Somewhat o/t recommendation

[JonS]

Would nations go to war if it was the leaders who had to fight first ... or their children.

Who are you, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWLHK2h8EBQ?

Besides, of course nations would still go to war. Up until the Middle Ages leading their subjects into battle was pretty much the entire job-description of rulers. George II was the last British monarch to do that, in 1743. Other national leaders continued the tradition for a few more decades, and we still see echoes of it with Harry swanning of to Afghanistan.

[Childress]

The biggest threat to our democracy is the elected officials being removed from any of the concerns of the "common folks". They have their own pensions, medical etc etc so why would they worry about their constituents... the voters that is. They certainly are concerned about their much more important funding lobbyists of course. They even "adjusted" the sequester cuts to the FAA at lightening speed when they realized it affected their own flights home.

Sounds like California: the paradise of gov't employees, and the Hell of small business owners. I blame it on the surge of Liberal arts graduates who constitute a noisy pressure group for an ever larger state. The more universities in a region, the more bureaucrats you get. The great thing about advocating more government- if you're a pol- is that you acquire a devoted Praetorian guard in the media.

[Kanonier Reichmann]

Your comments possess a brutal logic. The conclusion is akin to aborting a foetus which reveals a birth defect in order to preserve the integrity of the gene pool. Also brutally logical.

That's drawing an incredibly long bow with your analogy isn't it? One is a wartime situation, the other is the birth of a child with undertones of racial purity! What the fvck?

Regards

KR

[JonS]

Between that and his last post, I'm pretty sure Childress is just trolling for the lulz now.

[Childress]

You implied that Stigler contributed to more German deaths by his clemency. Removing a defective gene from the pool may contribute to better health for the species if the carrier reproduces. This was the rationale behind the aborted Nazi euthanasia program: eugenics. It's a matter of moral returns versus material returns. Which is greater? Which matters more? Not easy questions...

Edit: lulz? lol

[Kanonier Reichmann]

Yep, as I thought. An unbelievably long bow.

Regards

KR

[sburke]

hmm time to go to some other thread...any other thread. I think there is one by Martha Stewart on how to make a proper combined arms assault. Think I'll stroll over there. It's a good thing.

[Spinoza]

No need to change the thread . Anticipating the new direction Battlefront will inevitably take , I'd like to post a very simple yet effective recipe , courtesy bluehoney.org :

'' If you put Psilocybe mushrooms in raw honey for an extended period of time (few months or so), the honey will begin to turn blue. Not only will it absorb the blue pigment from the mushroom, but the Psilocybin as well…the honey becomes psychedelic. So if you just can’t stand the taste of the mushroom, you don’t need to eat the caps or stems, just blue honey and crackers, or blue honey in tea…that is, if you can wait a few months.

Fresh mushrooms contain water. Water is not compatible with honey, in fact, it makes the honey very runny and it will not taste very good at all.

First, chop your dried mushrooms into little pieces and mix them with honey. Add enough honey to make the mixture about 1/3 shrooms to 2/3 honey.

*Note

The “blue” honey is produced when you pick your mushrooms and they blue from bruising, they are then dried and ground, this bluish powder is put into honey. It is the amount of bruising while fresh that causes the color. If your dried mushrooms have not turned blue before you put them in the honey, your honey will never be the color blue, but it will still absorb the psychedelic properties of the mushrooms.''

Thank You and happy Mushroom hunting !

[dieseltaylor]

You implied that Stigler contributed to more German deaths by his clemency. Removing a defective gene from the pool may contribute to better health for the species if the carrier reproduces. This was the rationale behind the aborted Nazi euthanasia program: eugenics. It's a matter of moral returns versus material returns. Which is greater? Which matters more? Not easy questions...

Edit: lulz? lol

For balance the US position, and apparently carried on into the 1970's.

http://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/

[Vanir Ausf B]

Good idea. We need a well-balanced thread.

At its peak of popularity eugenics was supported by a wide variety of prominent people, including Winston Churchill, Margaret Sanger, Marie Stopes, H. G. Wells, Norman Haire, Havelock Ellis, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, John Harvey Kellogg, Linus Pauling and Sidney Webb.

[Michael Emrys]

Would nations go to war if it was the leaders who had to fight first ... or their children.

In fact it used to be that way. Even as recently as WW II the sons of elite families put on uniforms and some of them died or were wounded. Example: the two older Kennedy brothers.

In the US, at about the time of the Vietnam war, the sons of elite families were mostly carefully avoiding service, or at least avoiding combat. Example: George W. Bush.

For me, this is a disheartening trend.

Michael

[Sgt Joch]

On Eugenics, you have had proponents in all countries for a long time, the main difference between Germany and the Aliies was how far they took it.

Germany:

1. murder of an estimated 200-275,000 mentally disabled children and adults under their official T4 program.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_T4#Killing_of_adults

2. murder of 6,000,000+ jews, gypsies and other "races" to preserve the "purity" of the "Aryan race".

