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Grimly Fiendish

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About Grimly Fiendish

  • Birthday 03/16/1963

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    Washington, DC
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  1. I'm getting weird behavior from my CMBB. I don't think it was a problem with a game file, because behavior A showed up with the last file in the game and also now with previous files when I load them. Now, behavior B shows up with this latest file (I don't know about previous files). I have completely reinstalled game, v103, and Dark Steel BMP mods, and I still get behavior B. A = the play button took me straight from 0 to 60 seconds, so I could only view the battle in 10-second increments. A routing unit trembled like they were running in place at high speed. B = a negative countdown appears to the right of the 0.0 second counter and appears to require 6 hours to pass from the time I first loaded it. Each time I load it, the negative countdown is shorter---it's now at 5 hours. (Unfortunately I will be out at that time and can't wait! Maybe it will be OK after that.) Previously, I managed to do something that caused normal shooting and motion to occur, but I paused it and couldn't get it back. During the countdown to 0.0, nothing happens except that my opponent's visible tank (and mine) twirl clockwise, and an armored car travels slowly off the map. All other units freeze and there is silence. I just did a 1-player quickbattle and found that a turn plays normally by itself but hitting any other play/FF/RW button sets it back to 0.0 and starts the negative counter, now at 18000 seconds. In other words, my game is messed up and it manifests itself in different ways, but all have to do with video playback. I have never had the slightest issue before.
  2. I hate to be a downer, but I find so many things about DropTeam to so silly, so outright laughably dumb or poorly executed, that I don't even know where to start. But I'll try. (1) My GEVs are often literally uncontrollable, and I don't mean just hard to drive. Turning them left or right causes them to only turn right. Doing anything with them causes them to wiggle like a bee doing a pollen dance. (2) Constant crashes preceded by intermittent video. (3) The auto-updater causes the game to crash cleanly to desktop. (4) I have had bots literally drive in circles rather than move to the next waypoint. (5) I have had bots from both sides approach one another head on, firing constantly, literally nose to nose. In my heavy tank, I approached from the side and killed the enemy bots while they totally ignored me. Basically, the AI seems incapable of any kind of intelligent maneuver or any intelligence. (6) The whole idea of allowing vehicle pilots to kill themselves is silly. Humans would be your most precious resource if you were running a nomadic starfaring tribe. IMHO. (7) Finally, I once lost a tank because my camera didn't follow me underwater. (I was chasing an enemy tank that had gotten stuck because it was too stupid to maneuver around some underwater rocks.) Not being able to see, I flipped over. Only when I flipped over did the camera snap to underwater view. (8) The game engine clearly does not include any consideration of mass. A heavy tank should never flip over or even lift much when firing sideways on an Earth-grav-planet. Nothing in this game is truly heavy at all. (9) The mouse control of targeting, when combined with switching views, results in turrets swinging wildly around in the middle of a firefight. Realistic this is not. (10) Ogre doesn't work. All these issues have not only prevented me from learning how to do anything in the game, but stopped me from playing altogether. I'm just waiting for news of an upgrade that I can actually install . . . .
  3. It was a day that I had been waiting for since I watched the towers fall. I had helped take the fight back to those that would see people terrorized. Now we were terrorizing them. Sad to see such misdirected good intentions and misspent energy. What a waste.
  4. I have to make some long-witheld comments regarding the above discussion. I see two potential uses for Hitler. One is to demonize him (to separate him from the rest of humanity as an example of inhuman evil), the other is to apologize for him (to blame his lesser actions on everyone else and deny the worst of the greater ones). Neither is honest. The usefulness of apology is clear: it allows sympathetic alignment with fascism. A politician could deny the Holocaust, excuse the destruction of Germany, and propose "reforms" that bring back national militariam, and everyone would feel better. A historian could ride the good feeling to popularity. The usefulness of demonization is clear: a politician could blame the Holocaust on one man, deny that it could ever happen again, and propose "reforms" that would bring back concentration camps for certain classes of people, and everyone else would feel better. A historian could ride the gravy train to Oprah. So neither one is any less a tool of antidemocracy than the other, and in fact they go hand in hand. Try to find a defense of an act of atrocity, criminality, or just plain stupidity that doesn't include the argument "those other guys are worse." In fact, you often see arguments that go like this: (a) We didn't do it. ( Everybody does it. Do I need to point out that those arguments contradict one another? The publication of photos from Abu Ghraib ought to clarify once and for all that when soldiers are placed outside the usual battlefield context---but still in the context of a war--- they will often do things they shouldn't. It's also no surprise that when the trusted, "legitimate" sources don't tell the full truth, the only sources of certain information will be the dishonest, manipulative ones. It's easy to argue from an armchair using "known" facts, but the truth isn't always of good quality. Some sources are easier to mock than others, but some degree of discernment is necessary no matter what your source. In the case of John Kettler's POW camps story, the suspicious sources are antisemites and white racist militias and their spokesmen and sympathizers. But I find it hard to believe that there isn't SOME truth to the story presented here: http://www.the7thfire.com/Politics%20and%20History/us_war_crimes/Eisenhowers_death_camps.htm. Despite its source and form, some of it HAS to be true (the French whacked German prisoners in the head? Sacre bleu!), even if its most sensational claims are, er, probably not. (Note the breathless comparison of a baseless "1.7 million dead" to the Holocaust itself, as though you really need to go that far just to point out the injustice of being mean to POWs. The proper comparison, if any, would be to other POW camps or the witholding of supplies to former-enemy populations in general.) But where else will you find anyone to tell you that life was rough for Germans in a postwar POW camp? Not a history textbook. In this forum, I never see accusations of demonization, only accusations of apology. Why is that, and why do I see the accusation of "apologist" repeated so very often? Is this an accurate reflection of the distribution of these two groups in this forum? I don't think so.
