Tim Geithner - We can't cut the size of govt. We must pay more taxes. by AURaptor

Sig

I really agree

Byte

I mostly agree, but maintain that we didn't really get out of the depression, we didn't recover economically until 1953. I suspect the new deal and the war both made things worse.

Riona

You can disagree with historical reality, but it's not really a matter of opinion. When Germany surrendered to Russia, the US troops were just at the German border. It's absurd to say that we defeated Germany. It also really ill conceived to say that the American war was against Germany and not Japan.

The only thing we accomplished militarily beside demonstration of air superiority and nucleqr weapons which enabled us to take over the british empire, was the dissolution of Imperial Japan, creating a power vacuum hat spawned communist china, and a short term disastrous nationalist regime with out support, which by itself killed twice as many people as the holocaust, to say nothing of Mao.

If you want to argue that the US defeated Britain in the war, which is the point I think Byte is making, you might have a point, as long as you're not making the stock but demonstably false argument that the US either defeated Germany or ended the holocaust.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Tuesday, June 28, 2011 2:14 PM

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." -- William Casey, Reagan's presidential campaign manager & CIA Director (from first staff meeting in 1981)

Quote:
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
Possibly, I haven't done as much research into the impacts of the New Deal. But the WW2 impact seemed pretty straight forward, to the point where it almost seems like America has been trying to revisit the whole war-time economy boost thing ever since, and failing abysmally at it.

The problem with the war-time economy boost thing is that it's partially illusionary - production does sometimes increase, but resources are being exploded and consumed in an unrecoverable fashion. Eventually you use enough resources that supply and demand becomes a little broken and you lower both the baseline economy AND the average standard of living.

Bingo. That was why I brought it up. The conventional wisdom seems to remain, "It worked then, so it should work now!" Truth is, as even DT admits, nobody really seems to know WHAT worked during WWII and just after, only that SOMETHING happened in the aftermath to propel the US to a preeminent position on the world stage.

What we should realize by now is that this idea that wars boost economies has been pretty conclusively disproven, and even if they DID provide any boost, it would be a purely temporary, unsustainable one, because as you so rightly point out, you're really exploding all your production, quite literally!

"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservatives." - John Stuart Mill

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Tuesday, June 28, 2011 3:05 PM

Mike

Depends on your goal. I would not want the US cold war dominance position. That happened because of the militayr shift to air power, to which Japan was our only serious competitor, but Russia later became one.

Economically, the US was already on the way up from post civil war to 1913, the rise of american industry had more to do with our lack of taxation. We recovered to some extent due to the inertia of that growth.

You could argue that credit worked in the 20s, and that carried us through, but credit also caused the problem. Overall, it's definitely not worth the cost, and I would skip it.

It's also worth noting that the current US GDP is a lie for two reasons:

1) half of it is the govt itself. The govt is neither efficient nor productive, and cannot survive on taxing itself.

2) about 1/3 of it is transactional wealth fromm international finance which will leave for the cayman islands tomorrow morning if we try to tax it, because it is not american, and is no ,onger tied to anything physical, and exists only on computer systems. It stays with us because we don't try to tax it. The minute we start, it leaves. Maybe we want it to leave, but that's another issue.

At any rate, the great depression was not parallel to this situation. We didn't owe $20 trillion

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Tuesday, June 28, 2011 5:29 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:

You can disagree with historical reality, but it's not really a matter of opinion. When Germany surrendered to Russia, the US troops were just at the German border. It's absurd to say that we defeated Germany. It also really ill conceived to say that the American war was against Germany and not Japan.

DT: You're really stretching here, and you're wrong, badly.

America declared war on Japan on December 8, 1941. On December 11, Germany, bound by treaty, declared war in the United States, which in turn declared war on Germany and Italy.

To say that the U.S. war wasn't against Germany is to denigrate the service of every American who fought in the European Theatre in that war.

By the way, here's a map of Germany on May 1st, 1945. That's the U.S. and allied troops well inside the German borders to the west, having liberated several concentration camps already.

