The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Clio, the Muse of History

Why I Write

Once upon a time, I wrote for very political reasons. Bush had invaded Iraq, I was upset about it, and I saw that if the US and the world in general did not change the path they were on, we were going to wind up in an era of war and revolution. Combined with climate and other environmental issues like aquifer depletion and ecosystem collapse, we were going to have a huge human die-off and massive suffering.

At first, I went all wonky. I assumed people couldn’t possibly want such a catastrophe, so I explained why it was likely to happen and I explained how to stop it in terms of plans. I used to do VERY detailed policy posts.

That didn’t work. Didn’t get any significant traction at all.

I examined the situation, and realized that people couldn’t reason morally and ethically. A few incidents convinced me that people didn’t understand really basic things like: “Killing civilians is worse than killing military,” and “Killing more people is worse than killing less people.”

So I spent a couple years trying to explain basic morals and ethics to people.

That didn’t work. They either already understood, or they were incapable of learning, no matter how simply I put the propositions. Oh, they might agree with no context (although often not even then), but the moment their tribe was involved, they became evil again.

So, I looked at that feedback, and realized that most people can’t reason, can’t separate morals from their own interests, can’t separate ethics from identity, and so on. Worse, many couldn’t even separate their own interests in terms of health, money, and staying alive from their tribal identity.

To put it simply, they were living in completely delusional fantasy worlds, so separate from any even vaguely objective reality that they might as well be living in a TV show (and, in effect, many are).

Yes, they were incapable of basic ethical and moral reasoning. Yes, many were incapable of thinking a few years into the future, or evaluating opportunity cost (look it up). Yes, if they identified with a politician or a group, they were largely incapable of applying ethical rules or even assessing their own self interest in relation to the actions of that politician.

I then moved onto issues of ideology and identity (though I’ve written less about the second), trying to dig into why people are how they are, how and when that changes, and so on.

Short answer: They have to die. The generations who are that afflicted cannot be taught, they simply have to age out of power and shuffle off the mortal coil. At a very fundamental level, they never intend to do the right thing if it conflicts with anything else of importance to them. And if that means a billion or two billion people die with whom they are not personally identified, and/or there is a great-die-off of non-human life, they’re fundamentally okay with that.

They can’t even understand “kill less people.” It is genuinely beyond them in practice. The majority will certainly never vote for a genuinely good candidate, and those candidates have been offered to Democrats during their primaries regularly.

They don’t want to do the right thing. (Yes, not everyone in those generations is so afflicted, there are large minorities who aren’t. They are minorities.)

So, I do not write, any more, to convince people to do the right thing. I know that doing so is beyond most people, certainly most Americans over the age of 30. And that is not about Trump, or Clinton: A population who wanted to do the right thing would not have had an election between two such monstrous individuals.

I write, today, to tell truths which are I believe are ignored by many people–especially on the center-left (the right-wing does not read me). Truths such as: Clinton’s hatred of Russia was extremely dangerous; Trump is not incompetent by any useful definition of the word; racism grows stronger when times are bad; under the EU, some people in England have been plunged into hopelessnes, and; while it may not be the EU’s fault, they are the status quo and will be blamed (though it isn’t not their fault).

This is shit people don’t want to hear.

As such, I suppose, I shouldn’t complain when people scream because I’ve hit a pain point. After all, by telling them truths that are not generally accepted in their group, I’m aiming for pain points.

Yet, I still am flabbergasted by the inability of people to understand simple points like “good and competent are not the same thing,” or “don’t underestimate your enemy.”

So, I write here to explore subjects which interest me, and, quite often, to tell truths that are not widely accepted.  I see little point in writing articles which simply parrot views you can already read in the NYTimes or hear on CNN.

As such, I am likely to say things which challenge your world view. Things which, yes, may hurt.

But the reason the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and the reason we are actively riding that handbasket all the way down, is that we were given warnings that we were in the hand basket and we ignored them for decades. Trump isn’t the cause, he is the symptom. And frankly, though most can’t understand it, so were Clinton and Obama (who, if you want to blame someone, is the man most proximately responsible for Trump’s victory, but most people can’t admit that, either).

People wanted to live in fantasyland, and so we are going deeper and deeper into hell.

And so I will speak the truth, as I understand it (I may be wrong, though if you think I am mostly wrong, you should not read me). That is, more than any other reason, why I write.

We are here because people wanted to both believe and act on lies, because they could not stand to live in the real world, fantasyland being much more congenial to their self-image (based on their group-based identity), and to what they perceived (often–but not always–incorrectly) as their self-interest.

The problem does not lie at not being able to fix the problem. Leaving aside the whole “it’s too late now” argument, we have no significant problems we couldn’t start fixing or substantially mitigating tomorrow if we so desired. We could easily have avoided the worst of climate change, ecological collapse, and the rise of racism/stagnant economies if we had acted decisively 20 years ago.

The problem lies with people not wanting to do the right thing, and with them willfully living in a world that contains no more than a remote resemblance to the real world.

People who cannot understand simple things like “kill less people,” or “don’t underestimate your enemies,” have problems that are far deeper than whether Trump or Clinton rules them, but many who read this won’t even understand that.

The truth won’t set you free by itself, but lies will keep you in hell more surely than chains made of iron ever could.


The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

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99 Comments

  1. Well said that man!

    I mangle AI to extract what’s most reasonable from binary data, because I’m incredibly lazy and can’t be bothered to follow up all the bias inspirations that my natural mind generates. We didn’t get here by thinking straight, so unless the trajectory looks fine we gonna need perceptual goggles, or thinky pointers like this article, for which many thanks !

  2. Tom

    Yeah, its a crazy world. Trying to explain anything to my mother is a fruitless exercise.

  3. Dean Flemming

    Keep on observing, researching, thinking and writing. Intelligent essays are fuel for the active mind.

  4. V. Arnold

    Your’s is a unique blog Ian; one which I value above all others.
    Keep on doing your thing, the thing you do so well.
    And thank you for allowing me to be a small part of it.

  5. Steve

    “They don’t want to do the right thing.”

    Ian, the interesting question is ‘why don’t they want to do the right thing?’

    There’s a calculus there involving self interests, perceived and real, of all sorts.

    Like your stuff.

  6. anonone

    Ian, I sometimes disagree with what you write, but you are one of the most thoughtful and original bloggers that I read regularly. Thanks.

  7. peonista

    Tribalism and “fairytale thinking” are a very old and entrenched phenomenon for humans (religion, anyone?) Sadly, I don’t see it ending anytime soon.
    I wish I could share your enthusiasm over the under 30’s Ian. The election last month shook my faith in that group,. I saw many a Bernie supporter turn into a rabid Clinton swat team member that policed anyone in their Bernie group who dared to vote Green. If the center left could just break from their” lesser evil Democrat box” we might see some real change. I am in my 60’s and gave up holding my breathe for that event a long time ago.
    I agree with you Ian on Obama. Obama set the stage for Trump.

    Thank you for not giving up on us Ian. I know I am not alone in saying you are a beacon to all of us walking in a darkening world. As many have said before, Write on.

  8. Sluggo

    Well, if you read Morris Berman, you would know it is an absolute waste of time trying to convince Americans to not hustle. Save yourself further years of mental anguish.

  9. Sterling Fuller

    If knowing the truth was adaptationally superior then humans would seek the truth, but if liars reproduce faster than truth-seekers then the world would not be much different than what we see today.

    https://youtu.be/oYp5XuGYqqY

  10. zot23

    I enjoy your posts Ian and have gotten a lot out of them, even all the way back in those dark, pre-Iraq days. I just don’t post as much as others, I don’t think I’m alone. Keep going, people read what you write.

    Besides, all BS aside, you like writing and holding a mirror up to the sickness. It’s the rarest creature to find someone who listens to someone else’s good advice without experiencing the burn of trial/error first. Just keep doing what you want to do anyway, don’t focus on changing people’s minds.

  11. Jack McKinley

    Just simply this…beautiful, honest and excellent.

  12. S. Rowell

    These ideas need to be introduced at an early age and reinforced throughout, they are not. We are all products of our inputs, our inputs are, and have been, shit. While most will never change to a degree that matters there are those that innately align but flounder from the lack of a good example. Thankfully you provide that.

  13. Senator-Elect

    Great post. It brings up several critical issues.

    1) On the human reaction to the threat of extinction, I found Jonathan Schell’s Fate of the Earth to be quite insightful. When nukes were invented, how did people deal with the implications? We see the same responses with climate change. Perhaps we are still suffering from the initial infection.

    2) Voting behaviour is not explained. First, why do nearly half of eligible Americans fail to vote? This should be a top concern of political science and the politicians, yet it gets virtually no attention. Second, I think the post is a little harsh on people. Most people do not think before they act. Twitter is great at demonstrating this—supposedly literate people reacting like any Joe Blow on the street. So we should clearly expect ordinary people to react rather than think. Third, people are sheeple. Monkey see, monkey do and keep up with the Joneses. This explains a lot about how candidates with name recognition get elected despite zero accomplishments (Reagan, Schwarzenegger, W. Bush, Hillary, Justin Trudeau).

    3) Our elites have been screwing up for over 30 years. After a few decades of good stuff coming out of the Depression and WWII, we started heading backwards. We have seen massive failures of military, economic and environmental management. And the media have totally failed to prevent or even highlight them. So how can we blame ordinary people when our supposed extraordinary people have failed too?

  14. nihil obstet

    I’ve read you ever since BOPnews, and hope you keep writing. Emotionally, I agree with a very harsh view of other people. Why can’t they think and do right????!!!? Not that I’m judgmental or anything, oh no-o-o. But in my more detached moments, I do think that our Rational Man is as big a fallacy as the Soviet Union’s new Soviet Man or the neoliberal’s Economic Man.

