Och under tiden kommer ockuperade delar av Ukraina utsättas för våldtäkter, tortyr, kidnappade barn, och Ukrainare fråntas rätten till deras eget språk, kultur och nationella identitet och mördas i fall dom bara ens viftar med en Ukrainsk flagga eller talar sitt eget språk.
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You got the government. And you got the private sector (citizens, corporations, banks, etc).
Every government borrows money from the private sector. And there is nothing wrong with that. Every country does that. And if you didn't do that, then you would not have any money in your country - because all money is debt.
And without debt you do not have any money.
So when your government goes more into debt, then do the private sector get richer. But when the government gets richer, then private sector gets poorer.
It is not hard to get why. If the government increases taxes, then the people will become poorer while the government will become richer. And when the government spends more money and going into debt (and thereby getting poorer) then the private sector will get more money, and the economy will be going well, peoples wages goes up, unemployment goes down and everyone is happy.
So it doesn't really matter how this happens. As long as the government spends more money than it takes, then private sector will get richer while the government will get poorer. You can do this by increasing welfare spending, wasting more money on the military or cutting taxes or doing everything at once.
The government have an unlimited ability to pay for everything it wants to have. Just like you would be able to buy everything you would see in a store if you had your own printing press. The only limitation you would have would be inflation.
What we now see here is that Germany did not borrow much money. The German government borrowed money from the German people. But building bombs and then blow them up is perhaps not the best way of creating valueable things to repay all loans.
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All countries had grenadiers in their armies. They were the heavy infantry, and it consisted of the best men in the army.
And the Swedish solidiers of the 1700s are usally called caroleans after king Karl XII. They carried their yellow-blue uniforms and used their own distinct tactics of this time. In movies like "the Patriot" or "Barry Lyndon" you will see solidiers in the 1700s walking in line formation and fire salvo after salvo upon the enemy... But Swedish tactics were very different. Our troops held their fire until the enemy only was about 25 meters away, and then they all fired, and directly after they fired they attacked the enemy with bayonets, pikes and swords.
And this was because Sweden couldn't afford losing any manpower in long firing duels with the enemy. The Danish army prefered to fire and exchange shots with their enemy for hours, while the Swedish army was extremely offensive and prefered attacks with cold steel more than any army in Europe.
The Swedish army was also an army that prefered to fight the battles inside enemy countries, rather than trying to go on the defensive and fight the enemy inside Swedish territory instead. And the reason was simple - Sweden was a poor country with little manpower so it could not afford a long war, and especially not so if its own towns would be burned to the ground. So it was better to take the fight to the enemy and steal his money and letting his farmland feed the Swedish army, instead of giving Swedish farmers and taxpayers the burden of supplying the Swedish army. And if Sweden could win its wars fastly with superior troop quality, tactics and good commanders... then limited resources would not be so much of a problem.
So it was no coincidence that Sweden had the most mobile army in Europe in the early 1700s. And many military speed records was set during the Polish campaign, when the Swedish army quickly ran out of food on the poor polish farmland and therefore had to constantly move on towards another village to get food.
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@AndyWoohoo666
I do not doubt Emil Eneblad is pro-Sweden and against russia. I am quite happy seeing this video actually because there are people with some correct views that are not like the party leadership that is towing the Kremlin line. So I got nothing personally against Emil or the average Sweden democrat.
What I do hate about politics is all enigmatic statements, where politicians gives a hint what they really wanna do, but does not dare to say unpopular things openly because then would everyone stop voting for them. Like that Trump cannot openly say that he supports the dictatorship russia and wants to throw Ukraine under the bus. Party leader Jimmie Åkessons statement that we cannot give endless support to Ukraine should fall into the same category as Trumps statements that he wants to make peace over a single day (and the only way to achieve this is to betray Ukraine and cut all US military aid to them, and since Europe does not have the military muscles to compensate for a US withdrawal of support would this be catastrophic for Ukraine).
All these other nonsense ideas imported from the populist right in USA and continental Europe also becomes extremely silly in a Swedish context. We do not have many religious fundamentalists here in Sweden like in USA, Hungary or Poland. A large part of the population are atheists, and I guess the majority are non-practionary believers. So obsessing about abortion makes no sense in a Swedish context. The issue is dead here. If you try to take away womens rights your party will tank.