That's also why there used to be a "West Germany" and an "East Germany" after WWII - the Soviets kept what land they captured, and we extended NATO protection to the portion of the former Fatherland that we were responsible for.

Please don't disparage the U.S. efforts against the Nazis.

Yes, the Soviets paid a higher price, but they certainly didn't do it alone, nor could they have.

"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservatives." - John Stuart Mill

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Wednesday, June 29, 2011 2:09 AM

By the way, DT, I'd wager that by the end of WWII, we owed pretty close to $20 trillion if adjusted for inflation to today's dollars.

After all, we hit a stretch where the deficits and government spending hit more than 120% of GDP.

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Wednesday, June 29, 2011 3:08 AM

Edit: I was really annoyed. I think you're just playing devil's advocate here. See my later post, where I'm still annoyed

ETA: i can't find where I said camps, but I meant holocaust camps or extermination camps. The US liberated none of them, we did get some POW camps. Also, I happen to have the actual contemporary troop maps from our actual War Office which do not give us nearly the red you have painted here. There are two points where US forces are east of the western border of germany at the time of the surrender on those maps. But that area is now called France, not West Germany,

The partition of Germany and the drawing of the Iron Curtain had nothing to do with troop positions. It was a carving up, post war. Yalta, IIRC. Dividing germany was about preventing the rise of Germany, because it appeared a recurrent problem. Goering had already forseen this, and had started the wheels turning to creat the EEC/EU as a fourth reich. The EEC was a phrase he coined himself for the fourth reich, as was its strategy and its symbol, which appears on the Euro, but this is all very far from the war the US fought.

You know as well as I do that the US european effort was a token effort thay launched because Germany was quickly losing the war, and Churchill wanted us to stop the Soviets, which we did. (I assume you do. Maybe you're as ignorant as you're pretending.)

It's easy to get the storybook picture of the American victory taught in school, but everyone already has that.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005131

My point was, dig deeper: the holocaust was an eastern european afair, and the defeat of the German army happened there. Any historian knows this, but no cold war american education system is going to construct a curriculum around it.

That was, of course, the point of the war, to pit germany against russia to have them wipe each other out, as concocted by FDR and Churchill. Churchill began to worry in 1944 that a soviet complete victory was inevitable. We stepped in for that reason alone. FDR didn't give a damn, he was chasing manifest destiny in the Pacific.

Oh, and the debt in 2000 dollars was two trillion, but in 2011 dollars that's getting closer to three trillion. And no, we never paid it off. The only one who tried was Truman.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Wednesday, June 29, 2011 4:35 AM

FREMDFIRMA

Cause it's applicable given the topic shift, surprisingly so, and the irony provokes me to do it since we've godwinned the shit out of this one already.

Yanno, given the post WWI reaming dished unto them, and the rampant financial fuckery of the time otherwise, that goosestepping shithead might have done a little better if he had merely shifted his emphasis.

Instead of howling his head off about JEWISH bankers and travelling down that path, what if he had shifted that just a hair and howled about jewish BANKERS....

Pondering the last sixty-five years in hindsight, and considering even the economics of the time, I'm not so sure he would have met nearly as much opposition.

Not that he wasn't a Fascist dickhead, but the world has no shortage of those, not even today.

-Frem
PS. That's all snark and sarcasm, btw.

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Wednesday, June 29, 2011 4:49 AM

The stupidest war was probably World War I. Not only did it set up all the current problems we have now in the Middle East, but it set up for World War II, the Nazis, and the current situation with China. All over some random duke? Seriously, people, wtf?

The world wars are the best supporting evidence for the idea that the entire human race has the collective brain power of a colony of lemmings and are just going to Darwin themselves out of existence. :/

The Manhattan Project is a close second. They weren't even sure if the chain reaction of the nuclear explosion could ignite the entire atmosphere, and they tested it anyway.

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Wednesday, June 29, 2011 5:32 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

You know what's strange? I read Mike's post, then began to read your reply, DT. You started right out with

Quote:
Your hatred of me has gotten away from you. I was merely arguing against the idea of willful ignorance, and you are arguing in favor of ignorance.