US/UK:

1. murder of...well actually no one was killed under a government approved extermination plan.

so..score card:

Germany: 6,200,000+ murders.

USA: 0 murders.

UK: 0 murders.

[Apocal]

In fact it used to be that way. Even as recently as WW II the sons of elite families put on uniforms and some of them died or were wounded. Example: the two older Kennedy brothers.

In the US, at about the time of the Vietnam war, the sons of elite families were mostly carefully avoiding service, or at least avoiding combat. Example: George W. Bush.

For me, this is a disheartening trend.

Very few people who got to spend time dodging hot steel consider it such an exhilarating, informative experience they want their children to do it. If any of my children suddenly need to discover for themselves that was is a generally bad and universally serious business, I have a collection of about 900 pictures and 20 videos I can show them.

[Childress]

Germany: 6,200,000+ murders.

USA: 0 murders.

UK: 0 murders.

Yes, Sgt Joch, but let's be honest... The Eugenics movement began in America in the 19th cent. We were the pioneers. It was especially popular among academics, so-called progressives and nascent think tanks. Women, like Margaret Sanger, were prominent. It never evolved into outright murder, true, but proponents fostered immigration restrictions, forced sterilizations and segregation for the mentally handicapped. Some states, Connecticut for example, enacted marriage laws with eugenic criteria.

The Rockefeller Foundation helped develop and fund various German eugenics programs, including the one that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

The 'We Do Not Stand Alone' propaganda poster from 1936, supporting Nazi Germany's 1933 eugenics Law. Note the US flag.

OK, back to Hanomag gunners...

[dieseltaylor]

On Eugenics, you have had proponents in all countries for a long time, the main difference between Germany and the Aliies was how far they took it.

Germany:

1. murder of an estimated 200-275,000 mentally disabled children and adults under their official T4 program.

US/UK:

1. murder of...well actually no one was killed under a government approved extermination plan.

so..score card:

Germany: 275,000.

USA: 0 murders.

UK: 0 murders.

The Allies - However this is not quite true is it. I mean they may not have reported deaths but certainly they were making people ill.

The meeting was triggered by the US government's apology last year for federal doctors infecting prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis 65 years ago.

However, later on the US officials also acknowledged there had been dozens of similar experiments in America, which often involved making healthy people sick.

An Associated Press review of medical journal reports and decades-old press clippings found more than 40 such studies, which some just amounted to curiosity-satisfying experiments that hurt people but provided no useful result.

The emerged shocking experiments included infecting mental patients in Connecticut with hepatitis, exposing prisoners in Maryland to a pandemic flu virus, injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital, and infecting prison inmates with gonorrhea at a federal penitentiary in Atlanta.

Media never covered most of the newly uncovered studies done from the 1940s to the 1960s. However, in those reported the coverage centered on the breakthrough and not how test subjects were treated.

At that time, many famous researchers believed that it was legitimate to do experiment on people who did not have full rights in society such as prisoners, mental patients or the poor blacks.

http://edition.presstv.ir/detail/167478.html

And please note the willingness to test abroad.

I have stripped out the mass killings as that is really genocide not eugenics. An interesting point is that in certain societies the killing of newborns is an accepted act if there are deformities etc. Quite understandably in primitive times when all bodies were needed to work for the survival of the people. Think Sparta for an extreme version.

[Sgt Joch]

well, we could probably go on a long time comparing man's inhumanity to man and no one would say US or UK society in the 40s (or even 2013) is perfect.

However, in comparing 20th century atrocities, the result is always the same, the usual suspects (Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, pre-45 Japan, etc.) are the worst in pretty much all categories and the "liberal" democracies are usually far in back of the pack.

not much good can come from this type of topic, perhaps another tack...

[DasMorbo]

@ASLveteran & the other americans around:

I didn't want to put Nazi Germany and the modern USA on the same level.

What I wanted to piont out is this:

I do have the impression, that your governmnet has done some very bad moves in 2001 and 2003. I am under the impression that many Americans thought the same but nobody had the possibilities to stop what was already going on.

(This is not an attack against your Country. I like the US and have met many nice Americans already.)

There were pretty many Germans who knew the government was crazy but were so tied up in the situation, they had just no way to stop them.

My apologies for the misunderstanding.

@ Sgt Joch & sburke:

Yeah, you're right.

Better stop this.

I'll GTFO now.

[Childress]

I have stripped out the mass killings as that is really genocide not eugenics. An interesting point is that in certain societies the killing of newborns is an accepted act if there are deformities etc. Quite understandably in primitive times when all bodies were needed to work for the survival of the people. Think Sparta for an extreme version.

Good points. Eugenics is not genocide. Recently a 1st century letter, on papyrus, was discovered at the Oxyrynchus site in Egypt. It was from a visiting Roman to his pregnant wife in Rome. He commands her that if the child is female to 'expose it'.

