Political Roundtable - Part VII

[nate33]

I don't question Trump's ability to shoot himself in the foot. How many days to the Republican convention? He's got that much time to avoid inserting foot in mouth. I think it will be hard for him.

I thought this was a possibility 2 months ago. I no longer think it likely. Trump has intentionally said a few outrageous things to grab headlines. But now that he's a front-runner, he is growing more responsible in his rhetoric. Underestimate him at your own risk. He is smarter than you think he is. Also, by being so outrageous early on, he has built up some immunity to any gaff that might harm a different candidate.

The amazing thing is that he has spent way less money than any other major candidate, and has accidentally raised more money than all but Bush, Rubio, Carson, Fiorina, Paul and Walker.

[dobrojim]

Remember that isolationism has a price too... And under the US as the world cop, poverty has shrunk substantially and until recently world migration rates have been quite stable.

pure speculation - we don't know and therefore can't say would might have happened if
we had done things differently in the past.

[Zonkerbl]

Trump is a moron with a ton of moronic tv fans who are voting for him because they're too dumb to recognize any of the other candidates. Idiocracy here we come.

You can believe that if you want. You are wrong, but I prefer for your side to continue to misdiagnose the Trump phenomenon.

I hope to god I'm wrong. My worst fear is being right about this, because we'll end up with a completely unqualified moron as leader of the free world.

Although I guess I don't really think Trump is a hopeless moron, after watching the debate. Just a jerk, which is actually not a disqualification to being POTUS. I'm hoping he'll surprise me.

[dobrojim]

Trump is a moron with a ton of moronic tv fans who are voting for him because they're too dumb to recognize any of the other candidates. Idiocracy here we come.

You can believe that if you want. You are wrong, but I prefer for your side to continue to misdiagnose the Trump phenomenon.

it's fascinating that Trump has recently, in his attacks on the hapless Jeb!, been spouting views
that until very recently were apostasy for GOP ie that W 'kept us safe' as if he deserved a mulligan
on 911. And that ISIS is a direct result of the Iraq war. I have to agree with him completely on
these points. But I still have strong doubts I could support him in the general. For one thing,
what he says one minute, and what he proposes the next in writing (his budget) are completely
dissimilar.

Rubio is now looking like the most popular 'establishment' pub and I think many view him
as a pretty boy puppet of the neocons.

Bush, the theoretically 'professional' pol, is having his lunch money stolen from him every
day by the 'amateur' pol Trump.

[nate33]

For one thing, what he says one minute, and what he proposes the next in writing (his budget) are completely
dissimilar.

Could you expand on this?

[dckingsfan]

Remember that isolationism has a price too... And under the US as the world cop, poverty has shrunk substantially and until recently world migration rates have been quite stable.

Poverty has shrunken substantially? By what metric? If you mean world poverty, I'm sure that's true, but we don't know if that's thanks to U.S. hegemony or merely the unrelenting advance of technology.

If you think U.S. poverty has shrunk, you must be looking at averages and not medians. The top 1% are doing great, but middle class wages have been stagnant for 20 years and we have an employment participation rate equal to the 70's. We have situation now where you're better off on welfare than honestly working a low-skill job. That's not a good thing for the long term moral character of the citizenry. And the money to fund those welfare rolls come from debt, debt that is growing rapidly and must inevitably collapse at some point.

yes, world poverty...

[dckingsfan]

Remember that isolationism has a price too... And under the US as the world cop, poverty has shrunk substantially and until recently world migration rates have been quite stable.

pure speculation - we don't know and therefore can't say would might have happened if
we had done things differently in the past.

True - we could have stayed out of WWII and things could have turned out fine...

[nate33]

Remember that isolationism has a price too... And under the US as the world cop, poverty has shrunk substantially and until recently world migration rates have been quite stable.

pure speculation - we don't know and therefore can't say would might have happened if
we had done things differently in the past.

True - we could have stayed out of WWII and things could have turned out fine...

Just think, you have to go back 75 years to find a war that we should have participated in.

And frankly, I'm not even convinced the world would have been all that different if we refrained from entering WWII - at least in the European theater. Russia did most of the heavy lifting anyhow.

[Zonkerbl]

pure speculation - we don't know and therefore can't say would might have happened if
we had done things differently in the past.

True - we could have stayed out of WWII and things could have turned out fine...

Just think, you have to go back 75 years to find a war that we should have participated in.

And frankly, I'm not even convinced the world would have been all that different if we refrained from entering WWII - at least in the European theater. Russia did most of the heavy lifting anyhow.

Yeah by the time we entered WWII Russia was already winning. Our contribution basically kept Russia from sweeping all the way across Europe. So for example France would be slightly more socialist than they are now.

[dckingsfan]

Wow...

[Zonkerbl]

http://www.amazon.com/Russia-War-1941-1945-Alexander-Werth/dp/0786707224

Stalin knew that U.S. and Britain starting a second front would prevent them from taking over all of Western Europe but at the time Russia's losses were so staggering (some estimates have Russia losing 7 Russian soldiers for every German soldier killed, if you count civilian deaths) they just wanted the war over as soon as possible at any price.

Russia says they lost 20 million people to WWII and other sources say they lost half that. Germany lost about 3 million soldiers. Something historians quibble over.

[dckingsfan]

There wouldn't have been two fronts. The German factories wouldn't have been decimated. Italy wouldn't have been taken out of the war. Japan would have been still going strong. Just saying...

Oh, and there was that little thing of six million Jews slaughtered - sometimes we want to forget - but we shouldn't.

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ronaldreaganbergen-belsen.htm

[DCZards]

Trump is a moron with a ton of moronic tv fans who are voting for him because they're too dumb to recognize any of the other candidates. Idiocracy here we come.