I couldn't figure that out, as I didn't see anything "hateful" in Mike's post, so I went back and read it again. There's not a damned thing in there hateful; he said you were wrong, 'badly', and that's it.

I think your hypersensitivity is getting away with you, DT, and I'm not sure Mike "hates" you at all. I'm sad you read it that way, and I hope if you re-read it you feel differently. It's bad enough dealing with those here who really DO hate us, without thinking others do who really don't. Man, that is one convoluted sentence; I hope you get what I mean, and this isn't intended as a diss or put-down or attack or anything; I just got here, first thing in the morning, and was struck by it, that's all.

Hippie Operative Nikovich Nikita Nicovna Talibani,
Contracted Agent of Veritas Oilspillus, code name “Nike”,
signing off

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Wednesday, June 29, 2011 6:10 AM

Well, there was a period of time when DT was getting hammered for talking about Reagan. I don't know if that's changed any, as I haven't been paying much attention to who Kwicko's been arguing with lately, but I'd assume that DT still feels it's going on.

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Wednesday, June 29, 2011 11:04 AM

I over-reacted because I was disgusted. I really suspect Mike doesn't really disagree with me that WWII was a pointless war about american empire and had nothing to do with saving the jews, which we didn't do, and that we purposefully did nothing about germany until the last year of the war, and then, only at Churchill's behest did we intervene, and then only to stop the Soviets and having nothing to do with Germany. We had already taken on Italy, but that was more because they were more in the way of our empire. Germany was helping us unintentionally by keeping everyone else occupied. (sometimes literally

)

But that's just the poinnt: Mikey *isn't* ignorant or a war monger, so he's just taking the position to shoot me down, and paint me as holding to some position I'm not, in otherwords, it's not partisan or political, it's personal, and purposeful.

And yes, it is very much like that time I was NOT defending Reagan. Mike managed to say I was to the point where someone, I think it was Story, threw me under the bus for being a "Democrat for Reagan" based on what Mike was saying, which he was only doing to be a dick to me. It was pretty clear in that thread that I was not defending Reagan, though people should be allowed to defend him if they want, as I think I posted here several times, I was a socialist at time, why the hell would I have been for Reagan? But now I'm not, and Mikey's statement about Obama being more conservative than Reagan is still absurd, speaking of socialists.

Now seriously

Frem,

Did it ever occur (of course it has) that the *reason* Mr. A. H. "Oh I'm not really a Rothschild I'm just drawn that way" didn't want to do that was that he *was* just such a person, and that his little project there was about creating a socialist utopia on a whole new model because the bankers were losing control of the USSR, and so they thought "oh, let's try again." His international banker support that was funding his damned war would have evaporated immediately if he had taken out the bankers.

That's part of what made him a rat bastard, rather than an alternative to TPTB, which is that he was TPTB. This is one of the places John is 1/2 right. Yeah, sure, he was one of them, but no, it's not all one big conspiracy. But it was enough of one that when Britain's Rothschilds thought that Germany would dominate Europe, they had no interest in doing anything about it.

Think of these bastards as being like a mitotic DNA line. It fissions into splinted groups which then fission again, creates new splinter groups and sometimes they're some caustic cancerous menace, and other times they're just more of an annoyance.

Byte,

Dumbest war ever is a real contest. I think earlier that I nominated the war of the triple alliance, but in destructive results, sure, WWI made a mess. You can than the Warburg Bros for that one, being the aforementioned specific other jewish bankers of note, though there were some others in the mix, but if you want malicious cretins funding both sides...

ETA: Maybe I give Mike too much credit, perhaps he really does believe that, since he has that tag line abiut religions and airplanes, maybe he's a straight line official story gulper... Or perhaps that tagline is a snark at some other fanatical religion... ;) [edit: this was a snark]

For the record, I considered both of those aforementioned counterargument threads to be trolling [edit: i think this is how rap feels too, that the point is being argued not because of what was said but because of who said it, and that there is a perceived board advantage to be gotten from making an argument out of what is, again, not a real disagreement, but an endurance test on who is willing to waste the most time], and frankly I don't have the time to argue, but when someone misrepresents you to the point where other users on the board are taking what someone else is saying about you as your position and not what you actually post yourself, you are forced to defend yourself, which is a frickin waste of time which gets me really fracking ticked off.

