What’s great about this, and Stephen Fry is brilliant, is not that he’s absolving Musk, or that he’s criticizing Tesla, but that it is an argument likely leading to Elon Musk protesting,

‘No, my cars are good enough that I can be a Nazi!’

  • droplet6585@lemmy.ml
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    4 hours ago

    Hur hur. I’d wish people would stop assigning hyper-competence to Nazis. They never were. Hitler was a drug addict and the trains didn’t run on time.

    • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world
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      23 minutes ago

      Hitler was a drug addict and the trains didn’t run on time.

      German trains still don’t run on time. Can’t blame that one on the Nazis, that’s just a German thing.

    • Fuckfuckmyfuckingass@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      Exactly this. My grandmother lived under the Nazis and she said they were fucking idiots. Exactly the same type of incompetent blowhards. The whole hyper scientific ubermensch BS in the cultural zeitgeist is so frustrating. I blame all the WWII video games and movies that played up the myth to have more interesting villains than the sleazy shit stains that they actually were.

    • Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      3 hours ago

      A small country took on the ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD (TWICE) and very nearly won. The second time with a lunatic at the helm.

      What does it take to impress you? To what would you assign their disturbing success?

      • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        2 hours ago

        At no point were the Nazis close to winning. After the Soviets won the battle of Stalingrad in 1943 the Nazis were on full retreat until Berlin got captured.

        Even leading up to up 1943, Germany had its oil nearly cut off. They became dependent on Romania for their supply. This may sound like a cartoon, but Nazis were dragging their tanks to the frontline using horses.

        Germany simply did not have the industrial or logistic capacity to win WW2 at any point. The Nazis had already ransacked the German economy through privatization reforms and selling off anything that wasn’t nailed down. Invading Poland incurred a bunch of sanctions and embargos that resulted in Germany’s only primary oil trade coming from uhhh…the Soviet Union, so the Nazis had the brilliant idea of declaring war on their main source of gasoline.

      • TankieTanuki [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        2 hours ago

        To what would you assign their disturbing success?

        Material support from the Western ruling class who wanted Hitler to destroy communism for them.

        • Bloobish [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          2 hours ago

          This, the biggest mistake Germany made was interfering with dominant western European capital (i.e. the US, UK, and France). If they had just devoured the eastern European countries and fought Russia then capital would not have batted an eye.

      • droplet6585@lemmy.ml
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        3 hours ago

        Small country? They were a highly industrialized, highly educated and still quite materially wealthy colonial power going into the wars. They didn’t need to be competent. Enough people went along with them and there was plenty of residual wealth to burn on the war machine.

        You don’t need to be an architect to burn down a building.

      • Bloobish [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        2 hours ago

        What does it take to impress you? To what would you assign their disturbing success?

        Meth chocolate, fascism, and taking on armies using WWI tech and tactics

          • Bloobish [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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            1 hour ago

            Yup, biggest thing is that their attack, though expected by quite a few powers, came out of left field and add in the rushing forward on armies still using cavalry units and the early massive land grab via Germany makes sense