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Phyzzle posted:A war of conquest in response to some perceived provocation or escalation is still a war of conquest. The nation or bloc which carries it out is on the offensive. "Someone else's perception that they are being provoked" was not an act of aggression by the nascent Soviet Union in 1918, and it was not an act of aggression when it happened to South Korea. This seems like a rather weird semantics game to be honest. I mean I know that is what this topic generally turns to but it still should be pointed out.
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Nov 30, 2013 00:38
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thecolorpurple posted:I'm a US expat and self-described socialist who regularly defends the USSR to my american peers. This whole thing is probably getting more into the military history thread jurisdiction anyways. It's almost like we can't even get into a rational discussion about US/Soviet relations without it turning into narrative wars between communism and capitalism. Same petty bullshit the two countries were both so wrong for focusing on in the first place.
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Nov 30, 2013 01:25
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Cold warriors never die, they just fade away.
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Nov 30, 2013 01:31
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Sakarja posted:Yes? Yes, revolutionary Russians would attack the U.S. and the Cubans would invade Florida. Brilliant. The blacks were on their way to kill all whites in South Africa too! The point is that it's absurd to point out that North Vietnam were the "aggressors" when foreign action split the nation in two just to create a cozy puppet to U.S.'s interests. The Korean question is getting into a weird area. There's no problem with North Korea being called the agressors, since in their mini cold war they were the ones that made it hot because they had the material capacity to unify Korea. That the aid given to the South was clearly with the intention of unifying the peninsula shows that the South wanted to do so too if they could. Both sides wanted to gobble up each other, one had the means, the other had the connections. Thus the Korean War developed as it did. The primordial point was that the U.S. was the one with the initiative and aggression to beat their opponent. From their involvement in the revolution to world wide anti communist action(with communist here meaning literally anything from actual communists to priests who dared stand in their way) and ending with the absurd agression that led Reagan's government into almost ending the world because he wanted to scare the reds with large scale military trainings right near the border. U.S. and West German action against Yugoslavia shows that this wasn't no petty super power hissy fit, they were deliberate attempts at crushing anything that opposed capitalism (liberal capitalism at that, since even moderate social democrats were nipped in the butt). Soviet foreign policy, as dreadful as it was in various cases, did not have the intention of delivering such blows against their foes. Possibly because like South Korea, they did not have the means, not because they were peace loving hippies. Like North Korea in that conflict, the U.S. was the aggressor. There's no need to apologize for USSR's foreign policy because it is filled with dreadful actions too. And the U.S. would absolutely murder any French government that dared to abandon the military policy of NATO. They were allowed independent action but you're nuts if you think they'd allow France to turn Third Worldist (or Second). Now please, tell a European newbie about mass transportation. How true is the conspiracy theory about General Motors discarding entire buses into landfills so they could sell cars? Was mass transportation trully dismantled in the U.S. or did it exist in a better shape at all?
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Nov 30, 2013 01:56
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Mans posted:Now please, tell a European newbie about mass transportation. How true is the conspiracy theory about General Motors discarding entire buses into landfills so they could sell cars? Was mass transportation trully dismantled in the U.S. or did it exist in a better shape at all?
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Nov 30, 2013 02:08
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Ofaloaf posted:That was true for a select few companies, but there were plenty mass transit companies that were just horribly managed and fell into bankruptcy on their own without having a conspiracy push them over the edge. The thing was that when the companies failed, the state didn't intervene (for various reasons) so instead of having failing private ventures in public services being turned into government operations, they just ceased to be. It sounds like the Great Depression also killed a lot of the intercity passenger rail that was going between cities, and since freight was more profitable that stuck.
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Nov 30, 2013 02:17
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Jesus, enough Stalinchat. Let's talk something far more interesting: The US Constitution So, we often think about the framing of the Constitution in a very simplified, ahistorical way. There are three main ways we approach the Constitution and the larger Revolutionary/Early Republican period, all of which have flaws and virtues. The Neo-Beardian school, with its origins in the early 20th century work of historian Charles A. Beard, sees the US Constitution as primarily or exclusively an outgrowth of the financial, commercial, and power relations among the colonial elite classes. This interpretation relies strongly on an examination of the family connections, personal assets, and future businesses pursued by the Framers of the Constitution. The Neo-Whig school, descended from the mid-20th century work of historian Bernard Bailyn and probably the dominant field in modern American academia. Bailyn and his many, many acolytes wish to place the emphasis on the growth of Republicanism and other complex enlightenment ideologies for the Revolution itself as well as the tensions surrounding the Constitutional Convention and Ratification debates. This school, because it is so big, has numerous sibdivisions -- some Neo-Whigs want to place great emphasis on the religious roots in Scottish Presbyterianism and Massachusetts Congregationalist thought, others look at the English Whig tradition of 'Republican virtue,' with its emphasis on Ciceronian and country gentry ideals, and some see the Revolutionaries and Framers as genuine early democrats, concerned with popular sovereignty and the rights of man above all. Finally, the Trans-Atlanticist or New Imperial historians think the American Revolution needs to be understood in a much broader context of the larger Atlantic and Imperial world of the British and French Empires, both in terms of the social history of the populations and individuals participating in the Revolution and Framing, but also in terms of where the ideologies and beliefs they believed in came from and the origins of their economic and power relations with others. I'm just going to lay out one of the most widely misunderstood and problematic issues at the convention briefly just to give you a sense of how much fun these issues can be. Representation and Slavery During the initial phases of the Convention, James Madison's plan of government, known as the Virginia Plan, was basically just accepted by the delegates as a blueprint for the document they were creating, and most of the efforts were dedicated to developing and fleshing out the Virginia Plan. One of the most notable features of the government was its populist bicameralism, in which the vast majority of lawmaking power was vested in the citizenry. Edmund Randolph delivered the plan on the floor, because Madison was well known as a strong nationalist and feared that if the plan came directly from him, people would immediately react strongly against it. The resolutions of the Virginia Plan originally dealing with the legislature are worth quoting at length: Mr. Randolph, delivering the Virginia Plan for James Madison posted:Resd. therefore that the rights of suffrage in the National Legislature ought to be proportioned to the Quotas of contribution, or to the number of free inhabitants, as the one or the other rule may seem best in different cases. So it's worth noting most importantly there that Madison's plan allows rich states with few free persons (like Virginia) to base their representation in the legislature on their contribution to the federal treasuries, but small and poor states (like Connecticut) to base their contributions