And cancel culture and woke are things they obsess about in USA, Germany and Hungary. We do not need those things here. We are adults. We got better issues to talk about.
So flirting with these Putinists parties is something the Sweden democrats has done for some years now. And that is not a good sign, when we see Le Pen, Trump, Farage, AFD, Orban, Wilders, Fico side with Russia. So the Sweden democrats should stay Swedish and democrat. And not continental European.
I think your literarly interpretation of what Åkesson said is incorrect. You have to read between the lines. And you also have to look at the wider context when this statement has been made.
Talking about an upper limit is just silly. This is a war very much in our national interest, and then we should spend a large chunk of our GDP to win it. Borrow and spend the money needed to win and taking up the bill can we do later is probably what we would have done if Finland was attacked by the Commies.
And I think we should do a similiar thing for Ukraine. I am not saying we should give Ukraine half of our GDP or something. Right now have both Norway and Denmark given more of their GDP to Ukriaine than Sweden so talking about upper limits to our aid to Ukraine now is just silly. A totally useless statement, unless its meant as russian propaganda.
We are surrounded by other Nato countries. What will happen if we gave away "too much" weapons to Ukraine?
Will Denmark that just gave away all of their artillery to Ukraine now see a chance to invade Sweden and retake Scania after some 350 years?
Our military equipment was built with only one possible enemy in mind. So I see it as a criminal waste of resources that we do not put it into its intended use. Its better that the enemy is fought in Ukraine than having to fight him here in Sweden later on as I sees it. Losing a CV90 in battle and having its crew killed is tragic. But from a cynical selfish Swedish perspective is it better that Ukrainian are the ones fighting inside that CV90 than we are losing our own countrymen doing this fight.
Ukrainians will die in this war no matter what, and we have the ability to save Ukrainian lives by giving them better weapons. We can build more vehicles. We can pick up the price tab later.
Our government made a huge military support package for Ukraine of 70 billion Swedish crowns (about 7 Billion Euros).
That is much defense money even for countries like Germany and USA, just to put some scale to things. However are we drowning ourselves in debt as Åkesson and the Russian bots say?
Not really. 70 billion out of Sweden's GDP of 5000 billion per year, is not crushing us.
So either are the people making this argument clueless about economics. Or they are insincere dishonest liars that tries to mislead the public to help russia.
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Protectionism is a good thing when it comes to protecting infant industries. But it is simply idiotic when it comes to protecting old outdated industries that needs to die the death of "creative destruction".
The EU protectionism is only of the useless variant. The Chinease can buy up the next generation of European high tech firms without politicians lifting a finger to save their crownjewels from getting stolen.
The only protectionism the EU does is to protect farmers that are overproducing expensive food so that European consumers have to pay an overprice for food, and african farmers get thrown into poverty when European subsidized food gets dumped on African markets and dump prices so much that Africans go out of buisness.
The EU trade policies is wasteful, immoral and destructive to the planet since the overproduction of food waste limited resources like fresh water, topsoil, phosphorus, and fossile fuels for tractors, planes, waterpumps, creation of fertilizer and pesticide.
And when too much food is produced and can't be sold for profit, then food are burned despite all resources that have been wasted on producing that food. Millions are starving, but the EU rather destroys food than changing course.
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The US military have invented the GPS, the internet, the semi-conductors, SIRI voice app, nuclear power, the walkie talkie, superglue, duct tape, digital cameras. So how many jobs haven't DARPA created? It is propbably the most succesful state-owned company in history.
The entire computer and internet industry have created millions of jobs and generated billions of dollars in revenue for America and companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft have been possible thanks to DARPA.
I don't think any government agency anyware have been as skilled to collect talents and creating new products as DARPA.
While EU projects are usally costly jokes. The expeensive galileo project for example which is totally outdated by now, and totally outcompeted by the much cheaper and better American GPS system which remains the dominant system today.
Nor do Europe have any silicon valley or as many Fortune 500 companies like America.