    Some things we sometimes overlook:
    1. Human beings are extraordinarily adaptable. That’s how we’ve managed to survive and even thrive in very diverse environments. What’s true in physical terms is also true in psychic terms. Human beings have thrived swimming in seas of very diverse religions, social organizations, equality or hierarchy (well, I don’t think we thrive in hierarchy, but I just have problems with authority), and economic arrangements. Reason and logic are not hardwired values.
    2. Some things are hardwired. The main one is the need for other people. We’re social animals with a strong drive to be accepted and respected by others. Very few of us will accept disgrace, shame, or expulsion. We will do so generally only when there’s another group that will accept and respect us. That is, we’ll change groups rather than strike out in lonely virtue.
    3. On most subjects, most of us are really low information participants. There is far more information available than any of us can deal with effectively. And let’s be honest — it really doesn’t help the average person to know a whole hell of a lot about government or politicians. When labor unions or farmers’ cooperatives or precinct-based political parties were strong, the group shared information that could be the basis of action. But today? Any decision will be announced with reams of contracted expert studies that prove the best policy is the one that benefits the elite. For most people, what’s the point? And for us, why call the people stupid?

    There are better times and worse times. The way to the better times is to keep pushing our approach — reason, logic, kindness and its values. And hope it drags those people kicking and screaming into our group, even if all we can see now is the kicking and screaming.

  15. coloradoblue

    Thanks for your absolutely spot on comment that Trump’s win was due to Obama’s failure(s). I’ve been trying, and mostly failing, to explain to friends and acquaintances this since it became apparent Trump would be the nominee. A few come around when I get to “We elected the Dems in 2008 because we wanted, and needed, fundamental political and economic change, and we didn’t get it. A few find that understandable.

    The half of the American electorate that voted the change in 2008 voted for change again in 2016 and this time we’re going to get it!

    We’ve been voting for, and getting, failure for 40 years and I wonder how much further down the rabbit hole this country is going to go.

  16. Adam Eran

    Terrific column. Bill McKibbon makes the distinction between and argument and a fight. He says the climate activists have more than won the argument. What’s left is to win the fight, which is about money and power.

    I’ll still support your writing to disclose what’s ignored, but I’d suggest a fight is what’s on our hands now. How to “fight for peace”…now there’s a riddle!

  17. BlizzardOfOz

    Ian,

    The question I have tangential to the OP, but maybe still relevant. When I read your posts on ethics, I often think they present too narrow point of view for the statesman (or for the citizen). I know you mean them as pedagogical tools, or building blocks for a fuller perspective. But then I read something like this –

    The majority will certainly never vote for a genuinely good candidate, and those candidates have been offered to Democrats in primaries regularly.

    – and I wonder. Are we talking about someone like a Bernie Sanders? Because this brings me back to the limits of a purely ethical perspective. While Sanders is surely an ethical man — who would not kill unless he could picture his son and still pull the trigger — he surely lacks other virtues that are rarer and absolutely essential for a leader of men. I mean things like vision, strength of will, force of personality. You can see in Sanders a weakness — I’m thinking of episodes like holding the deciding vote for Obamacare yet not extracting any meaningful concession for the American people — that would not give me confidence in him waging a serious fight for his ideals against fanatical resistance.

    So I find myself asking a three-part question to try and draw out my theme. The first question: which leaders, present or past, most attained to the ideal of a good man (or woman)? In other words, history is filled with great men, and also with good men; but are there any that are both good and great? Of course it’s a highly subjective question that requires great judgement.

    A second question: which men (or races of men) have succeeded in forging a world or national order that was good? You mentioned that Ghengis Khan, despite his bloodthirstiness, created an empire that was tolerant of religions, and where trade flourished and general good order was preserved. In a similar vein we could talk about the Romans, who forged an imperial ideal, parts of which have survived to the present day; Charlemagne’s empire, and so forth.

    Now, a final question that gets to what I’m driving at: shouldn’t we desire men of the second type, who forge good and lasting states, rather than ethical ones? Now ideally we would want men who embody both types. But is there necessarily any overlap between the first type – men who driven by an ideal are able to forge a state out of the chaos – and the second – men who hold themselves to a kind of utilitarian ethical standard?

    Think of someone like Patton, not exactly a cautious man, but driven by his own unerring instincts. If he had (as he wanted to) continued on from Berlin to crush the Soviets, then on the one hand a lot more people would have died, but on the other, maybe the Eastern Europeans would have been free of the Soviet yoke, maybe we would have been spared a generation of CIA-sponsored meddling all over the globe in the name of containment.

    Apologies for the lengthy comment — thanks again for the great work you do.

  18. realitychecker

    Ian, people who think and analyze with integrity, as you do and as I try to do, will always be a tiny minority, and that is a damn shame, but somebody has to carry the lantern, regardless.

    Thanks for holding the lantern high. You are a fine exemplar for the rest of us.

  19. BlizzardOfOz

    I guess, to ask the question is to answer it. “Great” and “good” exist on independent axes. But you have to first be great to work good. And even great “bad” mean can work good, and likewise great “good” men can work ill.

  20. EmilianoZ

    Short answer: they have to die. The generations who are that afflicted cannot be taught, they simply have to age out of power and shuffle off the mortal coil. They, at a very fundamental level, never intend to do the right thing if it conflicts with anything else of importance to them.

    This seems to be a thinly veiled dig at the Boomers. The thing I do not understand is this. Most of the older people have children. Don’t they care about them? According to the “selfish gene” theory the individual does want to save himself/herself. The individual wants to save the gene. The writer Murakami had this image: the gene rides the individual like a horse. The individual is just a vehicle for the gene.

    I guess one of the great successes of big oil, is that they managed to ascribe a certain level of uncertainty to the science.

  21. EmilianoZ

    Erratum: According to the “selfish gene” theory the individual does NOT want to save himself/herself. The individual wants to save the gene.

  22. Ian Welsh

    You haven’t been offered men who forge strong states. Everyone since Nixon (yeah, including Carter) has pursued policies which made the US worse off and almost everyone since FDR has (in fact, only LBJ is even a close case, due to domestic policy; and Eisenhower, due to inactivity.) Truman chose to make permanent the military-industrial complex. JFK started the Vietnam war and made unjustified tax cuts.

    Kucinich goes into genuinely good & he had executive experience as a mayor where he demonstrably did a good job. And he ran for the democratic nomination virtually every time.

    Camelot myths aside, the last great president you had was FDR (maybe LBJ). And FDR, though he definitely did some bad shit, did far more good than bad, and exhibited a genuine concern for the wellbeing of people.

    A genuinely good man is not one who has never done anything bad; but one who has done the vast majority of things good. Perhaps Sanders doesn’t quite make it (he might). But Kucinich does and there have been others.

    I never get Americans or Brits or whoever, it really isn’t hard. Like in Canada: where while I wouldn’t put Mulcair in the genuinely good category, I would put him in the “has genuine integrity and principles” category (demonstrated repeatedly), while Justin Trudeau had never demonstrated any sign of integrity.

    And Canadians elected Trudeau, who is now backtracking on multiple key election promises.

    Such people cannot be helped.

  23. “I’ve disagreed with every governor of New York, especially this one.” M. Cuomo will speaking as governor of New York.

    Remember politicians can only do what millions of people want to do – this means often they order things that they know are bad. People can only be led so far, and all of the good presidents knew this.

  24. Ian Welsh

    Yes. Leaders can only take followers so far; and leaders that are too far from what followers want (Kucinich) will not be followed.

    In this same way, I find Brits refusal to support Corbyn more of an indictment of Brits than of Corbyn.

  25. rkka

    Blizzard,

    “Think of someone like Patton, not exactly a cautious man, but driven by his own unerring instincts. If he had (as he wanted to) continued on from Berlin to crush the Soviets, then on the one hand a lot more people would have died, but on the other, maybe the Eastern Europeans would have been free of the Soviet yoke, maybe we would have been spared a generation of CIA-sponsored meddling all over the globe in the name of containment.”

    The only Patton would have gotten to Moscow would have been as Zhukov’s prisoner.

    The term you want to google now is

    “Operation Unthinkable”

    The Chiefs of Staff thought the prospects dim.

  26. Synoia

    Oh no. There you go again puncturing my delusions.

    And my delusions were so comfortable.

    There was a comment I read once about theories in physics, I believe between Newton’s and Huygens, theories of light, asked of Huygens when he was old. (That is before Einstein really upset the Physics apple cart).

    Q: What happened to Newton’s theory?

    A: The people who believed it died.

    The same has to be true of neo-liberalism. And it is the baby boomers who have to dies, and they will.

  27. Tom

    Operation Unthinkable would have succeeded. The Soviets were burnt out and their entire industry was reliant on regular American resupply of critical components because Stalin had so screwed the country up.

    US Forces were better trained and equipped than the Soviets and the Sherman had proven itself the best tank of the war with a 7-to-1 kill ratio against Panzers as verified by combat records.

  28. Elliott

    First and foremost, Ian, you are honest. Sometimes brutally so, but we need that.

    Plus, you are obviously intelligent, well educated (autodidactic-plus). and well informed. And your thoughts and opinions are carefully considered before you hit “publish.” These are the top reasons I like/need to read what you write. I thank you for caring to share this with the rest of us.

  29. Ian,

    You’ve written a version of this multiple times in the past, and I will again be the one to dissent. Emotion and emotionality are a fundamental part of the human experience, and any expectation of people that they will vote for or follow “genuinely good men” in the absence of an understanding of subjectivity and emotionality actively defeats itself.

    Apparently unlike you, I do not blame people for making poor choices in the absence of an emotionally-aware form of political impetus. Corbyn seems to be a genuinely good man, but anyone can now see that he (so far) has not found a way to steer the emotional state of the electorate. That is not only a flaw of the British electorate, that is also a flaw in Corbyn.

    Yet, I still am flabbergasted by the inability of people to understand simple points like “good and competent” are not the same thing. Or “don’t underestimate your enemy”.

    And I find it very difficult to see why you’re flabbergasted. Who bears the message and how they bear it matter. Have you examined what it is that you are doing to provoke that reaction?

    We are here because people wanted to believe lies and act on the lies, because they could not stand to live in the real world, fantasyland being much more congenial to their self-image based on their group-based identity, and to what they perceived (often but not always incorrectly) as their self-interest.

