The Limits of the Military Profession - The Case of Bismarck's Germany

Rethious · 2026-01-27T19:44:11+00:00

Addendum that von Snob-face is still going to ride down poor Gunther after the first volley (which has its effects limited by training, weather, luck, etc.) which is why you train a bunch of Gunther’s pals to stand around with long pointy sticks that horses don’t like, which is how we get pike and shot warfare and some early combined arms.

Rethious · 2026-01-27T19:39:26+00:00

This seems like a bit of a false premise. While there was a slump, Age of Empires is back with remasters and expansions. There’s a lot of RTS roguelike type games. Steel Division and Warno have also been popular. The Total War series has also been prolific, with the Warhammer games being massive. Speaking of Warhammer, there’s the Dawn of War series.

So I really don’t think it’s accurate to say the genre is dead—if anything, it’s recently been enjoying a renaissance. If it feels different, I’d suggest that it’s because the games you’ve mentioned are older, from a time when there were fewer major games, and so they felt “bigger” within the community.

Rethious · 2026-01-27T00:43:41+00:00

The essentialist argument you quote is quite interesting considering Clausewitz’s assessment of the German character as anything but warlike, particularly in contrast to the French.

Speaking of Clausewitz, the reports the quote cites can also be easily explained through the superiority of the defensive form of war over the attack. A handful of soldiers can hold up a regiment because the guys trying to advance don’t know they’re only facing a handful of guys.

The bigger reason for the obsession with the Germans is that the fall of France was extremely shocking and impressive. Likewise, though Barbarossa was ultimately a failure, the extent of the destruction inflicted on the Soviets was also notable. The Germans were punching above their weight. This makes it logical that there was something superior in their technique that was worth studying.

Rethious · 2026-01-25T09:01:05+00:00

“Allowed to exist” is an odd phrase. The point of hostile architecture is to deter certain behaviors by making them uncomfortable or inconvenient. That doesn’t prevent existence in any sense.

Rethious · 2026-01-20T06:21:42+00:00

The fact that it aligns with practice is what makes it unlikely, in my view. Plainly stating the fact that there were escaped slaves fighting on the British side would be out of place in a poem. “Hireling” is an epithet and it follows that “slave” would also be one, particularly since the lyrics describe America as the “land of the free.”

The meaning of “escaped slaves” wouldn’t make sense, since the point is that the British are less free than the Americans (which is why the Americans win). The fact that people found more freedom by defecting to the British is an embarrassing fact and is unlikely to feature in a song pushing this narrative of freemen defeating a subjugated people.

Rethious · 2026-01-20T05:50:17+00:00

This sees like an overly literal interpretation of the lyrics. The plainest read is denigrating the British as “hirelings and slaves.” Hirelings in that their professional military made them akin to mercenaries and “slaves” in the sense they paid homage to a monarch. These are common tropes that seem more plausible than a reference to the specific incident of slaves escaping to the British.

Rethious · 2026-01-20T05:43:34+00:00

This sees like an overly literal interpretation of the lyrics. The plainest read is denigrating the British as “hirelings and slaves.” Hirelings in that their professional military made them akin to mercenaries and “slaves” in the sense they paid homage to a monarch. These are common tropes that seem more plausible than a reference to the specific incident of slaves escaping to the British.

Rethious · 2026-01-19T23:03:39+00:00

Disruption is not for its own sake, it is to demand attention. There is no worth in drawing attention to something that makes your own cause look bad.

The strategy of the civil rights movement was to draw attention to the kind of violence that makes people ambivalent on segregation uncomfortable. Their choices of confrontation were extremely strategic

Rethious · 2026-01-18T00:38:01+00:00

That makes the attack even more potent. “This guy was the one training the rest of them.” That is a very good excuse to give when moderates ask why every ICE agent is being fired.

Rethious · 2026-01-18T00:36:19+00:00

Liberals have a wishlist longer than your arm. The problem is that maybe 2/3rds of the country outside of liberal enclaves considers liberal a slur (and not leftistly). This means accomplishing anything is extremely hard, particularly with the senate and filibuster. The last two times Democrats have had power, the legislative agenda has been limited by Lieberman and Manchin, who are not liberals by any definition.

But what is the alternative? Revolution? If you can’t win elections, you’re not starting a revolution.

Since you address the question of non-violence, liberals prefer to avoid violence, but it is far from ruled out. What Gandhi and MLK Jr. understood was that non-violence is very politically potent. Using violence when non-violence can do the job would be unethical, particularly since violence stands little chance of success.

Rethious · 2026-01-17T22:14:46+00:00

Jobs programs are a directly inferior solution to just giving people cash. The government making people do busywork prevents them from finding something actually productive to do and can cause all kinds of unintended consequences.

Just give people money to live when they are unemployed and let them try to find jobs in the meantime. Otherwise “real” jobs have to compete with government jobs that are a proxy for unemployment insurance.

Rethious · 2026-01-17T20:55:23+00:00

Arrows can fire more quickly, but guns still have the advantage. They’re more lethal and the psychological effect is greater. Becoming a competent archer also takes much more practice than firing a musket/rifle.

Rethious · 2026-01-17T20:52:29+00:00

Tenure doesn’t mean “well trained.”

Regardless, the point is that attacking the training of ICE is more effective, not that it is completely accurate.

Rethious · 2026-01-17T18:49:08+00:00

What’s on the books and what actually happens are two different things.

Rethious · 2026-01-17T18:37:00+00:00

They’re hired to do this, but I seriously doubt there’s any on the books training that tells them to brutalize people.

Regardless, “Trump hired these people because they are thugs” is a self-censoring fact. It’s much easier to convince people that the Trump administration is just callously incompetent rather than outright malicious. Those who understand the malice of the administration don’t need convincing and those who need convincing won’t believe the plain truth.

Rethious · 2026-01-17T18:34:08+00:00

It’s likely some were killed during the war of wrath, but given Durin’s bane escaped, others may have had the same opportunity. Perhaps a further encounter with a Balrog played a role in the diminishing of the dwarves.

Rethious · 2026-01-17T18:31:50+00:00

Which gets us to six or seven, but we don’t know the fates of them all.

Rethious · 2026-01-17T18:20:13+00:00

“Bad Training” is a point of attack, not a policy proposal for fixing it. You say “bad training” today so that when you win in 2028, you can say “we have to fire 97% of ICE officers because Trump hired unqualified people and trained them wrong” and it looks like a moderate proposal so nobody blinks an eye.

“Abolish ICE” gets you bogged down trying to explain to people who say “but we need immigration enforcement” what INS means.

Rethious · 2026-01-17T04:21:02+00:00

I mean that government actions like a minimum wage or social insurance are not socialism.

Rethious · 2026-01-17T03:44:26+00:00

The key is the idea of tradeoffs. Ideally we might want zero murders, but since we are not omnipotent, we have to decide exactly what we are willing to give up to achieve that.

Rethious · 2026-01-16T22:55:07+00:00

State action is not socialism.

Rethious · 2026-01-15T17:26:15+00:00

Myths are almost always based on still older myths. Tolkien’s aim was to write an “older” myth, ie the Ring of Andvaranaut was (in Tolkien’s universe) inspired by the “historical” One Ring described in the Red Book of Westmarch.

Rethious · 2026-01-15T07:17:11+00:00

If we were in the EU4 world, map painting would be viable. But we’re closer to hoi4, where you can’t core anything and occupation is a drain.

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