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I have never claimed that the military invent most things, I just said that the US military have been a succesful source of innovation. But you dont of course need the military as a middleman to get pharma and green tech to make medicines or solar panels.
And as I said earlier, I don't think the F35 is as costly and shitty as people have said it to be. It have just never lived up to the expectations people had of it - which were quite unrealistic in my opinion since I don't think you can make one plane to do every role on the battlefield. It was the military branches and cost-cutting policians that wanted a plane that could make all roles to minimize the logistic footprint and minimize production cost by using common spare parts for all three F35 variants.
Anyways, the plane have not so much commonality among spare parts between the variants so to me it seems like that not much have been won in the end. And the plane doesn't perform well against the planes it was intended to replace - F16, F15, F18, AV8B and A10. But one should then also remember that other great planes like the legendary F16 also was seen as a crappy shitplane that people wanted to scrap when it was new, and before it got upgraded and improved into a nice plane.
I also think that one should not forget that Rafale, F35 and Eurofighter are also different planes with different aims, so one cannot just say that one is better than the other because it could win a dog fight.
F35 is an attack aircraft with some air combat capabilities to defend itself, and not an air superiority fighter first and foremost. While Eurofighter is more of dedicated fighter with high manouverability. And rafale seems more like a carrier based attack aircraft with powerful electronics with some air combat capabilities. F35 however is a stealth aircraft so it will avoid getting involved with enemy fighters and rather let F22 deal with them. And European fighters will be of limited use with their impressive manouvers if they cannot find the enemy with their 4th generation aircrafts.
Fact still remains though that F22 is the best fighter aircraft and Europe got nothing that can beat it. Not rafale, not Eurofighter, not Gripen.
All I'm saying is that US citizens could've a way better life if the gov wasn't dumb and too proud to ask for help, wasting tons of billions from their taxes...
F35 is already a multi-country project. And it have faced deleys, but hey, so have also Rafale, Eurofighter and Gripen.
All of those planes are pretty old by now and they are likely nearing the end of their lifecycle. While F35 only just recently begun entering service and have its best years ahead of it.
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How is your 3 day war going Ivan? Seems like you have lost lots of land since mid 2022. And lost every battle you involved with.. Hostomel, Kyiv, Sumy, Chernigiv, you also lost all 4 battles of Sieversky-Donetsk, and then you lost Charkiv, snake island, Khersun, Vuhledar, the western black sea, and Avdiivka have so far only been a costly humiliation for russia.
Not that impressive.
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PanzerIII was intended to be main tank of the German army - and it was the best tank they had in the beginning of the war, so this was the tank they wanted to use against other tanks.
And PanzerIV was a bigger machine that was just thought of as something to support other tanks or helping the infantry. Its gun was short because it was used to kill enemy bunkers and enemy footsolidiers.
And that was the German idea on how the war should be fought. But those dreams got crushed in 1940, because Germany didn't have enough panzerIII tanks to fight against France since the production of the German industry was so small. So Germany had to attack France with all that they had - which was mostly weak light tanks such as Panzer I, Panzer 35t, Panzer 38t and the most numerous of all German tanks was the Panzer II.
And Germany only had a very small number of somewhat good tanks as Panzer IV, Panzer III and StuG B.
But Germany won over France anyways.
And after the battle of France the Germans realized how good the StuG B was so the started to build them in large numbers, and they also realized that they had to replace their weak light tanks with more powerful Panzer III and Panzer IV tanks, and give the PanzerIII tank a new better 50mm gun so it would have any chance of winning a fight in a modern tank battle.
Then when Germany invaded Russia they had a much more powerful tankforce with much more StuGs and medium tanks - but even in 1941 so was the weak Panzer II still the most used tank in the German army.
And in Russia the Germans got many nasty surprises - they meet monster tanks like t-34 and kv1 which was the most powerful tanks in the world in 1941... just as the Panther and Tiger was the most powerful tanks in the world in 1943.
And the only way of taking out those tanks was to fire at them with the powerful 88mm anti-aircraft guns. And the shots from German tanks just bounced off the Russian armor of those beasts. The German solidier felt powerless against those Russian tanks, and the Luftwaffe anti-aircraft gunners didn't like their new job as tank killers, since this was nothing they was trained for, and driving this high siluette unarmoured thing close to the enemy lines was nothing they liked.