    It’s a fundamental part of the human condition to have an emotional filter over information and reasoning. Emotion is an informational filter, that’s what it’s for. We are here for a lot of different reasons. But one of them is a particular belief among those who see themselves as the truth-tellers. That belief is that everyone else has an obligation to look at and mentally process truth the way that they do and accept truth in the way that they want to present it, with the same moral and emotional weight.

    That belief, however, is not well grounded.

  30. Steve

    Having met Dennis Kucinich, I cannot say that I was very impressed by the man. To be president of the United States, you need to be able to manipulate the enormously powerful reactionary sentiments of US citizens. Kucinich just was not capable of that. John Edwards might have been. Edwards was a shyster, of course, but he might have had it in him. You simply cannot rule a country like the United States with the straightforward goodness of someone like Kucinich, you need a sociopath. Does anyone disagree that FDR and LBJ were sociopaths?

    My biggest frustration when discussing politics actually occurs when people ostensibly agree with me. They hear the words that I say but then they simply reinterpret what I say into their own worldview and then agree with themselves. It drives me totally crazy. These people are nonetheless useful though as near-perfect mouthpieces for their positions in society. If I want the most conventional views of a college-educated, single, feminist woman I know exactly who to ask. She’s a one-person focus group if you will. In my case, my fantasies have been shattered so many times that I’m not sure what is left of them.

    I am glad that you write, Ian. Yes, we humans live in fantasyland. Some cognitive scientists even think that these fantasies are what have kept us alive all these years. But now we have power that we cannot handle with our feeble grip on reality. History has taught us that humans only embrace fundamental change when forced to. I think this means that we are going to have to let go of those fantasies or become extinct. Can this occur without some sort of violent rupture with the past? That is, the original meaning of apocalypse as “an uncovering.” I am not sure what the future holds, but I hope that it can bring a new set of problems more interesting than the ones we have now. It’s time for humanity to grow up. (Or die.) I wonder what the new age will be like…I hope I live to see it. I don’t want to end up like a character from The Cherry Orchard.

  31. rkka

    “In the Left Corner, the Chiefs of Staff of the British Armed Forces, with vast, direct experience of waging the most horrific war in history.

    In the Right Corner, internet commenter Tom.”

    “Operation Unthinkable would have succeeded. The Soviets were burnt out and their entire industry was reliant on regular American resupply of critical components because Stalin had so screwed the country up.”

    One wonders how they managed to bleed the Wehrmacht white before more than $85,000.00 worth of Lend-Lease from the US arrived.

    “US Forces were better trained and equipped than the Soviets and the Sherman had proven itself the best tank of the war with a 7-to-1 kill ratio against Panzers as verified by combat records.”

    Cite on the Sherman-Panzer kill ratio please.

  32. Max

    What do you think of the rights plan to cut social security and Medicare?

    Can you please write an article on it for your worried folllowers, or at least a long comment

  33. Lisa

    I have long argued (and only half jokingly) that what we need is a full on nuclear war.. When it is over we will have about 2 billion people left, the southern hemisphere as a reposititory of technical skills, the US and Europe gone, Chinese and Indian (etc) populations drastically reduced.

    The world cooled significantly and a chance for trees, fish and wildlife to come back and aquifers recharged and a human population well into its ‘sustainability’ level.
    Sure the biosphere will take a hit, but realistically no more than another 5 or 10 years of current human caused damage and depletion.

    So is that the best hope for the human race to survive at a reasonably good technical and sustainable level?

    The problem is that at each missed opportunity for positive change the options close ever more. By not starting to change in the 1980s we automatically closed off many easy and painless options. To take but a simple example, changing to non CO2 producing electricity generation would have been fairly simple back then, but we have left it too late and a crash program to change would be far more difficult and too much damage is now locked in.

  34. S Brennan

    Over time I’ve had to drop bloggers because it became apparent that they were self serving sycophants…I haven’t drop your blog Ian.

    Yeah, not much of an attaboy, but you know…

  35. different clue

    Even the sincere effort to live in truth stops short when truth gets too painful to live in. For example, it is considered to be true that we have placed so much global warmy gas in the air that a whole lot of warming is the unavoidable future. Yet even the people who consider this a truth they are ready to live in may not be able to bear the further possible truth that the warmup will not stop at some historical future point either. If the truth is that Earth will warm up to Condition Venus Lite at the very least, how many livers in truth are prepared to live in that much truth?

    How much truth is too much ( if it is really true)? Fellow Canadian blogger Jeff Wells at his Rigorous Intuition 2.0 Blog wrote a couple years ago the post We Are The Monsters We’ve Been Waiting For. Is it too much truth to live in? Here is the link.
    http://rigint.blogspot.com/2011/09/we-are-monsters-weve-been-waiting-for.html

    Here is a blog by a totally amateur blogger called Wit’s End. Her thesis is that near universal ozogenic ground-level pollution all over the land surface area of the earth is compromising the photosynthetic functionality of trees and non-tree plants over millions of square miles. This compromises their ability to suck down any CO2 at all. This means that any chance of future survival for species man and most other complex multi-celled species has been ruled entirely out. If she ( and the sources she cites) are correct, is this too much truth for anyone to be able to live in?
    http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/

  36. V. Arnold

    different clue
    December 11, 2016

    I must say, your post loses me completely. Too much truth?
    Is that even possible? Possibly for some, but I do not know or; really care.
    I absolutely know that as a dominant species we’re done. There is no other possible outcome.
    I say this because I see people living as usual while giving lip service to solutions to turn things around; which isn’t possible. Or rather, I should say it won’t be done.
    I became aware of the problem in the 1980’s. Almost 40 years of inaction; and now Trump.
    I accept the truth of our demise just fine thank you.
    Perhaps you could define “too much truth”; I don’t get it…

  37. Ché Pasa

    “She would certainly get us into a nuclear war with Russia while he saved us from it” has been one of the oddest and most persistent arguments in defense of Trump.

    It’s still being retailed as if it were an established fact, when in truth it is little more than campaign rhetoric and propaganda without a factual basis.

    From what little we could know during the campaign, neither candidate would start a nuclear war with Russia.

    From what we know of how our government works, a President has no authority to launch a first strike nuclear attack. Any attempt to do so would be countered by disobedience and refusal to follow clearly illegal orders — at a minimum. That doesn’t mean that a president wouldn’t try to circumvent built in safe-guards over war-making. We’ve seen it happen in other administrations my entire lifetime. But that hasn’t yet led to nuclear holocaust, and neither Mr. Trump nor Mrs. Clinton were advocating or promoting first strike nuclear attack on anyone. Mr. Trump questioned why we don’t do it, since we have so many nuclear weapons (obsolete though they supposedly are), whereas Mrs. Clinton clearly knows why we don’t do it and showed no signs of questioning why we don’t.

    The kind of anti-Putin/anti-Russian rhetoric the Clinton campaign was using was provocative, outrageous, over the top, and dangerous as hell. Those of us who lived through the Cold War and paid close attention to what our rulers and their Soviet counterparts were actually doing, though, could recognize the rhetoric and saber rattling for what it was:

    It was a particularly poorly executed example of Cold War style Brinkmanship.

    Those of us who were raised during the era — ’50’s to ’70’s as both Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton were — lived through repeated episodes of Brinkmanship and its variants, a few of which (ie: Cuban Missile Crisis) got pretty close to mutual annihilation — or so they wanted us to believe. These episodes were always used to whip up anti-Soviet/anti-Communist sentiment and to inspire dread and loathing of the Enemy. It worked, too. Primary domestic purpose was propaganda. Internationally, it was done to attempt to thwart or control Soviet expansion and the spread of dreaded Communism.

    But no matter the provocation, these episodes never led to an actual nuclear war, nor were they intended to. Call it a “negotiating tactic.” They worked effectively to avoid nuclear annihilation. In the end, one or the other side, or commonly both sides, backed away from the brink. Always. And that was the point.

    The only way that Mrs. Clinton’s Brinkmanship and provocations during the campaign would lead to nuclear war with Russia were she president is if the Kremlin launched a first strike, much as it was the only way there would have been a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

    I saw no signs that anyone in the Kremlin, least of all, Tovarich Putin, had an itchy nuclear trigger finger.

    This is a rational understanding of what was going on during the campaign based on US government history, the kind of conditioning Mrs Clinton and all the rest of her generation received in public school during the Cold War, and the kind of advice she was likely receiving from Old Cold Warriors such as her good buddy Dr. Kissinger.

    Note: Mr. Trump did not go to public school; he was in military boarding school during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Needless to say, he received a very different kind of conditioning during the Cold War.

    

  38. Ian Welsh

    Yes, Che Pasa and Mandos, we disagree. More than that, Mandos, you don’t actually understand what I understand about your world view. But I’m very tired of that argument, so I’m just going to skip it.

  39. Lef

    To Sterling Fuller,

    Great link. Much appreciated.

  40. realitychecker

    @ Mandos and sundry others

    There is truth, and then there are your feelings. You don’t get to change what is the actual truth, aka reality, by choosing to believe what is most comforting to your particular subjective feelings.

    And you don’t get to change what is the truth by voting on it.

    It’s nothing but runaway ego to think that the truth must conform to you, rather than you attempting to conform to the truth.

    Humans at the animal level may not be able to deal with this, but that is what training and discipline are for.

  41. Whether I agree or disagree with you, in part or in whole, I always find your posts thought-provoking and that in iteslf, to me at least, has great value

  42. More than that, Mandos, you don’t actually understand what I understand about your world view.

    That is uncharacteristically inscrutable. *shrug*

  43. Realitychecker:

    There is truth, and then there are your feelings. You don’t get to change what is the actual truth, aka reality, by choosing to believe what is most comforting to your particular subjective feelings.

    The “subjective feelings” of others and “reality” are actually inseparable from one another, and it appears to be a “comforting” belief of some that feelings and emotions exist in a plane of discourse other than that of “reality”.

    And you don’t get to change what is the truth by voting on it.

    It’s nothing but runaway ego to think that the truth must conform to you, rather than you attempting to conform to the truth.

