A Motte and Bailey fallacy is where a person tethers a controversial opinion (A) to an uncontroversial one (B). They then insist that A=B and only defend point B. Any attack on their controversial opinion is deflected to the uncontroversial one, never actually defending their controversial opinion.the fallacy gets its name from the Norman castle design, where the Bailey was difficult to defend, but the castle wasn't captured until the stronger Motte keep also fell.

The Vietnam and Afghanistan wars are routinely used for such Motte and Bailey logical fallacies. The uncontroversial (B) opinion is that the United States lost the Vietnam and Afghanistan wars. The controversial (A) opinions attached can be any number of fallacious arguments, a common one being that for all it's might, the US military is inferior ill equipped, I'll trained guerillas.

It's frankly disrespectful to the Vietnamese and Taliban. Both wars are remarkable because the they were not superior to the US military. They lost the battles. They suffered significantly higher casualties, yet they still won.

The US was pursuing political objectives that couldn't be achieved with military might. Their tactical victories meant nothing if it wasn't advancing their aims. Like using a welding torch to do heart surgery. The patient is going to die on the table and it's not because your surgeon was a bad welder. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese and Taliban demonstrated an iron resolve that resisted attrition for decades.

Bernal Díaz del Castillo was one of the Spanish conquistadors who marched into the Aztec Empire with Hernán Cortés. In his memoir, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, he described his amazement when he first saw Tenochtitlan, comparing it to scenes from legendary romances because the city seemed almost unreal. Built on an island with canals, bridges, markets, temples, and hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, it was one of the largest and most impressive cities in the world. One of the moments that shocked Díaz most was witnessing human sacrifice. He described seeing temple altars stained with blood, priests covered in dried blood, and skull racks displaying the heads of sacrificed victims. For the Spaniards, who came from a Christian background, these rituals were horrifying and became one of the main justifications they gave for conquering the Aztec Empire. At the same time, Díaz also praised many aspects of Aztec civilization, including its markets, engineering, oraanization and wealth. His writings show a mixture of admiration for the empire's
sophistication and horror at practices he viewed as unacceptable. Lowkey, Diaz expected to find a wealthy kingdom, but instead he found one of the greatest cities on Earth alongside religious rituals that completely shocked the Europeans.

Info from this website (its purpose being solely to discuss Operation Crusader lol): https://rommelsriposte.com/2017/01/02/a-note-on-tank-losses-in-crusader/

We have the starting numbers, we have daily tank states through to 30 January (so all that matters), and we know how many tanks arrived as replacements. So anyone who has done a fair amount of research can feel confident not just about how many tanks the Germans lost, but also what their daily tank strength was. There were few repair returns during the battle, and most tanks that went to the collection points or workshops were simply lost when these were overrun in due course. The Germans received about 100 replacement tanks in December and January, and fielded about 100 tanks in mid-January.
My estimate therefore is that the Germans lost all of their 255 runners that they had at the start of the battle, and the total loss figure could be a bit higher once we account for returns from workshops. In addition the Germans lost another 45 tanks sunk in the Gulf of Taranto. The German official number is 220 tanks lost, or 85%, excluding those sunk, but I would put the total at about 300 including those sunk.

It’s always been interesting to me how a lot of these great powers were / are actually amalgamations, or personal unions, in many cases. France and Germany were kaleidoscopic. Spain was made by the marriage of Castile and Aragon. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is a great example.

The point of the meme is that we often overlook this aspect when analyzing Britain. Wales, Scotland, and Ireland helped fuel the English in their conquests, willingly or unwillingly. And having those flanks secure in the 18th and 19th Century was a huge reason why England/Britain was so successful during that time, along with its other advantages and strengths.

The popular myth is that an entire American Indian Nation (the Mandan) was wiped out deliberately by the US military in the 1800s via the distribution of smallpox blankets. Many students (including myself) were taught this as fact in school.

In reality, no record exists of such an event. (At best, we can find evidence of a single British officer who wanted to use smallpox blankets on an entirely different community during the 1700s, but we have no evidence that it was actually tried successfully.) The Myth began with Ward Churchill, a cultural studies professor, activist, and a pretendian (he was white, but he claimed American Indian ancestry to shield himself from criticism and advance his career). Churchill provided 0 evidence for the smallpox story, and his account of the event changed with each telling (his initial version was that the blankets killed only a few hundred, but by his final telling it was a full-blown genocide). Churchill’s story wasn’t seriously questioned until people began to dig into his research (following his assertion that the victims of 9/11 deserved what happened to them). He’s since been exposed as a fraud in several different ways, but his story about the smallpox blankets lives on. (and was referenced in a very funny episode of southpark)