We've wandered down a side street with this discussion. But it's not irrelevant when pondering Stigler's act of mercy. What are the long term ramifications? Short term it was damaging to his side.

[dieseltaylor]

O/T

The reliability of memory and people who lie.

I am reading Churchill's Wizards and I think anyone here would find it a very interesting read - and ignore the Churchil bit - that is a title for sales. Its chock full of information. For instance this chap gets a mention:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Meinertzhagen

Seriously misleading chap, and a possibly an out and out psychopath.

Anyway 601 pages plus 20 pages on source notes, and a 20 page index. Lots of people and lots of facts running from 1914 to 1945. The best book about "The British Genius for Deception" I have ever read starting with helmets and camouflage in WW1 running through the inter war years until the kickoff for the big match and until 1945.

[Apocal]

But it's not irrelevant when pondering Stigler's act of mercy. What are the long term ramifications? Short term it was damaging to his side.

Stigler's act of mercy is less about disobeying what he felt was an immoral cause and more reflective of the fact that - for normal human beings - there has to be a justification behind killing another human being beyond lofty ideals. Typically in war, it is fairly simple: him or I, but in Stigler's case he felt no threat and reached his limit for justification.

[dieseltaylor]

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/popular-german-tv-star-was-secretly-a-nazi-documents-reveal-20130503-2iwqc.html

Slightly relevant to the thread is this article which to my mind highlights a bizarre attitude to the past. Halting the potential re-runs of a popular German series seems to me to hurt the pockets of the other actors [i assume repeat fees apply in Germany] rather than impress.

Working on the basis of innocent until proved guilty has been a pretty solid idea for society. If the crime was not prosecuted then - every member of an SS Division was guilty - it seems exceedingly weird to take action on a TV series.

Of course if specific evidence came to light then that may be another matter but for the moment it looks like a stupid knee-jerk reaction.

[poesel]

I don't know if you get repeat fees here but the series is (or was) one of the best selling German TV series. So if they got any they are already rich anyway.

AFAIK it is not yet clear what he actually did except being member in the SS 'Totenkopf' division. But I'm sure we will know soon in detail.

Stopping a re-run is a good thing no matter if he's guilty or not. Have you ever seen an episode?

[Michael Emrys]

"ZDF is shocked and troubled by the news that Horst Tappert was a member of the Waffen SS," spokesman Peter Bogenschuetz said.

Translation: "We were hoping this would never get out."

Michael

[Childress]

This is wild. I was chatting with an elderly neighbor yesterday, Delton, who's 89 y.o.but physically robust. (He was cleaning out his garage) Delton was wearing an army cap so I inquired about his experiences, presumably in WW2. Turned out he the tail gunner on a B-17 which went down over Germany in 1943. November 26, to be precise. The plane was shot up by a pair of fighters. Two of the crew were killed, the rest bailed. When the chutes opened the German planes departed. Four of them were able to escape from Germany to France. He related some of his adventures but it can be hard understanding him through the rattling dentures and Texas twang.

Delton's name is unusual so googling was easy.

http://www.100thbg.com/mainpages/crews/crews2/ford.htm

I printed the page and left it in his mailbox. Be interesting to get his reaction. We talked on and on about the bombing campaign, the flak, the planes, the commanders. The odd thing is that he wasn't surprised at all that I would be so knowledgeable on the subject: most natural thing in the world.

The only discrepancy was that Delton claimed the two enemy fighters were 109s. According to the website they were FW-190s. He did nail the date.

[mjkerner]

This is wild. I was chatting with an elderly neighbor yesterday, Delton, who's 89 y.o.but physically robust. (He was cleaning out his garage) Delton was wearing an army cap so I inquired about his experiences, presumably in WW2. Turned out he the tail gunner on a B-17 which went down over Germany in 1943. November 26, to be precise. The plane was shot up by a pair of fighters. Two of the crew were killed, the rest bailed. When the chutes opened the German planes departed. Four of them were able to escape from Germany to France. He related some of his adventures but it can be hard understanding him through the rattling dentures and Texas twang.

Delton's name is unusual so googling was easy.

http://www.100thbg.com/mainpages/crews/crews2/ford.htm

I printed the page and left it in his mailbox. Be interesting to get his reaction. We talked on and on about the bombing campaign, the flak, the planes, the commanders. The odd thing is that he wasn't surprised at all that I would be so knowledgeable on the subject: most natural thing in the world.

The only discrepancy was that Delton claimed the two enemy fighters were 109s. According to the website they were FW-190s. He did nail the date.

In the Bloody 100th! They were savaged on several occasions. Wonder if he knew the crew of the aircraft that caused all the extra Luftwaffe animosity against the 100th? (You know the story--Damaged B17 put its wheels down signifying that the crew wishes to surrender and will land, LW escorts it toward a landing area, damage is repaired so decision made to not surrender afterall, B17 shoots down most/all of escort with out warning. Germans very angry--swear to take out the 100th whenever encountered. 100th has horrendous casualties in subsequent raids.)