Edit: the only time I have to post here is while sis is taking her meds, so okay, i have the limited time to post, but i don't want to waste it arguing about what's already been decided, unless someone other than Hero has a serious case to present that WWII was actually a good idea, I was hoping we could focus on more relevant ideas, like:

Frem, how do you propose we might rid ourselves if these meddlesome bankers?

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Wednesday, June 29, 2011 11:08 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
The stupidest war was probably World War I. Not only did it set up all the current problems we have now in the Middle East, but it set up for World War II, the Nazis, and the current situation with China. All over some random duke? Seriously, people, wtf?

The world wars are the best supporting evidence for the idea that the entire human race has the collective brain power of a colony of lemmings and are just going to Darwin themselves out of existence. :/

The Manhattan Project is a close second. They weren't even sure if the chain reaction of the nuclear explosion could ignite the entire atmosphere, and they tested it anyway.

Not some random duke. He was [arguably] the most powerful person on the planet at the time. Still, the war wasn't about him, except in that it was about the dissolution of Austria.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Wednesday, June 29, 2011 11:33 AM

The way I heard it, alliances were so convoluted at the time that there could have been any number of assassination targets that would've sent up Europe like dry tinder.

But, okay, sure, I never understood what was so important about the archduke anyway. Guess I know now.

Still doesn't change the fact that everyone involved was apparently dumb enough to get into a multi-national land war, using bioaccumulative chemical weapons on lands they intended to claim for themselves.

EDIT: No wonder WWI, WWII, and the Triple Alliance War were dumb, look who financed them. XP

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Wednesday, June 29, 2011 11:53 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
The way I heard it, alliances were so convoluted at the time that there could have been any number of assassination targets that would've sent up Europe like dry tinder.

But, okay, sure, I never understood what was so important about the archduke anyway. Guess I know now.

Still doesn't change the fact that everyone involved was apparently dumb enough to get into a multi-national land war, using bioaccumulative chemical weapons on lands they intended to claim for themselves.

EDIT: No wonder both wars were dumb, look who financed them. XP

It's a bit more complicated. Austria, aka the Holy Roman Empire is one of the major successor states to Rome. While started by Charlemagne, it was really the uniting of ostrogothic and visigothic kingdoms that overthrew rome.

The other major states being the Bizantine, which had been overthrown by ottoman turks and had become an islamic altaic empire, and britain, which viewed the other two obviously as major competitors to its global domination. All of these were in decline, sure, as the rise of America and Japan were be beginning to dominate the scene, as was Russia.

It's about what it has always been about: world domination.

The reason the Arch-duke is the arch duke is that other dukes are his vassals. The title is synonymous with Emperor, and he held the title of Holy Roman Emperor, and more or less ruled central europe. (IIRC He was assassinated by a rebel group of Serb nationalists, and this didn't actually *start* a world war, it was a minor regional conflict in Yugoslavia not tied to anything else, but it happened first, and so is considered the spark, much as the First Gulf war may be considered the spark of our current conflict, when it gets named WWIII.

When you stop to consider the impact of the Empire at its largest extent, you see where the serious rivalry sets in.

At its greatest extent, in the seventeenth century, the empire of the archduchy ruled almost all of north america, all of south america, much of africa, parts of asia, and most of eastern and western Europe.

It's worthy of note re: earlier mention of Marie Antoinette, who was 12 when she married Louis XVI, she was akso the archduchess of austria, and the marriage added france to the empire. Her austrianness was actually the enlightenment's main issue with her. They tried using her gaming, mingling with peasants, and bisexuality against her, but they were also opportunistically trying to overthrow the concept of monarchy, and in this they had a lot of support from aforementioned bankers, though france was in considerable debt for its funding of the american revolution to oust britain from north america.
That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Wednesday, June 29, 2011 12:21 PM

AURAPTOR

America loves a winner!

