u/wycliffslim

Not the original poster but I think they ARE answering the question.

They're saying the Roman style of building a camp worked within their overall system of military campaigning and organization.

Maybe it was a better system, but only so much as it was part of a system that all worked together. The overall system of Roman military organization was better, just the annals of history are pretty clear on the effectiveness of the Empire... but was the camp a reason for it being better or was a the camp simply a requirement that flowed down from all the other decisions? Another culture could't simply say, "we're going to encamp like the Romans now because that's better". They would have had to adopt the entire Roman system for building camps in that manner to be practicable. The Roman style of encamping worked very well for the Romans because it was part of the overall Roman manner of doing things.

Edit: You're looking for an answer that says, "oh... the Greeks just lacked the ability to build a Roman style camp. They would have loved to do it but they simply weren't capable". Nothing about Roman camp building was particularly difficult... there's no reason someone else couldn't have copied it. But it WAS a lot of work that was a waste the vast majority of the time. BUT, due to the way the legions were structured a decent amount of the general work needed to be done anyways and an army needs a camp so... you get the Romans nearly obsessive camp building practices because it wasn't really much extra work for them.

Are you in London? Because if so I think you encountered one of those werewolves that Warren Zevon was talking about.

It's hilarious that everyone is so up in arms(lol) because other than the admittedly silly statement by the judge this is actually a pretty perfect example of the legal system working incredibly well by following the law but caring about citizens and context.

What the kid did was VERY illegal and could be punished by a permanent felony and years in jail. Instead he got probabation that will be wiped if he stays out of trouble, training to be more informed in the future, and court mandated mental health that anyone should get after killing another human being.

As long as you follow the law probation is barely even a punishment. The judge gave basically the lightest possible sentence possible while still acknowledging that a pretty serious law was broken.

Everyone pays more for vehicle insurance at a young age. Last I checked men/women are actually pretty close in cost anymore. Looks like young men pay about 10% higher insurance cost than women and the number essentially equalizes by early to mid 20's.

I don't think there's any perfect answer but I think that comparing charging young men 10% more(on average) for insurance for several years is not even remotely equivalent to charging women or people who were born with an illness significantly more for insurance for their entire life.

And again, unfortunately men get charged more for insurance because they just tend to do more dangerous shit in vehicles which is a choice. No one is forcing men to go be idiots and drag race each other. Any individual man might not be, but overall they are and ones who prove that they're not idiots very rapidly get treated appropriately for their actual risk. It's not perfect, but it's a separate conversation imo.

Ehhhh...

Attrition and public opinion in the game is significantly easier to deal with than IRL to the point where the dowsides of sending troops into foreign wars is pretty much irrelevant.

Once you send an army to a foreign war in HOI it kinda ceases to exist to your domestic audience(and public opinion isn't very important in general). Depending on the country, in real life, your citizenry doesn't just stop caring about their children dying in a foreign war because they're a "volunteer" army.

Famously, that's essentially what the French used the Foreign Legion for... getting into shit in other countries without actually using "real" French troops that a domestic audience will care about when they die.

Yeah, that's in the region of what I was getting at with my last point and well put.

The elites KNEW the war was going poorly. The Wehrmacht officers and general staff may have been many things but they were most certainly not stupid or bad at their jobs(generally speaking). They were professionals who could read a map and they absolutely knew they were fighting a losing war.

But what do you do... confront the fact that everything you've worked towards is crumbling. Your station in life will soon be, at best, a prisoner of war and a loss of nearly every privilege you currently possess? Or... do you just focus on the today. Plan the next defensive position, talk about the next counteroffensive. Maybe if you can break through Allied lines in the Ardennes you can push them back off the continent. Then, with breathing room while the western allies regroup for another invasion you can concentrate forces in the east and crush the Red Army.

It's farcical, delusional thinking that every single general had to know had approximately zero chance of happening. But it fits into the culture, it lets you hold onto your position for a bit longer and it's much easier to focus on the convenient lie than the inconvenient truth.

I would be very interested in how you would defend characterizing the western theatre of WWII as, "a gentlemans disagreement over territory".

That sounds more like how you would characterize a proxy war but WWII was not even remotely a proxy war. The western front was certainly less barbaric than the eastern but it was still a conflict in which the idealogies that existed were mutually exclusive and neither could suffer the other to endure.

I'd also be quite curious to understand how you would defend WWII as being a "war launched by the west to annihilate the USSR" when the war started with a joint invasion of Poland(who were allied and protected by the western allies) by the Germans and Soviets and the next stroke was of the Germans into France specifically BECAUSE Hitler knew that he couldn't invade the Soviet Union without first knocking out France.

If the war was launched and supported by other western nations to destabilize or destroy the Soviets then it was a very confusing plan with many counterintuitive decisions made. Why would they have formed a defensive alliance with Poland(a nation that would HAVE to be taken in order to attack the Soviets)? Why would the western allies have not simply told Hitler... go off queen... get your living space, we'll just go take a quick smoke break and if we come back to Wehrmacht tanks in Moscow we can only assume they were invited in.

Besides all of that... how is any of this relevant to the question about the Germans fighting to the bitter end?

