Read about the Danzig-Troyl, Tuchel & Darmstadt POW Labour Camps.
POW Camps that were virtually death sentences to any sentenced there.
What's the most Cringeworthy Alternate History you've ever read?
- Thread starter Silent Runner
- Start date
- Post-1900
POW Camps that were virtually death sentences to any sentenced there.
- Location
- USS Enterprise CV-6
I mean from what I've read most of the deaths were due to illness which was a side effect of Germany having to build the camps quite rapidly when it became clear the war would be longer then expected. Also those camps weren't just a German thing, the British pretty much gave the Nazi's(and Imperial Germany) the idea for Concentration camps during the Boer War as an example.
What you read was wrong. Some of the aforementioned labour camps were made solely for the purpose of labour exploitation during the time of war from 1915 onwards. David Bilton's book is a great read on the topic.
And? No one can deny the crimes of the British Empire during their imperialism and anyone who does is a fool and revisionist. At the same time, this discussion is about the whitewashing of the Kaissereich. Neither do the British & Kaissereich get a free pass.
People have run the math on the main geoengineering proposals. Some are pure vapourware - things good but are incompatible with the laws of physics. Some would work, but building the infrastructure that they'd need would require increased emissions that would worsen things by more than they'd help. Some would work, but would be very slow, and thus fall under "how to soften the blow and recover from climate change" more than "how to stop climate change". Some can cool local areas at the cost of warming others.
So for example, the models show that if China creates more clouds that cool their part of Asia, it comes at the cost of India warming so much that it becomes uninhabitable by humans.
So far as I know, and I've delved into the technical literature on this fairly deeply, there is no form of geoengineering that actually works. If you know of geoengineering methods that would work, I would love to hear about them.
fasquardon
- Pronouns
- They/Them
To be fair, that third category is actually pretty valuable, IMO.
Absolutely. Action along the lines of "plant more trees" and "replace industrial agriculture with food-optimized ecosystems" kind are some of the most useful pro-active things we can do. But unfortunately "green the Sahara to stop climate change" doesn't work. It would take centuries to even turn the Sahara into a savanna and thousands of years to turn it into a tropical rainforest (and doing so may kill the Amazon rainforest).
So people sometimes invoke that stuff when discussing geoengineering and they would kinda work... But they wouldn't work on a short enough timescale to STOP climate change. So they are less geoengineering and more geocultivating.
fasquardon
Hakazin
Serpent Admirer
- Pronouns
- She/Her
And let's not forget the fact that any work to mitigate the effects of climate change will likely be taken as license to ignore needed action to attack the causes thereof.
Because this is a time in world history when three things that have never before occurred simultaneously are happening - strong Monarchal systems of government, a lowered chance of dying of dysentery, and Zeppelins.
bookwyrm
Doom of Public Libraries
- Location
- Wichita, Kansas
Someone should do a timeline where Hindenburg has a heart attack or something and that Zeppelin guy runs for President of Weimar Germany in 1932. Hugo Eckener's celebrity status as globe-trotting airship captain, his PR savvy keeping Zeppelins in the national consciousness as modernizing technophilia instead of chronic deathtrap disasters, and his "independent outsider" vague centrism vs Hitler, the KDP candidate of Ernst Thalmann, and like the Stahlhelm diet Nazi candidate Theodor Duesterberg getting a second wind due to Kurt von Schleicher and others of Hinderburg's old Kamarilla playing with fire and trying to astroturf Duesterberg as their tool to control the right and maintain power.
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the atom
Anarcho-Kemalist Thought Leader
- Location
- Comfortably numb
Yeah I think it's the same impulse behind Romanov what-ifs as well.
Since when does aerosol dispersal not work? I thought the science has been settled behind that for awhile?
Why would anyone do that instead of building renewable powered indoor farming complexes? That sounds like a good way to rapidly cut the human population in half.
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Hakazin
Serpent Admirer
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- She/Her
You say that like building indoor farming complexes somehow isn't a fundamental part of replacing the current unsustainable system of industrialized agriculture. Besides, we're currently producing enough food to comfortably feed a couple billion more people than currently exist on the planet. We're hardly going to be in danger of a total Malthusian collapse by adopting less ecologically-ruinous methods of food production.
chem
Self-Requested Ban
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Settled in that injecting SO2 aerosols or calcium carbonate into the stratosphere will probably cool the climate and halt climate change (as long as it goes on), but there are still many unknowns when it comes to the other potential effects of stratospheric aerosol injection. All scientists really have to base their models off of are volcanic eruptions, so what we know about the potentially detrimental effects (i.e. reducing the monsoon season, sudden temperature increase due to abrupt termination of injection) is limited.
Not to mention the fact that aerosol injections will do nothing to solve the other big climate problem, ocean acidification.
Edit: Of course, you can solve the latter issue by going all in on geoengineering and pouring a bunch of iron in the ocean to encourage algal blooms... but that may not even work and/or end up making massive hypoxic dead zones.
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- Location
- Busan Metropolitan City, Republic of Korea
Reasonably, both should be done together. Modern agriculture is marvelous, but it's also highly destructive and resource-hungry, so replacing the current methods with better ones is a must.
