johnfabian
3mo 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.
johnfabian
3mo ago
johnfabian
3mo 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.
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
3mo ago
Or is there something about the nature of modern combat that means military supply chains require this sort of "socialist" central planning to be effective?
Yes. I'll try to keep this short because I'm meeting a friend in fifteen minutes so I've got to go fast. But with the advent of heavy artillery, planes, tracked vehicles, trucks, etc. the fighting strength of armies have switched rather decisively from individual armed men to the equipment they operate. Because this heavy equipment requires so much fuel, ammunition, maintenance, etc. to operate, this means that the center of gravity (in the Clausewitzian sense) of any army of the 20th or 21st century is in its administrative "rear" and the logistical operations they run. An army separated from its source of supply ceases to become an effective fighting force and has to devote most of its time to somehow surviving, if it can.
This is why the operational and strategic doctrines that emerged during WWII and after focused on creating ways for the mobile forces of your army to target these rear elements. The Soviet or German plan for any great offensive was to figure out the best way to achieve this: usually by creating some kind of breakthrough on a narrow front that your tank/mobile infantry divisions can exploit to get hundreds of kilometres into the enemy rear and target the really important things: railway junctions, bridges, communication nodes, ammo depots, repair yards, slaughterhouses, granaries, oil dumps, etc.
WWII is the period I'm most familiar with but usually armies operated even then with much more rear personnel than those at the front. The Western Allies had a ratio generally of 1:6 frontline infantry/armour:rest of personnel. The Commonwealth forces generally had more artillerymen in a corps than infantry. Germans and Soviets ran more infantry-heavy because they were less mechanized (especially the Germans).
You don't read many memoirs from cooks or artillerymen or tank repairmen because they didn't see much combat, at least among the western Allies. In the more wider-open Eastern Front things were more fluid and the Germans were particularly enthusiastic about pressing administrative personnel and other rear-area types into infantry roles because of desperate manpower shortages. In any case in the mass encirclements that characterized the big offensives in the East it didn't matter what your job was, your life was on the line and everyone had to fight.
johnfabian
3mo ago
How young would the girl have to be before the immorality of the age difference overwhelmed the immorality of the casual sex? You've established an adult man having sex with a 12 year old is morally superior to casual sex with another consenting adult woman. What about a 9 year old? A 6 year old?
johnfabian
3mo ago
why would you pick his sons over Ivanka? It's not like she's popular or anything but at least to me she appears much more mentally with it than either of his adult sons.
johnfabian
3mo ago
This felt less like a prediction and more like a lay-up. I couldn't see any other course of action for the Democrats.
johnfabian
3mo ago
Would Hezbollah have any moral concerns about killing Druze? Are they not viewed somewhat as Muslim apostates?
Partly it has to do with what /u/Rov_Scam pointed out, but I don't think that's the heart of it. Mickelson had long been a fan favourite, the second biggest golfer of the Tiger years, and was playing decently well into his 50s... even won his sixth major in 2021. So for him to jump ship from the tour that had made him a big star felt like a betrayal for people. Especially considering the money involved for his depreciating talent. It's one thing for an up-and-comer to take the big payout; sports careers are unpredictable, you could get a career-ending injury at any time, and lots of golfers simply lose their mojo for no explicable reason. He was also a big instigator of the scheme (he needed to be: big gambling debts!). For a fading older golfer to schism the world of pro golf for his own benefit after decades of being well-loved by the fans and by the prize purses... yeah, people didn't like it.
edit: The other thing to consider is that LIV as a product is just bad. This might all be forgiven if it were equal to or an improvement to the PGA tour in entertainment. It's not. All the changes that have been made to the format (teams, 54 holes, shotgun starts, music, etc.) have made it at various times annoying, crude, stupid, and boring. The talent is there but the players are not competitive. And the viewership as a result is practically non-existent. It exists only as long as the Saudis keep feeling happy about pouring billions of dollars into it per year.
johnfabian
3mo 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.
johnfabian
3mo ago
I never really understood the appeal of golf. Does Trump love the game for what is truly is, or does he love it because it's a rich person sport you can brag about with other rich people that play that sport? Based on his skills and anecdotes, it sounds like he actually is passionate about the sport.
Golf is an endless difficult and rewarding sport. It's a game that just throws endless euphoria and disappointment at you. I love it desperately (I just came back from a holiday where I played golf every day, sometimes multiple times, for two weeks) and I understand why some might not. But Trump loving golf makes a lot of sense to me.
johnfabian
3mo ago
I think this is overstated. DeChambeau isn't really hated, his detractors think he's just more of an annoying kinda weird dude. Mickelson gets more ire, as do the LIV golfers who have generally failed to impress since the move. And of course your wording absolves Patrick Reed from consideration.
Also winning another major does big things for you. Both Koepka and DeChambeau seem fairly well-esteemed to me at the moment, just from idly browsing /r/golf.
johnfabian
4mo ago
Those saccharine smiles in the audience, that praise him as being an American hero, smiling as they stab him in the back. Ugly.
