The Oil Drum

Correct me if I'm wrong. I wouldn't want to misrepresent your views. That was you, right? Not some other fleam?

Funny thing was, I was going to write a cute little, humorous piece in the attempt to put this behind us. I read your initial response to my "Oil" post just previous to having to go out. Didn't have a chance to respond. Unfortunately, oldhippie preempted this attempt.

Take the fig-leaf, dude. (Yeah, I'm trying to teach a lesson in diplomacy - unless you'd rather get steamrolled, of course).

Or does it and I am just too dumb to see it?

I was speaking with another PO person, who feels we may get a "cushion" of another 1mbpd of net new production, which sounds plausible to me. But this is only about 1.2% of daily production, and a fraction of one standard deviation. We have too much noise, and not enough signal.

Actually the property and assets of the Jews helped to fund the Nazi War machine, furthermore the Jews themselves were a resource in the form of slave labor.  Lastly, the hatred he stirred against the Jews provided another resource in the form of willing manpower to further his aims in the political and military fronts.

The elimination of the Jews had quite a bit to do with resources.

The Jewish population of pre-WWII Germany was something on the order of 1%. I.E. it would have been impossible to run the Nazi war machine on the seized assets and slave labor of the Jews.

You can argue Hitler's Social-Darwinist outlook drove his desire to conquer Eastern Europe, but his pathological persecution of the Jews was driven by little more than ideological hate.

As for the Yugoslavian problem, the simple premise there was one ethnic group didn't want another ethnic group remaining on a certain piece of land.  The people involved ultimately might not have been aware it was about "resources" but I can guarantee you, that there were leaders promising land grants, and riches in the event of a win.

Your explanation is little more than derivative Marxist interpretation of history -- materialist explanation for a situation where they don't apply. Instead of 'class conflict' you invoke 'resource competition' as the primary explanation. Please explain how 'scarce resources' pushed Yugoslavia into civil war in the 1990s when scarce resources hadn't resulted in civil war earlier.  

We are territorial creatures, and we have repeatedly shown the willingness to excercise ruthlessness if not outright violence to maintain or gain territory.  And territory is not always specifically land.  Given our higher thought processes we perceive many things to be "territory".

So?

For instance if an idiot wandered on these forums and cursed up a storm and was being generally anti-social, the natural reaction would be to kick him from this virtual space in an effort to guard this online "territory".  Or at least I would assume that would be the course of action.

Its all about resources or at the very least tied to resources in way or another.

That makes no sense.

What's chilling about WWII is the original resource wars were over simple soil. Germany didn't have enough soil to grow its wheat, potatoes, etc on to feed her people. Germany was a food importer. Germany wanted the rich lands to the east, but the Soviets wanted them too.

There are a LOT of other factors - crippling reparations being paid by Germany, something like the US's debt, Depression, and literal riots in the streets - there were very aggressive Communist groups rioting, backed by the Soviets, and trying to take over Germany. They almost did. Germans were being killed in the streets, old folks were starving every winter, the Communist groups were bloodthirsty and to the average German the Nazis looked pretty good. You or I would make the same decision under the same circumstances.