My spelling might not be quite right, it's a pronunciation based spelling.

But it's German for "death ride". I believe first used in relation to a cavalry charge in the Franco Prussian war. It was basically the Prussian concept of duty in the face of death. Your duty as a soldier is to carry out orders and do the job, even in the face of near certain death.

If I can make a comparison to fiction. In the LOTR, when the Rohirrim are preparing the charge into the hosts of Mordor surrounding the Gondor they are executing a death ride. They see that they can't win, yet they also see that it's their duty to attack regardless.

Here is a great talk by Dr. Robert Citino on exactly this subject. It's focused primarily on why the Wehrmacht itself kept fighting to the last, but is applicable, I think, to the German people more broadly as well.

https://www.youtube.com/live/UI72BLrwqR0?is=XzVD77T31B12QI56

To summarize though, it's a few things.

1: The "Stab in the Back" myth from WWI. Part of the Nazi rise to power was based on how the weak willed socialists, jews, insert undesirable had stabbed the army in the back by forcing a surrender in WWI even though the army was winning. This is patently false... the Germany economy was collapsed, the people were starving, and the front was about to collapse. But it was an appealing lie compared to the truth.

Hitler and the Nazi party had locked down the homefront for WWII. They had taken the last decade+ to essentially indoctrinate the population and create an environment where there was, practically, no opposition to the State. The officer corp and general staff was ready for the Totenritt(Death Ride) to the very end and the population was coming along for the ride.

2: The elites were being bribed out of their minds with cash, gold, and land from occupied territory for their loyalty.

3: The decleration of Unconditional Surrender along with the rapacious advance of the Red Army was certainly useful propoganda at least. Did the requirement of unconditional surrender have any impact on the decision making of the leadership... it seems pretty unlikely that Hitler was going to surrender in any event but it could certainly be spun to the population. Similar to the Soviets fighting fiercely to the end knowing what Nazi occupation meant, the Germans knew what Soviet occupation meant and it wasn't an appealing prospect for them.

4: This is more just my personal editorialization of humans. Sunk cost fallacy is a thing... being faced with an awful situation it can easier to just tuck your chin and carry on than face the truth. For the Wehrmacht... they were professionals, it was easier to just focus on the task ahead of you and the battles you're involved in than to focus on the broader, hopeless situation.

For the people of Germany... what else were they going to do...? The Gestapo were active to the end, executing civilians and soldiers alike for any perceived weakness. There was no real organized resistance movement so as any random German your choice looked a lot like; speak up and get hung/shot out of hand by the Gestapo, or keep your head down and try to survive the cataclysmic end of WWII.

Edit: I should add, it's not even this simple. Humans are complicated and they do things for complicated reasons that often appear illogical from an outside perspective. But overall I think these points give a decent high level overview and the rest is getting more into the minutiae of the Nazi power structure, German/Prussian cultural history, and the fallout from WWI and Depression era Germamy.

Holy fuck. You can buy cases of them online, or even in store, and get down into the $2.xx range which is... still a lot but $5/can is wild.

I get annoyed when I let my bulk orders run out and I have to pay gas station prices of $3/can.

Right... even at $3/can that's still about 3 cans/day. That's unhinged.

By this logic, neither is the right to bear arms.

Tl;Dr

They died.

1: Germany doesn't have to remain fully committed to the offensive in the Ardennes because it was basically over once it began. If the Soviets invade, say, a week after the battle of France kicks off, the Germans are already committed and slicing through France. They're literally to the English channel in a week and have cut the Allied forces in half already. They can already smell victory. It's not like they got bogged down in static combat. They went all in and made rapid progress. Eastern Europe is big and the Red Army in 1940 is slow, unorganized, and barely capable of simply holding itself together in place. They would have had time.

1. MAYBE... but they surrendered partially because their military basically collapsed under the German blitz. It wasn't that they capitulated easily, it was that they had no functional ability to resist and wanted to avoid the trauma of Paris in the French countryside getting demolished by a pointless act of defiance. Maybe they try and hold out a bit longer but the Red Army probably isn't going to be making reassuring progress and Germany could just start to shuttle troops over without seriously jeopardizing the mopping up of France.

This prompt says "when the Battle of France had just begun".

The thing about the Battle of France is that by the time it began it was basically over. The war with France was functionally over within the first 2 weeks. Soviet logistics means that they're not making much progress in 2 weeks even with Germany functionally not home.

The Red Army likely would have basically just fallen apart if it was asked to do an offensive operation on the scale of a reverse Barbarossa.

Well, the Battle of France was functionally over within the first 2 weeks.

So... the Soviets roll into German held Poland, immediately start falling apart, their logistics start to collapse. They mill around in Eastern Europe for a while and then Germany pivots back to the east and kills/captures millions of Red Army soldiers a year early before the Red Army has even gotten close to any native German territory.

I think trying to extrapolate that big of a change is essentially impossible, but I don't see any scenario where it works out better for the Allies. The Red Army was in absolute disarray and got systematically pulled apart even on the defensive whuch is the single easiest thing an army can be asked to do. They had 0 capability of conducting offensive operations. You can't just "go all in anyways" when your military literally doesn't possess the ways or means of doing something.