You can believe that if you want. You are wrong, but I prefer for your side to continue to misdiagnose the Trump phenomenon.

I've been very surprised by Trump's strength in the GOP primary. I'm not sure whether to credit Trump for being a good campaigner or to blame the Repubs for backing such an immature punk.

If Trump does make it to the general election where Dems and Independents get to weigh in with their votes--and Hispanics get to go upside his head--I believe the Trump "phenomenon" will become an historical footnote

[Zonkerbl]

There wouldn't have been two fronts. The German factories wouldn't have been decimated. Italy wouldn't have been taken out of the war. Japan would have been still going strong. Just saying...

Oh, and there was that little thing of six million Jews slaughtered - sometimes we want to forget - but we shouldn't.

http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ronaldreaganbergen-belsen.htm

German factories weren't decimated. Allied bombing of German factories was entirely ineffective, read Speer's memoirs. As was German bombing of UK. Complete waste of resources on both sides.

Italy was irrelevant the entire war.

I don't understand what you're saying about Japan or the Jews. I'll let you elaborate before I opine.

[dckingsfan]

Bombing of Germany was effective vs. the opposite when the US wasn't in the war and Germany's was bombing England. We are looking at the US involvement vs. not being involved, right? The point is that it would not have been a foregone conclusion that Russia would have won if the US was not engaged.

Jews - moral obligation to go into Germany for this reason alone. Unless you have a "let the world burn" philosophy.

We added fronts for Germany first in North Africa and then in Italy - so, although Italy wasn't an effective ally, it wasn't a front they had to defend.

Japan brought us into the war... if we weren't in the war they would probably have been successful first in China and then later in Russia.

Again, the point is - we don't really know what would have happened if we didn't get involved. Would 10M Jews have been killed instead of 6? Would Nazi Germany have survived and kept most of Europe? Would Imperial Japan still be in place.

And moving forward - is the goal to withdraw from the world stage. Should we never get involved - which is where it seems this is argument is leading?

[dckingsfan]

"...attacks on German oil production and refinement were effective and led to widespread shortages of gasoline. Not only did this affect the ability of the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe to conduct operations, but more importantly, it limited the amount of training time pilots, tank operators, and other fuel-intensive vehicle pilots received before heading into combat. Ultimately, this had a huge impact on the quality of troops fielded by the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe."

Just thought you would find that interesting...

[Zonkerbl]

[edit: whoops, I forgot Nate started this whole thing off saying the world would not be different if we hadn't entered, sorry!]

And thanks for quoting one paragraph from some random dude on quora, who then goes on to say:

"Ultimately, though, the Strategic Bombing efforts were a complete waste of time, money, and resources. Each bombing run was extraordinarily costly in terms of both aircraft lost, but more importantly, in terms of quality pilots killed or taken prisoner. These pilots could have been put to much more effective use flying air superiority missions or interdiction missions against the Luftwaffe. The production of B17s could have gone toward more useful fighter-bombers and interceptors."

Dude. That whole article is about how ineffective bombing is, and you go in and cherry pick the one paragraph that supports your argument?

Who do you think you are, Nate?

So I think the question is, what would the world be like now if the US hadn't entered WWII?

That's a weird question because Japan attacked us so we didn't really have any option to enter WWII. We had to fight Japan, they were attacking us.

The relevant question is, what if the US hadn't helped the UK invade Normandy?

That I can answer. If the US hadn't helped invade Normandy, or if the invasion of Normandy had failed, not very much would be different. The continual threat of an invasion of Normandy helped pin some German troops in Western Europe but frankly by the time Normandy happened Hitler had already shifted most of his troops to the Eastern front. Which was why after we managed to break through in Normandy we were able to basically cake walk our way almost all the way to Berlin.

Maybe if there had never been any credible threat at all that the Allies would open a second front things would be different. But the UK was always a threat and they didn't get much help from the US anyway.

We really didn't contribute all that much to WWII, frankly.

[dckingsfan]

No, the conversation started with should we involve ourselves in the world affairs. And the original comment was we could have just stayed out of WWII and every would have been fine. Which is clearly your point. We should stay out of all foreign affairs... we have no moral obligations because the US is the bad guy.

And I have no problem with Nate - he has logical arguments in many cases - I don't always agree but he doesn't get as personal as you ALWAYS do...

[nate33]

To be clear, I never said that the world would be no different without us getting involved in the European Theater of WWII. I just question how much different it would be. I don't subscribe to the notion that America saved the world from a thousand years of Dark Ages.

I think Zonker's take is on the right track. France would have been a little bit more socialist than they are right now. We also don't know what would have become of Germany. A stronger Germany would contained the expansion of communist Russia into Eastern Europe and probably saved the lives of the millions who starved under Stalin.

Finally, let's not overlook that part of the cause of World War II was Britain's diplomatic aggressiveness. They were very hard-lined in their resistance to Germany trying to amend the untenable Treaty of Versailles. If Britain didn't have the implicit backing of the U.S. perhaps they would have caved on some of those negotiations and alleviated the frustrations of Germany - frustrations that led to the political climate that facilitated the rise of Hitler in the first place.

Again, I'm not saying I have all the answers here. I'm just questioning the conventional wisdom that World War II was "The Good War". Remember, victors always right the history books and they're rarely objective. War usually involves lots of bad decisions made by both sides. Hitler didn't just randomly decide to take over Europe with no provocation.

[Zonkerbl]

I see how it is, I catch you in a flagrantly dishonest manipulation of the truth so you try to distract me crying about personal attacks.

Biyatch, please. How dumb do you think I am?

Try worrying less about being called out on your dishonesty and focus more on being honest.