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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Fun fact: during the early part of WWII, when Germany had signed a series of economic and political pacts with the Soviet Union (and before Germany invaded the USSR, obviously), they shipped various weapons systems and other advanced military technologies to Russia as part of the deals. One of these shipments included advanced 37mm anti-aircraft guns and turrets that had originally been earmarked for installation on the Bismarck, which was instead equipped with older, less effective guns. When she made her one and only sortie in 1941, she was fatally crippled by actual biplanes.

    The moral of the story is: “don’t give shit to Russia”.




  • so they largely did just that right up until Pearl Harbor made it so they could not turn away

    FWIW we (the United States) could conceivably have gone on turning away from what Germany was doing even after Pearl Harbor (although that was unlikely given Roosevelt’s anti-Germany stance). Hitler declared war on the US on December 11th, not the other way around.







  • Chamberlain has gotten a bum rap from history - he did not think that appeasing Hitler was anything other than a temporary expedient to buy time. The British government at the time (not just Neville himself) felt that Germany’s modern air force was powerful enough to destroy them on its own and that they couldn’t challenge Hitler until they had enough modern fighters (Hurricanes and Spitfires) to defend themselves. In additional fact, the only reason Britain had these fighters in the pipeline at all was because Chamberlain had resisted the entreaties of Britain’s own “bomber mafia”, a group of RAF officers and industrialists who wanted Britain to build their own massive bomber fleet for offensive action in lieu of defensive fighters.

    In retrospect, the impact of the bomber was vastly overestimated in the 1930s, as evidenced by the fact that Germany ended up suffering a much more massive assault at the hands of British and American bomber fleets later in the war while continuing to increase military production all the while. Britain under Chamberlain should have stood up to Hitler much earlier, but this was an error of judgement and not an act of capitulation.






  • I’m totally amazed that they pulled that off so well.

    That’s been their MO for a long time now. In the runup to the 2000 election, Al Gore’s inarguable main strength was his championing of the Internet, such that “{whatever} superhighway” (derived from his coining of the term “Information Superhighway”) had already become a well-worn joke format. Karl Rove took Gore’s perfectly defensible - and actually 100% true - claim that he “took the initiative in creating the Internet” and through simple repetition turned it into “Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet”, making Gore seem like a crazed person. Which helped Bush Jr. get elected and cemented the GOP’s current control over the Supreme Court.