Comments by "Seven Proxies" (@sevenproxies4255) on "Military History Visualized" channel.

  1. 910
  2. 781
  3. 644
  4. 616
  5. 293
  6. 282
  7. 231
  8. 113
  9. 109
  10. 104
  11. 104
  12. 81
  13. 78
  14. 73
  15. 64
  16. 57
  17. 52
  18. 47
  19. 43
  20. 39
  21. 35
  22. 32
  23. 28
  24. 22
  25. 20
  26. 20
  27. 20
  28. 19
  29. 19
  30. 18
  31. 16
  32. 15
  33. 15
  34. 15
  35. 15
  36. 13
  37. 13
  38. 13
  39. 13
  40. 12
  41. 12
  42. 12
  43. 12
  44. 11
  45. 11
  46. 11
  47. 11
  48. 11
  49. 10
  50. 10
  51. 9
  52. 9
  53. 8
  54. 8
  55. 8
  56. 8
  57. 7
  58. 7
  59. Bo's'n Bruce: Can't say I think the military is full or contradictions. And the irrational behaviour that you point out is hardly the norm within the armed forces. They wouldn't be able to achieve their results or function effectively if they were all clowns. The contradictions rather stem from the culture shock between what men in the armed forces were taught and brought up with in civilian society and how those values completely contrast with the necessary values needed in war for soldiers to function. In civil society, men were brought up with very "soft" values. Be nice to other people. Hurting other people is wrong. Killing is absolutely verboten. In the military they have to have those values beaten out of them and be repurposed and taught that being "nice" is not good. You need to demand that your peers perform and punish them if they are found wanting, and that killing is right when you're killing the enemy. More ancient societies didn't have the same problems because they usually contained a warrior class and warfare and skirmishes between different societies was more commonplace. Being a competent fighter and a known slayer of enemies didn't earn you scorn or social stigma, it earned you praise and celebration. I think it probably helped people of that time to maintain a more balanced view between civilian life and military life. Especially among the rank and file (like with vikings for example where many men who wnt out to raid in other countries had completely civilian jobs at home, unless they were exceptionally competent raiders who could sustain their livelyhoods on raiding alone). But in modern times, soldiers are basically forced to hold two completely opposite ideals in their heads at the same time. So it undoubtedly will have some strange and unpredictable effects on their minds.
    7
  60. 6
  61. 6
  62. 6
  63. 6
  64. 6
  65. 6
  66. 6
  67. ManilaJohn01: I disagree. Capturing and holding oil fields is a more simple task than capturing and holding an entire city. The germans were actually in the process of capturing them during Operation Edelweiß (so they had already arrived in the region, in opposite to your conclusion that the germans didn't have the strength to get there). But the effort had to be abandoned since the soviet Operation Little Saturn threatened to cut the german forces off from the rest of their forces. So we have here two situations of germans getting or risking getting cut off and surrounded: Stalingrad and the Caucasus. One of the objectives would've denied soviets of oil, which they desperately needed while also supplying the german war effort with much needed oil. The other objective would, at best, serve as a railway and transport hub. One was significantly easier to capture and hold (since the germans had already made an initial success in the region). The other was far too difficult to capture and hold, and also lead to the german forces getting surrounded and cut off. If the germans had instead allocated the resources and logistics that were sent to capture Stalingrad to fortify the Caucasus oil fields (both the fields themselves, and the supply routes in and out of the region) the germans would probably have been in a much more favorable position than they would have trying and failing to capture a city of much lesser strategic importance at that point in time compared to the oil fields.