Quote:
Originally posted by Niki2:
Simply put, my position: We can cut the size of govt. We also need to pay more taxes."

We NEED to cut the size of govt. However, paying more taxes is futile. It'll only be wasted on more vote buying pork programs, to be followed by more cries from the govt that we don't have enough money.

Like those who enable a drug addict, some will believe the lies and demagoguery , and breathlessly ask that we be taxed even MORE ! To which the cycle will repeat itself, and taxes will continue to be raised, wasted, raised, squandered, raised and pissed away, until we'll be in the same shoes Greece is finding itself in now.

" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "

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Wednesday, June 29, 2011 2:18 PM

Rap, I guess you really are a true patriot. I find myself thinking on the side "OTOH, maybe this Obamanomics is a good thing, because it's almost certain to kill the USA, and then we'll be rid of this overbearing fascist govt." <- yes, I was really thinking this. But then the other part of me was thinking this -> "But what if it just gets replaced with another overbearing police state like China, who already wants to colonoze Idaho?" <- yes, I was also really thinking this.

And then part of me thinks that the only reason Mike has been picking fights with me is because of posts like this one, where I actually admire something about you, even while I may disagree with you on some key points (I'm so not voting for Herman Cain, though he does have great pizza) rather than just endlessly snarking you for defending really tired Bush lies like "My vice president does not actually have a white angora cat."

^
|
Yes, I was really thinking this too.

But I was also really thinking this
|
V
Maybe part of why I get so irritated lately at people I think are wasting my time is that I find myself extremely stressed and short on time lately, with a number fo very serious matters to attend to and I unduly take it out on members of the forum because of my exasperation with being short of time and I should really apologize to them for being a dick about it.

So, I'm sorry if I was a dick lately.

Perhaps I don't have time for this and should move on.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Wednesday, June 29, 2011 4:02 PM

RIONAEIRE

Beir bua agus beannacht

A DT a chara,
I'm glad you're there with your sister, I think you're a good brother, you spend lots of time with her and I think that is one of the best things you can do for someone in life, love them and spend time with them.

Byte, I agree that WWI was pretty dumb, I wouldn't discuss it in that thread about the last veteran dying because I felt it wasn't the place. But I don't mind saying here that I agree it was dumb. You know what was even dumber though? Us getting involved. I assume we did it to save England, but still, with all that mustard gas floating about we would have done well to stay away. But what is done is done and I know that the guys who went over (my great grandfather among them) were way braver than I'll ever be and deserve my respect.

My grandma's dad never talked about it with them, she just knows he was there. Her brother later fought in WWII in the Pacific and so the only people father and son would talk about war to was each other, it was that horrible intense bond that was for them and them alone, because only they understood the horror and intensity of it.

"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya

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Wednesday, June 29, 2011 4:13 PM

US involvement was the idea of the new federal reserve. Loaning money to nations to buy weapons created a huge cashflow for the US, launching us into the credit economy of the 1920s. It's a whole big mess.

Hayek's economic theories stem from his analysis of WWI. Interesting guy, he was a neurologist, not an economist, and most of his initial research into the war were for its political causes, it was only by accident that he discovered the underlying economic machinations.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Wednesday, June 29, 2011 4:57 PM

DT, you make the mistake of interpreting my posts as some form of personal attack on YOU, as a person. They aren't. They are a refutation of some really stupid shit that you've been posting, and you have yet to cite ANY credible sources to back any of the claims you make.

You're allowed to do that, of course, but as a public service, maybe you should change your signature to "This is just my personal OPINION, and I have no facts or cites to justify it or back my positions."

You post things about WWII which are 100% factually incorrect. You claim we didn't pay any attention to the Germans prior to the last year of the war. That's just flat bullshit, and as someone with friends who fought there and family who fought there, if offends me that you besmirch their contributions in such a fashion. It would be tantamount to me telling you that you don't know a goddam thing about the Holocaust.