    Here’s a reality check for you, realitychecker: the emotional reasons for why people vote for things are part of your reality, that vote very much does change what the truth is, and that truth you don’t get to change by inveighing against it or calling it names like “runaway ego”.

  44. Tom

    @rkka

    Look up the National Ballistics Laboratory Report on the European Theater. They combed through the battlefield examining every wreck and all combat reports.

    In every battle, Shermans won the fight. That is because they had horizontal stabilization and padded gunsights that enabled them to track targets on the move. German Tankers did not have this and could only search for targets when stopped. In addition, Shermans 75mm guns had superior velocity and when fitted with the right AP Ammo, they easily penetrated even Tigers. But most targets they engaged were MG Nests.

    Also Shermans had amazing protection for the day and German 88s had to repeatably fire on them to get them to burn, allowing the crew to escape.

    The T-34-85 was a poor tank with numerous soft-flaws that hampered its combat efficiency. A penetrating hit meant the Tank brewed up as the fuel cells were right next to the ammo.

    This is before we go into the massive air and sea advantage the allies had and the bomb.

    In addition half the soviet airforce relied on US supplied aluminum and US 100 Octane fuel. All Soviet Soldiers relied on US Supplied boots, food, and trucks. And that is the tip of the ice berg.

    The Soviets under Stalin could not have won on their own, if the US had not entered the fray, the Russians would have lost.

  45. realitychecker

    @ Mandos

    Kind of mind-blowing to see you misunderstand what was meant by a separate sentence like

    “And you don’t get to change what is the truth by voting on it,”

    especially when the context was clearly set by the preceding paragraph.

    But deliberate misunderstandings and misinterpretations of the words of others seems to be all your kind of “thinkers” (using the term loosely) have left anymore. Are you really unable to get it that when I used “vote” in that sentence I was meaning what I had described in the previous paragraph, i.e., that “vote” was used in the sense of

    ” . . . choosing to believe what is most comforting to your particular subjective feelings . . .,”

    which you had just ALSO quoted?????????

    I showed your comment to my lady, and she says I should have made the meaning of “vote” in that sentence more clear by giving an example; I “feel” it’s a bit demeaning to ASSUME that low a level of reading comprehension in the people I am trying to communicate with, but since you have now proven me wrong in that overly-generous assumption, here you go:

    E.g., If people were to “vote,” i.e., “feel,” i.e., “believe,” that they could simply walk off a high cliff and not fall downward, that would still not keep them from falling downward when they walk off the cliff.

    Better now? Are you now able to understand that I was not talking about any of our pitiful little election day events? Would you now care to address the point I was actually making?

    Probably not, I’m guessing.

    In all seriousness, I have come to see this as a preferred tactic of many in public dialogue, especially on the Internet, where the goal seems to be a version of the basic diversion/distraction technique. I despise that tactic, but it is effective in the sense that I have now had to spend a substantial bit of time and energy writing this ‘clarifying’ response, AND I GET TIRED EVENTUALLY, which means maybe I get so disgusted I just go away and leave the field looking as though you had made some cogent point. Which you didn’t.

  46. E.g., If people were to “vote,” i.e., “feel,” i.e., “believe,” that they could simply walk off a high cliff and not fall downward, that would still not keep them from falling downward when they walk off the cliff.

    But this is a completely irrelevant, trivial sense of “vote” that anyone reading this discussion should readily dismiss. The whole thread exists fundamentally in the context of the question of how large groups make decisions. So if a large group of people vote to throw themselves off a cliff and take you with them, you had better consider the reasons why they did so as part of your reality.

    I know very well that the thrust of these “reality” arguments is to set human group decision-making the against the laws of physics, with the obvious implication that the latter will win. The rhetorical sleight of hand is that if the laws of physics are presented to people, it must be the case that by voting in a manner that will destroy themselves, they must be voting against the laws of physics, that it is their “fault” that they can’t handle the truth, etc, etc, that they lack a basic ability to make moral and survival calculations in the face of physics. That the would-be Cassandra has done her job, but the benighted idiots have decided to “die in lies”.

    And that is not true. The would-be Cassandra has not done her job, if the public has decided to vote against the laws of physics and throw everyone off a cliff. So then the next step is for the Cassandra to back off and claim that she isn’t really trying to save anyone, because obviously, since they weren’t listening, they are not savable. That’s more than a little astounding a claim: it implies that people should only be saved if they let themselves be saved on Cassandra’s terms.

  47. realitychecker

    @ Mandos

    You have now conclusively demonstrated with that absurd burst of drivel that there is no point in discussing reality with your cramped little mind. LIKE SO MANY ON THE LEFT, YOU SEEM TO THINK THAT A BLIZZARD OF UNFOCUSED TYPING CAN SUBSTITUTE FOR, AND ACTUALLY BE PREFERABLE TO , DIRECT AND FOCUSED SENTENCES.

    Is there any topic where one cannot willy-nilly re-direct to a hundred different ‘contexts’, if one is trying to avoid engaging an argument that he does not know how to refute directly? Forests, trees, trees, forest, forest, trees, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum, where does that get us, except to keep us in endless unresolved confusion? That is why it is important too have some sense of the specific context at any given moment, an art/skillset you clearly have no competence in.

    FYI, this thread exists in the ‘context’ of how we can try to think clearly, rather than being mindless slaves to our individual subjective emotions, desires, and tribal identities.

    You had responded specifically to me and my comment, and actually QUOTED my comment in your response, so that is the context for our particular exchange. But instead of actually trying to refute my point, you just engage in more ridiculous blather. I trust that most here will reject your thought process, and will pity you rather than agree with you.

    That kind of nonsense and preference for word games is a prime reason why I have been forced to disassociate myself from the left in recent years. If you can’t accept basic physics as an acceptable exemplar of reality, then you simply lack the disciplined brainpower to participate in serious discussions. And a serious person is wasting his time by engaging you. You are nothing but a rhetorical tarbaby.

  48. realitychecker

    Let me just add, re your silly “Cassandra” reference, that there are many ugly, disturbing, disappointing realities in this world, this life, this universe. Ignoring the ones that don’t make us feel good is delusional, and is not my way. I accept many things as true that I do not like, even though it makes things more complex and difficult than simple ‘black or white’ thinking.

    Unfortunately for people like you, there are many ‘grays’ around us. Deal with it.

  49. Just Passing By

    Aristotle understood this problem 2,500 years ago.

    His solution was simple.

    You have to decide who can and cannot be persuaded by rational argument (which he called dialectic).

    Those who cannot must be persuaded by rhetoric.

    It’s not much more complicated than that.

  50. Ian Welsh

    And then there are those who cannot be reached by rhetoric.

  51. ks

    @ Mandos,

    “You’ve written a version of this multiple times in the past, and I will again be the one to dissent.”

    Thank you! With all due respect to our good host Ian, he has recently posted multiple variations of this theme so perhaps it should be dawning on him that maybe it’s not “them” who doesn’t get it.

    Also, your accurate examinations of realitychecker’s banal posturing were marvelous and of course sent him into his usual hysterics though it’s amusing watching the poor guy falling back, restating and ending up where he always does – back to his banal posturing and imagining that he’s some rigorous observer of objective reality when that’s clearly not true.

  52. Ian Welsh

    By the time you’re sick of writing it, the audience is only beginning to clue in and not everyone reads every article I write. Articles are not written primarily for regular commenters, who don’t even make up 1% of my readership.

    The feedback on this post has been the most positive for any post in quite some time. You aren’t a typical reader.

    As I’ve noted before, if you’re tired of what I write, don’t read it.

    As for the other bit, no, because actually there are objective consequences to actions, and so far they’re going pretty much as I predicted. When the big human die-off starts, if I’m still around, no doubt somebody will be saying “there is no objective reality.” Hopefully I’ll laugh.

  53. rkka

    Tom,

    Have you Can you direct me to the National Ballistics Laboratory Report on the European Theater? I expect it is pre-Google. Thank you.

    “In addition half the soviet airforce relied on US supplied aluminum and US 100 Octane fuel. All Soviet Soldiers relied on US Supplied boots, food, and trucks. And that is the tip of the ice berg.”

    The Soviets had significant domestic sources for all of these items, any had the process for the additives required for the 100-octane avgas. And both the Japanese and the Germans utilized US methods for boosting the octane levels of their avgas.

    “The Soviets under Stalin could not have won on their own, if the US had not entered the fray, the Russians would have lost.”

    The Soviets had Army Group Center down to infantry company strengths of 50-60 before the US entered the fray. For the ’42 campaign, only AG South could be rebuilt to a state fit for offensive operations with the infantry replacements available, after what the Red Army had done to the Wehrmacht in 1941, and the ’42 campaign would destroy AG South.

    All this was before any appreciable quantity of Lend-Lease arrived.

  54. Very good article. I have found much of your writing to be very insightful. I have spent much time over the past few years trying to help educate people as to how the PTB are doing the exact opposite of what would be best for their individual interests and values. Local gatherings / groups, Facebook, Twitter, blogging, local newspaper articles, etc. It does not appear to be a battle that can ever be ‘won’, but I intend to keep fighting for the people who can be reached and brought to ‘enlightenment’, and hope you will to.

  55. Antifa

    Oh, dear. Somebody is wrong on the internet. Still no citation for the 7-to-1 kill ratio of “Tommy cookers” against Panzers.

    Right. Case dismissed for absence of evidence.

    But I would add to this bonfire of inanities: it is well known that, given their nature, you can fit precisely 137 angels on the head of pin. Only a ninny would disagree with that.

  56. ks

    Okay then, I guess you’ll carry on until “they” get it. Or not. It’s your shop.

    Oh I know I’m not a typical reader here and that’s more than fine by me.

    Btw, who said there wasn’t objective consequences to actions and no objective reality? Is that an interpretation of Mandos’s examination of reality/Morocco’s posturing or something else?

  57. Tom Finn

    Whoa! An opportunity to respond…Thank You!! Ian Welsh. “Why you write” is why I read it.

