ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
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User ID: 626
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14d ago
You have it backwards, he was writing his utopia and had to cover it up with the thinnest veneer of criticism, so people don't show up at his door with torches and pitchforks.
1/3? Unless I'm missing something, it's another variant of the Monty Hall thing.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14d ago
Haidt was on it pretty early on too, from what I remember, but yeah the classical liberalism thing is a bit of dead end, so I don't think he'll get anywhere.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14d ago
It's a bit weird how late the Republican party was to discover wokeness,
I love how over the course of this forum's lifetime we went from criticizing conservatives for freaking out over "just a couple crazy kids on college campuses" to "being late to discover wokeness".
even when they did, it was usually pretty cringey (think Jordan Peterson/Elon Musk interview).
???
Peterson was screaming about this since 2017 or so, and was pretty wildly hip with young people to the point the entire mainstream media complex was having waking nightmares about him?
But uh, isn't that just a temporary phase?
Yeah, and in my experience so it is with parents as they learn the ropes, and the kids grow up an become less absorbing. But I think it's understandable that new parents get completely overwhelmed.
It's incredibly cringe how some guys will betray their closest friends and become completely pussywhipped by a girl they just met the day before. We don't need to encourage and reward that sort of behavior.
Sure, but discouraging these sort of behaviors went both ways. Getting pussywhipped was cringe, but so was "scaring away the hoes" or whatever the kids call it nowadays.
But it seems like so much of modern American life is built around this ideal of "the nuclear family" where the father comes straight home from work, sits in "the family room" with his kids, watching TV, and has no friends or hobbies outside the house.
I come from more of a clan culture, so the "nuclear family" thing looks weird to me as well. Not saying there's nothing in the culture around parenting that can't be improved, but no matter the improvements, the childless are still going to feel left behind, much like the girlfriendless.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14d ago
But from my perspective, it's more like all of my friends are being brainwashed by a cult that forces them to drop connections to anyone outside the cult.
I'm on the same side of the "being a parent" divide, so it's not that I don't sympathize, but I can't help but notice that this is exactly what it felt like when my older friends suddenly started obsessing over girls. Maybe this time for sure it's the natural course of human development that's wrong, but I wouldn't count on it.
I'd propose that if we're calling the literal global hegemon of the time "very primitive", maybe it's time to take step back and reassess if we're using the right standard.
If you want to say that the tech-level of the time allowed for more advanced solutions, yes I agree. The problem is that it takes time for these advanced solutions to get the required infrastructure to support it, that's why you see horses being used in Europe well after the war (into the 60's in poorer countries, and even into the early 90's behind the Iron Curtain - I still remember seeing quite a lot of them when I was a kid). Not being able to instantly snap that infrastructure into existence is not a sign of primitiveness (though taking your sweet time until the 90's probably is).
Germany was in the situation where the vast majority of their divisions were exactly as maneuverable as in WW1 the second they got off trains and hitched their guns to the horse teams. My dad had an older artilleryman friend who said they were jealous of the panzer units heading east, but very grateful for the horses heading back east because you can't eat a tank.
Here I'll just quote my response to Hyperion:
I mean, even there that's not particularly backwards and low-tech for that era. Especially if you look at the amount of infrastructure in the east, and the German's chronic problems with just finding enough oil, it might even start looking like a rational choice.
But in any case, the reason I did a double-take, and an now at the stage where I'll die on this hill, is that they were talking about the economy, not army logistics.
At any rate, its important to keep in mind just how pre-modern this country was. It was not, for most average people, a country of cars driving through cities the way Nazi propaganda films made it look. It was a country of people living in rural farms, where they didn't have electricity or radios, and had to take a train to the nearest city if they wanted to watch a news reel.
If someone is basing their view of the German tech-level on propaganda and WWII Hollywood action films, I can see why you might want to correct that. But if you fight propaganda with propaganda, you're not going to end up with a more accurate picture of the world, you're going to snap right back around to something just as inaccurate, but from the other side. Like, yeah, people don't understand how pre-modern Germany was, but that's not because of anything specific to Germany, it's because they don't realize how pre-modern the world was at the time.
So I'll go right back to the raw production numbers I cited, and point out they were roughly on-par with Britain. They obviously ultimately lost, but the run for the money that they gave to Europe + US would indicate that they weren't backwards or low-tech. Either that, or everyone else was as well, which makes those descriptors meaningless.
Also re: locomotives in particular, you can tell where Prussia used to end, and where the Russian Empire began, just by looking at the railway map of Europe. To be clear: not the 1930's and 40's map - the one from current year. Like, I don't know if you realize how tall the order of "Germany was a backwards low-tech economy" is.
I would imagine that the sheer scale implies the use of some sort of mass transportation system, like a railway, to deliver the raw resources needed for their production. Also factories. But if Tooze says it's mules all the way down, I guess I better trust the experts.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
14d ago
I mean, even there that's not particularly backwards and low-tech for that era. Especially if you look at the amount of infrastructure in the east, and the German's chronic problems with just finding enough oil, it might even start looking like a rational choice.
