Originally posted by JustAGame:
On the contrary. I told my opinion and he disagreed. I argued my point further and he argued his as well. There was no issue until he tried to "win" the discussion by dissecting my posts and rewording my points to strengthen his own and finalizing his post with an empirical retort that was far from being correct to my factual statement that noone really knows what could have been. My response to his "I Know" was that he isn't omnipotent, then I find such a claim to be amusing. No sir. It was my opinion that was being attacked. He is far from being a victim.
You still don't get it do you? This had nothing to do with "winning" or "losing" this argument. There's no prize for "winning" around here and no penalty for "losing", and if you use excessive sarcasm and insults to "win" arguments here, you'll just end up debating with yourself as no one will speak with you. The "omnipotence" remark became the primary issue because it *was* an attack/insult, and totally unrelated to what was being argued. It was not a reasoned response for a debate, even a heated debate.
In retrospect, my arguements would have been served by pointing out the inaccuracy of his "I know" in a more candid than sarcastic manner.
Yes, this is what you should have done. I admit in retrospect that my "I know" response could be interpreted as being a little sarcastic. I don't believe it to have been a serious mistake and it wasn't intentional, but I don't expect you to believe that anyway. Your actual response went beyond sarcasm however, never mind it having nothing to do with the argument, and your crack about Russians not being able to get beyond their original communist teachings of history didn't help any.
I have also learned that "history" is a living entity and what we "know" now is not everything and always accurate. In short, my point of view is not fixed and I try not to limit it to what is popular at the moment.
It may shock you to know that I agree. There is a lot I don't know, I don't claim to be knowledgable of all things, and the truth is often very hard to find and sometimes downright impossible. I don't know the details of every controversial military order given by Hitler during the war. If you had looked carefully you would have noticed I was concentrating on Hitler's "Southern Strategy" for '41, since that was mentioned as being a good idea. I was not making a sweeping assertion that every one of the acts Hitler made were bad military decisions. I don't know enough to carry on a detailed argument on that, and I'm quite willing to accept the likelyhood of some of what I've learned about Hitler's military competency could be wrong, although I think most of us can at least agree that by '44 Hitler was not totally in touch with reality, rendering whatever military skill he had useless. The question is how much of what I've learned is wrong? Are *all* the German officers who have gone on record discounting Hitler's talent lying?
What I do believe, and what I was arguing about, was that the "Southern Strategy" was clearly a mistake given historical hindsight. To repeat my basic argument:
Because of Hitler's shifting forces around, Moscow did not fall before the winter set in, and Hitler stuck to this Southern Strategy on a much more massive scale in '42, with the results being exactly what I believe would have happened in the Soviet counterattack in the winter of '41. Too much frontage to hold and not enough men, a lesser advance in the north do to units assigned up there being sent south, giving the Soviets more breathing room around Moscow allowing *them* to shift forces south for their winter offensive, and leaving portions of a now lengthy front line very weakly held, making a Soviet winter counterattack in '41 even more effective than they historically were.
If you disagree with that, by all means lets continue our argument, but lets do so without dragging my highly overrated omnipotence back into the debate.