on the number of free citizens they have. This is really brilliant because, as Madison well understood, it provided a strong incentive for states to reduce their reliance on slavery (since no state government wanted to pay more to the federal level) and promised not to give slavery itself any specific representation. This is especially true because the size of the state's representation in BOTH branches depended on either their contribution to the national treasury or their free population, not just one branch. It immediately came up - after Madison's plan rolled over the Convention attendees like a juggernaut -- that he had specifically included free persons as a part of the equation, excluding slaves. The whole thing became the subject of very intense debate -- it was in fact the first thing the Convention took up the next day, and it was so vexing that the committee had to table the whole clause and replace it with "the system of representation should be equitable and not like the Articles of Confederation." I love the moment when this debate starts, since poor Madison tries to head it off by saying the term "free persons" might "provoke debate which would divert the committee from the general question." The debate moves along for several weeks, and the Convention returns to the calculation of representation directly on June 11, after hemming and hawing about it several times. James Wilson, the dedicated democrat from PA, and Madison have had a firm alliance all along to ensure popular election and, as much as possible, proportional numbers in each branch of the legislature. Wilson, however, found alliance with Charles Pinckney, from South Carolina, as the 11th wore on. Having seized the initiative with a long speech from Franklin, he postponed other's motions in order to propose that a general population rule be adopted (advantaging large states like his native Pennsylvania), but replacing the option of representation by financial contribution with allowing "3/5 of all other persons" to count as free persons (advantaging poorer slave states like Georgia and South Carolina, who feared having their representation reduced if they fell on bad economic times). They were very smart to choose this number -- James Madison himself had chosen it, about five years earlier, when he was the Virginia delegate to the Confederation Congress, as the appropriate way to count slaves when determining how much each state owed in tax revenues to the Confederation. The debate stuck on this for a little while, then proceeded to other questions, since part of the deal Wilson had reached ensured that the resolution would pass a vote. However, things heated up again at the end of June, when the presentation of two totally alternate plans of government by Patterson of New Jersey and then by Hamilton threw all the previously passed resolutions into chaos, including and especially the proportioning of representation in the legislature. Franklin called the resulting bitter argument and chaos "melancholy proof of the imperfection of human understanding," and Madison spent hours lecturing the delegates about obscure historical crap like the Amphytronic Confederacy of Grecian city states in hopes of convincing them to come back around. The whole conflagration really heats up when South Carolina's delegation proposes to make slaves count 1:1, after the passage of the CT Compromise robbed them of the hope that a 3/5 advantage would carry over to help them in both houses of Congress. The floor now open to the question, Gouvenor Morris takes a new tack: since we've decided to count population not wealth directly, it seems unfit to include slaves at all, since they are not politically present. Though his goal was to edge away from measuring population and to find a measure of wealth to represent each state, he exposed the slavery issue to open debate. By the next day, the 13th, the members of the convention morally opposed to slavery being a measure of population had to go for broke. There are a series of vicious exchanges where Madison declares slavery, not geography or size, the true divide in American politics, and Morris claims that the convention can never succeed if the South "always conspires to get the best of public councils." Through a series of parliamentary maneuvers and close votes, the 3/5 compromise is preserved. Madison consistently votes against it except when it is needed to keep the convention moving -- he and his other allies say it is "a confusion," in which population is being used a measure of wealth and wealth production by slaves is 3/5 of a regular laborer -- something they find foolish and problematic, especially because it is based on a compromise made in haste at the Confederation Congress. However, the proposal to allow any new residents -- or "inhabitants" to become part of the scheme of representation -- stirred the hornets again. Rufus King and other saw that the new system, as agreed to, now encouraged Southern states to import as many slaves as possible to increase their representation. He and others couldn't morally abide such a perverse incentive. Gouvernor Morris flys into a well prepared tirade at this which is worth quoting at length: Morris on August 8 posted:Upon what principle is it that the slaves shall be computed in the representation? Are they men? Then make them Citizens and let them vote. Are they property? Why then is no other property included? The Houses in this city [Philada.] are worth more than all the wretched slaves which cover the rice swamps of South Carolina. The admission of slaves into the Representation when fairly explained comes to this: that the inhabitant of Georgia and S. C. who goes to the Coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections & damns them to the most cruel bondages,20 shall have more votes in a Govt. instituted for protection of the rights of mankind, than the Citizen of Pa. or N. Jersey who views with a laudable horror, so nefarious a practice. He would add that Domestic slavery is the most prominent feature in the aristocratic countenance of the proposed Constitution. The vassalage of the poor has ever been the favorite offspring of Aristocracy. And What is the proposed compensation to the Northern States for a sacrifice of every principle of right, of every impulse of humanity. They are to bind themselves to march their militia for the defence of the S. States; for their defence agst. those very slaves of whom they complain. Morris is defeated in a speedy vote, and Pinckney rubs it in with a horrible joke about how the risk of defending Massachusetts fisheries is a worse burden on the Southern states than defending slavery and slave traders with their lives is to the Northern states. There's more to the story of slavery at the Convention, but this post is already partway to tl;dr....so this is my area of expertise, and I'd love to answer more questions about the Convention, Constitution, and Revolution.
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Nov 30, 2013 02:26
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Can I get a recommendation for a book that covers the actual history of the Boston Tea Party in detail?
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Nov 30, 2013 03:08
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:Can I get a recommendation for a book that covers the actual history of the Boston Tea Party in detail? From Resistance to Revolution by Pauline Maier covers the background and the event in several chapters. I don't have a book recc off the top of my head soely on the tea party itself, but I'll see if I can dig one up.
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Nov 30, 2013 03:11
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BrotherAdso posted:Jesus, enough Stalinchat. Let's talk something far more interesting: Now that's how you change the goddamned subject
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Nov 30, 2013 03:31
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Without wanting to revive Stalinchat, it occurs to me that anyone interested in the rise of the Neoconservatives and their manipulation of information to make the USSR appear scarier to create the political changes they wanted should watch The Power of Nightmares by Adam Curtis (watchable fanmade trailer here). It's a pretty interesting and powerful documentary concerning recent american history by a British filmmaker.
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Nov 30, 2013 06:23
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BrotherAdso posted:There's more to the story of slavery at the Convention, but this post is already partway to tl;dr....so this is my area of expertise, and I'd love to answer more questions about the Convention, Constitution, and Revolution. This is wonderful, please do more. Where can I get a copy of the debates at the Constitutional Convention?
