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by nprateem 801 days ago
That's like investors trying to predict a crash. You can only ever make sense of things retrospectively.
1 comments
hiddencost 801 days ago
First land war in Europe since WW2, 500K casualties, idk what you want in terms of empiricism here, but, uh ...
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Izkata 801 days ago
Don't forget how alliances/treaties/etc kept pulling more countries in, turning a local conflict into WWI. I think that's the bigger parallel.
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nprateem 801 days ago
What? If they could have predicted the severity of WWII, Chamberlain and the rest wouldn't have tried to appease Hitler or delay.

Predicting the severity of events in advance is difficult. I wouldn't listen to what historians predict today. Every catastrophe is different, but despite this people like to pretend (after the fact) all the signs were there and were obvious.

For all we know Ukraine will stay confined and China will just keep being belligerent but take no action.

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