    6
  68. 6
  69. 5
  70. 5
  71. 5
  72. 5
  73. 5
  74. 5
  75. 5
  76. 5
  77. 5
  78. 5
  79. 4
  80. 4
  81. 4
  82. 4
  83. 4
  84. 4
  85. 4
  86. 4
  87. 4
  88. 4
  89. 4
  90. 4
  91. 4
  92. 4
  93. 4
  94. 4
  95. 4
  96. 4
  97. 3
  98. 3
  99. 3
  100. 3
  101. 3
  102. 3
  103. 3
  104. 3
  105. 3
  106. 3
  107. 3
  108. 3
  109. 3
  110. 3
  111. Gibbons3457: The problem is that "moderate" left-wing politics doesn't work either because their ideology is still based on and influenced by the flawed, dysfunctional economical model that all communism is derived from. What usually happens when "moderate leftists" are voted into power is they act like spendthrifts with public money and national savings (usually funds that have been accuulated for years by right wing parties), so prosperity seems good in the beginning of a mandate period of moderate leftists. But then evidence shows that their policies are ineffective at taking economic realities i to account, and they're usually extremely bad at investing public funds into projects that actually pays society back with a surplus. By then, all public welfare institutions starts to crack since the leftist governments spends more money and take more loans than they can afford. As drastic emergency measures they make surprise raises in taxes for larger corporation, which scares them away and make them set up shop in other countries, taking the jobs with them and thus creating even more people dependant on social welfare that the government can't afford and so on. If your politics are influenced by "Das Kapital", you're never gonna be able to make a functional, stable society overtime. And before you start arguing, I should let you know that I live in a country where these exact things have happened over and over as left wingers got voted into power and I've seen it happen in practice, not just once but several times over.
    3
  112. 3
  113. 3
  114. 3
  115. 3
  116. 3
  117. 3
  118. 3
  119. 3
  120. 3
  121. 3
  122. 3
  123. 3
  124. 3
  125. 3
  126. 3
  127. 2
  128. 2
  129. 2
  130. 2
  131. 2
  132. 2
  133. 2
  134. 2
  135. 2
  136. 2
  137. 2
  138. 2
  139. 2
  140. 2
  141. 2
  142. 2
  143. 2
  144. 2
  145. 2
  146. 2
  147. 2
  148. 2
  149. 2
  150. 2
  151. 2
  152. 2
  153. 2
  154. 2
  155. 2
  156. 2
  157. 2
  158. 2
  159. 2
  160. 2
  161. 2
  162. 2
  163. 2
  164. 2
  165. 2
  166. 2
  167. mPky1: All lands conquered needs to be occupied for quite a long time afterwards. There's no real way around it, since you turn the population of a conquered land your enemy as soon as you declare and wage war on them in the first place. It's not like you can conquer a nation by not killing anyone or destroying someones property, so it's next to impossible to do it while maintaining popular support among the population of the enemy country. So there's always a period of "cracking heads and restoring order" after the enemy government and armed forces have been forced to surrender. Which is why I point out the problem with Hitler being overly ambitious and not respecting the necessary timeframe needed to pacify a newly conquered population. He believed that since they achieved a swift military victory in Poland, he should just keep going, dedicating most resources and manpower towards invading the next country on his hitlist. Not only did it leave newly conquered territories vulnerable to local insurgency, but the speed of his conquests also instilled a greater sense of alarm and urgency in other foreign enemies like France, Britain and Russia. The trick is to slowly conquering your neighbours while projecting a complete lack of ambition towards conquest to the people watching you. Basically: drop the frog in boiling water and it will jump out immediately. But drop the frog in cold water and then slowly increase the heat, and the frog will allow itself to be boiled alive without any intervention. Classic deception, all according to the principles of Sun Tzu.
