xthetenth

For that matter how frequently do you see non-enemy Iraqis? I mean there's a war in a country and the people in that country barely make an appearance like they're an afterthought.

Ahh, good old subnormality. It's like a bleeding heart liberal decided to ape R. Crumb lapsing into prose. Also you mentioned Lordi which means it's time for renowned classic GWAR:

Tank is big and heavy like it has armor and big gun but has neither. Very pretentious. Poke it in the side, it is soft like Sherman.

I'd argue it's a function of the ratio of volume to mass, and therefore the Nashorn is an excellent fit.

Narrower and taller than an ISU. The Jagdtiger is closer in height to it than an Elefant.

While we're linking stuff from bands making bad music in genres they don't belong in, have the only universally liked song from The Smashing Pumpkins' Adore: I won't blame you if you tab away from the video. EDIT: Oh god I listened to the album. There are only three good songs on it. They're in the first four songs of the album, conveniently enough. And I actually like a decent amount of goffik music.

I still can't see anything other than Moby Dick in a Sandbox from American Sniper. There's a pretty sound anti-war reading to be made from it in that it takes in all these guys and everybody who isn't a true believer or in it for revenge gets ground down, but any reading is pretty much propaganda for are brave hero. Also the middle bit of the movie where they're running around with punisher skulls on their stuff makes me think of the Mitchell and Webb look where the SS guys are wondering if they're the baddies. I spent that section trying not to snort under my breath. I'm pretty terrible at being an American though.

Well there is a handy dandy means of determining which is the case, that being that words have meanings, and rhinocerous and nashorn refer to the same animal. Other than that it's tall boxy and grey which is the height of pretension, especially when it doesn't have the armor to be a box tank.

Chuck Yeager was very good at talking about doing things that would mean Chuck Yeager is a good pilot, no matter what the facts are. Here's a big old source dump post on the subject of B-36 intercepts: http://www.tank-net.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=9510&p=179123. The quote from Magnesium Overcast is there in the book, so I'm confident in the Big Stick quotes being in that one.

Extreme optimism is generally common for paper planes pushing the boundaries of performance, because if they actually knew all the problems they'd run into they'd have a working plane.

*9.75% chance of one dying, .025% chance of both for a pair of two people. But point stands. Aren't we already at the point where overall we aren't breeding over reproduction but our population increase is instead driven by the disparity in numbers between the young and old? I'd argue that a huge driver for slowing reproduction is a decline in premature mortality, so it may end up being you must breed and raise your replacements when you shuffle off the mortal coil or get someone to do it for you in such a situation.

This is very true. However, has there been any culture so dedicated to the generation of reams of information regarding the everyday and the banal as the current one? Actually it's going to be interesting, because we keep so much data but we keep our data with such impermanent methods. They already grossly misrepresent, and yet there's plenty of information out there on how to do things well and how things really work. There's stuff giving perspectives on things that got no ink in antiquity these days. A huge amount of what we know about the lives of anyone who wasn't an elite is kept in what they used and their stuff, but now basically anyone can write at length. You've got all sorts of video of people shooting well and discussing the nuances of modern guns, for example. It's got to be a lot easier dealing with biased sources when they aren't literally the only source on the matter at hand.

I'd kind of be surprised if the mythology became quite that bad because we've got a huge amount of documentation of the things in use, so if they decide to use them in cripplingly moronic ways there's evidence that no, they're bad and wrong.

Knights had to be hoisted into the saddle is one of my favorites. Fencing in a full harness bears as much resemblance to wrestling or judo as the sort of dramatic swordfighting where the heroes wade through bad guys with the sort of cuts that'd only really work against unarmored opposition. When the guys wearing that sort of armor attack each other's balance so you can get to where you can hit the other guy in his weak points as much as anything else, you'd better well be able to move in it. Some things are clumsy or awkward, but if you can't move you can't fight. I mean you're not going to be doing things like assaulting walls with dudes in full harnesses if they can't move pretty well. It's like effete Victorian fencers not being able to wave a real sword around with their fingers and proclaiming weapons that people actually used with their lives on the line were unusably heavy and incompatible with Technique and all sorts of lovely victorianisms.

The Middle East is kind of its own deal and what happened in Africa doesn't necessarily map cleanly to what happened there, and examples where groups with no experience actually running things came into power definitely don't because there were governments and a continuous elite, the problem was cementing their rule without an external force giving them control or a real ideological backbone to legitimize them. There's a lot of really fragmented identity stuff in the Middle East, and European meddling in the borders of what had been the Ottoman provincial borders. For example, the French going out of their way to add more Muslims to Lebanon, a country which actually made things work for quite a while with one of the few decent power-sharing arrangements with their system of confessionalism (until the fixed representation ratios caved under changing demography), but a lot of countries wound up with whoever controlled the colonial power structure controlling the new countries, and often ending up in a situation where they needed to run some really problematic regimes to maintain that hold. Part of the reason for the whole Arab nationalism thing during the early Cold War was because it was the only really coherent national identity that would actually work for making nation(s) rather than countries, and that was overall a bad show. I'm gonna have to go back through my books to really firmly argue this though, I might do it or I might be too busy with work.