  58. Ché Pasa

    A logical corollary to the unsupported belief that Mrs. Clinton would start or would be far more likely to start a nuclear war is that provocation, Brinkmanship and trash-talking against a nuclear armed adversary will inevitably unleash a nuclear war between adversaries.

    This may be true, but there is no evidence of it since the end of WWII

    There is abundant evidence that saber rattling, provocation, Brinkmanship and trash-talking nuclear armed adversaries is a time-worn and sometimes effective form of negotiation with an otherwise undefeatable rival/adversary, one that does not lead to nuclear war. The threat of it and the fear of it helps keeps domestic populations in line and more or less obedient, while focusing the attention of adversary governments on power issues of mutual interest.

    In the modern world, the more likely initiators of a nuclear attack are Israel, Pakistan or India.

  59. bruce wilder

    Why I Read

    an example

    this morning I watched a bit of the public affairs talkfests that are slotted into American television on Sunday morning when almost no one is watching and one big topic of conversation was the claim by the U.S. government that the Russians had interfered in the American elections by means of cyber hacking with hostile intent to destabilize the country

    on the one hand, I cannot quite fathom what the elite leadership of the deep state, as we call it these days, is thinking. Does Clapper really think that calling into question the legitimacy of Trump’s election is not de-stabilizing the country, but putting Podesta’s emails on WikiLeaks is? Does Clapper think Trump cannot fire him?

    Doris Kearns Goodwin was saying this

    . . . I think what’s troubling is that to cast aspersions on the C.I.A. before you’ve even taken the Oath of Office, . . . [Trump]’s going to have to use the professionals there. Yes, they’ve made mistakes. They made mistakes with WMD. But you bring that up as the most embarrassing moment in their history right away, you’re going to need those professionals. Many of them have died for us. Many of the men and women who’ve worked there have done noble things that we may not even know about. Of course they screw up at times. The Bay of Pigs. But to use this example– I don’t see what– there’s nothing wrong with them saying, “They hacked us, and yet, I won the election fairly anyway.”

    God forbid that anyone should criticize the CIA!

    anyway, this is the kind of uncalculated madness that burbles unchallenged thru the American political discourse and i come to Ian Welsh among others as a reality check that the more prominent talking heads like Ms Goodwin are unable or unwilling to provide.

    I do not know that Ian will choose to comment specifically on this development and I am not asking him to — it is just an example that is present to me in this moment — but if he does comment, I do not doubt that what he writes will be considered and honest. And, I trust that, being one of the relatively sane ones, he will choose to comment on at least some of these strange memes and help me keep my bearings and detached wonder at the insanity.

  60. By the time you’re sick of writing it, the audience is only beginning to clue in and not everyone reads every article I write. Articles are not written primarily for regular commenters, who don’t even make up 1% of my readership.

    Well I at least have been around long enough to know this, and I’m neither sick of reading you write it, nor am I sick of responding to it, for the very reasons you mention. I suspect neither is ks, really.

    The feedback on this post has been the most positive for any post in quite some time. You aren’t a typical reader.

    As I’ve noted before, if you’re tired of what I write, don’t read it.

    Again, I, at least, very much expected you to get very positive feedback on this post, because it confirms the rhetorical tendencies of a great deal of your regular commentariat, if not your readership in a way that posts on specific political issues do not.

    As for the other bit, no, because actually there are objective consequences to actions, and so far they’re going pretty much as I predicted. When the big human die-off starts, if I’m still around, no doubt somebody will be saying “there is no objective reality.” Hopefully I’ll laugh.

    Who on this thread argued that there was “no objective reality”, I wonder? What on earth does this refer to? I also think that humanity is headed on a crap trajectory, most probably. It is merely a matter of understanding why it is those who have a good grasp of what is going on, in “objective” terms, have had even less influence than what anyone would have expected.

  61. The funny thing about Cassandra is that most people forget the other part of the allegory. Apollo, the god of poetry, punishes Cassandra with seeing the future but never being believed, because she refuses to have sex with him.

    Another version of this theme appears in Gregory Maguire’s retelling of the Baum’s Wizard of Oz from the point of view of the Wicked Witch of the West, Wicked — yes, the book the (pretty good) musical was based on, but the book was 10 times better and more politically perceptive. As I recall the plot, the Wicked Witch is a tragic figure whose perceptiveness and moral clarity is unparalleled, but she is essentially unable to make use of her grant of magical power given her for reasons that have a lot of real-life resonances with parts of (especially American) left-progressive politics.

  62. sid_finster

    I am fairly far right in some ways and I read you.

  63. StewartM

    I have been lurking here for the past two years or so, Ian, and I agree with most of the things you write, and I follow your reasoning and agree with much of it and its underpinnings (though not all). In fact, I’ve quoted your articles a lot in debates on DKos (which I abandoned after HRC won the nomination, it became (and still is) too painfully the Official Clinton/Obama Cheerleading Site).

    Marvin Harris, my favorite anthropologist, wrote: “In an age eager to experience altered, nonordinary states of consciousness [this was written in 1970] we tend to overlook the extent to which our ordinary state of mind is already a profoundly mystified consciousness–a consciousness surprisingly isolated from the practical facts of life”. He then went on to explain how:

    “Ignorance, fear, and conflict are the basic elements of everyday consciousness. From these elements, art and politics fashion that collective dreamwork whose function is to *prevent* people from understanding what their social life is all about. Everyday consciousness, therefore, cannot explain itself. It owes its very existence to a developed capacity to deny the facts that explain its existence. We don’t expect dreamers to explain their dreams no more than we should expect lifestyle participants to explain their lifestyles.”

    And I think, personally, it is this “collective dreamwork” whose very purpose is to prevent understanding rather than further it, which tells all its participants that the buck-naked emperor is really sporting a fine set of new clothes, is what you struggle against. However, no matter how hard we strive, nobody is completely free or exempt from this cultural indoctrination. We all have blind spots.

    But please, keep writing.

  64. realitychecker

    Mandos yesterday:

    “It’s a fundamental part of the human condition to have an emotional filter over information and reasoning. Emotion is an informational filter, that’s what it’s for. We are here for a lot of different reasons. But one of them is a particular belief among those who see themselves as the truth-tellers. That belief is that everyone else has an obligation to look at and mentally process truth the way that they do and accept truth in the way that they want to present it, with the same moral and emotional weight.

    That belief, however, is not well grounded.”

    Mandos this morning:

    “The “subjective feelings” of others and “reality” are actually inseparable from one another, and it appears to be a “comforting” belief of some that feelings and emotions exist in a plane of discourse other than that of “reality”.”

    Mandos later this morning, responding to Ian (try not to laugh):

    ” Who on this thread argued that there was “no objective reality”, I wonder?”

    And then, here is Mandos’ latest contribution:

    “The funny thing about Cassandra is that most people forget the other part of the allegory. Apollo, the god of poetry, punishes Cassandra with seeing the future but never being believed, because she refuses to have sex with him.

    Another version of this theme appears in Gregory Maguire’s retelling of the Baum’s Wizard of Oz from the point of view of the Wicked Witch of the West, Wicked — yes, the book the (pretty good) musical was based on, but the book was 10 times better and more politically perceptive. As I recall the plot, the Wicked Witch is a tragic figure whose perceptiveness and moral clarity is unparalleled, but she is essentially unable to make use of her grant of magical power given her for reasons that have a lot of real-life resonances with parts of (especially American) left-progressive politics.”

    Hey Mandos, never bring a sponge to a scalpel fight.

    Does ANYBODY here see this as illustrative of clear reasoning? Or as a competent attempt to pay proper deference to objective reality and the need to search for it?

  65. realitychecker: In none of the things you quoted did I argue that there was “no objective reality”. Not once. You obviously can’t read properly or can’t follow an argument that doesn’t bow before one of your strawmen.

    Rather, I argued that, among other things,

    1. people’s subjective experience is an inseparable part of the objective reality you claim to want to “defer” to.

    2. any political discussion that refers to the consequences of objective reality must take into account people’s subjectivity and emotional interpretation of reality as an inseparable part of that objective reality, or it is not properly “deferring” to objective reality.

    3. the attempt to “search” for an objective reality that does not include the subjective mental states of others is not actually a “search” for objective reality, as it neglects that subjectivity is a part of objective reality and attempts to separate what is not separable.

    4. the sort of progressive political argument/praxis that is most common around these parts continues to punch under its weight, so to speak, because it attempts to separate what is not separable — human subjectivity from objective reality.

    5. the failure in (4) is most evident when participants in these discussions declare that the rest of the world is not savable because the rest of the world does not respond as (bizarrely) expected by such self-proclaimed seekers for objective reality, or “reality checkers”, if you will.

    6. this failure becomes even more evident when said reality checkers react rather emotionally and evidently quite viscerally to the idea that their grasp of objective reality may be rather incomplete.

  66. Lisa

    Tom “Look up the National Ballistics Laboratory Report on the European Theater. They combed through the battlefield examining every wreck and all combat reports. In every battle, Shermans won the fight.”

    Nope. The only Shermans that had a chance from Normandy onwards were the British 17 pounder adapted ones. The US one were slaughtered against Panzer Mk IVs and Panthers…and of course the few Tigers.

    See ‘Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II’
    by Belton Y. Cooper The 3rd Armored Division suffered 900% losses from Normandy to the end of the war.

    Uk ballistic tests showed that clearly, the original 75MM gun couldn’t penetrate German armour except at very close range, the 76mm gun later introduced was better but still nowhere good enough. The British 17 pounder could and did penetrate even Tiger armour at a decent range.

    As noted in the book (and others), the gyro stabalising was never used in combat, most tankers (especially after hideous losses) were too poorly trained to do so. In fact the far better optics of the German tanks made them far more accurate at longer ranges.

    It was a poor tank, poor gun, not enough armour and too high a track pressure so it got bogged more easily. Competitive against the Panzer Mk III and early Mk IVs in North Africa it fell well behind when the upgunned Mk IV came out in early/mid ’43.

    The 2 best tanks were the Mk IV and T-34. At the start in 41/42 the T-34 was superior, in ’43 it was the upgunned Mk IV, then the T-34-85 in ’44 and ’45.