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Nov 30, 2013 07:03
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Mans posted:Now please, tell a European newbie about mass transportation. How true is the conspiracy theory about General Motors discarding entire buses into landfills so they could sell cars? Was mass transportation trully dismantled in the U.S. or did it exist in a better shape at all? The General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy is a popular leftist myth. It's convenient to blame corporations for the sad state of American transportation infrastructure but the truth is complex and horrifying. First let's talk about what's true. Yes, General Motors did purchase a number of municipal streetcar lines and close them or convert them to bus transit. This first requires municipal or utility authorities to want to sell those transit agencies. Generally speaking - and I do mean generally, trying to draw trends in the US is like trying to draw trends across the nations of Europe - streetcars and other surface transit in the 1920's-30's were performing poorly. Most transit agencies were set up as side projects of utility providers, who found that streetcars were a good way to use up excess generation capacity during non-peak hours (as the original mass consumers of urban electricity were civic authorities as well as residential/commercial retail uses). Eventually there were much more profitable ways to dispose of that power. Also, transit agencies usually had pretty restrictive fare caps and other regulations placed on them by local authorities in the wake of mass protests, which most of the time never got taken off the books. In some cases cities never bothered updating their legally mandated fare schedules in the face of inflation or higher operating cost. By the 1930's, when mass automobile ownership and suburbanization were really taking off in a big way, streetcars were unable to compete in terms of ridership and for actual street real estate against the newer and more popular automobiles. This allowed corporations such as GM to purchase many of these agencies to either dismantle them and free up more road space for highway expansion, or convert profitable lines to bus modes. Conversion isn't a conspiracy either - the company was called General Motors, not General Electric Trams. In this sense, transportation infrastructure was dismantled in the US in many cases. This is mainly because of the economic and legal context in which many American cities existed. European cities tend to be hundreds or thousands of years old, with multiple overlapping jurisdictions and land ownership cases that make outward expansion difficult. If you want to expand into the village of Old Badkreuz, you may have a lengthy struggle on your hands to deal with all their antiquated cultural horseshit - and it may not be easy to put a four lane road through town if it means knocking down a hundreds-year old inn where the Emperor poo poo once. But in America, the average city is like 150 years old and there's not much stopping you from expanding. There are places in American urban jurisdictions which have still never been developed from their original virgin prehistoric overgrowth. Since it was so easy and cheap for American cities to expand, this tended to preference a transportation mode which allowed for wide coverage at inefficent cost rather than mass transit, which permits for small coverage at very efficient cost. Basically mass transit in America flourished in between the 1880's invention of workable electric trams and the 1920's mass adoption of automobiles. In Europe, automobiles remained a luxury for the people who could be bothered but in America (and Canada, and Australia, etc.) automobiles moved rapidly from a novelty to a luxury to a pragmatic useful item to a practical necessity as our cities continued to spread outward ever farther into cheap cheap land. EDIT: Another important thing in short words because I'm lazy. Many places in Western Europe and the Old World are old, meaning that they were adequately populated hundreds of years ago when most people walked places. This means that the land was developed on a human scale, so even in rural France you can walk between multiple villages in a day. This would be called low suburban or exurban in America, as in still part of an urbanish framework. Many places in America are a less than two centuries old - Iowa wasn't even a state until the 1840's - meaning that these places developed along with more intensive forms of transportation such as railroads, the expectation of horsecarts/trucks, and so on. Rural America, as in really middle of nowhere poo poo, is like an overland expedition to walk from one village to another. You can find Old World styles of development in America where it was densly populated by the stanards of the day back when the day meant walking from place to place, such as New England. But the majority of America is this wide open cheap land stuff that is much more amenable to automotive-focused development. Ofaloaf posted:That was true for a select few companies, but there were plenty mass transit companies that were just horribly managed and fell into bankruptcy on their own without having a conspiracy push them over the edge. The thing was that when the companies failed, the state didn't intervene (for various reasons) so instead of having failing private ventures in public services being turned into government operations, they just ceased to be. This is also true. Plenty of transit agencies simply went bankrupt, and weren't pulled back into the historical record because they were never purchased by GM. The cities where GM didn't have any success were the few cities - New York, Chicago, San Francisco - where density or geography caused land prices to be high enough to create a situation where mass transit would be profitable or useful enough for the city to subsidize. Side trivia note: the famous San Francisco Cable Cars are a niche useless form of street traction that survived due to geography. A cable car is a tram which hooks onto a literal actual huge rear end cable buried in the ground, like a ski lift or a gondola. On flat ground this is dumb and stupid, and everywhere these lines rapidly lost out to Sperry electric trams. However, on San Fran's big annoying hills it turns out it works really well. These lines managed to survive long enough to become tourist attractions, probably because they're so steampunk or some bullshit. boner confessor fucked around with this message at 10:12 on Nov 30, 2013 |
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Nov 30, 2013 09:33
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Mans posted:Yes, revolutionary Russians would attack the U.S. and the Cubans would invade Florida. Brilliant. The blacks were on their way to kill all whites in South Africa too! You're misrepresenting the argument. I didn't say that the Bolsheviks or the Cuban revolutionaries were about to invade the West or the US. The argument I was responding to wasn't that South Korea was about to invade North Korea, but that they would have done so if they had been strong enough. I applied this reasoning to other conflicts in order to illustrate the absurd results it generates. quote:The primordial point was that the U.S. was the one with the initiative and aggression to beat their opponent. Yes, and the counterargument is that conflicts like the Korean War show us that this wasn't always the case. Anyways, I'm fine with leaving this topic since it seems like the thread is moving on.