So Germany realized that they needed better tools that was able to kill those tanks before the Russians could start building them in large numbers.
So Germany started the Panther project in 1942, and they continued their development of the Tiger tank since the German army deseratly needed anything that could take on the Russian monsters. And to solve the most urgent crisis the Germans put some Russian 76mm guns they had conquered and putted them on Czech panzer 38t tanks and used them as the Marder38t tank destroyers.
And the old PanzerIII and PanzerIV got better guns so they would be better able to kill enemy tanks. Panzer IV got a long 75 gun and thereby became the best tank in the world in 1942, but the little panzer III was too small to carry such a big gun so it only got a 50mm gun that was good enough to kill most tanks, but it could not destroy the frontal armour of a KV1... so the German infantryman now always felt safer standing next to Panzer IV.
Panzer IV had become tha main tank of the German army because it had a better gun against enemy tanks, while Panzer III became more of a support tank because it too weak to fight the best enemy tanks.
But panzer III would live on for the rest of the war, because it was a reliable good tank that could turn fast. Its big problem was its weak gun, so the Germans took away the turret from the tank and built it like a box with a large 75mm gun on it. And without a turret, a tank becomes cheaper and easier to produce.
The turret also weights a lot, so by taking the turret off, the Germans could instead put a larger gun on the tank and give it extra thick armour. So the StuG became the most produced German tank of world war II, and also one of the most succeful. It was cheap to produce and it killed 3 tanks for every StuG that was lost.
In August 1942, the Tiger tank entered service, just about the same time when Germany was trying to conquer southern Russia and push forward into Egypt. And it was not a tank Germany planned to build in large numbers since it was too expensive and too difficult and time consuming to produce.
This heavy tank was intended to be a huge sledgehammer that would turn even the most well defended enemy position into pieces. And it would be a weapon superior to anything the enemy have, and it would be a great morale booster to the German troops and make the enemy solidiers piss their pants when they saw one these monsters show up.
And it was a good tank, but not good enough to justify all trouble that went into producing these machines. And they had their drawbacks - they were too heavy to use most bridges, and also most German military bridges.. and they needed 3 trucks to draw them to a repairshop because they were so heavy, and doint that thing is not a funny job at a battlefield where fire is raining down everyware.
And by 1943 the war had changed and Germany was now no longer the attacker, but now needed to defend her territory. And then the Tiger was forced to fight a type of war it was never build for.
And in 1943 Germany was getting the Panther which was starting to replace the old Panzer IV as the main medium tank of the German army. It was fast, had a good gun with excellent precision, penetration, range and reload time, and it had good frontal armour....and it could travel over snow and mud better than all other tanks - even those half its own weight, and its optics was superior to any tank during the war, and it was a pioneer in IR-sights (something Nato only began using in the 1960s).
But the tank also had serious drawbacks. It was expensive to produce and consumed many workhours to make one tank. It was too heavy to use on most military bridges. Its sidearmour was no better than other tanks despite this tank was so expensive to make. And the tank was an overly complex design so it often suffered from all kinds of problems from engine fires, electrical failures that prevented the gun from firing to all kinds of things. It needed so much repairs that it every year spent half its time in a repairshop, and therefore only could help the troops on the battlefield half the time. While Sherman and T-34 could be at the battlefield 80-90% of the time because they were tanks with less design problems.
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If Hitler thought that Russia was about to fall, then there would be no need to get Japan involved to share the booty. The Japanease Navy was an impressive addition to the Axis, but I think Hitler made a huge misjudgement when one compares the benifits of having Japan as an ally compared to having the USA as an enemy.
But as I said earlier, Hitler and Japan had to make a quick decision. Because Japan was quickly running out of resources, and without those resources the war in China would be doomed to fail. And Japan was furious on USA for their blockade, but on the other hand did they fear a war with this mighty power. And Hitler made the decision that he wanted to have Japan as his brother in arms, so he tried to impress them and make them believe that the war in Russia was almost over so Japan would be convinced to join the Axis and fight America togheter with Germany.