But in any case, the reason I did a double-take, and an now at the stage where I'll die on this hill, is that they were talking about the economy, not army logistics.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
15d ago
Then please step me through how these horses and mules built something to the tune of 100K aircraft - roughly the same number that the Brits did. Did the Germans use some Aryan über-mules, or were the Brits fake-industrialized as well?
We could spend all day speaking past each other.
Sorry I'm seeing you put a lot of effort and my reply probably won't be very satisfactory... but this is also why I have to jump in - you're right, we are speaking past each other, and I'm afraid all this effort is in vain. None of this addresses my argument that Germany cannot be accurately described as doing "Potemkin industrialization". Feel free to post quotes from the book - they are actually very interesting - but if you do so, please do it with the knowledge that this type of argument is not going to move me. It's not because I'm stubborn, it's that it presents a very narrow context.
The quotes don't let me see the entire economy of Germany, let alone let me compare it to the UK or the US. The pre-war times was the era of the Great Depression, there were incredibly insane policies, superficially meant to alleviate the problems of the working class, being implemented all over the world at that time. I'd have to dust off my Mises-Libertarian days' notes, but if I recall correctly, America was literally arresting people for selling their goods too cheaply, in order to fight deflation. In war time everybody switched to a command economy as well, and I assure you, economic pathologies are endemic in those regardless of whether you're a Nazi, or a nominal "capitalist".
In math / tech fields there's the concept of a sanity check. The idea is that it can take a lot of effort to reach a conclusion, and it's pretty easy to make a small mistake somewhere in the process, that will turn whatever it is you're deriving from representative of reality to clown world. So to ensure your conclusion is (/has a decent chance of being) correct, you come up with an easy test that will let you know if you made a wrong turn somewhere. For example, when you're deriving a formula for some physical metric you're interested in, you check the units of measurement that the formula spits out. If your formula for acceleration spits out anything other than units of velocity divided by units of time, you know you screwed up.
And so, I proposed to take the raw output of tanks / aircraft / ships / munitions, and compare them between the belligerents of the war. These couldn't have been Potemkin tanks, and Potemkin aircraft, and Potemkin bombs, that they were using, otherwise the war would resolve a lot quicker than 6 years. You can't build real military equipment in a Potemkin factory, so I think those were real as well, and therefore I only see 3 possibilities:
- Germany did not go through "Potemkin industrialization" - IMO, most likely
- All the major world powers also went through "Potemkin industrialization" to a similar extent as Germany - also likely as per the above argument re: Great Depression era economics, but makes the criticism of German economy meaningless
- Germany did go through "Potemkin industrialization", and no one else did, so the Nazis were fighting the war with one hand tied behind their back, which would imply they would wipe the floor with the UK and the USSR had they gone with more sane economic policies - the least likely option, IMO
Now, if you want I can go watch the videos you linked, and we can have this conversation in the next week's thread after I had the time to digest them, and we both cooled down... but also tell me, do they actually address the kind of argument I'm making? Is there any kind "big picture" comparative analysis they go through that will satisfy my need for a sanity check?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
15d ago
Sorry, if my antagonism / frustration is directed at anyone, it's more at people like Tooze.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
15d ago
To be clear I do find the general topic interesting, but I don't want to portray myself as someone who spends his free time studying these things. I definitely appreciate the information!
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
15d ago
I would suggest that having one of your major tank facilities only able to crank out 2 tanks a day while fighting the combined industrial might of the USSR, UK, & US might not be a sign that they had the best possible economic/industrial set up before the war.
I've been pointing to this link throughout this thread, that I lifted from Wikipedia for a quick sanity check. They seem, at first glance, roughly on par with Britain. Those are not basket-case numbers no matter which way you slice it, though obviously not enough to withstand the combined industrial might of the USSR, UK, & US, and I still don't see how WWII even gets started on Potemkin industrialization, let alone gets as far as it did.
This whole thing feels like playing zoom/pan/crop with facts to paint a very specific picture.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
15d ago
I see nothing objectionable in what you said here, but it doesn't sound to me like this is what the other posters were getting at.
I still don't understand why anyone has to answer for Tucker, but no one has to answer for these weird academics / officials. More people watch him? Ok, but academics are taken more seriously. Position tends to trump numbers from my experience.
Also, I seem to remember some politician defending Mao on British TV, and only irrelevant internet Chuds getting upset over it.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
15d ago
Both Germany and the USSR primarily used horses and mules for logistics in WW2
Yeah, and so did France as per your own link. The UK got early on the mechanization train - good for them - but that does not mean that everyone who didn't is a primitive economic basketcase, because that would include practically the entire rest of the world, and the word loses it's meaning. The second issue is that all that mechanization somehow didn't seem to help them significantly outperform Germany in terms of production. Those numbers should not be possible if this portrayal was accurate.