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Nov 30, 2013 09:40
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Sakarja posted:The argument I was responding to wasn't that South Korea was about to invade North Korea, but that they would have done so if they had been strong enough. I applied this reasoning to other conflicts in order to illustrate the absurd results it generates. This is one of those cases where applying obvious answer A to other situation B will of course result in an absurd outcome. I wouldn't reboot my toaster oven either. That doesn't mean the original obvious answer was invalid. Syngman Rhee was a nationalist who wanted to rule a unified Korea. He wasn't happy being the stooge ruler of a fake assed half nation any more than Kil Il Sung was. Both of them - and the Korean people - wanted Korean unification and Korean self-determination more than they wanted to wave some other country's ideological banner. It would be counterfactual for me to say that Rhee wanted to invade or was preparing to invade North Korea. But, it doesn't sit well with me to say that Kim was belligerent to take advantage of the only opportunity that either he or Rhee had to unify Korea, since it was clear by 1950 that any sort of peaceful reconciliation between the Superpowers wasn't going to happen in the near future. I mean like he wasn't invading another ethnic group's mineral rights: five years before, that land had been part of the same nation and was only made different because some transoceanic dickholes said it was gonna be that way. If US aid was freely flowing and Soviet/Sino aid was tight then I have no doubt that Rhee would have rolled north in June 1950, because he would have been taking advantage of a natural discrepancy advantageous to him in the only way that it was within his power to unify the Korean state. (Assuming that Truman permitted it like Stalin saw the shift in American Korea policy circa 1949). boner confessor fucked around with this message at 09:53 on Nov 30, 2013 |
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Nov 30, 2013 09:50
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Mans posted:Now please, tell a European newbie about mass transportation. How true is the conspiracy theory about General Motors discarding entire buses into landfills so they could sell cars? Was mass transportation trully dismantled in the U.S. or did it exist in a better shape at all? Adding to what several other posters have said, remember that streets looked very different prior to the introduction of the automobile, with great crowds of pedestrians crossing at will when carriages and bicycles would let them. Streetcars usually ran through the streets' centers, since this allowed for quick boarding and departure, and didn't conflict too much with delivery carts and the like. It was a great system, one that allowed for rapid development of cities during the late nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries. Once cars began appearing in large numbers, this was no longer tenable, and a new pattern for how streets operated had to be developed. Streetcars began to be viewed as a risk, since there was a greater danger of being struck whenever you exited one. Moving tracks toward the edge of the street, building islands for stations, or grade separation via elevated tracks or tunnels might have helped, but doing this for already-established networks would have been prohibitively expensive. Besides, companies were already beginning to not replace equipment as they wore out, so the streetcars were run into the ground and eventually abandoned completely. There was a period when streetcars were replaced with trolleybuses, which may have worked out, but they too were wrecked. In the years following World War II, oil was cheap, so it was thought by some very foolish and shortsighted people that buses running on diesel rather than overhead lines made better sense. Because they had more flexibility and weren't fixed to certain routes. And, of course, there was no need to build or expand on subway systems, because everybody would be driving cars to their suburban houses on Robert Moses' freeways or whatever bullshit.  edit: A lot of cities in western Europe and Asia also got rid of their tram systems, although they replaced them with metros that actually saw some investment. Hedera Helix fucked around with this message at 10:43 on Nov 30, 2013 |
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Nov 30, 2013 10:36
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Popular Thug Drink posted:This is one of those cases where applying obvious answer A to other situation B will of course result in an absurd outcome. I wouldn't reboot my toaster oven either. That doesn't mean the original obvious answer was invalid. Why is that? By what method can we separate military conflicts into categories where your reasoning applies and those where it doesnt? Why is it appropriate to apply this reasoning to the Korean War but not, for instance, Operation Barbarossa? Is it the legitimacy of the claims involved? If thats the case, the original argument, that North Korea wasnt the aggressor because the South wouldve done the same if theyd been able to, is entirely superfluous. The (original) argument seems to be that if the circumstances had been completely different, if the military power of the belligerents had been inverted, then the country that was actually invaded would probably have been the invader. It doesnt make any more sense when its applied to the Korean War than any other conflict. What South Korea would or wouldnt have done if circumstances had been completely different isnt very interesting, and it certainly shouldnt prevent us from identifying the aggressor.
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Nov 30, 2013 10:36
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Hedera Helix posted:There was a period when streetcars were replaced with trolleybuses, which may have made sense, but they too were wrecked. In the years following World War II, oil was cheap, so it was thought by some very foolish and shortsighted people that buses running on diesel rather than overhead lines made better sense. Because they had more flexibility and weren't fixed to certain routes. And, of course, there was no need to build or expand on subway systems, because everybody would be driving cars to their suburban houses on Robert Moses' freeways or whatever bullshit. Well, subways are crazy expensive and on-street transit is out for reasons you mentioned. That really only leaves grade seperation surface rail aka heavy rail, which for most of the mid 20th century was too expensive until American cities started to realize in the 1960's that the whole suburbs/car thing wasn't a good long term strategy for urban development. Much of American municipal transportation policy is just making up for and attempting to correct Corbusian/Wright ideas about the Automotive City which were futuristic I guess in 1939. Sakarja posted:Why is that? By what method can we separate military conflicts into categories where your reasoning applies and those where it doesn’t? Why is it appropriate to apply this reasoning to the Korean War but not, for instance, Operation Barbarossa? Is it the legitimacy of the claims involved? If that’s the case, the original argument, that North Korea wasn’t the aggressor because the South would’ve done the same if they’d been able to, is entirely superfluous. Sure, I guess if you ignore all the ways in which the Korean War wasn't like other wars and compare it to other wars that weren't at all similar to the Korean War then it's kind of absurd how the Korean War started but that's the methodology supplied I suppose. Can you name another war between two nations which were culturally identical but somewhat ideologically differentiated via external forces, which was triggered largely due to an imbalance in externally provided military resources? Sakarja posted:The (original) argument seems to be that if the circumstances had been completely different, if the military power of the belligerents had been inverted, then the country that was actually invaded would probably have been the invader. It doesn’t make any more sense when it’s applied to the Korean War than any other conflict. What South Korea would or wouldn’t have done if circumstances had been completely different isn’t very interesting, and it certainly shouldn’t prevent us from identifying the aggressor. The true aggressor was the Soviets/America for drawing a completely arbitrary line in the sand in the first place then winding up and arming their particular side of the fence. If both sides were able to agree to walk away from Korea in a way that was amenable to the Korean people then it would have never been an issue but welp this was when America had a hard on for whipping communists in the street so here we are with the most pointless border conflict imaginable sixty years and counting down the line.
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Nov 30, 2013 10:46
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It is unlikely the Red Car system could have been maintained as is, it wasn't terrible efficient for very long distances which the greater LA basin is known for but there isn't really any reasoning for destroying already established infrastructure like the Bunker Hill street car tunnel which could have at least been part of some time of system to get people out of downtown LA. The problem was the total eradication of these systems not just paring them down. Sometimes did retain portions of their systems (SF and New Orleans) and generally it has worked out very well for them. The system needed to be shut down but yeah its complete annihilation was completely unneeded especially in LA in which during that period did have build up areas that could have still benefited (especially around Downtown to West Hollywood). LA's government obviously bent over to corporations, that doesn't mean the scandal didn't happen but that corrupt or careless politicians were apart of it. As for heavy rail, LA needed a heavy travel line far sooner than the late 90s, there was obvious pressure against it though. It is quite obvious though the LA government has been corrupt and incompetent to the point of uselessness for a very long time. Look at the Green Line and LAX for the best example of this. Also, A "leftist myth" is terrible framing and honestly, it doesn't seem like there is much support for "myth busting" without straw manning it. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 11:06 on Nov 30, 2013 |
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Nov 30, 2013 11:03
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BrotherAdso posted:the South "always conspires to get the best of public councils." I've been reading Master of the Senate and I think that one sentence holds in it (most of) the political history of the US Senate.