Personally I think that Hitler had reason for some optimism in 1941 and 1942. The Russian military disasters of 1941 was simply happening at an unsubstainable rate. He had misjudged the opposition and it was guessed that he would face opposition from 150 Russian Divisions, but a few months into Barbarossa it was estimated by his own military that he had been facing 300 Division equalents, and by late October over 150 Russian Divisions had been destroyed.
The German losses had also been heavy of course, but not as severe as the Russian losses. And as 1942 started Germany began the war with a decimated force, and so did the Russians. But in terms of firepower Germany was better off. Her tank losses had mostly been among the outdated garbage with shitty armour and guns, while all newly produced tanks were powerful machines - such as the excellent PzIVF,G and H models.
While Russia had lost of her good equipment in 41 and her industry was in great trouble with all movement to the Ural. Germany also had total control over the skies.
And after the catastrophic Soviet winter offensive and the disasterous Kharkov offensive in 1942, I would say that the Axis had its finest hour and Victory was almost at sight. The road to Southern Russia laid open for Germany to take and Japan was still having the upper hand in the sea battles of the pacific.
But just a few weeks later things would change forever with the battle at Midway. And Japan would lose her naval dominance. And later that year the Afrika korps would get defeated, and the battle for the Atlantic would turn bad for the Germanz, and the year would end with the disaster at Stalingrad. And the war would be lost.
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"My opinion : the byzantine empire was a hypridic one : state organization was Roman, religion Christian, and language / education Greek"
You made the point earlier that things that seem important to us today may not have been so important to people in earlier times. And I think that point certainly apply here. As historian Oswald Spengler noted would religion matter extremely much to the Romans and if you would go back in a time machine and asked a Roman to learn you about what is would mean to be Roman he would not show you the aqueducts, the amazing architecture or other such wordly things that we admire the Romans for today.
Instead he would take you to a temple and tell you about some made up stories and mythology and such.
So a Roman would much define himself by his religion. So while hellenism or orthodox christianity might seem like an unimportant bullshit issue to us today, things were seen as very important in the past.
"As to "ethnicity", the problem is a fictitious one, since in the 11th - 15th centuries (and even much later, well into the 18th), "nation" or "ethnicity" the way we perceive them today, did not exist."
One should not exaggerate the amount of nationalism people felt in the past when people even rarely meet any fellow citizens outside their own home province. But it did however sometimes exist to some extent, even if the nationalist feelings rarely was a strong as they were during the 1800s or early 1900s.
The Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus in the 1600s spoke both to his advisors and to common people about the necessity to fight his wars to protect the beloved fatherland. And this is just one example among many.
In some way I also think a kind of nationalism existed in very early times as well. From what I can remember did the Greeks living around 400 BC like to think of themselves and other Greeks as part of a common cultural sphere. While people in balkans and rest of Europe were seen as barbarians, and Persia was considered to be a kind of common enemy for all the Greek city states.
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Land warfare in the 1700s was not pretty. A cannon ball would be flying towards you in about 350 meters per second that would be slow enough for you to see this ball coming towards you, but also too fast for you to have the chance to jump to the side and avoid it.
And when the ball did fly into your line of men, then the effect would be devestating. It would plow a hole into your ranks of three men, and those hit by the ball would likely die instantly on the spot. A Swedish soldier hit by a Russian cannon ball at Poltava was cut in half as his bones and the entire lower part of the body instantly got detached from his body he made soft sound and died nearly instantly on the spot.
And all his comrades around him got their uniforms stained red with their former friends blood and what remained of his body. Teeths, skeleton bones, swords, and iron and wood parts from the muskets would also fly around as a soldier got hit and killed, and those hard sharp objects could be very deadly as they did fly around in high speed and hit the poor guys who stood near they man who got hit by the cannon ball.
The energy and power of the cannon ball was immense. Would the man stand in ranks 20 men deep, then the losses could be gigantic from cannon fire as the men would fall like dominos and men around them would get either injured or severly psychologically wrecked from seeing their friends dying such a brutal death.