  5. In the previous thread, I just noticed the following statement made, I believe, by John D Salt. "A classic example is Herr Doktor Goebbels' assertion that it was the British who first invented the concentration camp in the Boer War; not true, but so widely repeated by now that it may as well be." If this is false, then why? And what definition of a concentration camp are we using? To me, a concentration camp is a place to concentrate civilian enemies, not POWs, and the British apparently invented the term, in addition to using barbed wire for the purpose.
  6. Jason, sorry I didn't read any of your responses until just now. I went skiing and then I kind of lost interest. But I think I have to answer if for no other reason than that you seem to think the way to win an argument is by shouting, and I will not be shouted off a thread. I remain firmly convinced that Barbarossa and OIF share enough similarities for a superficial but useful discussion of the whys and hows, and that only partisan blindness could prevent one from acknowledging this. I'll respond to each of your posts individually. (1) You complained that I have introduced politics into the discussion. Naturally, there are always political considerations when you seek to invade and control another country, and so political questions were present in this thread from the beginning. Yet you, not I, were the first to mention contemporary politics and political parties outside a strictly operational context: "Dems pathetic attempts to make mountains out of molehills . . . ." Your own politics were predictable from your previous posts, especially because of the way you argue. In fact, I think you argue this way because you think political arguments are won that way, and that this is a political argument, as though politics are always irrational and military planning is always objective. That's not a very productive approach to any topic, as you rightly point out, especially a thread about a historical military operation with uniquely perverse political goals. By the way, I don't really accept the desire to conquer as "normal." Invasions can only be justified by political ends, and I originally sought to question Hitler's, rather than simply accept them. Plenty of big-name conservatives think Iraq is lost. Stick your head up and look around and you'll see. But what I was hoping to get here in response to my hypothesis was an objective, apolitcal analysis, and I still haven't seen it. (2) Your summary of events since 2003 strikes me as fairly accurate. However, I find it curious that you introduce your remarks as "military matters" and then focus almost exclusively on media matters. In any case, your post serves only to highlight differences between Barbarossa and Iraqi Freedom, while ignoring every single one of my questions about the similarities. Bravo! (3) Again, accurate but irrelevant. I never mentioned defeat. I pointed to evidence of lack of planning. Yes, casualties were low and remain low, although the media only count fatalities and much of the reduction in fatalities is owed not to superior military prowess or technology but to better medical technology: all those amputees would have been dead 60 years ago. Also, casualties should properly be compared with the number of people needed to complete an operation, not worst-case scenarios based on hype and poor—or skewed—intelligence. For example, sending 500,000 men into Russia expecting 250,000 casualties and at the same time to win would be, uh, a little optimistic, I think, unless you hopelessly outnumber your enemy. That's the arithmetic you should be doing. It's also possible to actually determine the cause of casualties and whether they were avoidable. The difference here is between casualties under as-good-as-can-be-expected conditions vs casualties from simple criminal failure to properly supply or plan. Note that, even had Barbarossa succeeded, the Germans would still have had to occupy the pacified areas and continue operations in unpacified areas—IN WINTER. You don't patrol even a peaceful Moscow without a coat. That's the kind of hopeless optimism I am pointing out. (4) Your fourth post sees you foaming at the mouth again. I'd be happy to see Iraqi vets vote. It has been observed (wish I could remember where) that American military fandom decreases in direct proportion to actual American exposure to the military "way of life." Just give them a few extra tours and they'll be softened up real nice. I have one more similarity to add to my list, and this time I'll let a British ex-SAS officer make my point for me: "Mr Griffin said he believed that the Americans soldiers viewed the Iraqis in the same way as the Nazis viewed Russians, Jews and eastern Europeans in the Second World War, when they labelled them "untermenschen". "As far as the Americans were concerned, the Iraqi people were sub-human, untermenschen. You could almost split the Americans into two groups: ones who were complete crusaders, intent on killing Iraqis, and the others who were in Iraq because the Army was going to pay their college fees. They had no understanding or interest in the Arab culture. The Americans would talk to the Iraqis as if they were stupid and these weren't isolated cases, this was from the top down. There might be one or two enlightened officers who understood the situation a bit better but on the whole that was their general attitude. Their attitude fuelled the insurgency. I think the Iraqis detested them." " http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/03/12/nsas112.xml
  7. Jon, if aerial bombardment of civilians is not specifically spelled out as a crime in 2004, then what would have made it any less a crime in 1943? Not that I'm arguing it was---from a legal point of view, it either was or it wasn't. Of course, even if it was directly banned in 1949, that doesn't make it honorable in 1943. Or '45. Mr Jingles, here's a point you might consider. In a lot of pastoral/nomadic cultures, retaliation is honorable. Under the GC, which as Jon notes was intended to suppress retaliation, it is not. Therefore one might posit 2 kinds of honor: the kind in which aid is extended to the wounded etc., and the kind in which a fair fight is sought between warriors.