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Nov 30, 2013 11:37
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Popular Thug Drink posted:Sure, I guess if you ignore all the ways in which the Korean War wasn't like other wars and compare it to other wars that weren't at all similar to the Korean War then it's kind of absurd how the Korean War started but that's the methodology supplied I suppose. Can you name another war between two nations which were culturally identical but somewhat ideologically differentiated via external forces, which was triggered largely due to an imbalance in externally provided military resources? In your first post on the subject you compared the situation to two guys screaming at each other leading to one of them punching the other. That seemed to suggest that the reasoning could be applied generally. Are you now arguing that the situation in Korea was so unique that the original argument cant be extended to any other conflict? As I pointed out earlier, youre shifting the debate to the legitimacy of the claims of the belligerents. This is not the same as arguing that X and Y hate each other and if either one of them was able to invade the other they would do so, and for this reason we must refrain from identifying the one that actually invaded the other as the aggressor. Theres nothing absurd about how the Korean War started. Rival factions opposing each other over artificial geographical divisions imposed by great powers, and fighting each other with the assistance of the same great powers is nothing new in history. The ideological divisions seem far less important than the competing claims to leadership on the local level and the strategic interests of the superpowers on a global level. The imbalance in military resources was requested for the purpose of the invasion. The war was thus triggered by one belligerents decision to invade the other with the blessing of its patron. quote:The true aggressor was the Soviets/America for drawing a completely arbitrary line in the sand in the first place then winding up and arming their particular side of the fence. If both sides were able to agree to walk away from Korea in a way that was amenable to the Korean people then it would have never been an issue but welp this was when America had a hard on for whipping communists in the street so here we are with the most pointless border conflict imaginable sixty years and counting down the line. Hows that an act of aggression? And first you say that both the superpowers were to blame, but the last sentence suggests that the Americans were the only ones at fault. If they had such a hard on for whipping communists, why did they refuse to arm South Korea sufficiently for an invasion of the North?
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Nov 30, 2013 11:40
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Popular Thug Drink posted:Basically mass transit in America flourished in between the 1880's invention of workable electric trams and the 1920's mass adoption of automobiles. In Europe, automobiles remained a luxury for the people who could be bothered but in America (and Canada, and Australia, etc.) automobiles moved rapidly from a novelty to a luxury to a pragmatic useful item to a practical necessity as our cities continued to spread outward ever farther into cheap cheap land. Great post, I agree with all of it, but wanted to emphasize this point. So many American cities in the mid-20th century were surrounded by cheap, wide open land, and with millions of servicemen coming home and wanting to buy a home and start a family (in fact considering it their right after serving the country) the fast and easy solution was to slap down some asphalt out into the country and to throw up some tract housing. This became so ingrained into the culture that it became culturally stigmatizing if you didn't live on a large lot with a stick frame house and a picket fence. They were bombarded with this imagery on TV and in advertising. High density masonry construction ('brownstones') became a mark of poverty. When your urban planning is concerned with providing housing for millions of new families as quickly as possible, long term planning issues like transit infrastructure end up taking a backseat as growth rushes outwards at a pace too quick for rail to keep up. There were also the infamous racial and corruption elements as well. St. Louis is one of the best examples of all of those forces conspiring together. City planners in the 40s were preparing for the city's population to double over 30 years, instead it dropped by half, meanwhile the surrounding county's population quadrupled from people moving out of the city and rural folks moving in. There was a heavy defense industry so most if the job growth was actually outside of the city and developers were building suburban housing near it. A book on the subject: http://www.amazon.com/Mapping-Decline-American-Politics-Culture/dp/0812240707 A series of blog posts: http://www.thewellstonloop.com/colin-gordons-mapping-decline-introduction http://www.thewellstonloop.com/mapping-decline-urban-abandonment-and-suburbanization http://www.thewellstonloop.com/mapping-decline-hypersegregation-in-st-louis http://www.thewellstonloop.com/mapping-decline-what-colin-gordon-has-to-say-about-wellston http://www.thewellstonloop.com/mapping-decline-final-reflections Maps!!: http://mappingdecline.lib.uiowa.edu
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Nov 30, 2013 17:48
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Mans posted:The Korean question is getting into a weird area. There's no problem with North Korea being called the agressors, since in their mini cold war they were the ones that made it hot because they had the material capacity to unify Korea. That the aid given to the South was clearly with the intention of unifying the peninsula shows that the South wanted to do so too if they could. Both sides wanted to gobble up each other, one had the means, the other had the connections. Thus the Korean War developed as it did. This is best illustrated by the end of the Korean War, where South Korea refused to sign the ceasefire treaty and tried their best to sink the peace deal, because Syngman Rhee wouldn't tolerate anything less than complete conquest of North Korea. The only reason the South stopped fighting was because we threatened to pull out and leave South Korea to fight alone against the North without our help. Seriously, blaming the start of the Korean War on either of the Koreas reveals a profound ignorance of just how unstable the forceful division of Korea was. The question wasn't whether a Korean War would happen, but when it would.
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Nov 30, 2013 18:30
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Good post. I'd also emphasize that I think the economic transformation of the time enabled suburban living to an extent not possible before. The war spurred the economy in general and increased the capacity and technology to build more and better cars and tons of customers could now afford them. I'd say demand for single family living always existed and the newfound economic conditions (combined with access to wide open land) post WWII enabled people to afford both the houses and the cars necessary to live in them (if people had wanted row houses those could have been thrown up quickly too - probably more quickly). It then reached a tipping point where it became a cultural norm which further fed growth.
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Nov 30, 2013 18:40
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:Can I get a recommendation for a book that covers the actual history of the Boston Tea Party in detail? Two books that I enjoyed were American Tempest by Harlow Giles Unger and Defiance of the Patriots by Ben Carp. Unger's book gives you more history and background of the major players, while Carp's book is more chronological of the events leading up to December 16 and after. Both books have lists of maybe participants, since we still don't know for sure who participated.
