Wasn’t that a song by the Rolling Stones?
It’s a little of both, but closer to B, I think. Like most histories of that summer, the book is very linear, so of course you would not need to remember what chapter or page a claim might be found in. If it’s about dialog between the Kaiser and the Tsar, you know it’s going to be in the part of the book dealing with July 29th to August 1st.
To say the quiet part out loud: there is very little reason to believe DrDeth had read The Sleepwalkers, since the book does not contain the arguments or evidence he attributes to it. Judging by some of the things he’s said in his last few posts in that thread, though, I think he is skimming it now.
Which also means he is—after years of accusing the French of lying about starting World War One—only just now discovering that Clark really doesn’t have that much to say about France. The line in the index for “France, preparations for war” lists three instances.
- The first is a single sentence where a trip to Sweden to ensure Swedish neutrality is “in preparation, one must infer, for an impending European war”
- The second, two pages later, portrays Poincaré, returning from this trip, as pleased to learn that France has taken “the steps which, in the event of need, would permit an immediate mobilization”
- The last describes France as “scrupulously avoiding any aggressive measures against Germany”
I guess it is a little amusing to be able to watch him realize what The Sleepwalkers is actually about play out in real time, but not enough to recommend everyone else read a 600-page book of German apologia if they are not already interested in the topic.
My contribution to this as a Pit thread, though, is: the habit on display now—saying something risible, baiting people into replying, waiting until he’s unambiguously called out, and then breezily declaring that having to explain himself is a distracting hijack he will waste no further time on—is a form of argumentation in such bad faith that it really feels indistinguishable from trolling.
I don’t disagree with that, though I’m not sure if by the definitions on this board that it’s not clear enough to qualify as “trolling” as usually defined here. But it does seem like trolling, or at least “being a jerk”.
I mean, shit, how hard is it to just say, “Guess I was wrong?” Everyone is wrong sometimes. I’m wrong often and generally admit it, and will often thank whoever is correcting me. Because this site is supposed to be about fighting ignorance. I hope that’s why we’re here. Not to just push agendas and viewpoints that sometimes contradict with proven facts.
For what it’s worth, I don’t think DD has an actual agenda or anything like that. I think he’s an unteachable idiot that genuinely believes sources will back him, at least at first. But when that almost inevitably does not prove to be the case, is too proud to back off and thinks/hopes tiring the other side out constitutes a ‘win’ of some sort.
Heaven knows I should have given up on him years ago when he claimed that Germany didn’t occupy France during WWI, because a couple of days march inside another country’s territory is not worth whining about.
Yeah, that “tiny toehold” just happened to include most of France’s iron reserves, a massive chunk of its coal mines, and key industrial centers responsible for energy and steel production, crippling the economy.
But no biggie.
DD, while undoubtedly a clueless dickhead, above all gets off on being a contrarian. The consensus, no matter how evidence-based, must always be wrong and he’s got the book to prove it, even when he hasn’t read it.
N/M all that.
I think he might be one of those “Disney Adults”.
And that I do not forgive.
This one seems really quite remarkable, though, in the way that rather than admitting that a cite doesn’t support his claim, he’s willing to admit that he doesn’t understand how to read books. It’s such a phenomenal own-goal, it’s hard to get one’s head around.
It was about 4% of France’s area - a proportion of France roughly equivalent to the area of New England and New York together relative to the lower-48 States - trivial!
For that matter, it is estimated that between 0.5%-0.75% of the world’s population was killed in Nazi concentration camps. That’s less than a percent even at the top end! That’s practically nobody! I’m sure he’d consider the Holocaust to be no big deal. Just a few unfortunate people.
Seeing as he is incapable of engaging in good faith on either subject, it kind of feels like DrD ought to have a topic ban on (a) history and (b) current events. And to be safe, probably also a topic ban on engaging in futurism.
But aside from commenting on past, present, and future events, he should be all clear to participate in discussions as normal.
I’ve been saying this for years… Well, strictly speaking I’ve phrased it as anything to do with history or the military, but good enough for government work.
You know who else used to work for the US government?
As noted within the first dozen or so posts in this thread, if there’s any single thing he should have a topic ban on, it’s anything to do with guns. Fortunately, aside from breaking news threads where political hijacks are forbidden anyway, we don’t have many of those any more as neither side is going to be convinced.
But as noted early in this thread, DrD’s tiresome assertion, made over and over again, is that comparing US gun violence with rates in Canada and Europe and other first-world countries is very unfair “cherry picking”. Instead, US gun violence should be compared with rates in Yemen and Honduras and the like. Since these countries contain brown people, failing to include them is also a form of bigotry!
The good doctor also has a brilliant explanation for why the US has so many mass shootings compared to other countries. It’s because the media reports them, thus glorifying them. Apparently other countries don’t have media, or if they do, reports of mass shootings are rigorously censored! 
This is a subject on which the guy is not only an idiot, but a tiresomely repetitive one.
That’s a bit broad, don’t you think? Under my much narrower and therefore generous (to DrD) scheme, he would be allowed to talk about guns… as long as they aren’t past, present, or hypothetical future guns.
So what, you’re fine with him ruining all the alternate reality / multiverse threads?
I’m sorry, is there a topic to which this statement DOESNT apply?
The problem with being a… I don’t even know what to call it, a dogmatic iconoclast? The problem is, if you start from the premise that “heterodoxy alone is proof,” there are no guardrails to keep you from being forced into a more and more absurd corner. You start with “Russia deserves most of the blame for WW1,” then you’re saying France lied about when they declared war, and next thing you know you’re accusing Serbia of assassinating Archduke Ferdinand and sarcastically mocking “poor innocent Belgium,” who I guess should’ve known it was a bad idea to have borders (???).
Yeah I don’t think it’s actionable or I would’ve reported it. To me where it crosses the line towards trolling, if not in a board rules sense, is that it feels like contrarianism specifically to bait people into correcting them. We all have stupid opinions. For instance, I am inexplicably fond of dumb Jude Law/Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. If there was a thread called “underrated 2000s sci-fi” or “hey, does anyone remember Giovanni Ribisi?” I might even bring it up.
What I would not do is lob that recommendation in a thread called, I dunno, “DC movies as good as the MCU,” hoping for someone to object that it isn’t a DC movie so I can spring the trivia that, actually, “the director admitted multiple times he made it as a Superman adaptation.” And then, 50 posts later after I link an interview with a quote from Kevin Conran like “I could take or leave superheroes, but I love pulp comic visuals,” insist my real point has always been that it was based on a comic book, which has now been conclusively proven, and oh by the way it’s time we all drop the hijack.
And even if I was that brazen, I like to think I really would not wait six months, show up in a different thread to say “False. This was shown to be Disney propaganda. Paramount released a fully computer generated DCEU movie in 2004 (Sky Captain’s World of Tomorrow),” and wait patiently for people to correct me again. Maybe I just don’t like Jude Law enuf.