Semi-disagree here from an agriculture nerd. Agricultural overproduction is vital for food security, especially now that climate change is beginning to threaten widespread harvest failure. Having two billion people worth of surplus means that, assuming a nonexistent ideal scenario where distribution is perfectly efficient, it'd take an unprecedented famine to actually threaten human life. Distribution isn't efficient though, and so the actual margin of safety is much lower, because marketized agriculture is a mistake. While we could probably skate by with less of a surplus, it'd take a worldwide grain dole for it to be anything like secure.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Yeah.
If the continent-wide harvest you were counting on to feed half a billion people abruptly fails because of a global warming induced chain of super-storms... Well, you need there to already be enough food stored or growing somewhere on Earth to feed that half-billion people. You can't suddenly start growing it at the last minute.
And that food would be "wasted agricultural surplus" in the alternate timeline where the super-storms didn't happen.
If the continent-wide harvest you were counting on to feed half a billion people abruptly fails because of a global warming induced chain of super-storms... Well, you need there to already be enough food stored or growing somewhere on Earth to feed that half-billion people. You can't suddenly start growing it at the last minute.
And that food would be "wasted agricultural surplus" in the alternate timeline where the super-storms didn't happen.
DracoDracul
Bigender Communist
- Location
- Austin
- Pronouns
- She/They
I mean wouldn't the logical alternative be turning that surplus into shelf stable items that can be used in such of an emergency, and then operating with less of a surplus? Because there is a cost to over production, it exhausts the soil meaning that your producing for a famine that isn't happening while causing further famines down the line.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
You can do that if you have global centralized economic planning for food production. Because you very much need this supply chain to be global, because you need to make people sock away extremely shelf-stable food items in giant repositories that will not be used for years, then transport vast amounts of them in a hurry.
To make this work, I'm pretty sure you need a world government. Simply because you need someone who can issue orders about what will be done with crop surpluses anywhere in the world, not just in the specific agricultural zones they control which will otherwise quite sensibly concentrate on building up (redundant) stockpiles to feed themselves.
If your plan involves "first, create a world government," then it's doubtful whether your plan can be fulfilled within our lifetimes.
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As well, the last few years have shown that capitalism's drive for the smallest surplus to yield maximum profits has been a complete disaster, from GPUs to Vegetables to Shipping Containers, which applies to running with minimal excess in general.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
To be fair, the idea "let's run a thinner agricultural surplus but stockpile it as efficiently as possible" is very unlike the ideas behind just-in-time delivery. It's much better. It could even work!
...But, again, I'm pretty sure that to make it work, you have the prerequisite step of "first, establish a humane world government with centralized economic planning control over global food supplies."
Alert: let us change the climate of this conversation
- Location
- Australia
let us change the climate of this conversation
A friendly reminder that while climate change is an incredibly serious issue whose ramifications should be discussed—as should potential solutions, whether past, present, or future—the Cringeworthy Alternate History thread is not the thread to discuss them in.
Thank you.
A friendly reminder that while climate change is an incredibly serious issue whose ramifications should be discussed—as should potential solutions, whether past, present, or future—the Cringeworthy Alternate History thread is not the thread to discuss them in.
Thank you.
Terra Allias
World's only Magical Girl Spec Ops Asuka fan
- Location
- Cheverly
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I oughta report you for that pun
- Location
- United Kingdom
- Pronouns
- She/Her
"The USSR's collapse was bad because it caused the unnecessary deaths of several million people in the collapse of a continent spanning state, encouraged and stoked by the vulture policies of their ideological nemeses for profit"
and
"Extremely Poor Post-Colonial Country Has Problems, therefore Racismland was fine and good"
arent remotely the same position. why are you conflating them. what are you trying to say here?
and
"Extremely Poor Post-Colonial Country Has Problems, therefore Racismland was fine and good"
arent remotely the same position. why are you conflating them. what are you trying to say here?
Anchises
Leader of the Coconut Tree Fremen
- Location
- Germany
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'm sorry but this has to be one of the worst "both sides" arguments I have seen.
The discussion of the USSR usually revolves around centrist and right-wing whitewashing of the Tsar and Kerensky. People pretend that the reactionary Tsarist government or Kerensky would have been wholesome big chungus if the dastardly Bolsheviks just hadn't caused a Revolution. When a quick look at reality reveals how utterly fucked the material conditions in Russia where when the Bolsheviks took over. Like the Tsarist regime was regularly having gamer moments and just left millions to die in crushing poverty because of corruption, neglect and incompetence. No one except for five people on Reddit are whitewashing Stalin or the other crimes the Soviets did but like the massive Cold War victory propaganda in play when discussing Soviet history is something that has to be addressed. People celebrated as heroes committed terrible atrocities in the same time period as Soviet officials but are uncritically celebrated. Pointing that out isn't whitewashing. People are just a little tired of all the implicit Imperialism - Bengal famine - Segregation - Vietnam War - Reagan gamer moments - etc. apologia that painting the USSR as the Empire of Evil includes. Nobody serious is saying Stalin was a swell guy and the Cheka was based.
Rhodesiaboos on the other hand are flat out saying yeah the racist state was right.
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- They/Them
To be fair, Sadsack is talking about the end of the USSR, rather than the start of it.
There is a degree of difference between people who speculate about how the USSR could have gone better at the start/avoided many of its mistakes, and people who are talking about whether the historical 1980s USSR could survive or not.
...except, of course, Shock Doctrine was mass-murderous and basically every bad thing about the USSR was doubled or tripled in the aftermath of the collapse, so.
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