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Nov 30, 2013 21:23
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Mans posted:Now please, tell a European newbie about mass transportation. How true is the conspiracy theory about General Motors discarding entire buses into landfills so they could sell cars? Was mass transportation truly dismantled in the U.S. or did it exist in a better shape at all? Denver had more miles of tramlines in 1910 than today. The last of the old tramlines were discontinued in 1950. You can still see some tracks embedded in the roadway (for example, the corner of Larimer and Speer). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_Tramway http://www.denvergov.org/Portals/479/documents/Historical%20Context%20%20Trolleys%20from%20S%20%20Bdwy%20NEPA%20Hermsen%20Consultants.pdf The next to last page of this presentation shows overlays of the street car and trolley lines. http://www.railvolution.org/rv2006_pdfs/rv2006_227b.pdf Family Values also points to zoning issues being part of the problem. The last PDF above is a "new" type of zoning that started in Denver called "Main Street Zoning". The "box on a pad" sort of architecture you see around the US is due to required parking as part of zoning. For many fast food stores, the "maximum occupancy" that is posted is due to the size of the parking lot. Zoning requirements for mandatory parking tends to push stores way back from the street - this makes it more trouble to ride public transit and more likely that you have to have a car to shop. Vertical zoning was something that used to happen in older cities (like NYC) where stores would be on the ground level, and office or residences located above. That sort of zoning became illegal by the 1940s. The documentary The Puit Igoe Myth talked about the problems St Louis and Detroit faced with shrinking due to migration (your library probably has a copy). Zoning restrictions set up a path dependency problem that lasts for decades and embeds current fads/bigotry into very intractable problems. The local public transport agency is trying to build newer light rail lines. It is very expensive, partly due to having to purchase the land for tracks and stations, but also due to inflation in things like steel, copper and cement. This inflation was so bad that the Bureau of Labor Statistics quit publishing the inflation index for heavy construction (it used to be called "producer price index - heavy construction"). When RTD expanded the light rail system as part of T-REX, light rail cost about $24-27 million/mile (this includes land acquisition, station and double-track construction). The current expansion (FasTracks) is running about 2x this. Public transportation in the US loses money. It is not possible to run bus companies at a price point that customers can afford while even breaking even economically. While RTD in Denver is one of the better run public transport systems, it still needs 60% of the operating budget to come from taxpayers to keep the system running. My suspicion, which I can't prove, is that much of the decline of public transport during the 50s and 60s was due to a combination of anti-Communism and racism. The racist part was a reaction to the desegregation of buses due to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the civil rights movement. The anti-Communist part was that the Communist nations used trams/trolleys and had very few automobiles. The emphasis on cars was a distinction of wealth between "us" and "them" just like adding the clause "under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance.
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Dec 1, 2013 00:35
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Huttan posted:My suspicion, which I can't prove, is that much of the decline of public transport during the 50s and 60s was due to a combination of anti-Communism and racism. The racist part was a reaction to the desegregation of buses due to the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the civil rights movement. The anti-Communist part was that the Communist nations used trams/trolleys and had very few automobiles. The emphasis on cars was a distinction of wealth between "us" and "them" just like adding the clause "under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Or in other words, white Americans were using automobiles to flee the city into racially pure suburbs. Pursuing these suburbs and the wanton over consumption of resources also signaled faith in the 'American way of life'.
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Dec 1, 2013 01:19
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Popular Thug Drink posted:Interesting context and nuance on US public transport's decline Ok so I don't disagree with much of the substantial content of your post but some of the framing is pretty odd. Leftist myth? It wasn't a conspiracy but it's pretty clear that GM and others did benefit from buying up and scrapping public transport systems, although it probably is worth noting that this was within the context of those companies failing due partly to incompetent local government (who I'm sure weren't benefitting from continuing policies that helped GM/etc.) and partly due to changing social trends. Your framing of the situation in Europe is pretty odd too. Yes urban development tended to be closer but this wasn't so much due to 'hidebound tradition' and not being able to knock down inns because 'the Emperor crapped there once'. That kind of appreciation for historical sites is fairly new in Europe, the simple reason is that that property was owned by someone who was probably using it for something. It's a consequence of relative population density, land costs more to buy and develop if someone's already using it. We did see suburbs and the like appearing in Europe (especially London) with the development of rail travel because suddenly people could live outside the horrible overcrowded cities but still work there. The difference (from my layman's knowledge) would be that Europe seemed to develop the commuter culture before automobiles became prevalent so suburbs developed around public transport. This is combined with land ownership (which isn't quite the same thing as population density, there's plenty of space in, say, France but it's still owned by someone that at least probably likes having a poo poo load of land. Compare that with the area around most early 20th century American cities and there's a big difference.
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Dec 1, 2013 03:45
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A small question I've always wondered about: How/when/why was the Los Angeles river paved over? And is it completely paved over, or is there an actual still-existing river bed somewhere in the LA metro area? I'm kind of curious after having watched "Chinatown".
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Dec 1, 2013 04:10
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Huttan posted:
There was a racial component to suburbanization, but it actually occurred about a decade or two later than what you're guessing. The often touted "white-flight" from American urban centers to suburbs began in the late 60s and early 70s, and consisted of predominately working class White Americans who were reacting to the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (Fair Housing Act) and more importantly the effort to desegregate schools through the "Busing system" (Basically, cities would desegregate by busing students all around cities, so students who lived on one side of a city might go all the way to a school on the other side even if there was an appropriate school just a few minutes away on foot). In a lot of American urban centers at this time, a lot of 'ethnic enclaves' (Based around immigrant groups who had come in the Great Waves of the late 1800s and early 1900s) existed. These were the "Little Italy", or "Little Warsaw" where many still spoke the old world languages and maintained a lot of older culture, and most of them had only recently been lifted out of general poverty by WWII. When the Fair Housing Act came into play though, you saw a lot of African-Americans, who were simply trying to move somewhere better for their families move immediately to the next relative step to where they were living, the neighborhoods that many of these ethnic enclaves inhabited. This caused a number of problems, undoubtedly complicated by the racist beliefs of a lot of these working class, but the Democratic Party badly bungled handling the situation, basically turning a blind eye to the complaints about a rise in crime and loss of neighborhood (ethnic) solidarity, which the Republicans under Nixon immediately took advantage of with his promise of a return to "Law and Order" during his campaign runs. The Democratic Party wasn't certainly helped by the fact that around the same time, you had the beginning rift between more well-to-do liberals in the party and the labor unions, which made the dominant well-to-do liberals even less sympathetic to working class complaints. But Busing was the big nail in the coffin that turned a lot of lukewarm White American supporters of the Civil Rights Movement against it, and actually turned a lot of people to private schools (Which naturally meant Public schools started to lose support among the general populace). Bus Desegregation was hardly the catalyst. Also, there's the whole component of de-industrialization that we haven't even touched, but part of the problem there was a ton of factories started to move out of the cities for cheaper land and tax abatements. As factories moved, workers had to move with the factories, which divided more well-off laborers (Who were typically White and able to move) with less well-off (typically African-American, and who were stuck in the cities).
