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For one thing, there is Neville Chamberlain's fine record as a cabinet minister, and especially as Chancellor of the Exchequer (from 1931 to 1937), which cannot be extinguished solely by his failure to stop Hitler.

The recovery of the British economy in the mid-30s had a lot to do with Chamberlain's prudent management. For the critics to the right of him, Chamberlain cut income tax; for those to the left he restored unemployment benefit, and imposed a tax on the arms producers.

Better still, he found in the budget enough funds to promote the biggest house building programme in the country's history. If expenditure on rearmament was not as great as some would have liked, the money went to an equally deserving cause.

Secondly, the principle of appeasement, forever twisted around Neville Chamberlain's neck, had actually been the policy of the British government ever since the end of the First World War.

There were moral and political reasons for that, but practical ones too.

The consistent advice from the Chiefs of Staff to the Prime Minister throughout the 1930s was that Britain was as yet incapable of facing up to the military threat of either Germany, Italy or Japan, let alone all three at once.

It remained Chamberlain's considered objective that rearmament must not be at the expense of all other government expenditure.

Thirdly, as Ward shows, the British people were hardly consistent in their views of Hitler's Germany either.

As late as 1935 the Birmingham Labour Party, Communist Party and other groups were protesting loudly against rearmament.

Peace rallies in the Town Hall and Handsworth Park condemned the growth in arms manufacture as a wilful slide towards war, and a betrayal of the League of Nations and of collective security.

Only when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia and Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia did the radicals begin to change tack.

In the eyes of the Left, Neville Chamberlain had switched overnight from a warmonger to an appeaser.

The cry reached a crescendo with a 'Chamberlain Must Go' rally in the Town Hall, organised by Victor Gollancz's Left Wing Book Club.

The wider public changed its tune, too. In the wake of the Munich agreement, there was widespread rejoicing at a crisis averted. 50,000 fans at Villa Park sang 'For he's jolly good fellow', while the Lord Mayor launched a Thanksgiving Fund 'intended to be an expression of the city's pride in the unique achievement of one of its sons'.

When Neville visited the Austin factory in July 1938 he was mobbed by enthusiastic supporters. Ronald Cartland MP commented: 'He has a following in the country far bigger than those in Westminster think.'

As late as May 1939 Chamberlain's Unionists were winning a parliamentary by-election in Aston.

Only with Britain's disastrous expedition to defend Norway in the spring of 1940 did the House of Commons turn decisively against the Prime Minister.

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None of the powers in western Europe wanted war. They severely overestimated Adolf Hitler's military ability at the time, and while Britain and France had superior forces to the Germans they felt they had fallen behind, and both were undergoing massive military rearmament to catch up. Hitler, on the other hand, was in just the opposite position. He far exaggerated German power at the time and was desperately hoping for a war with the west which he thought he could easily win. He was pushed into holding the conference, however, by Benito Mussolini who was totally unprepared for a Europe-wide conflict, and was also concerned about the growth of German power. The German military leadership also knew the state of their armed forces and did all they could to avoid war.

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Hitler "would never have considered invading Poland" without synthetic fuel technology provided by General Motors. The relationship of Ford and GM to the Nazi regime goes back to the 1920s and 1930s, when the American car companies competed against each other for access to the lucrative German market. Hitler was an admirer of American mass production techniques and an avid reader of the antisemitic tracts penned by Henry Ford. "I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration," Hitler told a Detroit News reporter two years before becoming the German chancellor in 1933, explaining why he kept a life-size portrait of the American automaker next to his desk.

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Originally written by Backwards impaired.:

Despite appearances, am not high in that picture.

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Originally written by Zeviz:
This is probably among the biggest unpleasant revelations you could have about somebody.

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Originally written by Zeviz:
And just because you knew his character, doesn't mean you know anything about the person behind the mask. So you shouldn't scrutinize his character's actions for signs of anomaly - if he is a good role-player there aren't any. Instead of trying to twist your morality into knots emphasizing with killer instead of victims, just accept that you didn't really know this person and that his online persona was different from his real personality.

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Originally written by Zeviz:
Of course this applies only if your question is how to deal with the situation while retaining your sanity.

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Originally written by radix malorum est cupiditas:
By "work" I believe he means "result in anything less than TM standard pictures".

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Originally written by Ephesos:
Trying to have a serious discussion where the people who have experience with the issue don't want to talk, and where TM and Alec are lurking, just doesn't work.

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Originally written by The Worst Man Ever:

Germany was a freaking titan. Fighting the war differently would have been criminal, and disastrous.

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My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace in our time.