Idk about radios but you can read the aforementioned book to get all the details about backwardness and ridiculous inefficiency of nazi economy. They had their moments because their opponents weren't much better and for most of the war their main one(USSR) had economical system even more backward and inefficient.
The problem with this argument is that it would require Britain to be a backwater as well, because their production was pretty much on-par, and at that point what does "backwater" even mean?
It's funny that you mention Diamond zebras thing because it's one of the greatest examples of WNs not being able to read. Diamond specifically makes a point of distinctioning between taming and domesticating animals.
That doesn't change the fact that following the publishing of his book, lot's of people were running around saying that you can't tame zebras, which is a pretty good analogue for this situation, because I expect "Wages of Destruction" to be full of strictly correct statements painting a false picture.
The other issue is Diamond was playing fast and loose with his definitions. If memory serves, under the one he gave every animal subject to Mendelian heritability is domesticable. Then he kind-of-sort-of implied that for an animal to be domesticable, tameness would have to be hereditary, but never outright said it, because it would violate the definition. Then he tried using an experiment that ran for all of 6 years to prove that zebras are impossible to domesticate.
Also, he again writes not about abstract possibility of domestication, but of it feasibility and desurebility for Neolithic tribesman on large time scales that are necessary for this. Of course in modern times some Siberian biologists can and did domesticated foxes in half of century but I don't think we should consider native European population more dumb because they didn't do it thousands of years ago.
I'm not into calling any population "dumb", but if it was so impractical, why was one the first thing done by Europeans, when they showed up, to tame them and use them for transport? I think it was more practical in the neolithic times, then when we already started seeing the beginnings of motorization.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
15d ago
What metric are we going when judging the German economy, production levels, or production quality? Because I'm seeing a lot of picking and choosing depending on what's convenient (Wunderaffen are irrelevant, it's all about production / The number of German radios is irrelevant, it's that they never were that good). If you want to say "well, obviously it should be a combination of these factors", then I'd propose that the country that Blitzkrieged France got the trade-offs right, rather than the other way around.
This whole meme is just bizarre to me. Like, if you want to say that the German economy had fatal flaws that ultimately cost them the war, that's one thing, but it's insane to claim it was a low-tech backwater.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
15d ago
Yeah, I think I'm starting to see what's going on here. That point said "international market" so "ho hum, while it may be true that Germany had more radios than the rest of Europe put together, but other countries weren't buying German radios, so we weren't lying".
This is starting to get all the smell of "it's literally impossible to tame zebras" that Jared Diamond spawned.
This is all with the caveat that I barely even have a passing interest in history... but it's just not adding up.
You can tell me all about how they outran their logistics, and couldn't recover their tanks, but I still don't see how we get to a 6 year war, that got as far as it did, if one of the belligerents is an economic, horse and mule drawn, basket case. Either all of them are, and the fight went the way it did, for as long as it did, because they were more or less evenly matched, or this portrayal is itself propaganda.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills...
Sure, I can buy the Nazis skewing their economy heavily towards the military sector, to the detriment of civilians, but portraying the economy writ-large as "horse and mule drawn" makes no sense. Forget about the Wunderwaffen, tell me how the horses and mules produce, in terms of raw numbers, enough tanks, fighters, bombers, and their respective munitions, to conquer France, challenge Britain, and drive deep into the Soviet Union at the same time!
Thanks for addressing my argument directly. While that does force me to readjust somewhat, I'm not sure it's enough to go all the way and vindicate the portrayal of Germany that the other posters have put forward. So before we continue I just want to make clear what I am, and am not arguing for.
What I'm NOT saying: Germany was Aryan Wakanda, the most advanced nation on Earth that only lost because they were outnumbered.
What I AM saying is: Germany was not a backwards and low-tech economy. While not the most advanced in the world, it was easily in the top 10, if not the top 5 most advanced nations on the planet. I don't think this is particularly due to the Nazis coming up with some brilliant formula to manage their country, quite the opposite in fact, I think national socialism was quite a bit of a clusterfuck. In fact I'm somewhat bemused at the idea that Tooze discovered something new, or cleared up some misconception, when these arguments were being made since the war started. The Nazis simply inherited way too much capital for the portrayal as backwards, low-tech, and Potemkin-industrialized to stick (in fact, I'll take a wild guess that that Czech industrial infrastructure was largely built by Germans as well).
I accept that the numbers I gave conflated the quality of the equipment being produced, and that the UK and US advanced quicker and performed during the course of the war, but I don't think that's relevant to the arguments being made in the course of this conversation. Achieving the level of production for even these simpler aircraft would have been impossible without a strong industrial base. If you could pull that off while being backwards and low-tech, Poland would have boasted of a similarly-sized and equipped air force.
I concede that the numbers also included external territories, and thus overestimated German performance. It was, after all, a simple sanity check. But if we drill down, do you think we'll find a backwards and low-tech country, or one of the most industrialized ones at the time?
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