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Dec 1, 2013 04:15
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MrNemo posted:Ok so I don't disagree with much of the substantial content of your post but some of the framing is pretty odd. Leftist myth? It wasn't a conspiracy but it's pretty clear that GM and others did benefit from buying up and scrapping public transport systems, although it probably is worth noting that this was within the context of those companies failing due partly to incompetent local government (who I'm sure weren't benefitting from continuing policies that helped GM/etc.) and partly due to changing social trends. Auto makers of course benefitted from the shift to auto centric planning, but it wasn't nearly the nefarious conspiracy it's often made out to be. Nor is it accurate in my opinion to level claims of incompetence. It's down to small thinking and the balkanized nature of the suburbs, where you have dozens of little municipalities who have no jurisdiction or interest in large metropolitan planning and whose primary purpose is to protect residential property values, which is often at odds with commercial, mixed use, or infrastructure development. Without a centralized planning authority, and with effectively veto power in the hands of the locals, mass transit was (and often still is) doomed. All of the other problems really stem from this root problem, I think.
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Dec 1, 2013 04:27
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BrotherAdso posted:There's more to the story of slavery at the Convention, but this post is already partway to tl;dr....so this is my area of expertise, and I'd love to answer more questions about the Convention, Constitution, and Revolution. There is no such thing as tl;dr in history threads. Sperg to your heart's content. What do you make of Zinn's claim that American slavery originated as a way to keep white and black indentured servants from finding common cause?
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Dec 1, 2013 05:18
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Meaty Ore posted:A small question I've always wondered about : How/when/why was the Los Angeles river paved over? And is it completely paved over, or is there an actual still-existing river bed somewhere in the LA metro area? I'm kind of curious after having watched "Chinatown". Per Wikipedia, late 30's and flood control
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Dec 1, 2013 05:23
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Main Paineframe posted:This is best illustrated by the end of the Korean War, where South Korea refused to sign the ceasefire treaty and tried their best to sink the peace deal, because Syngman Rhee wouldn't tolerate anything less than complete conquest of North Korea. The only reason the South stopped fighting was because we threatened to pull out and leave South Korea to fight alone against the North without our help. It was unstable, sure. But really who is going to blame Rhee after what the North did in 1951? The North rolled over his entire country and nearly pushed the Southern government into the sea. How does Rhee being pissed off and unwilling to compromise in '53 really say that much about the imperialist leanings of the RoK government?
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Dec 1, 2013 07:56
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MrNemo posted:Ok so I don't disagree with much of the substantial content of your post but some of the framing is pretty odd. Leftist myth? It wasn't a conspiracy but it's pretty clear that GM and others did benefit from buying up and scrapping public transport systems, although it probably is worth noting that this was within the context of those companies failing due partly to incompetent local government (who I'm sure weren't benefitting from continuing policies that helped GM/etc.) and partly due to changing social trends. I'm being flippant and casual to mock the tendency to blame corporations for bad outcomes. GM did nothing more than cynically profit from a confluence of factors which resulted in the shortsighted destruction of urban mass transit, which would have happened regardless. MrNemo posted:Your framing of the situation in Europe is pretty odd too. Yes urban development tended to be closer but this wasn't so much due to 'hidebound tradition' and not being able to knock down inns because 'the Emperor crapped there once'. That kind of appreciation for historical sites is fairly new in Europe, the simple reason is that that property was owned by someone who was probably using it for something. It's a consequence of relative population density, land costs more to buy and develop if someone's already using it. We did see suburbs and the like appearing in Europe (especially London) with the development of rail travel because suddenly people could live outside the horrible overcrowded cities but still work there. The difference (from my layman's knowledge) would be that Europe seemed to develop the commuter culture before automobiles became prevalent so suburbs developed around public transport. I don't disagree with you. I was being flippant again. In super general vague terms, the weight of history leads to an urban environment in Europe where there is going to be much greater resistance to outward expansion for multiple reasons. This then preferences more expensive but long term beneficial transportation solutions versus just plopping down megahighways everywhere. Family Values posted:Auto makers of course benefitted from the shift to auto centric planning, but it wasn't nearly the nefarious conspiracy it's often made out to be. Nor is it accurate in my opinion to level claims of incompetence. It's down to small thinking and the balkanized nature of the suburbs, where you have dozens of little municipalities who have no jurisdiction or interest in large metropolitan planning and whose primary purpose is to protect residential property values, which is often at odds with commercial, mixed use, or infrastructure development. Without a centralized planning authority, and with effectively veto power in the hands of the locals, mass transit was (and often still is) doomed. All of the other problems really stem from this root problem, I think. Ding ding ding. There is a lot of elaboration that would expound on this post but there are textbooks devoted to said topic. Ken Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier is a great monograph exploring American suburbia. To be general (again) European governments are much more willing to impose the sort of central authority which makes urban planning work, whereas American planning did and does get mired in patchwork jurisdictional squabbling. Crazy Joe Wilson posted:There was a racial component to suburbanization, but it actually occurred about a decade or two later than what you're guessing. The often touted "white-flight" from American urban centers to suburbs began in the late 60s and early 70s, and consisted of predominately working class White Americans who were reacting to the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (Fair Housing Act) and more importantly the effort to desegregate schools through the "Busing system" (Basically, cities would desegregate by busing students all around cities, so students who lived on one side of a city might go all the way to a school on the other side even if there was an appropriate school just a few minutes away on foot). No, it happened much earlier than that. Racial suburbanization was a decades long process, but it most assuredly kicked off in a legalistic way with the HOLC which was the origin of the term 'redlining'. Crazy Joe Wilson posted:But Busing was the big nail in the coffin that turned a lot of lukewarm White American supporters of the Civil Rights Movement against it, and actually turned a lot of people to private schools (Which naturally meant Public schools started to lose support among the general populace). Bus Desegregation was hardly the catalyst. Also, there's the whole component of de-industrialization that we haven't even touched, but part of the problem there was a ton of factories started to move out of the cities for cheaper land and tax abatements. As factories moved, workers had to move with the factories, which divided more well-off laborers (Who were typically White and able to move) with less well-off (typically African-American, and who were stuck in the cities). I agree with this, but with the caveat that social movements can often exist for years and years before they are labeled and enter the public consciousness. Suburbanization definitely started before WW2, but it wasn't really until the mid century that it was A Thing that the public was aware of and could argue about. boner confessor fucked around with this message at 08:17 on Dec 1, 2013 |
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Dec 1, 2013 08:08
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This is some excellent discussion on the loss of public transit, which I don't want to interrupt, but I just want to note something that kind of got glossed over, perhaps purposely. One poster mentioned both Vietnam and Korea as examples of Communist countries invading other ones, and while the Korean case is certainly complex, the Vietnamese one is far less so. The Americans knew that if all of Vietnam had a democratic election, Ho Chi Mihn would have won handily. That's the whole reason for the creation of South Vietnam. In fact, that "invasion" is basically the same as the North "invading" the south during the American Civil war, with a side splitting off because their way of life was threatened, and the other side going, nope, we're going to be one country. I mean, how could the VC be so powerful in the South unless communism and the North were popular with significant numbers of those living in the south? The leaders of South Vietnam were Catholic, came from groups that overwhelmingly collaborating with the French, and were wealthy. You really think they were popular amongst the mostly nationalistic, poor, and Buddhist Vietnamese? Lastly, there's no point in saying that North Korea was a dictatorship that invaded South Korea, because they were both dictatorships, and South Korea was until the 80s. What's more, the US general that came in after WW2 to oversee the Japanese surrender ignored the established Korean political party, and put in the former Japanese administrators and their Korean allies. When the South Koreans protested, the authorities declared martial law, and killed tens of thousands of them. There were multiple armed rebellions that had to be put done bloodily. So you could argue that the North's invasion was an attempt to overthrow a domestically unpopular government.
