Weird. Random. Interesting.

[Maedhros]

Haven't watched yet, but I'm guessing Subutai is in it? Can't really think of anyone who did more than him in terms of conquest. To be fair you could include other mongol generals as well like Jebe and Muquali.

 

Edit: Guess not. Pretty strange considering he conquered 32 nations, and won 65 battles.

Edited March 6, 2019 by Thingolfin

[Amentep]

Regarding Subutai (and Genghis, but probably applicable to a others) this was posted to the website where the data was revealed https://towardsdatascience.com/napoleon-was-the-best-general-ever-and-the-math-proves-it-86efed303eeb:
 

A number of people have accurately pointed out missing battles/generals in the data, particularly concerning the Mongols, including Genghis Khan and Subutai. This is a major problem, and stems from my reliance on Wikipedia’s lists of battles. This is something I should have caught sooner, and I plan on updating the dataset to include a larger number of battles. However, handling this data requires a great deal of manual data entry/cleaning, and it will take me considerable time before I can add a major update to the dataset.

 
The visualization can be found on that page as well, but I think it is a bit difficult to work through.  Ithink it's pretty clear it has a lot of data on specific wars/battles, but misses a good bit as well.  I didn't see any of the Sikh leaders, like Guru Hargobind, from the Muhgal wars, nor do I see Sima Yi from the late Three Kingdoms period.  But as I said the visualization makes it a bit of a challenge to see who is there, so I could have overlooked them.

 

[Gfted1]

Las Vegas convention authority wants The Boring Company to build 2-mile loop.

 

Kinda cool. No doubt local residents, and somehow the 9th circuit court, will kill the entire project to protect the Southern Nevada Sand Grub.

[Amentep]

You really dig The Boring Company don't you?

[Gfted1]

*badumtish*

[Zoraptor]

Regarding Subutai (and Genghis, but probably applicable to a others) this was posted to the website where the data was revealed https://towardsdatascience.com/napoleon-was-the-best-general-ever-and-the-math-proves-it-86efed303eeb:

 

 

Wait what? Napoleon came first and he gave Napoleon a positive mark for Borodino, an utterly unnecessary bloodbath largely so due to Napoleon's moronic bash the middle tactics and refusal to commit reserves?

 

Have no fear you will be spared a full scale rant about Napoleon's many and varied shortcomings due to the fact I have to do real world stuff, but...

 

bet he gave Napoleon high marks for Jena-Auerstadt as well when Nappy fought a crappy little army he massively outnumbered and it was Davout who bet the main force- and Davout was hugely outnumbered- and Waterloo where Wellington had a green, scratch army- not Peninsular veterans- with a lot of potentially unreliable Dutch who'd been fighting alongside the french up until a year or so earlier. Napoleon got an entire army needlessly slaughtered near to a man twice in Egypt and Russia, never learnt from mistakes and repeated the same tactical mistakes multiple times across multiple battles. If Rommel gets marked down effectively for being a strategic doofus (which let's be frank he was) and losing when he had bad supplies, too few men and little support Napoleon should be marked down for his myriad strategic blunders. Guess I should just be glad it wasn't Fredrich der Moron ranked first, saved as he was by Elizveta dying at an opportune time and that idiot prussophile Petr succeeding.

 

Best generals were Subotai, Khalid ibn Walid, Alexander (and pals, since he wasn't quite the same without Parmenion), and John Churchill. Early Napoleon up to Austerlitz, great, and I'll even let him off for Egypt if it were a one off; later Napoleon was herp derp and barely above average without all the lionising and historical stat padding from fanboys and Nappy himself.

[ShadySands]

[Gromnir]

I thought this was pretty interesting. A ranking of the greatest Generals in history using a sabermetric style scoring system:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18tLrSw-w1s

 

Hard to fault their thinking on most of them. I thought Julius Caesar was over rated since the in the majority of his victories he was outnumbered but commanded a technologically more advanced , better equipped, and more disciplined force. Plus the Gauls were no really united until it was too late to matter. I also thought Hannibal is a little underrated. It's hard to imagine a commander ho did more with less.

 

am suspecting there is some funny math at work.  am not thinking any military guy ever described grant as a particular brilliant general.  however, unlike previous union commanders, grant were willing to sacrifice personnel and material seeming regardless o' costs.  lee, though not in our mind the best o' the confederacy commanders, were hampered by the reality o' finite resources.  every dead soldier and lost piece o' artillery were a far more serious problem for the confederacy. so compare a longstreet to a grant or sherman based on the video's maths may be missing vital qualities, which would explain a few notable discrepancies. 

 

will also observe how the hannibal quote included in the video regarding history's greatest commanders were selective.  pyrrhus were in hannibal's top three military commanders.

 

oh, and wiki as a resource? c'mon man.

 

regardless, is a fun list to discuss, as many such lists is. 

 

HA! Good Fun!

[LittleArmadillo0]

A man find himself running for city council after releasing a string of surreal videos

 

[ShadySands]

Homeless veteran, woman behind GoFundMe scandal plead guilty in federal court

 

Somewhat amused by the fact that they got caught because of greed

[Zoraptor]

am suspecting there is some funny math at work. 

 

 

There isn't funny maths in the manipulation sense, but it isn't measuring the best commanders. They are measuring the best resourced battlefield commanders who weren't incompetent, not the best commanders full stop; and a competent and well resourced battlefield commander describes Grant in particular perfectly. It also excludes brilliant strategic commanders like Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck who fought very few actual battles and overvalues strategic idiots like Napoleon.

 

End of the day a raw statistical analysis results in Sir Harry Rawson being history's greatest commander- winning a war in less than an hour and with [divide by zero error] times more enemy casualties than his own. That it was the British fricking Empire vs Zanzibar is irrelevant, statistically.