Look into the raids at Regensburg and Schweinfurt to see how much we weren't committed to defeating the Nazis. More than 375 of OUR bombers and OUR crews went on that single raid (one bombing mission, two industrial targets - they called it "Double Strike", and it was aimed at crippling aircraft production to slow down the Luftwaffe, who were decimating the daylight bombing raids the U.S. was tasked with by RAF Bomber Command. The RAF took the night raids for themselves.) So 375+ US bombers went in, and 60 of them never came back. Nearly 600 Americans were lost in a single mission.

To say, or even to imply, that there wasn't a commitment to defeat the Nazis is just pure idiocy, plain and simple. That's not an attack on you, any more than you claiming I was posting things that were "moronic, on the level of Hero" was intended as a personal attack directly aimed at me.

And we all know you'd never do that. Right? ;)

We didn't "take care of Italy first" - we declared war on Italy the same day we declared war on Germany.

I'm not arguing with you about this because you're you; I'm arguing it because you're flat wrong, and you damned well know it. And if you don't know it, then you should stop posting about it, because you're posting out of pure ignorance and your well out of your depth on this.

American forces were very committed to fighting the Nazis. In fact, we had official and unofficial programs involved with that fight even before we declared war. We were giving support to the Soviets (look up "lend-lease" sometime) to fight them, we had volunteers fighting alongside the British.

Our involvement kept the Germans from being able to focus their full attention on the Russian front - contrary to your claims, the Soviets were not in the process of crushing the Nazis when we entered the war; in fact, the siege of Leningrad had just begun, and would last nearly another 3 years. Hardly any kind of "crushing" of the Nazis going on there, unless you mean they were crushing them so slowly it almost couldn't be detected. The Soviets kept enormous numbers of Nazi soldiers out of our hair, and we in turn kept the Nazis occupied so they couldn't really gain an upper hand in the East.

Were the Nazis our PRIMARY focus? No. But to dismiss our efforts as if they were simply an afterthought is both disingenuous and dishonest.

And that's not personal.

"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservatives." - John Stuart Mill

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Wednesday, June 29, 2011 8:56 PM

FREMDFIRMA

Mikey, some of that stuff is so wacked out even PN would laugh at it, so I don't see where one would waste time even tryin to pick that nuttery apart.

I won't even get into how stupid WWI was, or I'd be here all night...

And as for the bankers ?
Rope, lots of rope, following by the repudiation of Usury and actual enforcement against that crime.

-F

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Thursday, June 30, 2011 3:24 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Kwicko:

...as someone with friends who fought there and family who fought there

Sorry, yes, me too.

Quote:
raids at Regensburg and Schweinfurt to see how much we weren't committed to defeating the Nazis. More than 375 of OUR bombers and OUR crews went on that single raid (one bombing mission, two industrial targets - they called it "Double Strike", and it was aimed at crippling aircraft production to slow down the Luftwaffe, who were decimating the daylight bombing raids the U.S. was tasked with by RAF Bomber Command. The RAF took the night raids for themselves.) So 375+ US bombers went in, and 60 of them never came back. Nearly 600 Americans were lost in a single mission.

I'm very familiar with the subject. But you're making my point for me. Which you will succeed in doing by the end of this post.

Quote:
American forces were very committed to fighting the Nazis.

Those assigned to doing so.

We had particular interests to protect, we were not looking for war with Germany, in that, I applaud us, I wouldn't have been either. War always makes situations like the Holocausr worse, not better. It's hard to negotiate with someone you're bombing.

Quote:
(look up "lend-lease" sometime)

And now with the sarcasm. See, I was inclined to take all the blame for over-reacting here, but...

Quote:
Soviets were not in the process of crushing the Nazis when we entered the war;

Did I say they were? You put words in my mouth to make me look dumb. But this

Quote:
in fact, the siege of Leningrad had just begun,

Is the kind of political misrepresentation I was talking about. This is not when we decided to launch our invasion of Germany. It was discussed, but then deliberately stalled until '44, by FDR himself, with some encouragment by Churchill who said, essentially, "let them wipe each other out." Remember what Churchill thought of Russians... Basically like PN and Khazars, that they were "born evil" and should be killed off as infants before they could grow into adult Russians.