18th century warfare was like on movies with colorful pretty uniforms, nice flags, orderly line formations and military music with trumpet fanfares, taiko drums from horesemen, or fifes and drums of the infantry. But what you don't see on movies are the backside of the coin - afraid people who poop their pants, people who get blown up by artillery so there is nothing left of their bodies and brain substance flying around and splatter cover the flags of the company.
Cannon balls could be devestating. If you managed to somehow was able to get the chance to fire on the enemy from the sides then the effect could enormous - a single cannon ball could then (theoretically) kill an entire line of 150 men of company with a lucky shot that would make all those men fall like dominos to the enormous power and energy from the cannon ball.
And not only could cannons fire from far away and reload at a faster rate than muskets. At closer ranges could cannons also switch over to another type of ammunition - shrapnel - and the effect of that fire was even more horrible. Entire Swedish companies of hundreds of men was wiped out by a single one of those shots at the battle of Poltava in 1709.
So all those tiny pieces of metal perfectly illustrates the power of splinters as a single shot from a Russian cannon wiped out the entire Kalmar infantry batallion.
And I think I have made clear the powerful effects of normal cannon balls as well. So their effects on wood and turning it into deadly splinters and blocks of wood doesn't surprise me at all.
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"Wow I will give you the F 35's range is an issue for the Canadian Air Force it is a literally a whole generation ahead of the Griffin"
F35 is shitty compared to many 4th generation fighters. Its an overpriced, overly complex piece of garbage. Su35, Mig35, Silent Eagle, Rafale, Gripen and Eurofighter are literarly a generation backwards, but yet they all outperform the F35 in most things.... in everything from maximum speed to wingload, to thrust-to-weight ratio, to combat radius, to ferry range, to hardppoints, to operating costs, to peacetime crashrates per 100.000 flight hours.
Plus you would lose the ability to network and integrate with the US Air Force the F 35's greatest feature.
Sweden is not located in another galaxy like you seem to think. It is a rich modern western country in Europe with a long proud history of its weapons industry, and lots of western armies have bought Swedish military equipment (including the USA) everything from warships, to planes, to rocketlaunchers, to IFVs, to bofors guns of a large variety of calibers, to RBS70 SAMs to other things.
And things made are Nato standard. Believe it or not :O
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I think a problem with Spains Latin American empire was that it was exploitative. Native americans was enslaved. Many died from diseases, and some died from harsh treatment and in violent uprisings. So many died that Spain felt it was better to transition towards a semi-slavery/semi-paid labor workforce. So the native Americans took a forced labor job for spain and got underpaid, over-taxed, over-charged for the food and other stuff they were forced to buy from their slave masters, and the Spainish crown and the local rulers got very rich, while the native americans became very poor.
Society became unequal, and this prevented the rise of a mass consumer economy and therefore could no mass production economy rise either when people were too poor to buy good that were produced. And when England began to rule the waves it became difficult for Spain to rely on their old economic model of selling things to Asia and maintain division of labor. And when the silver mines ran out of silver, then did the economic engine that kept all other industries alive also die out. And places like Mexico deindustrialized.
So sucking the value out as much as possible and letting the rich benefit at the expense of the many is a recipy for economic stagnation.
However economic resources can be a big help to make countries rich - USA and Sweden shows that. But thankfully can also countries witout much natural resources also become rich thanks to innovation and manufacturing - like Japan, Prussia, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea.
Countries that are cold can become rich like Scandinavia and Canada. Countries that are hot tropical climate can also become rich like Singapore. Landlocked countries like Switzerland and Austria have also became rich.
So I think that geological determinism belongs to a time of the past.
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The west have not been flexing their muscles either. West got more money, more soldiers, larger population, better military leadership, better logistics, better motivated soldiers, technological superiority, higher industrial productivity, higher GDP, higher GDP per capita, better tactics, better doctrins, better GPS, better communication systems, better weapons etc etc etc
Russia got nothing. Putin knows this. If he felt certain that he would win the war then he would not treaten with nuclear weapons. But given how completly worthless his army has been its clear that he is going to lose the war.