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Dec 1, 2013 09:29
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Yeah, saying North Vietnam was the "aggressor" is pretty ridiculous, it was a civil war and the communists were the obviously more popular side. Also, are there sources to back up that GM really had no involvement in that process at all? Because the evidence in LA seems to indicate otherwise. Sub-urbanization was happening and the focus shifted to cars, but the Red Car system wasn't cut down to sized, it was completely eradicated including its existing infrastructure. I think GM's involvement is being heavily whitewashed. It isn't that public transit systems declined or were consolidated they just nearly completely ceased to exist except for a handful of cases. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 09:59 on Dec 1, 2013 |
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Dec 1, 2013 09:55
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Ardennes posted:Also, are there sources to back up that GM really had no involvement in that process at all? Because the evidence in LA seems to indicate otherwise. Sub-urbanization was happening and the focus shifted to cars, but the Red Car system wasn't cut down to sized, it was completely eradicated including its existing infrastructure. The wiki for National City Lines, the specific holding company in question, would be a good place to start. The question here is if NCL was an attempt to destroy mass transit as a thing or just to convert mass transit to a system which would consume the products that American corporations tended to produce. Because when we say 'elimination of mass transit in America' what we're really saying is the reduction of fixed-route rail transit, which has a whole lot of connotations for urban land-use economics and development which weren't academically understood until decades later. It's not like American mass transit was wholly destroyed, it just trended towards bus lines and other automotive modes which were not predominant elsewhere, and which turned out to be somewhat short sighted. Ardennes posted:I think GM's involvement is being heavily whitewashed. It isn't that public transit systems declined or were consolidated they just nearly completely ceased to exist except for a handful of cases. Again, mass transit didn't cease to exist - it just shifted towards buses instead of trains. Turns out this has a lot of other effects aside from the form of traction generation used on the vehicle. Los Angeles is a very specific example, one which can't really be replicated elsewhere in the US much less the world. LA grew very quickly, hand in hand with oil consumption for transportation, and LA is still the standard example of polycentric industrial metropoli developing along a predominantly automotive mode. Trying to extrapolate what happened to LA's streetcar lines as an example of what happened elsewhere in America (as amplified through LA's massive cultural advantage i.e. Hollywood) is painting in overly broad strokes. In my opinion, the worst that GM can be convicted of is trying to expand their market share by converting tram lines to bus lines because GM manufactured buses, not trams. This is a general failure of capitalism, not a specific failure of corrupt power brokers trying to screw over the public in favor of private gains. Lord knows there are enough examples of the latter in American history, but in this case the evidence is somewhat thin and I think largely driven by a general attitude that corporations gently caress the public as an active motivation rather than an incidental thing which happens in the pursuit of higher profits. Ardent Communist posted:What's more, the US general that came in after WW2 to oversee the Japanese surrender ignored the established Korean political party, and put in the former Japanese administrators and their Korean allies. When the South Koreans protested, the authorities declared martial law, and killed tens of thousands of them. There were multiple armed rebellions that had to be put done bloodily. So you could argue that the North's invasion was an attempt to overthrow a domestically unpopular government. MacArthur, that rat bastard, who got saddled with Korea when he mainly cared about using his stewardship of Japan to launch his nascent, narcissistic political career. MacArthur got incredibly loving lucky at Inchon, where the Chinese accurately predicted his strategy but whose warning went unheeded by Kim. MacArthur didn't give two shits about Korea until a war kicked off there that he attempted to surf into political office, which might have worked until he sent American troops north on a quixotic quest to subdue China where they got completely poo poo hammered into frozen hell trench warfare by Chinese troops. MacArthur's hosed up political ambitions failed so hard that President Truman fired him in the middle of a war, despite being literally the most senior and distinguished dude in the US Military and the dude who was de facto ruler of Japan for four years. EDIT: Fun fact about the Korean War: the battle of the Chosin Reservior is famous in American military tradition for being an example of American troops snatching a bare victory from the jaws of defeat. US military formations were surrounded by an overwhelming enemy force in incredibly harsh terrain (practically impassible mountains in the dead of a sub-zero winter) and yet they managed to pull back and avoid the obvious conclusion, that of encirclement and total annihilation. This was only because the Marine commander, Oliver Smith, was egregiously insubordinate to MacArthur (and Ned Almond's) insane demands. When an elite infantry commander is doing everything he can to resist your orders and is quickly vindicated by events, yeah - there's no way around admitting deep failures on the strategic level. boner confessor fucked around with this message at 10:43 on Dec 1, 2013 |
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Dec 1, 2013 10:13
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Grand Prize Winner posted:There is no such thing as tl;dr in history threads. Sperg to your heart's content. What was there about the origins of slavery in the United States that was different from the slavery that was incredibly profitable in the rest of the New World?
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Dec 1, 2013 11:22
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Mitchicon posted:He [Ronald Reagan] was in a state of dementia the entire time. I've heard this joke many times, but was there any truth on this? I know Ronnie used astrologists so he propably wasn't the smartest person. But did he really suffer from dementia?
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Dec 1, 2013 11:40
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