    2
  168. 2
  169. 2
  170. 1
  171. 1
  172. 1
  173. 1
  174. 1
  175. 1
  176. 1
  177. 1
  178. 1
  179. 1
  180. 1
  181. 1
  182. 1
  183. 1
  184. 1
  185. 1
  186. 1
  187. 1
  188. 1
  189. 1
  190. 1
  191. 1
  192. 1
  193. 1
  194. 1
  195. 1
  196. 1
  197. 1
  198. 1
  199. 1
  200. 1
  201. Jimmeh: Well, the "parasites" aren't parasites by choice. They are a long lasting creation and consequence of socialist policies, making full on privatization efforts near impossible. The way socialist politicians trap voters is by making as many of them dependant on government welfare in one shape or form as possible. Because they know that even if they lose mandate to capitalist/liberal parties for a short while, the backlash their privatization efforts will inevitably recieve pretty much guarantees that the socialist parties will be back in power soon enough. This because while capitalist parties are more than happy to outsource and privatize as much as possible, they rarely take the average incomes and salary levels into account when doing it. Average people with average incomes are relying on things like subsidized healthcare to be able to live. Most of them wouldn't be able to afford it if they had to pay for the full costs out of their own pockets. Capitalists wants "austerity" in public spending and try to take away things like subsidized healthcare, because subsidized healthcare has to be funded with high taxes. BUT, they aren't too keen on making sure that the wages for people of average incomes are raised sufficiently to make them be able to afford paying for privatized healthcare out of their own pocket. Without socialist influence for several decades, the market could potentially reach a state where average incomes are balanced against the average costs of things like healthcare and education (although looking back in hidtory at times when the bourgouise had a bit too much power, average workers were exploited like hell and recieved little in return for doing all the work, but i'm not a communist so I don't run around assuming that it HAS TO happen like that, even though I do take the risk of it happening into account). The problem is that socialism has already created too many citizens dependant on it's policies for their very survival. These people will have to suffer, and the really sick ones even risk dying as a result of too much privatization and austerity. Socialism isn't economically sustainable, but you're not really offering the "proles" a very appealing option either. And since humans, by nature, focus primarily on issues that are their most immediate concern, you're not likely to get an maintain a majority vote for capitalist policies that will leave the majority of people unemployed, homeless, sick, or having significantly reduced rights and conditions in their workplace. Or to put it in more simple terms: Liberals/capitalists usually argue in favor of appealing to the "rational self interest" of wealthy capital owners, and defend their actions when they're motivated by "rational self interest". The problem is that they never take the rational self interest of the vast majority of labourers into account.
    1
  202. Gibbons3457: Let me explain this in simple terms so anyone can understand: Debt = pretty much what it says. It's the national debt whereby the government has borrowed money from a bank for certain projects, and is now paying back what they owe the bank at a certain interest rate. Ideally the yearly national budget covers the interest rate AND pays off some of the debt as well in order to decrease the amount of money tjat the government owes over time. Normally though, the government is content with merely paying off the interest rate while not paying off the actual debt, because preventing the national debt from increasing is considered a win in itself. Deficit = The amount of money "missing" from a yearly budget to cover all the costs of both running society AND paying off the interest on the national debt. The money needed can be missing for various reasons: taxes are set too low, people evade paying taxes, people aren't working/consuming enough, businesses are leaving the country and set up shop elsewhere, government bumbled the budget from last year (investments didn't pay off as much as the government projected etc.) Austerity = making budget cuts to certain departments of society, with the intent of reducing the deficit, in order to afford paying off the interest on the national debt. People naturally hate austerity for obvious reasons. And people (like you) question why the government should prioritize paying off some "silly national debt" rather than spending that money on the people. Of course, we could do like socialist muppets do and go "mañana mañana" when it comes to the national debt and the interest rate. However, every year you don't pay off the interest rate, the national debt increases, and a rampant increase in national debt is dangerous for any society, because once your national debt reaches a level where the yearly interest rate exceeds your yearly Gross National Product (GDP, which is essentially the amount of money/profit/value that your society "produce" each period) your society is fucked. Because every bank in the world will know that in order for you to merely pay off the interest rate (not paying off the debt/loan itself) you're gonna have to dump all into merely paying interest. You won't afford to make any kind of investments, you won't be able to pay for the basic things to make your society function and so on. Which means no one will lend you any more money or make investments into your country, which in turn means that the value/purchasing power of your currency will plummet and it will all lead to a downward spiral of societal decay that no country can recover from on it's own without help from the outside. If you want examples of this, look at Greece and Spain. Both well on their way to financial collapse.
    1
  203. 1
  204. 1
  205. 1
  206. 1
  207. 1
  208. 1
  209. 1
  210. 1
  211. 1
  212. 1
  213. 1
  214. 1
  215. 1
  216. 1
  217. 1
  218. 1
  219. 1
  220. 1
  221. 1
  222. 1
  223. 1