  8. Thanks everybody! I realized after I posted that the book was probably chewed over here years ago. At any rate it's out in paperback, for those who are as cheap as I am.
  9. JonS, thanks for the link and the clarification. Oops, link not found!
  10. Sorry, Jason, all I was trying to do was pick a contemporary situation for a rough comparison that is, in fact, as far from 1940s ideology as I could get---that was the point. I was as unaware of your brilliantly simple distinction between history and (ugh!) politics, as I was that Nazi politicians still live and breathe. (Fundamentalists, however, are much the same no matter their background.) It seems to me that nothing is truly immune from honest analysis, and if you think my comparison utterly wasteful, then you should be able to answer the following questions about the Iraq war plan: How long did it take to capture Saddam? Why? How long was it supposed to take? Was the head of the serpent cut off, as planned? Or did it melt away before the air campaign ended? What were the plans for occupation? Were there any? (You're right that these are to some degree political, not military, questions. But then, were Hitler's plans for occupying Russia post-Barbarossa, if any, purely military in nature?) Did US troops go in with enough body armor? Good enough quality? Enough men? Enough Humvee armor? If so, good enough for what? To avoid how many casualties? Or were the 1000 postwar deaths part of the plan? (Clarification: I do not propose that they were. I do believe that the highest planners---the CIVILIAN ones---did not care about casualties. Naturally, this is supposition, and I reveal it here not to air my "politics" but to be honest about them.) No, I don't really expect sincere answers.
  11. Any opinions on this book by Rick Atkinson, 2002? Not a a source for scenarios or anything quite that crazy---just for getting a sense of the theater and a feel for the ebb and flow of events.
  12. Andreas and John Salt, I'm confused about something and I hope you can clear up a distinction for me. From everything I have ever read on the topic, the USAF deliberately targeted the residential and industrial areas of certain German cities to create terror among the civilian population and weaken their "resolve," such as it was. Whether they succeeded or not, my understanding is that is was a matter of policy. I would call this something of a gray area: something one would rather not do but that seems necessary under the circumstances. (The theory behind these bombings has now fallen out of favor in the USAF.) What is it that clearly separates these bombings from war crimes, so that one can unequivocally state, "These were not war crimes"? If carried out today except in retaliation perhaps, they would definitely be war crimes. [i see painfbat's parallel question was already answered. Did the Geneva Conventions simply fail to address mass slaughter and displacement of civilans by aerial bombardment?] Since bombings and concentration camps are being discussed in the same thread here, I'll ask another question: Does anyone know anything about the US "failure to target" certain death camps whose rail lines and boxcars were clearly visible in aerial photos? Any opinions on whether it should have been done, why it was not done, why it is ridiculous to ask such a question etc. etc? [ February 13, 2006, 04:44 PM: Message edited by: Dave Stockhoff ]
  13. John D, I'd be happy to do some CMAK armor PBEMs with you. I also have noticed the AI has an advantage in handling its tanks tactically, but I think that only makes up for its inability to plan anything. So you rarely get a really balanced game: in a QB, you can meet, get beat up by, outflank, and finally destroy enemy tanks and then after the AAR find several more wandering around in a corner of the map you never went into. AI tanks get bunched up, they expose their sides, they do all sorts of dumb stuff that you need to to take advantage of to defeat them. In exchange, they get a better sense of terrain and LOS than you do. At times it seems almost creepy. But one thing about their behavior you should watch and study is the way they overwatch for each other. Rarely does 1 tank point one way or advance without another one nearby pointing 90 degrees from it, toward a good spot for firing on the 1st one.
  14. Civdiv, here's a link I also just posted on CMBB. It's a classic, so probably many people know it: the Army basic training manual, illustrated version for dummies. http://thetrainer.info/infantry1.htm Relevant quote: ANTI-MECHANIZED FIRE Should hostile armored cars (reconnaissance vehicles) be encountered or in case of attack by light or medium tanks, antitank rifle grenades are employed within effective range (75 yards). Riflemen fire upon personnel carriers and armored cars. So there you are.
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