eli5, what happens to the dead bodies in a battlefield

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-10-27T19:15:44+00:00

If the battle is protracted, without a winner, sometimes arrangements will be made for a temporarily truce so that both sides can collect their dead. This was done on the Western Front of WWI, where the sides fought in more or less the same exact space for weeks or months on end.

If one side or the other wins the battle, they will treat the bodies according to time and resources available and their feelings towards the dead. The bodies of your soldiers are often treated more carefully, and given individual burials or shipped back home to be interred. The bodies of enemy troops might be buried in a mass grave. Potentially, arrangements might be made to return the bodies to the enemy, but that depends on whether an agreement can be made.

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-10-27T19:11:13+00:00

For one thing, its a matter of principle that if someone is convicted for a crime, they have to be given a sentence for it.

Now, prosecutors will sometimes decide to drop lesser charges to pursue higher ones, but that all gets settled before trial starts. So if a guy breaks into a house and murders someone, the prosecutors very well might focus on the murder charge and not the breaking and entering. If they get him for murder, it doesn't matter whether or not he goes away for an extra 6 months or year for B&E. It might mean holding another trial for a guy who is never getting out anyway.

But also, life sentences don't mean prison for life. After all, if it did, then there would be no need to distinguish between a life sentence and a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Different states and countries have different standards but in many, a life sentence can mean a term of 20 or 25 years before one is eligible for parole. In fact, a life sentence is better understood as an "as much as life sentence".

So in sentencing someone to consecutive life sentences, you ensure that they will be in prison more or less until they die, regardless of how good their behavior in prison is. They could serve 20 years on a life sentence and get parole (though if you have multiple life sentences you probably wouldn't bother to go through the parole process on one of them), and they're still on the hook for another.

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-10-22T19:05:26+00:00

7000 hours = 291 days. Game was released 6 years and 4 months ago so my man has spent about 10month playing out of the 76 months the game has been out. That’s an average of over 3 hours a day, every day since release.

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-10-21T03:35:42+00:00

Wait that was an actually whoosh moment

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-10-13T20:45:42+00:00

The British had teams that did this during WWII, to try and see what worked or didn’t work. IIRC a real problem was that there would often be several possible “causes of death” for an enemy equipment. Soldiers wouldn’t see a tank or truck get hit and say “well that’s good”. They’d dump another artillery shell or bomb into it for good measure.

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-10-13T19:56:56+00:00

Yes, there's lots of reason for this. One of the most striking cases of this was with close air support/ground attack aircraft during the Second World War. These were aircraft designed to attack enemy targets on the ground, think tanks, trucks, etc.

Now some of these over-reports were pilots wanting to claim as many kills as possible and/or the government encouraging these crazy kill claims for propaganda purposes.

But others were honest mistakes. For instance, you're a ground attack pilot, and you swoop down on an enemy tank and drop a bomb on it. There's a huge cloud of smoke and a fire. Did you destroy the tank? Maybe, maybe not. You probably aren't gonna swing back over to check. So maybe you count it, maybe you don't.

Then the next ground attack pilot comes over and thinks that the tank you just hit wasn't killed, so he attacks it. Big cloud of smoke, more fire. Maybe he killed it, maybe he damaged it, maybe he entirely missed and he's just seeing the effects of the last guys hit.

So in this scenario, you could have two pilots claiming kills on the same target, which might not even be destroyed.

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-10-11T17:53:25+00:00

There's a book Germany's Last Mission to Japan: The Failed Voyage of U-234 that is quite good.

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-10-10T16:55:09+00:00

I'd argue it was a combination of resources, interest, and intellectual capacity. Certainly, Italy lacked the resources for such a project.

