johnfabian
10mo ago
civ 5 still has a very active multiplayer community playing lekmod
johnfabian
10mo ago
Finished the books I was reading about Augustus and the Peloponnesian War. Now I'm reading The Long Price Quartet by Daniel Abraham (he co-wrote The Expanse). Finished the first part and was pleasantly surprised. Enjoying it quite a bit.
More numerous than any other individual combat arm? Generally, often yes. But in modern professional armies they don't tend to approach a majority. How things might actually play out for conscription-based armies which train most conscripts as light infantry remains to be seen though I suppose.
For the UK (and the Commonwealth countries which largely followed their military organization during WWII) there were two very important deciding factors which relegated infantry to a lesser size than the artillery. Most importantly was the scale of losses during WWI: politically, demographically, economically, whatever lens you looked through they were so high they could not be repeated. That inevitably meant a focus on greater firepower and heavy weapons rather than having infantry carry the burden.
Less importantly aside from the brief fracas in France the initial major land fighting the Brits did was in North Africa when the Germans were roughly on par with the in the air and the desert allowed for fluid maneuvers. This meant more losses to rear-area personnel and so they carried more men and got a higher proportion of trained replacements. This ended up adversely affecting British and Canadian forces in Europe because the decline of German air power and operational maneuver greatly reduced the risk to non-infantry combat arms. There was a persistent shortage of infantrymen throughout 1944 and 1945.
It is important to note that this wasn't some crazy or ineffective idea: artillery was in WWII, like all other modern wars, the main killing power on the battlefield. Certainly if you read German memoirs they are constantly bitter about the total dominance of Western Allied artillery (and air power). In Normandy there was frequent complaining about it being a "rich man's war" because of how badly the Germans were being outshot. Allied artillery command and control was also significantly more sophisticated and was a huge advantage.
johnfabian
11mo ago
The story is an hour old, give it some time. Obviously CNN has a bias but they also don't want to fuck this up too bad.
You know they've got $$$ in their eyes knowing they can run on this for the next month.
johnfabian
2mo ago
Personally I mentally separate the West and BC. When people talk about "the West" they are not talking about Coquitlam.
johnfabian
3mo ago
Does this mean it would be bigger than Texas? How many Canadas fit into Texas?
johnfabian
4mo ago
You are pretending like their hands were tied, when they could have remained neutral or even allied with Germany against the Soviet Union. Hitler pleaded for either of those two options, offering to pull out of France for peace with Britain. But Britain wanted to restrain Germany from becoming the greatest European power, so they allied with the Soviet Union and destroyed Europe to make it happen.
So after Germany has conquered Poland, France, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Greece, and tried to conquer the UK, you think they should have made common cause with Hitler. I'm shocked they refused to.
The only worthy response came from Churchill:
However matters may go in France or with the French Government, or other French Governments, we in this Island and in the British Empire will never lose our sense of comradeship with the French people. If we are now called upon to endure what they have been suffering, we shall emulate their courage, and if final victory rewards our toils they shall share the gains, aye, and freedom shall be restored to all. We abate nothing of our just demands; not one jot or tittle do we recede. Czechs, Poles, Norwegians, Dutch, Belgians have joined their causes to our own. All these shall be restored. What General Weygand has called the Battle of France is over. I expect the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."
johnfabian
4mo ago
The number of Chinese civilians that were murdered and needlessly starved under Mao was probably greater than the total number of deaths in World War II and the Holocaust from all causes, on all sides, civilian and military combined [source].
I would note that this is both a very high number (almost certainly an overestimate) for Mao's body count and similarly a rather large undercount of WWII's, which is pretty conventionally estimated at ~70-75 million.
I think it would be worth softening the language here.
johnfabian
5mo ago
Time for another tv recommendation: Severance. In my opinion it's the first show in a while that quality-wise stands among the other greats of the "golden age of television"; or at least it has done so far. It has an interesting combination of dark comedy, satire, character work, and philosophical introspection with a heaping dose of mystery. If you're unaware what the show is about or have heard nothing about it, here's a teaser; I wouldn't seek out more for fear of spoilers.
