It’s difficult to imagine a scenario where Hitler didn’t attack the USSR eventually. By my reading, the amount of race/communism hatred involved was only second to the anti-semitism.
Yeah, Mein Kampf and Lebensraum were always clearly aimed to happen at the expense of the Soviet Union. Hitler had no plans of stopping with what he grabbed in central and eastern Europe by 1941.
[I]From millions of men . . . one man must step forward who with apodictic force will form granite principles from the wavering idea-world of the broad masses and take up the struggle for their sole correctness, until from the shifting waves of a free thought-world there will arise a brazen cliff of solid unity in faith and will.
Adolf Hitler[/I]
See, it’s obvious. :-)
From playing HOI 2 I know that Russia always will go after Germany if you don’t act. You can even go completely left/democracy and will get steamrolled.
Oh hell yes, I know what I’m asking for my birthday.
The Confederates win the Civil War with aid from South African time travelers in this unconvincing [fuck you, Publishers Weekly] “what-if” tale. Using a time machine, Andrew Rhoodie and his cadre of white supremacists from A.D. 2014 join the rebels and supply them with AK-47 assault rifles. Rhoodie’s “America Will Break” brotherhood hopes to foster a haven for slavery and extreme racism that will last into succeeding centuries. Thus armed, Gen. Robert E. Lee’s troops are soon victorious, and Lincoln agrees to divide the nation. Lee wins political office in the South, and, ironically, becomes both a proponent of emancipation and a foe of the bigoted visitors from the future. Turtledove might win over some Civil War buffs through his knowledge of historical figures and events. But stilted dialogue, slack pacing and thin characters diminish the book’s appeal.
Ah. And I suppose Hitler establishes Israel after fighting off the alien menace?
I’ve frequently seen that WW2alt book facing in the SciFi section, and as much as I would love the concept to work it just seemed too … fetishistic.
Yeah, I did a google News search and the only places I can find the quote are sources with an established conservative bias, or sources reporting on the Fox News report and quoting them. And the Fox News report itself (the televised version) is only quoting what the Times Online reported. So, I doubt there is a recording of the quote. I’m skeptical the quote actually exists in that form (I’d bet that Gore alluded to Churchhill by invoking “political will” more than anything else)
The whole story smells funny at this point.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/16/AR2005111602197.html
EDIT: And this study says it’s twice as bad.
Hey at least one guy was somewhat truthful:
Seriously. It is really early to make wild claims, but hey if it gets you research dollars plug away! As Jack Donaghy says: “get yours!”
Yeah go ahead and ignore the WHO, Columbia University, peer-reviewed journals like Nature, University of Wisconsin Madison, the CDC and Harvard and choose to read into that paragraph. It’s not going to get any warmer, and even if it does, it’s only a couple of degrees, right? How could that hurt anybody? Those scientists are retarded.
The cold kills lots more people every year than heat does. This issue of climate change is extremely complicated and people like Al Gore try to reduce it to sea level rise disaster porn.
That’s what’s retarded.
Have you noticed that conservatives in general (and please, I don’t mean idiot talking heads) have slowly begun to accept evidence in favor of anthropogenic climate change? It’s because conservatives are cautious unlike most liberals. They’re not stupid…they’re willing to be convinced about things, but they’re not willing to destroy the economy or accept drastic changes just because Al Gore sighs and rolls his eyes.
There’s probably just enough support in the US to bear the burden of Cap & Trade because of this shift. It’s barely taken any time at all (politically speaking) despite the alarmists shrieking. Conservatives are now totally on board with green power (for example) because it’s going to enable us to tell the dictator oil states to shove it.
There are always plenty of good reasons to do smart things without resorting to FUD and propaganda.
Now if we can only get China and the other developing nations to think smart (unlikely any time soon) then we’ll actually be able to do something to keep the temperature from rising too dramatically. Maybe Al Gore should learn how to shriek “Hong Kong will be under water!” in Cantonese.
Everything’s retarded!
Oh yes, us liberals are all totally upset about the worse heat waves and too stupid to realize there’s possible offsets in warmer winters. It’d be silly to be concerned about millions of goddamn people drowning or turning into climate refugees from rising sea levels, or collapses in crop outputs.