Just like Germany couldn't just "go all in" and decide to invade the British Isles, 1940's Soviet Union can't just flip the "YOLO" switch, point all their soldiers towards Berlin and then turn the offensive light to green.

Their point, I believe, is that the military regularly went against the Emperor's wished, acted without consulting him, lied about the state of the world/war, and generally did what they wanted to, when they wanted to. The godhood of the Emperor was convenient for their own power and I'm sure they had differing degrees of reverence for him(no group is a monolith). But to act like the high command of the IJA/IJN, broadly speaking, drank the "The Emperor is a living god" koolaid just doesn't pass the logical test. If the majority of them truly believed that statement they would not have acted in the manner they did.

"Living god", "voice of god on Earth", etc are typically for the masses and things like that don't really hold up once you're talking to "god" on a daily basis where it's pretty difficult to not notice that they're just a person.

Yacht, jet, land, penthouse in a top 10 international city.

The US is not even remotely teetering on the brink of bankruptcy...

Yep. They're the ones who have talked about passing gun legislation targeting specific groups of people.

The left leaning haven of commiefornia is full of firearm laws that don't apply to literally everyone.

It's wild to me that a history nerd wouldn't find an astonishing number of similarities to early 1930's Germany. For instance, in the early 1930's, Germany wasn't gassing people. They were just telling them they were no longer welcome in Germany, blaming all of their domestic problems on those minorities, and asking why they couldn't just go back to where they came from and stop ruining Germany.

This post in general is a dog whistle for people who think that the crimes of Nazi Germany started in 1942 with the official administrative start of the Final Solution. Instead it was a gradual process. It went from "we don't like these minorities, they are the cause of all of Germany's problems" to "these minorities are being 'invited' to leave" to "we can't emphasize enough that these minorities should leave" to "we are going to move these minorites forcefully" to "eliminate them all".

The average voter absolutely did not care if that's who you mean by "they". The GOP as a whole also very clearly did not care.

I know plenty of Trump voters that claim to hold the 2A as one of their primary causes they vote based on. Almost uniformly I will ask them what federal gun control has been passed in the last 20 years that is informing their decision on who to vote for. They can't usually answer but the only meaningrful answers are Trump unilaterally and illegally banning bump stocks, and forcing Americans to either destroy their property or become felons, by executive fiat. And, just last year, a completely bipartisan bill that expanded federal Red Flag laws.

They don't care. Trump is a Republican and the GOP cares about gun rights while the dastardly Democrats are just waiting for the chance to snatch your guns away. That has been, for many people, so deeply linked in their brain that no amount of actual things that happen make a difference. Nevermind that Kamala and Walz both publicly stated they were gun owners and gun control was not even on the list of things they were worried about tackling at a federal level.

Nevermind that modern expansion of gun control had a large push under the the GOP's lord and savior Reagan. Nevermind that Trump has publicly stated
That sometimes you just have to, "take the guns first". The GOP is the ONLY thing standing between any random American and jackbooted, liberal, stormtroopers kicking down their door and stealing all of your guns. That's just been established as a fact in most people's mind and acknowledging that there is a massive difference between local, state, and federal political policies and initiatives introduces far more gray than many people seem to want to deal with.

I, personally, like owning guns and at a federal level, I am FAR more concerned that the GOP will curtail gun rights than the Democrats will. Guns are a hot button issue and the DNC are spineless, they have absolutely zero interest in touching gun control at a national level. The GOP has proven that they have no problem with gun control as long as it's on their terms. They were testing the waters around trying to de-facto ban trans people from owning firearms.

I mean... at the point of the jewelry end, you could just actually learn to make jewelry and make money too.

The whole point is that, broadly, criminals who steal cash are looking for easy money. The whole point is that they're looking for a get rich quick plan. Buying a bunch of jewelry from multiple pawn shops, learning to melt down precious metals, make jewelry and then market/sell that jewelry is not getting rich quick. It's going to quite a bit of work and effort to essentially just create yourself a job. It would take more than a year to even get to the point where you can make good jewelry that people would actually buy. And then, if you do get audited, where are the records for all the raw materials(silver/gold/precious metals) that you bought located? Your profit is fine... but where are your expenses? Who did you buys tens of thousands of dollars of gold from and where are those receipts.

If it was really as easy as, "swing by Spirit Halloween for a costume change and then go hit up all the pawn shops" there'd probably be a lot more successful heists of large sums of money. You don't think any pawn shops might think it's odd that someone is just coming in and buying a bunch of random shit in cash? None of them might call the cops immediately because they remembered watching the news last night and seeing a story about a recent pile of cash that went missing 2 days ago and now Beardy McBigNose is buying $30k worth of gold chains in cash?

What would you describe Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, and now all of Ukraine as?

Well, I would like to congratulate Russia on stopping NATO expansion by convincing everyone else bordering Russia to join ASAP. At least now NATO will pretty much stop expanding because Russia has successfully convinced anyone who can join that they should.

Russia has been the largest contributor to US expansion in eastern europe by continually being an aggressive and untrustworthy neighbor.