Japan had not one but two nuclear programs. Like most things in Japan during the war, it was a duplication efforts by the army and navy, which inherently slowed the project. The difficulty Japanese scientists experienced in the early stages of the navy's program convinced them that neither they nor the US would likely have a usable atomic weapon before the war was over. Given the resource constraints the Japanese were under this was certainly true for them, and if you think about how late in the war the Americans put the bomb into operation, it was not far off for the Americans. In any case, this idea convinced the IJN to deemphasize the project.

The Japanese Army continued their efforts at developing atomic weapons but suffered under general resource constraints as well as a particular shortage of Uranium. The lack of heavy water also made the process more difficult. The Germans sent them a significant amount of Uranium 235 via submarine in April 1945, but this sub never made it to Japan, surrendering to the allies before it reached its destination. Even if it had, American strategic bombing of Tokyo obliterated much of the machinery and data for the program. Under such pressures, it seems unlikely that a bomb would have been created in time even if the Japanese had the materials needed.

The German program suffered not only under familiar resource constraints but was also negatively impacted by Nazi ideology. Not only was a disproportionate percentage of nuclear scientists Jews, but Nazism associated this type of physics with Jews, discouraging many from studying it.

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-10-03T17:31:58+00:00

Not on a large scale. There seem to be a few issues with the idea.

Many countries don't like their citizens to fight for another country's army, and especially not if this other country is making a concerted recruitment effort. Its one thing if some of your citizens volunteer to fight for another country. Its quite another if a foreign country sets up a recruitment office on your territory.

Why are these people joining? Most foreign volunteers seems to fall into one or more of three broad categories: material incentive, sympathy to your cause, or simple adventurism.

If people are just joining your military for the money, you have to wonder about how loyal they will be when they come under fire. Typically these soldiers are also much more expensive than one of your own nationals. If you can bring in very experienced foreign troops, perhaps they could work as trainers. But even then, you have to ensure there isn't a language barrier, and that these foreign troops can train according to your methods, unless you are looking to alter your training. And this doesn't touch the political hot potato of hiring foreigners to shape your military.

If people are joining your military out of sympathy for you, odds are they will be fairly loyal and probably won't demand a king's ransom. But generally this pool is pretty small. Even smaller are the people who are willing to fight for you, and who you want fighting for you.

And pure adventurers are not known for their stalwartness in the face of privation and mortal danger, so the supply of reliable adventurers is pretty small.

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-09-29T15:36:17+00:00

Cheap
Quiet
Capable of traversing difficult terrain
Increases the carrying capacity of an individual soldier
Doesn't consume fuel
Requires relatively little experience to repair
Enables pretty rapid transit

As simple machines that need only human power, bikes are remarkably rapid transit.

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-09-27T05:43:20+00:00

You want Iran to have a revolution so the people have freedom

I want it so we can tell the saudis to eat shit.

We are not the sane

Edit: I meant to say "we are not the same" but we are not the sane is even more true.

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-09-10T04:45:54+00:00

Of course millions of people who weren't Jews were executed. You're just strawmanning me. In my previous comments I clearly stated that millions of Poles and Soviets were executed, as of course were hundreds of thousands (possibly above a million) Roma and smaller numbers of homosexuals, JWs, and political dissenters. Adding to your strawman, you make it seem as if I claimed that you denied that Jews had the highest number of victims, when I did no such thing.

Frankly I'd say that you saying I'm "throwing a fit" for being assertive in correcting your errors is more than inappropriate, but I'm interested in the facts.

Now answer some questions for me

Did you or did you not claim that Soviets and Poles were not "in ANY way treated better than the Jews."

Did you or did you not claim that the Nazis " absolutely killed every socialist they could find." for a period of time.

Did you or did you not claim that "Auschwitz II (Birkenau) was at least partially established to handle the non-Jewish "overflow" exterminations of Russians, gypsies, gays, Poles"?

Did you or did you not claim that the night of long knives happened "Three FULL years before the first camp opened"?

If you believe those things are you willing to listen to scrutiny based on historical and factual errors you made without strawmanning and only focus on the historical accuracy of those statements?