This is the REAL mentality on our side. Given this, our alliance was as doomed as theirs, white supremacy could never have really settled for a permanent power share with Japan, and our western supremacy was not up for a power share with russia.

The agenda of depopulating the former russian capital was something we paid lip service to opposing, but didn't actually oppose. It was not ended by anything to do with us. It ended when the Russians got the upper hand.

The turn of the tide came from Germany's idiotic decision to invade Russia, to fight them on their home turf, which exhausted the German was machine, and Germany's misconception that they would be able to turn captured terrirtory as a boost to their effort.

Quote:
Hardly any kind of "crushing" of the Nazis going on there

That's idiotic. Of course it was. That was where it happened. It was an eventuality that the west was preparing for.

Quote:
The Soviets kept enormous numbers of Nazi soldiers out of our hair

As is this. They had no interest in our hair. Their declaration of war was about Japan, they had no intention of attacking the US, in spite of our propaganda. They also didn't want to invade Britain, they wanted to establish Britain as an ally. That didn't work very well for them.

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we in turn kept the Nazis occupied so they couldn't really gain an upper hand in the East.

Hardly

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Were the Nazis our PRIMARY focus? No.

Thank you. Yes, that was my point.

Riona was posting a high school text book history of our role in WWII, and I was encouraging her to read more about the topic.

My point was, you swept in to reinforce that storybook fantasy which would merely doscourage her from reading about the topic and make her comfy with whatever the govt. told her.

Note that I made no arguments. Why? Because I felt that the facts spoke for themselves, and anything she found would give her a better idea of what happened.

This started out with someone attacking me for being anti-war, and you piled on. So, you got in the way of the bullets.

Didn't say they were an afterthought, but that they were opposed to the USSR.

Reality, I think that the Soviets would have stopped at Germany, after Goering surrendered.

If we were really willing to commit to the war, we might have tried to stop the Nazis somewhere like Leningrad. If we had ended up in control of part of Russia, handing that back to the Soviets could have been the negotiation, rather than handing them the whole slavonic world.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Thursday, June 30, 2011 3:28 AM

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Originally posted by Fremdfirma:

Mikey, some of that stuff is so wacked out even PN would laugh at it, so I don't see where one would waste time even tryin to pick that nuttery apart.

I won't even get into how stupid WWI was, or I'd be here all night...

And as for the bankers ?
Rope, lots of rope, following by the repudiation of Usury and actual enforcement against that crime.

-F

Did you want to take issue with something?

I may not be well versed in psychology, but I get this particular trick.

As for bankers, the problem is that they own the rope store and write the laws.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Thursday, June 30, 2011 3:37 AM

here's my point: you guys are opportunistically attacking me to discredit me, while neither one of you disagree with my position that US involvement in WWII was principally an insane grab for the pacific, and also the creation of the national debt, which allowed the bankers to seal their control over the US, as Mikey already said. And he's right about the GDP, off on the inflation. It was about 200 billion, which is now 2-3 trillion, but the US gdp has grown

Part of US GDP growth is our attracting away from europe the international financial sector, and part of it is the growth of govt, and part the growth of corporate US based empires overseas. The domestic US industrial economy is not much larger than it was, around 4 trillion or so, which is one of the reasons our country is in such tough shape: we can't tax overseas corporations, or the international financial sector; we can and do tax our own govt which is moronic, but frankly we have state and local govts. And the fed. Govt, both overtaxing the same income base to fund said wars and international corporate empires.

Neither of you seem to disagree, which is why these attacks come across as personal. If someone else, more on the left, or more female, posted it, you wouldn't attack it, or If I posted the opposite, you would attack it.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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Thursday, June 30, 2011 3:40 AM

Well, I'm not going to question US involvement in the war, as there surely was. But I'm positive we hit Sicily before we hit Normandy. DT is not all wrong (and quite a bit right), and you, Kwicko, are not all wrong (and quite a bit right).

Really I think this argument is more "point of view" than "correct and incorrect" because I could easily find cites to support you both.