Long before An Inconvenient Truth came out, the scientific community had overwhelming evidence for human caused climate change. There was no real debate except on the part of intellectually dishonest - or ‘cautious’ - conservative politicians. Now, like you, they have been forced to accept reality, due in part to Gore explaining the issue to the public in a concise and convincing way. No one except the badly misinformed and the Right actually thinks Al Gore is driving the debate.
I agree that he is a bit of a doomer, but it’s better to be a little shrill than to deliberately disregard the truth out of venality and political bullshit - sorry, caution.
Also: Iraq, torture, wiretapping, huge irresponsible tax cuts, fire-and-forget stimulus spending, Sarah Palin. I’m going to need a list of issues on which conservatives were cautious and not just retrograde, like abortion or gay marriage. In fact, you could come around the other side if you want; what issues have American liberals been wrong about due to lack of caution?
Trick question. It’s been so long since they’ve done anything that it’s impossible to come up with an example.
I’m only half joking. The Republicans seem to have utterly dominated the role of ruining our lives lately. I can’t even think of a brainless gun control law out of the left for a long time now!
Wrong in what they advocated or wrong in what they accomplished? The Kyoto Treaty is a big fat steaming pile of idiotic economic restrictions that was doomed to never succeed in fixing anything if it had been ratified, and it was primarily backed from the left. The NCCAM has enjoyed long-standing support from the left and is one of the greatest crimes against the American taxpayer and science in general in history. The thing about idiotic wingnut liberal ideas is that they involve new action away from the status quo whereas idiotic wingnut conservative ideas tend to stop at “let’s leave things the way they are,” which means they’re pushing a big rock uphill from the start. If you interpret the left to mean the Democratic party, you’re kind of not being entirely honest, as there’s a fair number of conservative members that will do things to temper the unbridled enthusiasm the far left has for stupid things (see the current health care debate, which is slowly but surely being ratcheted away from some of the more moronic proposals by the conservative portion of the Democratic party). If you interpret the left to mean the Dennis Kucinich type far-outs, the number of times they’ve had enough people in positions of power to bulldoze their agenda through is relatively slim, but if you investigate some of their proposals, they’re well on the ridiculous side of rationality.
‘overwhelming’ LOL. You must be trolling. Seriously.
Off of the top of my head, issues related to ‘global warming’: ethanol, nuclear power, and global cooling. The environmental part of the liberal movement has been consistently wrong on every issue. Always. No, wait, the response to acid rain was ok as was the Montreal Protocol (post hoc ergo propter hoc, but whatever).
There are so many important issues that the democrats need to address: the inequality in the US, health care, regulation in general after 30 years of free market dogma, but the greens suck up the oxygen with their crap. There is no constituency within the left that I hate more. They suck.
But being green sells to the upper middle class so hucksters are always pumping it. And putzs like you eat it up. Congrats.
Okay, I’ll bite:
What is the “correct” viewpoint on ethanol, nuke plants, and global cooling?
Ethanol - should not be. It’s less efficient than using fossil fuels. Seriously. It’s a subsidy for corn farmers and that’s pretty much it.
Nuclear Power - should be the preferred “green” power option. If we replaced every fossil plant in the U.S. right now with modern nuclear reactors, most of the nuclear waste that will even be produced for the entire lifespan of the planet Earth would still already be produced. The green opposition to nuclear power is one of the biggest failures of the environmentalist movement, surpassed only by its unfortunate conglomeration with anti-corporate activism.
Global Cooling - Eh? This one has me lummoxed. Unless you smoke dope in your back yard like Idso, I find it hard to believe anybody considers this to be a predictable and preventable possibility. There’s some evidence indicating that the sun may be entering a low energy cycle, which would in turn imply that getting rid of all this greenhouse gas is actually a monumentally bad idea, but that’s still a fringe position. CO2 fertilization was an idiotic argument back in the 90s when I debated the topic and an ice age is, in fact, one of the potential outcomes of global warming when the gulf stream gets buggered up.
The thing about pumping hucksters is they can get anyone, depending on their feared machine.
For example, although I’m too antsy on a nice Friday to actually defend this, 30 years of free market dogma looks a lot more like corporatism and re-regulation to the true believers, not to mention that it comes across as crap compared to e.g. war and civil rights for a lot of people.
The only real honest and important intellectual debate at the moment is the college football Bowl Championship Series. That’s just a universal truth.