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Originally written by High Priest with the Yellow Mask:
Procrastinator, while "tl" is not helpful, you could do with shorter posts, slightly less labored analysis

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Originally written by High Priest with the Yellow Mask:
and just a bit less sanity. This is Spiderweb, not Polaris.

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Originally written by Strontium:

It is also true that Germany systematically went about defying the Allies, breaking the Treaty of Versailles and rearming, etc for several years and started a war without any real opposition.

There was opportunity to invade from France, in support of Poland, but the allies stood by and watched Poland fall. This too was a realistic opportunity to stop Hitler, in the early stages of a war yes, but surely would have prevented many millions of deaths.

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Originally written by The Worst Man Ever:

And I don't see the relevance of the .iq anecdotes. Although I understand your seemingly pathological desire to drag the American government through the mud at any given opportunity, the examples given don't seem to have any serious relevance to the question at hand.

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Originally written by The Sporangium in God's Eye:
most immigrant groups tend to increase in class generationally at an encouraging rate.

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Originally written by *i:
I read a study once

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Originally written by Strontium:

With respect to solar/wind energy, I also made the argument that solar/wind energy does not replace fossil fuels but infact exacerbates the need, by requiring backup power to be installed and by causing that backup power to be a more inneficient form of production. This innefficiency is caused in part because of intermittent operation, which is ineefficent itself, and compounded by the inefficient nature of production, causing the selection of cheaper power plants which produce power less efficiently in the first place. Ie., if instead of investing in solar and backup power, you invested in highly efficient fossil power alone you ultimately consume less fossil fuel.

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Originally written by Strontium:

The article actually stated 278,000 homes, about half your stated capacity

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Signed Tuesday, the 20-year power purchase agreement, which is subject to California Public Utilities Commission approval, calls for development of a 500-megawatt (MW) solar project 70 miles northeast of Los Angeles using innovative Stirling-engine/solar-dish technology. This is enough power to run approximately half a million homes.

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Originally written by *i:
* Waste disposal is more a political problem than a technical one. We have the technology to do it, it's getting past the political hurdles that makes things difficult.

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Originally written by YAP the government does not insure its risks or require the energy companies to do so. [/quote:
quote]Originally written by *i:In the US with nuclear, actually the government does. This is a major role of the NRC, to calculate these risks and ensure they are below a threshold -- before and during plant operation. In fact, if the risk of an accident goes above a certain threshold, the plant is shut down.

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Where I live, eating game or wild-grown mushrooms is still associated with a radiation exposure.

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Originally written by *i:
Yes, there is radiation everywhere naturally -- always has been and always will be. I could double my exposure if I go up and live in Denver or eat four bananas a week and yet there is no increase in adverse health effects. Heck, even if I increased it by 20 times, there would be no increase.

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Originally written by *i:
* We need baseload power in large quantities, period. Solar and wind, although very good and should be expanded where feasible, cannot do this with current technologies, at least not economically so. It comes down to a choice: coal, natural gas, or nuclear.

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Originally written by The Worst Man Ever:

It's a zero-sum game, and making the poor less poor is going to take the rich being made - or becoming, by attrition - less rich.

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Originally written by *i:
no Chernobyl like plants are built today. The design flaws with Chernobyl were well documented before the incident.

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Originally written by *i:

In order to make your point valid, you need to link it to modern reactors that would be built today.

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Originally written by *i:

Anything with nuclear in it is typically held to a much higher standard than things equally far more deadly: car crashes, smoking,

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Originally written by *i:
chemical plants, fossil fuel emissions, etc.

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Originally written by *i:
It's just that radiation is something we are not as familiar with. Also, the human perception of risk is more dramatic event based than on accurred risk over time.

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Originally written by *i:
I find it ironic that an industrial accident in India killed tens of thousands of people and devastated the area, yet no one remembers or really knows about it despite the fact that many more people died than in Chernobyl

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Originally written by *i:
and that the chance of a repeat incident is far higher.

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Originally written by *i:
Your point about ethics makes no sense. You point to a highly unethical incident to something totally unrelated and somehow try to say it is inherent in nuclear reactors. This is probably one of the most non-sequitor arguments I've seen in a while. Care to establish that link better?

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Originally written by The Worst Man Ever:

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Originally written by Kelandon:

Um, I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to order the execution of an entire race of people.

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Surely you've heard of the Milgram Experiment.

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Originally written by Thuryl:

demonstration of the problems facing authors when trying to create believable characters. The point I was trying to make was that any short description of a character is likely to seem shallow and two-dimensional, because of the inadequacy of a few sentences to encapsulate an entire person.

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