    The Tiger was far too complex and expensive, hence there were only very small numbers, the Panther too unreliable and hard to maintain (even Guderian said that it would have been better to make more Mk IVs) . Both the Mk IV and T-34 had all the right characteristics, cheap, good armour, good gun, good cross country, reliable and easy to maintain.

  67. Steve

    @Mandos

    If the disagreement is now that human subjectivity is not separable from objective reality, this seems like a standard Chomsky vs. Zizek argument. To way oversimplify, Chomsky is on the side of objectivity to defend against fantasy, and Zizek is on the side of embracing the fantasy as a means to truth.

    I think the left would do better to leave Chomsky behind, and listen to Zizek.

  68. Steve: It’s not that there *is* no objective reality or that we should “adopt fantasy.” It’s rather that emotion and subjective experience and the way that they interact with the observable world is deeply a part of objective reality, and the reason why e.g. environmentalist arguments that rely strictly on a stark presentation of scientific facts are never going to create action, because they neglect the emotional state of the viewer. I don’t know if that’s what you were getting at in the Chomsky vs. Zizek thing. I’m a big Chomsky fan, including now, even though, yes, I don’t think he’s necessary an expert at getting more than a (large) core group of people to agree with him.

  69. realitychecker

    @ Mandos

    If you can’t see that the thrust and essence of your comments that I quoted was to detract from the concept of objective reality, then you are severely deficient in your thought process and reading comprehension.

    When you later refer to “subjective” and/or “political” to QUALIFY the term “reality,” you are no longer talking about objective reality; rather, you are describing the mental and behavioral behavior of variously dysfunctional people who simply lack the intellectual rigor to separate their emotions and outside manipulations from their perceptions of what is “reality.” Fantasy is not reality, so sorry to have to tell you. It is the opposite.

    But you seem to have a real knack for getting things upside down. Consider this:

    You say, “It’s a fundamental part of the human condition to have an emotional filter over information and reasoning. Emotion is an informational filter, that’s what it’s for. ”

    Really? Do you believe in evolution, i.e., natural selection as an adaptive process to better cope with environmental realities and needs?

    If so, which came first, human emotions, or human capacity for higher conceptual and intellectual reasoning? Don’t you clearly have it upside-down to say emotion (which all mammals have, btw) “is for” filtering the intellect, rather than that the intellect “is for” filtering the emotions? I believe the latter, and I believe you just pulled the former right out of your ass.

    You are really not competent to even participate in this discussion. But you are right that I get emotionally annoyed when I am continually confronted with sloppy thinkers posing as intellectuals.

    You don’t know the difference between blowing smoke and making incisive arguments.

  70. Lisa

    In the very truest sense there is no ‘objective reality’ rather models that we develop and use to understand it and predict All models have limitations, in that the environment changes so they become incorrect or they only work within a range of phenomena.

    Even what we think we see is actually a model, put together by our brain, it is not actually ‘real’.

    Good models are robust and work withing a specified range to a known accuracy. The classic is Newton vs Einstein’s gravitational theories. For nearly everything you or I will experience Newton is fine, however go past the limitations of Newton and you have to use Einstein…as in the case of GPS. Both special relativity (velocity) and gender relativity (gravitation) corrections have to be added to make it accurate.

    Bad models are wrong from the start, explain incorrectly and predict badly (or not at all) …such as in the ‘flat earth’ ideas.

    Cognitive psychology shows that the human brain is hard wired to make certain logical and probability mistakes, that require training to overcome. This creates incorrect biases in our instinctive models that we adopt (from parents and society) or create for ourselves unless they are based on formal techniques.

    We are also very bad at switching from generalisation to specific data and updating our models as things change. The classic is the person who rants about (say) blacks in general , but actually has one or more black friends that they think are ok. They find it hard to incorporate that actual data into their general model which they still adhere to.

    Certain mind types (specifically the authoritarian one) can and do hold multiple conflicting views and are incapable of resolving them together.

    Humans also have some innately poor methods of avoiding conflict to our models, the classic being cognitive dissonance, where a fact contradicts our model which cause emotional upset, so we then start to get all creative about explaining (or ignoring) this fact away.

    Funnily enough it is actually quite easy to train many people away from these traps (sadly a lot are lost causes). Some basic concepts of dealing with information (quite simple heuristics), some very simple probability training, plus a few others and most people will improve greatly on this…which shows you just how poor our education systems really are.

    I once took a bunch of claims clerks which had an accuracy of predicting claims costs of only about 50% and with very simple training increased that to nearly 90% within a few weeks.

  71. If you can’t see that the thrust and essence of your comments that I quoted was to detract from the concept of objective reality, then you are severely deficient in your thought process and reading comprehension.

    Since I wrote those comments, I know that the thrust and essence of my comments was, whatever else, not to “detract from the concept of objective reality”, whatever that means. The rest of your post is gibberish. For example,

    Really? Do you believe in evolution, i.e., natural selection as an adaptive process to better cope with environmental realities and needs?

    If so, which came first, human emotions, or human capacity for higher conceptual and intellectual reasoning? Don’t you clearly have it upside-down to say emotion (which all mammals have, btw) “is for” filtering the intellect, rather than that the intellect “is for” filtering the emotions? I believe the latter, and I believe you just pulled the former right out of your ass.

    I can unequivocally say that in any “reasoning vs. emotion” evolution discussion, the jury came in long ago, and emotion definitely came first. Emotion is highly adaptive in allowing the organization to develop heuristics that filter out branches of reason — and the sort of reason you’re talking about, the higher-level metacognition that we exercise in these kinds of discussions, is a very late development indeed!

    Even the mosquitos we squash when they try to suck our blood are probably feeling, emotional beings. Insect studies point to the idea of insects as emotional beings as being more likely true than not:

    http://brainblogger.com/2015/06/26/do-insects-have-emotions-and-empathy/

    Emotion is very, very deeply rooted and no discussion of any social or environmental reality is complete without it. It is how we interact with the material world, much more fundamentally than reason.

  72. Argh. “organization” -> “organism” in the last post.

  73. StewartM

    @Tom

    US Forces were better trained and equipped than the Soviets and the Sherman had proven itself the best tank of the war with a 7-to-1 kill ratio against Panzers as verified by combat records.

    As the US/British forces lost 9,000 tanks in the European Theater while the Germans suffered c. 11,000, I have a hard time seeing where you come up with that ‘7:1’ figure.

    To make matters worse for your argument, these two figures are not analogues, I recall that the biggest cause of loss for German vehicles cited in Western after-combat surveys was “destroyed by own crews”–which shows the effect of Allied air power; air power destroys tank forces less by direct attacks on vehicles than by interdicting their supply of fuel and spare parts. Ergo, tanks that run out of fuel or break down because of combat or mechanical wear-and-tear get abandoned and (usually) blown up by their own crews. Finally, as the Germans lost the war, ALL their vehicles end up counted in the “lost” category one way or another.

    By contrast, not only would such a case would be rare with Allied forces (as they were advancing) the Allied number only includes irrevocable losses–tanks that were knocked out by enemy action but repairable aren’t considered lost, and aren’t included in the totals, whereas tanks on the German sides that were only ‘damaged’ but could not be recovered or repaired due to the tactical situation, lack of time, or lack of spare parts, ended up “lost”. As it stands, even comparing the 9,000 to 11,000 figures is like comparing your only KIA to the enemy’s KIA, WIA, and MIA and crowing that ‘we were so much better’.

    The only fair way to ascertain combat vehicle effectiveness would be the look at the combined “damaged + destroyed” numbers, which probably don’t exist for the German side. (These are routinely cited for the Soviet side, which is why Russian tank losses look so horrific to untutored eyes–because the Russians, unlike everyone else, recorded any vehicle put out of action for any reason whatsoever as a “loss”, even if not combat-related, and even if only for a few hours. A T-34 gets stuck in a bog, an IS-2 throws a track, a SU-85 blows an engine gasket, and these are all “lost” even though all might be back in action in a few hours). What is known about Allied tank losses is that only a small percentage were lost to Tigers or Panthers, the vast majority were to far more humble weapons–AT guns and tank destroyers and Panzerfausts. The STGIII-75 assault gun/tank destroyer was probably responsible for more Allied tanks destroyed than any other German armored vehicle.

    Counting losses is difficult to do for the German side in particular because, 1) much of the paperwork was destroyed, and 2) where it does exist, it’s probable that German commanders (and sometimes, German tank crews themselves) were fudging their numbers and concealing their losses to make themselves look good to higher-ups. I think the German tendency to fudge their numbers affected the course of WWII, in the East particularly. Hitler’s military decisions in the East actually aren’t as insane as they were made out to be by postwar histories if the Germans had indeed been inflicting 8:1 tank losses and 5:1 manpower losses on the Russians, as Hitler was being told they were. But German forces weren’t inflicting such losses, and moreover they were concealing the extent of their own losses, so at the end Hitler’s moving around armies that existed largely only on paper was less due to any military incompetency on his part and more due to the fact his subordinates essentially telling him that those forces were real.

    Also Shermans had amazing protection for the day and German 88s had to repeatably fire on them to get them to burn, allowing the crew to escape.

    You are talking about (American only) wet storage for ammo; tanks without it burned at an 80 % rate. Wet storage was only included in a minority of American Shermans, built later in the war.

    The T-34-85 was a poor tank with numerous soft-flaws that hampered its combat efficiency. A penetrating hit meant the Tank brewed up as the fuel cells were right next to the ammo”

    In that way, it was like most tanks, which are crammed with ammunition and fuel. Getting penetrated by any round is not going to be a healthy thing for the tank or its crew, whether it hits ammo or not. And a Sherman hit by a large Soviet 122mm, 152mm, or 100mm round is a pile of scrap metal whether it has wet storage or not, and none of the crew might survive.