Also, I think Riona might have wandered off in the fray, not sure. :)

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Thursday, June 30, 2011 1:56 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by Bytemite:
Well, I'm not going to question US involvement in the war, as there surely was. But I'm positive we hit Sicily before we hit Normandy. DT is not all wrong (and quite a bit right), and you, Kwicko, are not all wrong (and quite a bit right).

Yes, we drove Axis powers from Sicily before we invaded Normandy. We also drove them from North Africa before that. And we destroyed oil production in Romania before we toppled Sicily, but it doesn't mean we did it as a way to grab control of Romania.

The idea was that we would deny the Axis power, land, and resources at every turn, in any way we could. That included destroying the refining capabilities at Ploesti, Romania, from which Germany got more than a third of its petroleum products. It meant cutting off armies in Africa and either starving them, destroying them, or forcing them to surrender, because that removes another several thousand men from service to the Fatherland, as well as all their materiel.

And it means taking an island like Sicily before invading Germany. Why? Because it gives you a forward air base and staging area with which to support an invasion of Italy (a member of the Axis, remember), and because it's much easier to protect such an invasion from a land base than from a seagoing flotilla. Germany didn't have much of a naval presence by this time - the Bismarck, the Graf Spee, and the Terpitz were either sunk or tied up elsewhere, so there was no real threat to the island from the sea, whereas the U-boat wolfpacks *could* threaten any naval flotilla.

The general idea was to lock Germany itself in a giant pincers-type movement, with forces coming from the south and west via France and through Italy, from the west through the Benelux countries (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg), and from the east by the Soviets. And the more force you exerted on every square inch of German borderlands, the more we would force them to try to defend every square inch of their borders, and the faster they would expend their men and materiel. That was entirely the point.

In the Pacific, we also invaded Guam and the Philippines before we invaded Okinawa; I don't think it means we wanted those islands more - I think it means we were able to get them first as we drove the Japanese forces closer and closer into their home islands while we took control of almost everything else.

Don't mistake the chronological timeline of what we took in battle, and when, for its strategic value to us or its importance to the overall mission.

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Really I think this argument is more "point of view" than "correct and incorrect" because I could easily find cites to support you both.

Also, I think Riona might have wandered off in the fray, not sure. :)

If DT's point was that Riona should read more about it, I agree. Our mission in WWII wasn't to defeat the Nazis to free the Jews, that's true. But it wasn't purely a land-grab, either, or we'd have grabbed and held onto a helluva lot more of it.

"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservatives." - John Stuart Mill

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Thursday, June 30, 2011 2:01 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
here's my point: you guys are opportunistically attacking me to discredit me, while neither one of you disagree with my position that US involvement in WWII was principally an insane grab for the pacific, and also the creation of the national debt, which allowed the bankers to seal their control over the US, as Mikey already said. And he's right about the GDP, off on the inflation. It was about 200 billion, which is now 2-3 trillion, but the US gdp has grown

Part of US GDP growth is our attracting away from europe the international financial sector, and part of it is the growth of govt, and part the growth of corporate US based empires overseas. The domestic US industrial economy is not much larger than it was, around 4 trillion or so, which is one of the reasons our country is in such tough shape: we can't tax overseas corporations, or the international financial sector; we can and do tax our own govt which is moronic, but frankly we have state and local govts. And the fed. Govt, both overtaxing the same income base to fund said wars and international corporate empires.

Neither of you seem to disagree, which is why these attacks come across as personal. If someone else, more on the left, or more female, posted it, you wouldn't attack it, or If I posted the opposite, you would attack it.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

My issue is with your posting of completely wrong data and claiming such as "facts" having to do with the actual fighting of the war; I pointed that out quite clearly. I have that issue of factual inaccuracy with many posters from time to time, be they left, right, center, male, female, or what have you. I haven't "attacked to discredit" you; I've corrected you. I'm sorry you seem to feel that someone giving you correct information is "an attack" just because they're politically to the left of you, or that because someone is to the left of you they can't possibly know military history.

"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservatives." - John Stuart Mill

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Thursday, June 30, 2011 2:39 PM