It's not stabbing Grandpa in the back to take away his car keys. It might feel like a betrayal, but it's for the best.
johnfabian
4mo ago
For larger massacres, generally. But lots of ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers had their surrenders not-so-politely declined; this was sort of glossed over in the post-war official histories but appear frequently in AARs. Also as Ioper notes due to the influx of draftees and soldiers from other branches into the Waffen-SS (whose units were almost always subordinated or OKH or OKW) just because someone was in the SS doesn't mean they were SS.
johnfabian
4mo ago
Depends on the period, roughly speaking. During WWII Germany was of course villainized in propaganda and amongst western Allied soldiers; massacres of surrendering German soldiers were not regular but also not uncommon. SS troops were frequently shot out of hand due to several high-profile incidents. In the mass surrenders at the end of the war surrendering Germans were not classified as POWs but rather as "disarmed enemy soldiers" who were not entitled to the levels of treatment outlined by the Geneva Conventions. The claims surrounding the "Rhine death camps" are overblown but there was genuine systemic mistreatment of surrendering Wehrmacht personnel during and immediately after the war.
The dive in relations with the Soviet Union led to the quick realization that Europe and the United States might need to fight the Reds and there were a bunch of people with lots of experience killing Russkies. This is what initiated the rehabilitation of ex-Wehrmacht senior officers and the start of the "clean Wehrmacht" myth in the west. I'm short on time but I might come back to this later because there are some interesting dynamics at play here.
After the end of the Cold War the changing political realities and the opening of Soviet archives doomed the reputation of the Wehrmacht. There was no way to deny their involvement in horrendous war crimes or the depth of their entwinement with Nazi rule.
A simple way to look at the arc of it all is to look at how officers convicted of war crimes to Allied forces were treated. Take Kurt Meyer for example: sentenced to death, reduced to life in prison, transferred to Germany, released permanently all within ten years.
johnfabian
4mo ago
That's very possible. I think if a bystander wasn't killed there would be a decent chance 20ish% of the population would have settled on it being staged.
johnfabian
4mo ago
After reflecting on this for an hour, I have collected my thoughts. Obviously this is bad. I don't think people are going to jump immediately to start making nail bombs, but Trump getting killed or dying under conspiracy-able circumstances were what I always feared as a tipping point to some kind of actual level of civil conflict in the US. The shooter has achieved maybe the second-worst possibility after killing Trump in trying to kill him and failing.
Idle culture war prediction: "stochastic terrorism" is quietly retired as a term. 95% of people who ever used that unironically have spent the last few months saying Trump is a fascist who is going to end democracy and everyone should be doing their best to make sure he doesn't win. I think it's sort of a shame because there clearly is a genuine phenomenon there that it touches on, just the nature of it makes it so prone to abuse I suppose it was inevitably going to become useless.
johnfabian
4mo 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
4mo ago
AP says two dead: the shooter and one attendee.
johnfabian
4mo ago
Not the first time this has happened. People working within these types of political systems are generally better at this kind of coalition-building. This whole left coalition was assembled in two weeks after the election announcement. Meanwhile Americans are fretting about whether or not four months is enough time to switch candidates.
johnfabian
4mo ago
Edit: Another point not about lately is Kamala Harris best shot to be president is just to be elected vice and then wait for him to die in office which is not that implausible. And she gets no negatives if the election is lost and is in a strong position for 2028.
Very much not, I would think. It's looking very much like she will not be elected vice-president again, barring some immense turnaround in the polls. If she goes into a primary in 2028 I would not think she is going to finish among the five top vote-getters. Her unique advantage and only asset is that at this point she is the candidate the Dems can pivot to without risking fragmentation, especially if Biden gives her the Official Blessing.
So her best play to be President at this point is to sit back and let others push Biden out, and then gracefully (if mock-regrettingly!) accept the scepter.
johnfabian
4mo ago
Compare that time Hillary collapsed at an event and got thrown into her limo like a side of beef. Really bad, but immediately her surrogates (essentially the entire establishment media) were out there fighting it hard and within a few days she was doing appearances where she was shaking it off.
If Biden's debate was a Category 5 Hurricane of a PR storm, Hillary fainting was at best a weak tropical storm. Yeah the optics weren't good but an aging politician fainting in hot, humid weather (presumably over-dressed and maybe a decent coating of makeup) isn't some great disaster as long as it's not a sign of some other problem. Much more of an embarrassment to shove under the rug than a critical failing.
johnfabian
4mo ago
I think it depends. The fatal weakness is any mention of "inclusivity" as a core value; once you do that you might as well roll over and present your belly because there is no way to defend yourself against someone with greater oppression points.
Something that had been consistently found in polls was the general perception that both Trump and Biden were weak candidates, and only by virtue of being pitted against each other via inertia were their flaws masked in the predicted election outcomes.
The Democrats were smart (or more accurately, lucky that Biden had such a disastrous performance at the debate) to force their unpopular candidate out first.
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