The quality of the Russian army is falling as the best troops are dying and the best Russian tanks gets turned into burning wrecks. For Ukraine you see the opposite trend. Ukrainian troops gets training from foreign specialists. They get better weapons. The men turns into experienced veterans and the bondage between the men are strenghtened and the morale increases with the victories won and all help and backing they get from the entire world.
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@richardmeyeroff7397 ITogheter did the western allies (GB/France outnumber the German 2:1 in land and air in the Benelux/France campaign. But the example however got not much in common with Ukraine today.
CSAs chances of winning the war with a swift march on Washington was theoretically possible.. but I don't think the new hastily assembeled CSA army was ready for such a victory yet and the logistics were not in place. They wanted to rally support in the slave states in the north and avoid devestation in the south and loved glorious battles.
But the only realistic way they could win was your 2nd alternative.
But a defensive war, digging in, making guerilla raids behind enemy lines and only fighting against small union units when they were outnumbered was considered coward tactics. CSA lost one of their best Generals (Johnston) early in the war and later on when the war went bad did they fire the only grand strategist General who proposed the strategy I proposed here. So the CSA was doomed after that.
And it probably survived many more years than it should. Its undeserved survival was only due to one bad General after another led the main force of the Union army - the Potomac army. McDowell, McClellan, Burnside, Hooker were all unfit for the job of leading this force. Meade was no genius either.. he was okay and mediocre.
But on the other hand were Southern Generals no excellent brains either. Jackson was more good at drill instructor teaching his men to walk as speedy as cavalry.. but he had no superior tactical sense. And General Lee did rarely win cheap victories in battle and his idea to go north was just reckless and ended with Gettysburg and the fall of his slave state.
Anyways, I do not think the American civil war have much similarities with Ukraines struggle.
Ukraine does not have the ability of trading away land for blood and time. And frankly Russia does not care about human losses, and never had. And the only country in Europe that could afford to lose land and do scorched earth tactics are the Russians.
Personally do I as a Scandinavian think this war in Ukraine mostly reminds me of Finland in 1939 or Finland in 1944.
In 1939 did the country have nearly no weapons as it was the poorest country in Europe (reminds me Ukraine today - a country with an average income lower then that of Mexico and the most corrupt country in Europe). Finland did however get some help from Sweden who sent some weapons and volunteers. But Finland was still outnumbered massily like 10:1 to Russia. But Ukraine and Finland practiced "motti" tactics, and much Ranger combat and I think both wars is similiar in every way and the only difference is that Ukraine today don't use ski units and got access to anti-tank missiles. The Finns had a poor army with no heavy weapons no heavy artillery (and little medium artillery)
and no tanks and a small primitive airforce. It also lacked anti-tank guns and had to improvise using molotov cocktails... which did work because Russian tanks was light and thinly armoured and could get knocked out this way, and they did not handle -30-40C degrees and Finlands forest terrain well either.
Finland offered hard resistance and humiliated Russia. The country avoided Russian occupation and the population did not have to be deported to Siberia (as Stalins secret plan was). Today Ukraine humiliate Russia, Russia have kidnapped Ukrainian civilians and done a forced resettlement of them into Russia. And like Stalin stole the province of Karelia from Finland, do many think that Putin will fail to conquer Ukraine but will steal the provinces Donbass and Luhansk from her.
The 1944 summer war with Russia was similiar in most ways. But now had Russia more respect for their Finnish enemy and they took no risks - they did assemble gigantic amounts of T-34, KV-1 and IS-2 tanks, tens of thousands of artillery pieces and katjuscha rockets, and many thousands of planes.
From the last years of war with Russia had Finland manage to steal som Russian tanks (+ later on getting a few StuGs from Germany) so it could field one tank division. But otherwise did things look dark for Finland. It almost lacked heavy weapons to deal with IS2 tanks. Snow and winter cold would not devestate Russian troops now. And so many Russian guns had been concentrating on the finnish front that their fire was absolutly deadly and would turn forests into piles of rubble and each Square meter of trench in the frontline would get bombarded by 10 guns.
So if the Finns did not pull back in time, then their unit would likely be 100% wiped out no matter how well they had dug in.