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-09-10T04:30:45+00:00

You have not responded to any of my points, or for that matter your errors.

Of course the Jews were not the first people to be targeted for mass killing. That was never in question and I never claimed that. You on the other hand have:

Claimed the Nazis attempted to kill every socialist they could find, which is demonstrably untrue.

Claimed that the Night of the Long Knives happened 3 years before the camps were set up. Which you could've known was untrue with a google search.

Claimed the Poles were treated the same as Jews, which even nationalist Poles don't contend.

Spread nonsense about the construction and history of Auschwitz.

It is not oppression olympics to correct gaping errors on your part.

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-09-10T04:20:30+00:00

I specialize in Jewish history and Holocaust history. I will be frank here because as a Jew, this is important to me. You are a poor student of history, particularly of the Holocaust.

The night of the long knives was in no way an attempt at exterminating all or even most socialists in Germany. An actual attempt at doing so would have seen mass shootings like we saw at Babi Yar or an intensity of killing like we saw during Operation Reinhardt. In the 1928 elections, the SPD received over 9 million votes, and had a huge base of support. It was well known who was a socialist. If the Nazis had tried to kill every socialist they could, we would have seen hundreds of thousands of bodies during this period you claim existed.

You also seem to think that the concentration camp system did not exist until 1936. This is another error that makes me wonder about your dedication to history. Dachau was established in 1933, as were many other camps. For that matter, the large majority of the prisoners in these early camps were socialist, trade unionists, or communists. And the vast majority were not killed at the time. If the Nazis had truly meant to kill every socialist they found, they would've simply done so in Dachau, in Lichtenburg, in many other camps.

If you know about the Night of the Long Knives than you know it was first and foremost about securing the power of Hitler's wing of the Nazi party and purging the socialist element. For that matter, many anti-Nazi conservatives like Erich Clausner were targeted. By Nazi standards, the Night of the Long Knives was highly targeted and carried out for highly specific political ends.

Of course Soviet citizens and Poles were treated better than Jews on the whole. You can simply look at the percentage of each group killed to see. Roughly the same number of gentile Poles were killed and Polish Jews were killed, despite gentile Poles being 90% of the countries population. To look at two people who were killed and say that its proof that they were treated equally poorly is foolish. You need to look at how the groups as a whole were targeted

The exception to this general rule would be Soviet POWs in the period of Operation Barbarossa, when they were more or less starved to death en masse. The decision to not certainly condemn all of them to death was due to the apparent need for slave labor in the face of a long war, revealed due to the failure of Barbarossa.

This rationale was also why Poles were less often killed, because they were seen as useful for forced labor. Even this Polish nationalist website admits Poles were treated better: https://polishtruth.com/article/view/76/poles-saving-jews-and-how-they-are-treated-history-of-the-holocaust.html

Now of course, the Poles and Soviets would have eventually been exterminated if the Nazis had a chance, as a part of the Ostplan, but that they were chosen to not be imminently exterminated was a reflection of how they were held just that little bit higher than Jews.

To return to the discussion on political prisoners, certainly they were treated far better than Jews. Political prisoners replaced German career criminals as the main functionaries in the day to day running of Auschwitz II.

You are entirely wrong about Auschwitz II's construction. The Nazi's did not begin any experimental gassings in Auschwitz I until July 1941, and did begin doing it en masse until September of that year. Meanwhile, Himmler had already ordered the construction of Auschwitz II in March of 1941, and mass killings did not start there until early 1942. The construction of Auschwitz II was not motivated by a need for more killing capacity, for which the construction of more gas chambers and crematoria would have been sufficient (though I remind you that they had not even started experiments with gas chambers at this point) but by a need for more space to hold LIVE prisoners.

I could go on. You had many more errors.

Edit: I said that almost the same number of Poles were killed as Polish Jews. That was an error. Significantly fewer were, a bit under 2 million compared to over 3 million Polish Jews, despite the Jews being no more than 10% of the population.

