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[mainiac]

It was also a Germany which cared for Germans, instead of letting them starve off.

1932-1939 were years of rising food prices, stagnant incomes and the working class crowding into slums.  The Nazis did prestige propoganda projects but the reality was it sucked to be poor in Germany at the time.  Yes the number of unemployed feel by more then 1% a year but the working class got hit by a double whammy of Nazi policies inflating food prices and the collapse of foreign trade driving up prices across the board.  This culminated in peacetime rationing of food.

I can definitely sympathize with what you are thinking.  I'm an economist (on my good days) and I believed the popular accounts for quite recently until I got around to reading Adam Tooze's excellent Wages of Destruction.  But basically what happened was that a variety of measures lowered the living standard of the german poor and channeled those resources towards investments in heavy industry and purchases of weapons.  At the same time that this was happening the Nazis did a bunch of propoganda about some prestige projects that they subsidized in public housing, subsidizing the food they were taxing, etc.  Perhaps the best example is the volkswagen, which was supposed to be the "peoples car" but was in fact far too expensive for even the upper middle class to own.  For propoganda reasons the volkswagen was supposed to cost less then any car could be built for.  So what actually happened was people paid for the cars ahead of time at a subsidized price but then the cars never got built.  But these imaginary peoples cars were great propoganda.

Hitler lost and Roose is loose won.

Gee, what a wonderful understanding of normative philosophy you demonstrate.

[Culise]

I don't really buy the argument, at the time the global human population was far too low to have the kind of negative effects we see today. It was under 500 million, if I'm remembering my timeline right.

Farming

What of it? For much less food, and with an intensity that might as well be nonexistant. There's just not a lot of environmental potential to be gained on a more wild Earth.

Do remember that the efficiency of agriculture in this era was vastly lower as well, requiring significantly more land for lower yields.  The deforestation of Europe, for example, began long before the charcoal demand of the early industrial era; an estimated 30-35% of Europe's total land area transitioned from forest wilds to agricultural fields just between the 6th and the 14th centuries AD^[ref].  It doesn't seem entirely out of question for a similar argument for historical deforestation may be carried to the part of the world with the greatest population and the most intensive agricultural development based on the principles of state-led infrastructure development underpinning the entire concept of the hydraulic empire - China.  Islands that exceeded their carrying capacity in Polynesia were effectively deforested, though I agree that this may be considered a fringe case due to their isolated location without external frontiers for expansion. 

That said, it wasn't necessarily a positive effect.  The sequestration of so much CO₂, even assuming their models were overstating the effects (I'll neglect Antarctic ice core samples that show actual atmospheric CO₂ levels; I'm not very familiar with the methodology there, and they seem to be used more often on geologic timescales) would have lowered global temperatures.  It also may have been mitigated by other sources; just as the Little Ice Age did not correspond to a global decrease in atmospheric CO₂, Genghis Khan's little adventures took place at the tail end of and just after the Medieval Warm Period.  That's obviously not to say that the two are related (if, for no other reason, than because the Medieval Warm Period's beginning and end are very fuzzily defined).  It's simply that, as you already know, there's more to global temperatures than just atmospheric greenhouse gasses. 

EDIT:
That said, it's worth noting that the study in question actually focused on four major depopulation incidents.  Only the two most long-lasting ones, the Mongol invasions in Asia and the European colonization of the Americas, showed any sort of long-term effect in the models.  The Black Death and the fall of the Ming Dynasty barely registered a blip; reforestation simply didn't overcome the emissions increase from decaying soil matter.

[scriver]

Two genocidal leaders who are being hail as historical/national heroes: Ataturk, Caesar.

Hell, apparently "young Turks" is a positive turnphrase in the us for "young go-getters". Which is pretty morbid.

[Sheb]

Yeah, MSH if you're interested in the subject I can recommend "Plows, Plagues and Petroleum", by William Ruddiman as a good book. Europe and other area of relatively high population were already deforested long before the industrial era. Rice paddies have been pumping methane in the atmosphere for thousands of years.

Code: [Select]

Argentinian propaganda during the war backfired when Argie conscripts surrendered or fled immediately rather than face the Gurkhas. They started to believe Argie propaganda when British media just showed images of the Gurkhas sharpening their khukris.
Funny, in Mein Kampf, Hitler complains that German propaganda was defective for the opposite reasons: he says they pictured the Brits and French as tiny, weakling loosers, which meant the German arriving at the front line were demoralized when they got their shit kicked by "loosers". Meanwhile, he was admiring the British propaganda showing the Germans as barbarous Huns.

[Erkki]

Funny, in Mein Kampf, Hitler complains that German propaganda was defective for the opposite reasons: he says they pictured the Brits and French as tiny, weakling loosers, which meant the German arriving at the front line were demoralized when they got their shit kicked by "loosers". Meanwhile, he was admiring the British propaganda showing the Germans as barbarous Huns.

I'm currently reading again David Bakers book on Adolf Galland. Galland too was surprised of Hitler's thoughts on the British: Hitler saw the British in many ways as equals to the Germans. Apparently Hitler even considered the British form of society admirable and superior to the still "developing" 3rd Reich.

[Antsan]

It's funny how hero-worship of modern monsters is justified by hero-worship of ancient monsters.

He got a Germany with stagnant incomes and high unemployment and created a Germany with stagnant incomes, low unemployment and an economy that was about to implode because they were spending all the savings and not making capital investments.

It was also a Germany which cared for Germans, instead of letting them starve off.

Uuuuuuhhhh… No. He killed millions of Germans in concentration camps and let starve to death other Germans only because he also wanted to kill many non-Germans.

Look sometimes shit goes down and everybody gets really excited and all of a sudden ohp there goes the head aw shit there's blood everywhere dude

We've all been there at one time or another.

Yeah, I know how that goes.

[Helgoland]

Also Aktion T4, his actions against (the non-gleichgeschaltet parts of) the Christian population, and, you know, dragging the country into WWII.
I can't believe I have to say this to a Pole, but fuck Hitler. He was not a good leader in any sense of the word.

I'm currently reading again David Bakers book on Adolf Galland. Galland too was surprised of Hitler's thoughts on the British: Hitler saw the British in many ways as equals to the Germans. Apparently Hitler even considered the British form of society admirable and superior to the still "developing" 3rd Reich.

Hey, already WWI was in part caused by Germany's inferiority complex towards the UK. Britain has a big navy? We need a big navy! Britain has colonies? We need colonies!
Germany in general is fairly anglophile, I think. If you were to ask around which people (excluding the smaller countries) was best-liked, I'm reasonably sure it would be the English.

[NJW2000]

They certainly speak our language better than we do.

[Il Palazzo]

Two genocidal leaders who are being hail as historical/national heroes: Ataturk, Caesar.

Hell, apparently "young Turks" is a positive turnphrase in the us for "young go-getters". Which is pretty morbid.

The Ceasar cut also seems much more in fashion than the Mein Fuhrer look.
Maybe in 2000 years people around the world will be able to sport a Hitlerstache & combover without fear.

[LordSlowpoke]

well, hitler was good at populism, you have to give him that

but how much of that was carefully crafted by goebbels remains to debate

i just want greece to become a federal territory already, ugh

[Helgoland]

Ew, no. We don't need another Bavaria.

[Sheb]

What have Greece and Bavaria in common?

[LordSlowpoke]

but their wine would be actually decent for once

[Antsan]

What have Greece and Bavaria in common?

I don't get it either.

[Sheb]

Yeah, if anything Greece is yet another victim of the Bavarian's worst crime: the Rheinheitsgebot.