The real story of Hitler's rise is mostly a history of contingency - bad choices by specific influential politicians first wrecked the German economy and then handed power to Hitler.
But I think this impulse to gild the lily and attribute the rise of Hitler to deep intellectual trends is an example of a pretty common fallacy of assuming that an incredibly important world event must have incredibly important roots.
Germany is in trouble. But the trouble goes deep and cannot be addressed by "more of the same" socio-economic measures in the domain of taxes or social spending or regulation.
Crude economic factors don’t explain the fascist shift in Germany. And Trumponomics, even if it worked (which it doesn’t) wouldn’t end the resentment feeding our own authoritarian movement.
Met a German founder this week and asked him if all the stories one reads about the challenges of startups in Germany are exaggerated. "No, they're understated." Proceeded to describe spending a full day having a 90-page investment contract read to him (mandatory under German law; § 13 BeurkG) by a notary that then charged €30,000. That was for his first company. His second company, needless to say, was not incorporated in Germany.
The French and Germans will ban Tesla FSD to protect their car industry that's being decimated by Chinese EVs and Tesla Allowing Tesla full self driving would make it so popular that it'd probably the end of their car industry Because no French or German car has self driving like Tesla, many customers would probably flock to Tesla
Well, PRC HSR construction costs relative to the amount of tunneling aren't particularly low. France's are lower; Germany's are inconsistent, depending on whether money is wasted on excessive tunneling or on other things.
Ideas like public key cryptography are I mean, they're just incredibly deep um very non-obvious ideas uh which in some sense lay hidden uh already sort of in in the 1930s.
People will sometimes talk about um you know, a theory of everything as a potential goal for for physics. And and then there's this presumption somehow that physics is done once you get there. And of course, this is this is not true at all if you think about computer science.
Nick Lloyd’s The Eastern Front covers the clashes between Imperial Germany and the Russian Empire as well as the Austro-Hungarians against the Italians and the Serbs. Whereas the western front was essentially static throughout the whole war, the east was characterized by the sort of maneuver warfare that most generals had expected to fight.
This was just because Hitler was afraid of the power of his army high command, and convinced by Goering's morphine-high vision that he would stop it with the air force, which he couldn't.
That's why Hitler was never a meth guy. That's also why I think this video is fake. He didn't take meth. I studied Morell's, the things he gave him. He gave a lot of things, and only twice was meth.
But it was used by right-wingers, and Hitler didn't mind because people who are drunk are more susceptible to right-wing populism, I would claim now here, and Hitler would agree. So he did not think it was bad that these people were a bit drunk, or maybe even very drunk, because if you're drunk you also get aggressive against others.
One thing that changed was that Eukodal was not available anymore, so the drug that Hitler actually had become physically addicted to was suddenly not available anymore. This had to do with the bombardment of the Merck company, the factory in December 1944. British bombers destroyed the production facilities.
And I spoke with Anthony Beevor once about the attempt of British intelligence to assassinate Hitler, and he had seen some evidence that at the point in time, they dropped those plans because they knew that drugged Hitler or malfunctioning Hitler, which he was after, you know, the summer of 1943, is better for Britain than, you know, killing Hitler and then having to deal with, like, some kind of, you know, maybe the army would have taken over the country
I think whoever fired first was not decided at that point, but I do think that from the moment that Hitler takes power in 1933, a conflict between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany is inevitable.
He might have amazing attention to detail, he might be able to understand, have an enormous capacity to remember units and where they are on a map, but he was only a half corporal in the First World war. He’s never been to staff college.
And I think radios are really, really key to the whole story because there is no denser radio network anywhere in the world, including the United States, than Germany in 1939.
And by that time, aircraft production in Britain is massively outpacing the Germans and the best ratio that the Germans achieve in 1940s, July 1940, when the British produced 496 new Hurricanes and Spitfires, single-engine fighters, and the Germans only produced 240 single-engine fighters.
And so, one of the reasons why you have this narrative that Britain was a bit rubbish and hanging on the shirttails of the Americans and all the blood was spilt in eastern front and Germany had the best army in the world and was only defeated because Hitler was mad and blah, blah, blah, that kind of traditional narrative, that narrative emerges through the prism of what was going on in the 1970s and what was going on in the 1980s and the changing world, rather than looking at it through the prism of the late 1930s or early 1940s.
Die Bundesregierung wird zukünftig alle finanziellen Mittel zur Verfügung stellen, die die Bundeswehr braucht, um zur konventionell stärksten Armee Europas zu werden.
Persistent U.S. trade deficits are an epiphenomenal mirror to our persistent capital account surpluses, which are in turn downstream of the beggar-thy-neighbor industrial policies of countries like China and Germany.
A short but powerful reflection from post-WWII Germany on 'true leisure' not mere relaxation or entertainment—is fundamental to human flourishing and the foundation of a meaningful life and culture.
Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint (Germany, 2019, CC) 3.6 When thinking about the most overlooked female artist, Artemesia Gentileschi often comes to mind. This documentary makes a persuasive case for Hilma af Klint. To my eyes, her most appealing works are not the large scale abstractions, rather it’s the small Klee-like gems that stand out. Don’t assume that if you have seen a half dozen of her most famous works that you have any conception of her overall career.
I think that that story about the latter part is completely wrong, almost 180 degrees wrong. I think that Einstein understood quantum mechanics as well as anyone, at least up through the 1930s. I think that his philosophical objections to it are correct. He should actually have been taken much more seriously about that.
Again, we are talking here about myth and mythology, because Bandera was not leading the fight against the Soviet occupation in Ukraine because, at that time, he was just simply not in Ukraine. He was in Germany.
If you focus on the years of collaboration, those were the same years when Joseph Stalin collaborated with Hitler, right? So, we have the same reason to call Stalin Nazi collaborator as we have the reason to call Bandera Nazi collaborator.
So, Ukraine is the country where there is no right or far right in the Parliament. We can’t say that about Germany, we can’t say that about France, so that’s just one more way to stress this unique place of Ukraine in that sense.
And I believe that there is a good chance you would've had World War II in the absence of Hitler. I believe that Germany was very powerful, it was deeply worried about the balance of power in Europe, and it had strong incentives to behave aggressively in the late 1930s, early 1940s.
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