It was a long, long gap between seasons 1 and 2 (the former aired near the end of 2022, the latter is airing now). But it's the first sort of "appointment viewing" for me and my friends in a while, and we've decided to get together as a group every other week or so and watch the new episodes. It's nice to experience these things with other people and it's the kind of show that very much benefits from group discussion/reflection.
johnfabian
5mo ago
I think it is highly probable such programs are already well underway in secret. Certainly it makes little sense for Russia to sink so much money and effort into building its new generation nuclear weapons and delivery systems (that are very obviously meant to be a counter to a missile shield) unless they think there is serious potential the United States might actually realize it. And this work has been going on for a while now, such that they've even been able to test some of them against Ukraine (the new hypersonic ballistic missiles)
johnfabian
9mo ago
Mountains also have another possible source of flash fooding: spring melt.
johnfabian
9mo ago
Like others I'd say the frontier. Smaller cities were also less oppressive in terms of the environmental pollution. London in particular had infamously bad air quality. The crux of the problem is though you're assuming you have options: the reason so many people ended up in these awful situations is because they were chasing what limited employment and opportunities were available to them. It's not like the rural exodus was just because people decided they didn't like farming.
johnfabian
10mo ago
The German war plans offered limited flexibility - not NO flexibility as the General Staff pretended - but once the decision was made to go in against France, Belgium was done for regardless. As units on the Belgian frontier were activated they were already moving across the border to secure the way for those coming behind them. The German deployment schedules which were so rigorously developed in the pre-war period required either a conquered Belgium or a pliant one. There were no alternatives.
johnfabian
2mo ago
Loved loved season 1. Season 2 was a mess. I'm willing to extend it some measure of grace because there was a long series of disruptions behind the scenes (writer's strike, actor's strike, power struggles). But if it continues in the way of season 2 I'm going to drop it quickly.
johnfabian
3mo ago
There's a perception that Democratic politicians are particularly fringe or loony with respect to trans issues or immigration and in general they're not. The problem is that the people who are extreme are uniformly Democrats, and that gets projected on to the rest of the party. It doesn't help that these people tend to, by their nature, be the most motivated, loudest, and most likely to get signal-boosted by their political opponents.
I think the equivalent trend for Republicans is something like racism. Most Republican politicians are not racist, certainly not in the good ol' boy kind of way. But for Americans who personally know racists or look on social media and see examples of politicians who are overtly racist it's uniformly Republicans.
johnfabian
4mo ago
I've been reading Richard Gwyn's two-part biography of Sir John A recently and it's interesting to see how many direct parallels there are. Confederation was essentially premised on economic rationales in order for the British North American colonies to be able to compete against American tariffs, and much of the post-Confederation work of Macdonald was to try and cobble together a semblance of national identity and acquire the rest of British North America as a way to forestall American annexation. We've been in tough times before. The problem is I don't know if there's any politician of that caliber around today. The people who would be that kind of leader generally aren't in politics to begin with.
johnfabian
4mo ago
There are lots of Syrians, Lebanese, even Afghans which have similar skin tones to Germans. That does not mean Germans and Syrians look alike. I'm not sure how long this ruse would last, especially as because others note, people who enable immigration fraud would not be inclined to do so on behalf of an ethnic German.
johnfabian
5mo ago
I think it's also extremely narrow-minded to assume that intelligence will manifest itself in certain expected outcomes, with the benefit of hindsight. Even if one were to toss the notion of cultural and societal differences entirely out the window, from a purely material standpoint Japan and Britain are very different beyond the superficial similarity of them being island nations.
johnfabian
9mo ago
need to carry your shield and spear the whole way like a proper hoplite!
johnfabian
10mo ago
Germany: political center (Berlin), legal center (Karlsruhe, weirdly), financial center (Frankfurt), tech hub (Munich)
Some of these are debatable because Germany is extremely decentral
johnfabian
10mo ago
I don't think there's a coherent way to pass the Nazis off as left-wing. Yes they were the nSdap but the word "socialism" has forever and always held a flexibility which lets anyone and everyone use it as they please. Hitler's view of "socialism" as a concept was - and I'm only roughly paraphrasing - "if it's good for the Volk, it's socialist." To quote more directly the historian Richard Evans said that Nazism was akin and different to Bolshevism in that racial struggle held primacy instead of class struggle.
johnfabian
10mo ago
I would never claim that poverty has no effect on crime. I think besides being on some intuitive level obvious there are very broad relations one one can see, that go beyond simply that people who commit crimes tend to have the same kind of cognitive impairments that also keep one poor.
But this supposed iron law that crime is purely the product of poverty is something you see repeated everywhere where even the simplest of glances at the correlation can see how patently false that is.
johnfabian
10mo ago
Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion are only two novels because publishers forced it. They're essentially one rather than a book and its sequel. That being said I didn't like Fall nearly as much.
johnfabian
11mo ago
Is this a troll? Golf is one of the most affordable and accessible hobbies you can have, and it's accordingly one of the most popular.
This is very country-dependent. In the UK, Ireland, and certain Commonwealth countries golf is very affordable, bordering on cheap. In the US it is generally affordable, somewhat less so in the south. But in mainland Europe and Asia golf is a sport for the elite.
yeah it's nice to get a taste of it every now and then. On the rest of social media it's all degenerate lefties, I need to see some degenerate cons to keep me in balance
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