    The simple fact is that the T-34/85 was a superior tank to al contemporary variants of the Sherman in most essential respects. The 75-mm Sherman variants could not penetrate a T-34’s frontal armor at normal combat ranges, and even the 76 mm variants needed an HVAP round to do it reliably (which was not available in large issues to Sherman crews). The 85 mm on the T-34/85 was essentially similar to the 88L56 on the Tiger I and could hole all variants of the Sherman (save the “Jumbo”) at any reasonable range. The T-34 was also superior in tactical mobility and also approached the Sherman’s record for mechanical reliability. Much of this assessment is not speculation, but the results when the two tanks met in Korea. The Jumbo Sherman and the M-26 Pershing would overmatch the T-34/85 in firepower/armor capability, true, but then again both of these in turn would be overmatched to even a greater degree by the later variants of IS-2s and the IS successors. Heck, even Allied assessments of T-34s said that where it counted, in many cases T-34 components were not only the equal of those on Allied tanks in quality, but sometimes they were even superior.

    That being all said–Tom, I actually agree that the US would probably have won—in a LONG, protracted war, mind you, not in Patton’s masturbatory dream. The Soviets outproduced the Allies in categories like tanks and artillery mostly because the US had to sink resources into building a huge navy, a huge merchant marine, a huge air wing, instead of devoting the lion’s share into its ground forces. This is also why the US decided on an manpower-conserving ‘island-hopping’ strategy in the Pacific Theater; we knew we could not simply afford to field ground forces large enough to be capable of fighting ground wars in both Europe and in China. The US would have had to retool its industry from making aircraft carriers and strategic bombers (even with the B-29, most of Soviet industry was out of range) to produce more tanks and artillery and tactical air and to field more ground formations. And don’t talk about the US A-bomb monopoly; the US atomic bomb program was a shambles after WWII due to bureaucratic infighting between the AEC and Air Force, with the know-how leaving the military to return to academia and the DoD worried that even the know-how would be quickly lost let alone the actual ability to make bombs (see Bigger Bombs for a Brighter Tomorrow: The Strategic Air Command and American War Plans at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, 1945-1950, by John Curatola).

    That would have taken some time, and in the meantime, according to Stephen Ambrose, even US contingency planners planned not an advance on Moscow, but a retreat to the Pyrenees in case of a ground war with the Soviet Union. For their part, Stalin and his commanders also realized their weakness; supposedly during the V-E day in Moscow, Marshal Budenny turned to Stalin and said “What a magnificent force! Wouldn’t it be something if they kept marching all the way to the English Channel?” to which Stalin is said to have replied “And who would feed them?” Soviet agriculture was in disarray due to the destruction resulting from the war; the Soviet Union had lost 50 % of its prewar GDP, and the Soviets knew that they had to demobilize quickly to return men to industry and to farms (which they did, and in fact, the Soviets started to do some of this even before war’s end; units start disappearing from the Red Army Order of Battle). The Soviets were also feeling a manpower squeeze, drafting 17-year olds in 1944 and 16-year olds in 1945. And finally, the Soviets had to cope with the Bendera partisans who continued fighting in the Ukraine until 1953.

    In short, we didn’t want war with the USSR due to the short-term pain, they Russians didn’t want it due to the long-term prospects. Fair enough? But that doesn’t leave much for Patton’s bragging spat, which he was always wont to do; with Patton every campaign he ever led was the “greatest achievement in military history blah-blah-blah” even though he was never in a battle where he didn’t have huge manpower and material advantages and even when the result was rather underwhelming (say, the Lorraine campaign). I see Patton as the WWII equivalent of a Phil Sheridan, good in some things, poor at others, and a prima donna for press coverage, and all the criticisms that many Americans level at Montgomery are equally valid of Patton too. I’m not saying Patton was incompetent, mind you, just overhyped.

  74. So yes, emotion helps us filter our perceptions and limit the input to our reasoning faculties. Reason is not “for” filtering emotion, although we may use it that way at times. And that is, at an individual level, highly adaptive, but apparently maladaptive collectively as a society. Nevertheless, it’s real.

  75. realitychecker

    @ Lisa

    “Cognitive psychology shows that the human brain is hard wired to make certain logical and probability mistakes, that require training to overcome.”

    That’s right, training is required. Rigorous training. That is what I am always arguing for, and what I believe Ian is arguing for.

  76. realitychecker

    @ Mandos

    Well, I disagree that what you call “gibberish” is not a fair characterization of what you wrote, but I will let the readers decide for themselves.

    As to your evolution remarks, very curious that you don’t find the later development to be an improvement of the species. Evolution acts to make us LESS effective? Perhaps that explains the flavor of everything you write lol.

    Look, I am not denying that emotion and even intuition play an important role in life, but so does intellectual and conceptual thinking. And yes, sometimes those are in conflict. It’s clearly best to have both aspects in agreement. But I have no doubt that the trained intellect most often produces better results than the emotions, so when I encounter such a conflict, my practice is usually going to be to give the trained intellect veto power over the raw emotional.

    You seem to choose the reverse of that process, so, like I said, you frequently get things upside down, and it’s not surprising.

  77. realitychecker

    @ Mandos

    “And that is, at an individual level, highly adaptive, but apparently maladaptive collectively as a society.”

    AND, “but apparently maladaptive collectively as a society” equals “dysfunctional,” so while dysfunction may be real, it has nothing to do with, and therefore has no place in a discussion of, objective reality.

    But do carry on.

  78. As to your evolution remarks, very curious that you don’t find the later development to be an improvement of the species. Evolution acts to make us LESS effective? Perhaps that explains the flavor of everything you write lol.

    *facepalm*

    Evolution does not give you, in some purposeful teleological sense, traits that fall from evolution heaven, in some cycle of human-like improvement-by-progress. It merely give you traits. Period. Some of which are selected for or against by the environment through fitness, and thereafter interact in unpredictable ways. Talking about “improvement” and “effectiveness” is anthropomorphizing claptrap.

    Look, I am not denying that emotion and even intuition play an important role in life, but so does intellectual and conceptual thinking. And yes, sometimes those are in conflict. It’s clearly best to have both aspects in agreement. But I have no doubt that the trained intellect most often produces better results than the emotions, so when I encounter such a conflict, my practice is usually going to be to give the trained intellect veto power over the raw emotional.

    You seem to think that human reason and emotion are in some kind of competition with one another, but even before you got to the point where you found a conflict between emotion and reason, most of the work was already done by your emotion. Your metacognition simply does not recognize it as such, which is normal and inevitable. Like a fish in water.

    You seem to choose the reverse of that process, so, like I said, you frequently get things upside down, and it’s not surprising.

    I don’t “choose” one process or another, reverse or otherwise. I merely point out that emotion is not separable from a discussion of human interaction with real objective reality.

  79. sidd

    I join in thanks to our host for this blog.

  80. Michael Robinson

    “So, I do not write, any more, to convince people to do the right thing. I know that doing so is beyond most people, certainly most Americans over the age of 30.”

    How fortunate we are that, in the long history of the human race, the first generation to appreciate truth and goodness has come along, in what may prove to be just the nick of time.

  81. realitychecker

    @ Mandos

    If Darwin was here, he’d kick you in the ass.

    The traits that survive do so because they deliver an operational advantage in the environment.

    I’m not wasting any more time on you.

    Go watch the Wizard of Oz again, or read some more Greek mythology. That is more your speed.

  82. Hugh

    People get more instruction in how to drive a car than in how to be a citizen. This is not a bug but a feature. To get we the many to make decisions not in our interest, but in the interest of the few, it is important to keep us ignorant and distracted. This is what class war is all about. The first step in fighting back is recognizing that we are in a conflict, the nature of that conflict, and who the real enemies are.

  83. MojaveWolf

    Adding my thanks & appreciation, fwiw.

  84. Stephen Douglas

    Once upon a time, I had you in my feed.

    But some of the things you say, just kind of made you hard to read any longer. At times, Naked Capitalism will link to you, and I’ll take a look once again to see if you’ve got anything interesting or enlightening to say.

    But then you say things like Trump and Clinton are “monstruous.” Hysterical nonsense.

    Or there is a gender pay gap. Thoroughly debunked.

    Or we should kill ourselves (I guess that is your solution, you offer no other real one) because the worst-case scenario of some climate change projections (modelling is almost always an extremely poor and infirm basis for hysteria in jounalism and politics) “predict” that we are all going to be fucked in 2080.

    Then, I turn away. Again. You claim you tried to write to wake up people, but they are set in their ways. You must have been looking in the mirror when you wrote that.

  85. Mike

    Ian and everyone else: Can I recommend everyone who hasn’t read this, to read it.

    http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2014/10/adventures-in-flatland.html
    http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2014/10/adventures-in-flatland-part-ii.html
    http://www.declineoftheempire.com/2014/11/adventures-in-flatland-part-iii-1.html

    I’m happy for people to tell me otherwise (if they know of something better to explain things), but it’s the best theory of Human nature I’ve seen so far, in so far as it seems to perfectly fit the facts.

  86. Ian Welsh

    Both sides criticizing someone doesn’t make that person right, nonetheless I am amused that Douglas despises me for saying bad things about Trump when all the angry missives I receive castigate me for saying nice things about him.

  87. realitychecker

    @ Ian

    If you wrote nothing, you’d be criticized for your silence lol.

    The world is full of people who love to criticize everyone but themselves. It’s not your fault, brother.

  88. Jef

    Mr Welsh – I believe you are wrong to blame the general public/citizens for not listening to you, or understanding the simple things, or doing the right things.

    The only thing that really matters to 99% of the population is going to work in the morning. You have not said one thing that allows them “do the right things” and still make a living for themselves and their loved ones. In fact most of what you suggest puts them at great risk of loosing their ability to “make a living”.

    They call it “making a living” for good reason, because if you don’t you make with the dying.

    I haven’t heard/read one single solution posited by anyone anywhere that addresses this.

  89. realitychecker

    @ Jef

    “I haven’t heard/read one single solution posited by anyone anywhere that addresses this.”

    I’m thinking that’s because there will be no easy or convenient way out of this mess, and, so far, there is no indication that the American public is willing to hear about anything that isn’t easy and convenient. Most would rather talk about safe spaces and micro-invalidations, it seems. Perhaps that will change as Trumpism eats further into the political correctness dogma.