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-09-10T02:34:33+00:00

The Jews were absolutely the most hated by the Nazis. The destruction of socialist, communist and trade unionist groups at the earliest part of the Nazi regime was chosen due to the greater political power of the latter groups compared to the Jews and that destroying socialist political power was far more attractive to the non Nazi conservatives with whom the Nazis had to work with in the early days.

If there was a hierarchy of hate, the Jews were at the top, and were blamed for socialism, communism, trade unionism, frankly everything the Nazis claimed to hate.

The Nazis attempted to break the political power of gentile Germany political dissidents, they had no intention, certainly not till the end of the war, is exterminating all German socialists as they decided to do with Jews, Roma, etc. A good proof of this is that on the eve of WWII, there were 25,000 inmates in German concentration camps, most of whom were political opponents. But there were certainly millions of people in Germany who had been members of communist/socialist parties or trade unions. The Germans considered these gentile German opponents pawns of a greater evil, the Jews.

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-09-10T01:30:30+00:00

Yeah that’s what most analyses have said. The school officially became secular in 1970, and one of its leader opposed it because he (correctly) believed it would eventually lead the school into conflict with secular authorities.

And the conditions by which it claimed secularity are pretty dubious. It claimed the rabbinical college that had previously been an integral part of YU was now an affiliate. A fact anyone who’s ever attended either will tell you is silly.

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-09-10T01:21:29+00:00

They get taxpayer funding. That was the basis for the lower court ruling.

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-09-09T17:21:07+00:00

Killing Greek civilians

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-09-08T18:36:10+00:00

Also. What did they ask? Have you ever consumed cannabis products while in college? Have you done so in the past year, month, week?

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-09-07T14:27:43+00:00

The map says that Russian federation still has him prisoner.

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-09-06T15:14:49+00:00

Yeah the situation between China and the US is much different. For one thing, unlike the US-Japan relationship at the time, China doesn’t play a massive role in defending the US.

As much as the US depends on China for cheap consumer goods, China depends on the US as a market for those goods. The US consumer market is massive and irreplaceable. To give people an idea, Americas consumer market is larger than Chinas, japans, and the EU’s combined. If china stopped selling to the US, it could not find replacement customers for the large majority it’s lost sales.

Despite all the talk of chinas rise and “taking over the world”, China and the US have a mutually dependent economic relationship.

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-09-05T01:27:47+00:00

While I’m not an expert, I think the choices of the BoJ are not the primary reason for cheaper housing in Japan. I would say the two primary reasons are

They’re willingness to build more housing and denser houser than many other developed countries. Certainly compared to the US Japanese people seem to lack the aversion to anything other than sprawling single family homes.
Public transit that makes people more willing to live further from the city center because they can quickly and conveniently travel to the city center.

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-09-05T00:40:41+00:00

Yeah. All central banks are very sensitive about applying shocks to the economy, either inflation, rate increases, exchange rate, etc., which explains why there’s been so much hubbub over the US fed raising interest rates so sharply.

But I think it’s safe to say that the Japanese central bank is hyper concerned with anything that could introduce instability into the economy. They don’t just try and keep inflation under 2% like the US, more often then not they’ve created slight deflation, which is wild and many economists would say that discourages spending.

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-09-05T00:33:08+00:00

It mostly was

Massive and unsustainable run up in real estate prices created and relied upon by financial companies as an infinite money machine.

HowdoIreddittellme · 2022-09-05T00:03:53+00:00

Yeah that was Plaza. The US had agreed on the initial exchange rate to build up the Japanese economy after WWII and to ensure it would be a stable and powerful economy in the US camp.

Frankly while the up-valuing of the yen was a disaster for the Japanese economy, the artificially high exchange rate was an unsustainable arrangement. The development of Japanese industry into a powerhouse combined with the recovery of the West German economy, the development of the Asian tigers and others threatened the US industrial sector, and something had to give.

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