Golden Mean Fallacy: Difference between revisions

*** Not really. Historical opinion is still divided on whether or not appeasement was a wise policy - certainly, buying time at Munich let the UK and France step-up re-armament to a level that they would find it easier to fight Germany with.

** A part of the treaty was that Germany could not possess an army of more than 100k infantry, which would be suicidal to go to war with. The problem with the treaty is more likely to have been that it leaned too hard towards the French standpoint (squash ze Germans!) while not having the support in the US or GB to be followed through in later years. A good example of the disaster the treaty was is that the attempted alleviation of the harsh terms, the League of Nations (precursor to the UN), failed to secure membership of the US and Soviets. Since Germany was barred from entering, this meant that almost half of the great powers were not part of the League, making it a useless formality at best.

*** Germany joined the League of Nations in 1926, the Soviet Union (founded in 1922) in 1934. From the French POV the problem with the Versailles settlement was that it was left incomplete because the defense treaties with the UK and the US that were supposed to guarantee French security did not come about after the US Congress failed to ratify the Versailles Treaty (which from the French POV leaned too much to the American, or more specifically President Wilson's standpoint) and the entrance of the US into the League of Nations. This gave the British government the pretext it needed not to enter into a permanent defensive alliance with France either, and that in turn caused French policy towards Germany to be much more confrontational because until the mid-1920s it was felt they had to use their transient military superiority to improve a situation largely determined by the much larger population and industrial strength of Germany.

** Perhaps the best interpretation of the Treaty of Versailles is that it was a toss-up between British pragmatism, American idealism and French revanchism, and ended up trying to be all three and failing at each one.

* There are many branches of science that are seen as controversial by laymen but are, in reality, grounded in a lot of evidence. As a result, people will often try to find a common ground behind science that works and quackery that doesn't, sometimes with disastrous results. Take, for example, medicine, which is "controversial" because of influences like the pharmaceutical industry, so often well-meaning newscasters will, "for balance", hold a debate between an accredited medical professionals and (often unqualified) alternative medicine advocates, even though [[Tim Minchin|if alternative medicine were to work, it'd just be called "medicine"]].