    You can’t even talk about armed resistance without being called various derogatory names. But it seems to me, strictly as a matter of analysiis, that to think the PTB will ever cede any power, or change their ways in any meaningful way without at least a credible threat of armed resistance is fatuous, to say the least.

    But just try to even suggest that folks should read the Declaration of Independence on any lefty website, and see what happens lol.

    WASF

  90. Ian, join the club! I struggle to get even people standing for elected office to take any interest in any argument that they think is not going to engage with the voters. Their priority is simply to get elected (or win a referendum), and they assume they can just muddle through afterwards in Government because they are ‘good people’! And that means anything beyond a buzz line. I am constantly being told to reduce my leaflets to ‘bullet points’ and that they are more like briefings and too complicated, but you know what, the actual voters I meet like my stuff. What they don’t like is being talked down to or taken for idiots.

    There is huge difference between listening and agreeing, which I agree the average voter fails to see, but I think you are falling into the gap between them. You don’t have a monopoly of wisdom any more than I do. The most we can do is bounce ideas and facts off people and see what reaction we get. For example I think the Iraq decision was far more complicated than you make out. Suppose Saddam had successfully re-invaded Kuwait while we simply stood by? Is that how you would like your allies to treat you? And don’t forget the US population and establishment were very reluctant to join WW2. It took Pearl Harbour to change their minds (I have just been watching a fascination documentary that reveals that the top brass in Washington had full warning of the attack – but kept Admiral Kimmel in the dark).

    There is a lot of perception in what you write and you make an interesting contribution. But it is not the whole truth or nothing but the truth! So please don’t become cynical because that would be a form of prejudice.

  91. realitychecker

    @ John Poynton

    Excuse me, but if you can find any good reasons to justify our illegal aggression against Iraq, and/or the consequences thereof, then people have very good reason not to listen to you,

    Maybe you are the one who needs to do more listening. You don’t seem like a thought-leader to me.

  92. Lisa

    StewartM & Tom: US 3rd Armoured Divisions. Of a total of 232 medium tanks, 648 were totally destroyed and 1,100 needed repairs. Of that 1,100 approx 700 had been knocked out in combat. That is 1.348 lost in combat. or 580% . As you might imaging the impact on crews were even worse since few crews did not suffer death or injury if hit. That is in the period from Normandy to VE day.

    Belton Cooper, Death Traps.

    Allied tactical air, plus (in Normandy) naval gun support, plus artillery made all the difference. But air support was not as it is now, bad weather and night time rendered it useless. The US lagged (because they started later of course) in air support. Even with their long experience it took the British until ’43 to match what the Germans had done in ’40.

    Where they were not as good was in being able to bring concentrated air firepower to a particular point, to stop/hold/break/etc the enemy’s concentration. This was why, sensibly, at Mortein they used the RAF which had by then mastered it (they got it worked out in Mareth) because they had the skills, C&C and firepower to do that. It took the US a while longer to master that, so their strengths were for a long time in mostly interdiction. This (plus lack of specialised armour) hampered the US when they were trying to break through German prepared defences, for example taking out pillboxes was a nightmare for them and they always suffered terrible losses doing that because they didn’t have the right tools.

    The USSR sensibly concentrated totally on tactical air power and like the British and US took quite a while to get it to the level that Germans had in the past (by late ’43 and ’44 the Luftwaffe was dying and becoming ever less relevant to the battlefield).

  93. Hugh

    In re Stephen Douglas,

    The following are data from pages 10 and 11 of the most recent US Census’ annual report on Income and Poverty in the United States: 2015. (The 2016 data will be out in September 2017.)

    Number of male workers: 86.4 million
    Number of full time year round male workers: : 77.0 million
    Number of female workers: 63.9 million
    Number of full time year round female workers: 47.2 million
    Median earnings of full time year round male workers: $51,212
    Median earnings of full time year round female workers: $40,742
    Ratio of median earnings of full time year round female workers to those of men: 0.80

    What these data show is that while women comprise about 51% of the US population, in 2015 they held only 38% of the full time year round jobs and their median pay for these jobs was 80% of the median for men. What these data show is that women remain both underrepresented and underpaid in the work force.

    While these data certainly debunk certain views about gender equality, I do not think they debunk the ones Stephen Douglas had in mind. But we knew that, right?

  94. Jef

    realitychecker – You make the very same mistake. You say “people aren’t willing…” BS. People aren’t willing to stop making money or to hinder in any way their ability to do so because ……. no money = you die!

    Even an intimate understanding of the Declaration of Independence doesn’t change this hard cold fact one iota.

  95. realitychecker

    @ Jef

    Don’t get mad, I agree about the need to make a living. It’s very inconvenient to do so and also fight a revolution. So hard, in fact, that all the PTB need do to keep folks home and passive is create a bit of ambiguity and uncertainty about the facts. Nobody in their right mind would go thru the hardship of a fight unless they could KNOW WITH CERTAINTY that they correctly understood what was going on. Just a tiny bit of ambiguity suffices to remove any such certainty. There are people who are experts at creating that bit of ambiguity, as I’m sure you have noticed.

    Reading the Declaration is useful for reminding people of the importance of the consent of the governed, and the justification for fighting if that consent is not present.

    When I was recommending it, years ago at Firedoglake, you were not even allowed to say the word “revolution,” so pointing people to the document that would open their minds to the possibility was the best one could do.

  96. StewartM

    @Lisa

    US 3rd Armoured Divisions. Of a total of 232 medium tanks, 648 were totally destroyed and 1,100 needed repairs. Of that 1,100 approx 700 had been knocked out in combat. That is 1.348 lost in combat. or 580% . As you might imaging the impact on crews were even worse since few crews did not suffer death or injury if hit. That is in the period from Normandy to VE day.

    Belton Cooper, Death Traps.

    So there the “destroyed + damaged” total is 1,348, or more than double the “destroyed” total. Extrapolating the 3rd Armoured division’s experience to estimate a figure for the American and British totals, one would estimate something like 18,700 “destroyed + damaged” to compare to the c. 11,000 German total (which, as the Germans lost the war, all their hardware ended up as a “loss” one way or another).

    Hmm, I am more in the habit of looking at Eastern front estimates, the number of combat “damaged” for 3rd Armoured seems small to the write-offs (often the irrecoverable losses are maybe only 25 % or 30 % of the total when I look at Eastern Front battles). Then again, as Cooper notes (and I have his book) a tank can be damaged lots of times and serve as a coffin for many of its crew, before it gets the hit that renders it a total write-off.

    This (plus lack of specialised armour) hampered the US when they were trying to break through German prepared defences, for example taking out pillboxes was a nightmare for them and they always suffered terrible losses doing that because they didn’t have the right tools.

    Or, in other words, they didn’t have armour like the IS-2 heavy tank and the ISU-122 and ISU-152 heavy assault guns/tank destroyers. The Germans ended up biasing their heavy armour development to be antitank assets, equipping them with high-velocity, smaller-caliber, weapons that might excel in antitank roles but were lacking in high explosive punch (i.e., due to smaller payloads) for use against infantry and guns and other non-armoured targets. Despite all ‘tank versus tank-which-one-was-better’ debates, tanks actually spend most of their time shooting at non-armoured targets.

    The Soviets, in contrast, developed their heavy armour to mount large-caliber weapons that were equally adept at either taking out heavy enemy armour or (because they fired a massive high-explosive round) blowing pillboxes and fortifications to smithereens. They paid a price for these large-caliber weapons in slower rates of fire, and limited ammo-carrying capacity, but the Russians thought the price worth it because these guns usually did the job against either enemy armour or a non-armoured target with just one hit.

    The heavy armour protection on the IS-2 rendered the standard German 75mm/L48 antitank gun, also mounted on the PzIV and most common tank destroyers and which formed the backstop of most German infantry defenses “almost useless” (Steven Zaloga), and it was largely impervious to the more potent 88mm/L56 on the Tiger I and the 75mm/L70 on the Panther save at very close ranges. Even a hit by the long 88mm/L71 on the King Tiger wouldn’t be an sure kill (one King Tiger crew reporting destroying an IS-2 at 700 meters, but only after having watched seven hits bounce harmlessly off). The IS-2’s armour and gun combination overmatched all German tanks save the King Tiger, and even there its gun could still knock a King Tiger out, even if the round didn’t penetrate, by the concussive effects of its massive round and by the impact cracking/spalling the King Tiger’s armour plates or breakage at the welding seams. The superior armour protection of the IS-2 gave their crews three times the survival chances of T-34 crews. Probably the biggest danger to IS-2 crews was German infantry wielding Panzerfausts (lethal to any WWII tank at short range, particularly flank shots), the Soviets lost lots of IS-2s in crowded city environments like Berlin (including the turret of IS-2 #441, of the 7th Guards heavy tank brigade, destroyed by a Panzerfaust hit in sector later occupied by American troops and which was secretly hauled off to Aberdeen for testing).

    The IS-2 was thus a tank that could advance with the infantry, its armour giving it a good chance of surviving hits from most weapons it was likely to encounter, and then dispatching any obstacle which was bogging down the offensive with just one hit. Something like that is what the US Army needed to break through fortifications, and we didn’t have it.

    The ISU-122 and ISU-152 heavy assault guns (122 mm and 152 mm guns mounted on turretless vehicles built from an IS-2 chassis) were likewise useful in this role, and were used to provide overwatching fire during Soviet offensives, and defensive antitank support. In both roles, it’s possible that the ISU-122 was the single most effective killer of the Tiger I tank, possibly destroying more Tigers than any other single weapon system.

  97. Rayner86

    Ian,
    I just came across your blog today and enjoy your writing. Your work is thought provoking and certainly does generate some interesting discussion among your commenters.
    I found this thread very interesting with sub-discussions on perceptions of reality and the effectiveness of the M4 Sherman in WWII going on concurrently.

  98. Charles

    Ian,

    I never write comments but this post prompted me to do so. Thank you for what you do. You are correct in your assessment, you write what I do not want to hear, which is precisely why I keep coming back. Please keep it up.

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