[Guard Dog]

@Gromnir Lee was actually a pretty decent tactician considering logistics and large unit strategy. As you and I have discussed in the past he was not the man you'd want to win a battle unless he was in a defensive posture. Grant enjoyed a superior tactical position through most of the war. In the west he was fortunate to be matched against inferior commanders and in the east he was fortunate to me matched against a Confederate army whose strength was mostly spent. This list overrated him by a bit. That said he was still a decent general. Certainly in the top 20 in that he was prudent, careful, and mindful of the cost of any victory. 

 

EDIT: IMO the best Confederate commander was Longstreet. Primarily for the reasons Grant was a good General. He was prudent, tactically sound, and mindful of cost. But he was much more content to win a war of attrition and Lee was very determined to force a short conclusion. 

Edited March 6, 2019 by Guard Dog

[smjjames]

Plus, it's applying a method to something which can't easily be boiled down to a batting average. It seems to put emphasis on battles fought/led, which is why Alexander the Great is so down low and Napoleon so high up, rather than tactical or strategic brilliance.

[Hurlshort]

 

EDIT: IMO the best Confederate commander was Longstreet. Primarily for the reasons Grant was a good General. He was prudent, tactically sound, and mindful of cost. But he was much more content to win a war of attrition and Lee was very determined to force a short conclusion. 

 

But bro!

 

 

 

Did my 6th grade Social Studies report on Stonewall, so I'm biased.

Edited March 7, 2019 by Hurlshot

[Guard Dog]

I heard something this week about sabermetrics. Sports agent Scott Boras said it. Sabermetrics is the ruler judging the quality of the cloth. It equates 10 inches of silk and 10 inches of canvas because both are 10 inches. But silk is more valuable than canvas. I though that was pretty insightful. 

[Guard Dog]

 

 

EDIT: IMO the best Confederate commander was Longstreet. Primarily for the reasons Grant was a good General. He was prudent, tactically sound, and mindful of cost. But he was much more content to win a war of attrition and Lee was very determined to force a short conclusion. 

 

But bro!

 

 

 

Did my 6th grade Social Studies report on Stonewall, so I'm biased.

 

We should probably we grateful Ewell was in command of Jackson's Corps on 7/1/1863 and not Jackson himself. He likely would have pressed and taken Culps Hill on the first day. A Confederate battery there prevents Meade from consolidating on the high ground and Gettysburg turns out differently. 

[Zoraptor]

Plus, it's applying a method to something which can't easily be boiled down to a batting average. It seems to put emphasis on battles fought/led, which is why Alexander the Great is so down low and Napoleon so high up, rather than tactical or strategic brilliance.

 

Yeah, the fundamental problem is that there is no wider context to the battles used for rankings. Win one battle comprehensively against massive odds and you don't count, win lots of battles that you should win and you rate well. A lot of the later battles in the USCW Lee could not realistically win and Grant could not realistically lose due to the disproportionate resources. Same is true to a lesser extent for Zhukov- who was at times profligate with his men's lives in battles he could not realistically lose- and is true in reverse for some Germans like Rommel and Manstein; who were also hamstrung by having to follow Hitler's idiotic orders.

 

There's also the problem that both Napoleon and Caesar were extreme self publicists, and especially for Caesar that bleeds over into the wikipedia sources.

 

And after all's said and done, if you do a statistical analysis of battles fought with no context then the conclusion is that the US comprehensively won the Vietnam War...

[Gorth]

What I get from the article so far is, Napoleon was the best baseball player

 

Edit: On a serious note, a good general for me is one that given the context and circumstances, can achieve the stated goals at the least cost to his own side. Some do it by out thinking their opponents on the day, some do it through long term planning, some do it through sheer recklessness and some through sheer luck. I know, no such thing as luck in war, but some make their own luck by stacking odds in their favour

[Guard Dog]

So get this one. A town in Germany raided a family's home to seize items to cover unpaid taxes.  One of the things the helped themselves to was the family dog: https://www.npr.org/2019/02/28/698900379/in-germany-family-pug-seized-and-sold-on-ebay-to-cover-unpaid-debts

 

I have always said taxation is theft. In this case it's really true. While that would not happen here in the US if it did... trouble. You can lien my house, garnish my pay and take away my driver's license. But if you think you're going to take my dog you better think again! You better be packing more than a court order and be willing to die for your job!

[Hurlshort]

Considering the pet deposit and monthly rent I have to pay on the family dog, I'm pretty sure he's more of a liability than an asset. 

[Gfted1]

Theres a "dog tax" in Germany? Kooky.

 

Are all species of pet taxed? Is it different per species? Ffs, a fish tank could break a budget!

[Raithe]

[rjshae]

 

That's just too d*mn cute. Can he be a pet in PoE2?

[Gfted1]

Ive always wanted a Toyger.

[smjjames]

So get this one. A town in Germany raided a family's home to seize items to cover unpaid taxes.  One of the things the helped themselves to was the family dog: https://www.npr.org/2019/02/28/698900379/in-germany-family-pug-seized-and-sold-on-ebay-to-cover-unpaid-debts

 

I have always said taxation is theft. In this case it's really true. While that would not happen here in the US if it did... trouble. You can lien my house, garnish my pay and take away my driver's license. But if you think you're going to take my dog you better think again! You better be packing more than a court order and be willing to die for your job!

 

Saw that one on the BBC news site a while ago.

 

The other outrageous part for me though is that they were at first thinking of taking away a disabled family members wheelchair. Why would they even think of doing that in the first place, never mind that it's illegal? Taking away the dog like that was bad enough, but even thinking of taking away something essential to a disabled person? That's something they should be fired for IMO.

Edited March 7, 2019 by smjjames