The Russians send away some spotters. Then came the artillery fire, and a massive wave of bombers. And then did infantry and tanks come. The finns fought hard and inflicted massive losses on the Russian troops attacking their trenches and defensive positions. And some Russian tanks were knocked out in close combat, but the situation was hopeless despite disproportional heavy losses suffered by the Russians.
Hitler which never had cared for Finland, now listened to what happened there. The war was going badly for the Axis and Hitler did not want the German people to become demoralized by losing another member of the Axis over to the allies. Germany could not afford letting the allies win more such political victories in his opinion - so he did send over a few JU87 Stuka bombers and thousands of panzerfausts and panzerschrecks.
The finnish airforce inflicted heavy losses in the air... but the Russians losing a few hundred planes when they had thousands did not matter (The Finns used the American Brewster Buffalo to great effect, despite the plane was considered outdated already when the when the war in the pacific begun with Pearl Harbor).
The German bombers did cause some losses on the Russians and made their offensive slow down. And the finns with their new German anti-tank rockets were now at least able to deal with gigantic IS2 heavy tank beasts in close combat in the forest.. so the Russians suffered heavy losses. A last attempt to take Finland was made - but was stopped by the largest concentration of Finnish artillery in history raining down on them throwing man and machines flying around in the air leaving nothing left alive...
Finland was once again saved from total destruction by its skilled little army. The war was too costly for Russia to continue. Russia had already lost much blood in World war 2, and it was still far from certain that it would survive its life and death struggle against the Germans. Taking over the poorest country in Europe and losing most of its tanks and half a million men to take this sparesly populated country with covered by forests and mosquitos was not worth it. The price was too high, and the gains was too low.
Stalin agreed to a peace with Finland. Finland would survive as a country and would get away cheaply by some minor land losses and promise neutrality for the future. It would pay some economic compensation for starting the war.
And the German troops in Finland had to be kicked out immediately (Stalin respected the skills of the Finns, but he was much more afraid of the German troops which made him shiver out of fear). Stalin wanted his army to be used against Germany instead. Finland was just an unimportant side show to Stalin, and the country could be taken later once Germany was destroyed if he felt like it.
Finlands leaders realized this offer would be Finlands only chance of survival. Hitler had saved Finland with stukas and panzerfausts, and now was his troops ungratefully kicked out of the country - and if they did not leave then they would be shot. For 3 years had Finns and Germans been brothers in arms, but now they were enemies.
The Germans were removed and Finland survived the war against all odds.
One could perhaps argue that Germany's help did save Finland. Foreign help to Finland in 1939 was not unimportant either, but her situation was still hopeless even after Sweden had sent over every rifle she could spare. And even with thousands of volunteers would Finland remain outnumbered 10 fold and having no tanks or heavy artillery.
For me the main take away is that a small country can surive a fight against a big if it uses the terrain, superior tactics and inflict disproportional heavy losses. Then the attacker will at some point no longer think it is worth he hassle of trying to take the country at such a high price that it will give up.
Finland survived, and the population was never sent away to die in a genocide in Siberia. She got away relativly cheaply by sacrificing about 10% of her territory.
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@isnotmimi I prefer democracy too I guess. And the food, healthcare, economic equality today is much better than back in the 1700s.
But there was of course things which I miss. The fashion, the music, the gallant gentlemen, and so on.
I also think that the ideals are better than the modern ones. A solidier which serves the country and unselfish risking his life for his country is worthy of more respect than a selfish rich dude who never did anything for his community and only got rich thanks to outsourcing and tax evasion.
Nationalism is worthy of praise, while egoism, greed, and materialism, is not.
The solidiers and officers should have a higher than mercants and bankers.
And serving the country, government and community is a virtue.
Men of the 1700s also endorsed enlightment ideals and had a very pragmatic view of economic and politics.
While today it is filled with dogma, and promotic globalistic ideologies is now seen as more important than
preserving companies and jobs, national independence, democracy and such things.
The respect for the principles of the Westphalian peace is starting to get erroded. And with that, and with all globalist crap we are pushing the world towards new disasters like ideological wars of the 1600s and economic catastrophes as the economy becomes an unregulated wild west as governments gets their powers taken away by globalist fanatics.
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