No, it's that the US generally is endearingly earnest about trying to make things better or at least feeling like they are, so they don't have the stomach for the usual procedures of setting it up so a local minority has the power and fights desperately to preserve it. That sort of vicious power politics that keeps everyone too busy to fight anyone other than each other in the meantime until things really come to a head isn't exactly going to fly. Which is probably just as well considering what a hash the British and French made of things in the long run.

That worked right up until it didn't. Although making it a formal part of the Empire might provide a splendid chance to rationalize the bloody borders, which generally do a splendid job of creating dysfunctional states that most certainly aren't nations. The thing is the US is a bit squeamish about the sort of intentionally destructive sort of trick that trades problems now for problems sometime down the road, so maintaining control isn't easy in the slightest. Kicking the can down the road is how we got here in the first place though.

Compare the scale of iron and steel production at the start of the early modern to the classical period. Compare the ability to make large castings and the like. The industrial steam engine has way more in common with the early modern cannon than the classical aeolipile. Or if you want to be a real jerk, compare post third century Rome to Pax Romana Rome. They're vastly different creatures, and The Graph™'s hypothesis falls apart totally when confronted with late Western Rome having as much in common with the early medieval as the height of the empire. The collapse of trade and devolution to a local economy was a huge change, and the end of the crisis only somewhat ameliorated things. But the start of the feudal manor with workers tied to the land was Domitian's reforms at the end of the Crisis of the Third Century, and a lot of the social structures in the previous western empire's territory are a much smoother progression from the late empire than usually presented because face it, what the barbarians wanted more than anything else was to become Romans. Stuff like the Vandal kingdom and the Visigothic Kingdom are trying to be successor states to Rome and continue on, but the final destruction of the Roman trade network during the Arab expansion finally hosed that plan.

There is a finite number of true believers. There is a significantly less finite number of people who will join up to strike at a hated foe. The goal is to prevent the latter from doing so. If going and being a useful invested member of society is a good life, living on the run and fighting and dying starts sounding a whole lot less like a good idea. Just look at what happened with the cycle of attack and reprisal in Israel and Palestine allowing lovely folks like Hamas to gain control over Palestine by making things into a war and opening their arms to their new recruits. Compare it to something like the Thai work against their little communist insurgency. And bullshit. We won the Iraqi insurgency just as much as we won the insurgency following the slavers' revolt, which is to say that we created an environment where the worst actors get to control the events in the region if they outlast us.

The other question is what can we do about it that would lead to a lasting solution and not just make the worst assholes more popular for the next go at it? Because taking the lead hasn't exactly worked well, and what we're doing is bleeding the hell out of them and doing a whole bunch less to make it look like we're the bad guys. People have a remarkable ability to forget and forgive the sins of people opposing who they think are the bad guys and it's high time we have that work for us rather than against us.

The real question is what happens when you factor in quality of life. Do you just freeze at your prime, or wait till middle age? Also there are regions where questions of infant mortality are really different. What about regions in Africa where the birth rate is still problematically high, and that's something correlated with high infant mortality?

Every bit of history that is lost forever is a reason why historical studies should be well funded, because some things are on a time limit, and we can't know what until it's too late. However, on the other hand, when we have treasures that are safe and stable, it could be well worth it to keep them buried until you can do it right. Don't just tear things out of the ground, do the history right. And wipe the damned ideology off the face of the map. Destroy them and make being part of the modern world so compelling that nobody ever wants to forsake it to be a barbarian.

Look, sometimes people make rookie mistakes, like letting Polish cavalry charge their tanks (such as at Mokra), and having troops who are a bit more practiced isn't going to make assaulting a fixed position easier.

Depends on when and who you're talking about whether Arianism was heterodoxy or heresy. There was kind of a big deal attempt to resolve the differences between the two. But it's really kind of misleading to label one of the competitors for the official canon when it was codified as a heresy because that implies there was an official canon when it started for it to diverge from. Then again this is a religion which had a remarkably ill-defined canon for a lot of the early days, including things like coopting a priapic statue worshipped by local people into a Saint Guerlichon, the veneration (ha ha) of which kept the monks busy making new members for the statue.

Then stop getting your little digi-fritzchens dead!