Matter over Mind - Wild over Will , decided WWII

Germany : lost a war it should have won through inefficiency or lost a war it couldn't have won at 110% efficiency ?

The majority of old school (modernist) authors on WWII (men mostly 70 years or older) will go to their graves unbending from a belief that human factors, not material factors , decided WWII.

Because basically they are still modernists at heart and that is what modernists do - or did .
The modernists thought that modern technology had solved most 'natural' issues and so they saw the material world as a largely inert backdrop to WWII's ongoing human drama over unresolved human issues.

Younger writers - post-modernists in spirit - once again appreciate that there distinct limits to human abilities and that natural cum material reality is not something to be underestimated.

So we are more open to evidence that the German Empire used what scant resources it had as least as good as the American, British and Russian Empires used their far more abundant ones.

But the German resource base (conquered lands and peoples and all) was still far too weak to beat off all three of its major opponents at the same time.

It once again lost a long slogging match in a war of attrition.

It had tried and won a war of blitzkrieg on nine of the eleven european countries it attacked, but then tried and failed a war of attrition on the tenth, the UK.

As a result of that failure in September 1940, Germany had to divide its forces between the various UK fronts and the Russia front when it tried to brazen out a blitzkrieg war upon Russia in June 1941 -thus ensuring its ultimate defeat.

It simply could not front-load its Russian effort strong enough to sustain an assault on Moscow against what should Germans should have expected as resistance from Nature and Russian, given their nine earlier risk-filled blitzkrieg experiences.

Too many skilled men and too much good war material had already been lost on various other war fronts since 1938 and the replacements were simply coming in too small and too slow.

But even if Germany had conquered the British Isles and European Russia - what then ?

The Nazis were not racists - defenders of all the White Race or even defenders of just Western Europe.

Rather they were extreme nationalists who couldn't much abide even their own Italian and Hungarian allies or their closest Aryan cum Nordic cousins like the Dutch and the Norwegians - let alone any true 'outsiders'.

They quickly offended all their potential allies - mostly by being forced to be greedy with others' human and material resources, because their own country was too small in population or natural resources to sustain its war empire.

And this was a problem that only got bigger, not smaller, with each new "success" .

Without real heartfelt allies, Germany couldn't have defended an empire the size of the USA or the USSR against the rest of the world for long , not on its own national manpower base.

And your own national manpower base is truly a natural  limit - because even an all-out human effort can only increase it in terms of many decades not a few years.

Offending all your potential allies was a human failing of Germany - having too few people and natural resources of its own was a natural failing of Germany : together they doomed its war efforts ....

97% consensus of climate scientists OPPOSED good evidence of climate change in 1892,1902,1922,1942 etc

If today's climate scientists are united in accepting evidence of climate change it is NOT because the evidence has changed that way.

It is because the scientists themselves have changed - no longer living in (and promoting) High Modernity with its rarified/reified views of the unlimited potential of Man to quickly solve any little problem He himself might create.

Now they live in post-hegemonic times and while most of the population still lives off the values of High Modernity, most scientists in the non-applied physical sciences now reflect the values of low postmodernity and global commensality, with their much more cautious assessment of what Humanity can do to reverse the problems it itself creates.

One can confidently claim that if the case for human climate change via excess carbon pollution of the atmosphere had been put forth forcefully,repeatedly and publicly by a determined but small body of climate scientists during the heyday of High Modernity, it would have been shot down with the same sort of mechanisms that today's modernist , denier, scientists are still using.

Inadequate sets of data, uncertainty of cause versus effect, contaminated data sets - on and on.

If worrying about being able to reverse carbon pollution in time is a pecularily postmodernist concern - and I hold that it is - then we can see how other postmodernist style concerns and beliefs were in fact harshly dealt with, back  in the salad days of High Modernity.

The Missoula Floods, Tectonic Plates, bacteria in extreme environments like deep down oil wells, bacterial horizontal gene transfer /  biofilms /  molecular mimicry / quorum sensing. Bacterial Endosymbiosis leading to the development of all multi-celled life including humans.

All these were introduced by good scientists, using good evidence, to the general scientific world in the 1920s and shot down and often the scientist involved were hounded out of any chance of future advancement.

Later on, in the post-modern era and using the same evidence as was available in the 1920s, their theories were accepted into the general consensus ---- in fact forming the very foundation of it !

All had suffered scientific death earlier, because they crossed a forbidden line in the modernist sand : Modernity's core axiom : that the small building blocks of Reality were simple and stable at the bottom and got ever more complex and ever more unstable at they got bigger.

If I can switch from biology to physics, I need only add that holding that view today would get you thrown out of all grad seminars in any physics department world wide, thanks to the overwhelming experimental support for all the various quantum theories.

And need I add that the quantum theories were at best half-accepted in the 1920s on onward (half accepted until that white knight, Einstein, would return surely proving them wrong).

In any case, they were silently ignored in daily physics work, all through the apogee of High Modernity Science.

Today the modernists are no longer hegemonic dictators but mere 'deniers' and have been pushed into the vast, but academically less powerful worlds of applied and popular science.....