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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Same b. Dude was dangerous but he didn't deserve to die. Also maybe he can get the help he needs now. a lot of fuckin help QFT Honestly I hope the feds lock him up in a psychiatric facility for a year or so
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Apr 9, 2016 06:25
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Who is caro?
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Apr 9, 2016 06:39
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dublish posted:Who is caro? possibly the craziest goon to subsequently be interviewed by NPR and be the subject of a GQ article
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Apr 9, 2016 06:45
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dublish posted:Who is caro? Whatever else may be said, Caro is a person who has had a more...interesting life than most of us. He also proves rhat having (or desiring) an interesting life is often a curse rather than blessing...
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Apr 9, 2016 07:31
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Pre-WW2 Russian stuff tended to be that way. Post, as well.
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Apr 9, 2016 08:18
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Can we please put an end to all wars so that Caro doesn't get himself killed in yet another conflict? 
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Apr 9, 2016 14:10
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Just promise that you people will notify Vice and post a link to the resulting interview
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Apr 9, 2016 17:59
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I'm just glad that we didn't give Michael Bay another excuse to use a dead goon in one of his terrible films
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Apr 9, 2016 19:15
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The crazy ones always survive.
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Apr 9, 2016 22:26
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100 Years Ago And A Bit More Too It's now the 5th of April, and yesterday we left a bunch of extremely poor bastards from Kitchener's Army, many of whom survived Suvla Bay, fixing bayonets in a frankly hopeless cause at the Hanna chokepoint. I believe I said that they'd need a miracle to take the position. And wouldn't you know it? You wait ages in this war for one miracle and then two come along at once! Perhaps there is hope for Kut after all. There's certainly hope for Edward Mousley and chums. Elsewhere; the fighting on Lolkisale begins to sputter as thirst grips the South African Horse; the Germans make final preparations to swing the sledgehammer at Verdun once more; Aristide Briand secures future British cooperation by bearding Herbert Asquith and forcing him to listen to his finance minister's plan to have the Bank of England buy some cheap French bonds; Grigoris Balakian turns down a chance to escape the death march on his own; and the Sunny Subaltern gives us yet more extremely interesting detail about trotting up and down the Menin Road with the rations.
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Apr 9, 2016 23:08
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steinrokkan posted:The crazy ones always survive. your av and text are gold
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Apr 9, 2016 23:38
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Hogge Wild posted:your av and text are gold Thanks, you've read the Svejk novels?
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Apr 9, 2016 23:45
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steinrokkan posted:Thanks, you've read the Svejk novels? Yeah, and actually when I was a conscript myself. Timeless stuff. And I also watched this when I was a kid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfMdakd4bHI
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Apr 9, 2016 23:52
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Hogge Wild posted:Yeah, and actually when I was a conscript myself. Timeless stuff. And I also watched this when I was a kid: Man, that is a sad, sad parody of the original. Unfortunately it seems that there is no English translation of the awesome movie version starring Ruddolf Hrusinsky. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDU2AEwCIuc The Svejk moives are the pinnacle of our national culture, arguably. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Apr 10, 2016 |
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Apr 9, 2016 23:57
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I remember reading a couple of strips of a comic based on the Švejk's misadventures when I was a kid. The fact that he was probably being incompetent on purpose completely flew past me at the time. 
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Apr 10, 2016 00:26
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HEY GAL posted:I'm going to make a new shirt for reenactment, probably based on these models: Have you decided yet whether to go with the standard Bar human being or the more esoteric Twisted human being
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Apr 10, 2016 00:38
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swamp waste posted:Have you decided yet whether to go with the standard Bar human being or the more esoteric Twisted human being leaning Italian human being tbh
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Apr 10, 2016 01:09
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E: Aw, my granddad bound and drew for a copy of the Good Soldier Svejk :3 This is a mistake. Dude has untreated paranoid schizophrenia, exercabated by 4 years in a Syrian torture room, and SA( for all that it does well) is full of manchildren who will flame and troll him. Better he get the help he desperately needs, and then he can tell his story if and when he wants to.
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Apr 10, 2016 06:34
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Tias posted:This is a mistake. Dude has untreated paranoid schizophrenia, exercabated by 4 years in a Syrian torture room, and SA( for all that it does well) is full of manchildren who will flame and troll him. Better he get the help he desperately needs, and then he can tell his story if and when he wants to. Why the gently caress does everybody get infantalized and told to go get locked up again? Let people be weird, drat.
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Apr 10, 2016 12:49
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Panzeh posted:Why the gently caress does everybody get infantalized and told to go get locked up again? Let people be weird, drat. Eh, being an actual schizophrenic is a bit different from being "weird".
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Apr 10, 2016 14:09
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So I recently finished reading Grant's memoirs, and there's an interesting claim he makes I'd like to double-check against the thread. He repeatedly describes the Confederacy as an "armed camp," essentially a military dictatorship, and contrasts this with the Union's freer government structures. According to him, this has two concrete effects - first, the South practiced censorship of the press, so that Southerners only ever heard stories of victory or talk about the justice of the cause while Northern papers would consistently espouse doom, gloom, and the next best thing to "treason" without the US government doing much about them. Second, he argues that the Confederacy was able to draft more of their population into the army and do so sooner because of their military dictatorship, while the US government had to tiptoe around drafting so as not to cause a political shitstorm. Both arguments he tends to pull out to refute the idea that the Union was militarily incompetent because it took so long to defeat the South even with all its advantages - basically going "Yeah, well, we could have beaten the South a whole lot sooner if we were willing to stoop to the same level the South did." So - how accurate was Grant's depiction of the South there? Did they in fact practice censorship more often than the North, were they quicker and more effective in drafting and mobilizing their population, and was the South notably more dictatorial as a government than the North at the time?
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Apr 10, 2016 14:10
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Tomn posted:So I recently finished reading Grant's memoirs, and there's an interesting claim he makes I'd like to double-check against the thread. He repeatedly describes the Confederacy as an "armed camp," essentially a military dictatorship, and contrasts this with the Union's freer government structures. According to him, this has two concrete effects - first, the South practiced censorship of the press, so that Southerners only ever heard stories of victory or talk about the justice of the cause while Northern papers would consistently espouse doom, gloom, and the next best thing to "treason" without the US government doing much about them. Second, he argues that the Confederacy was able to draft more of their population into the army and do so sooner because of their military dictatorship, while the US government had to tiptoe around drafting so as not to cause a political shitstorm. Both arguments he tends to pull out to refute the idea that the Union was militarily incompetent because it took so long to defeat the South even with all its advantages - basically going "Yeah, well, we could have beaten the South a whole lot sooner if we were willing to stoop to the same level the South did." That's kind of a...mixed bag. The CSA wasn't ever anything close to a dictatorship, not even in the de facto WWI Hindenburg/Ludendorff sense. The closest example is probably Kirby Smith and the Trans-Mississippi Department (which was basically the entire CSA west of the Mississippi), but even then the situation was more anarchy than dictatorial. The only real examples of dictatorial power that we saw during the war were the northern military governors who administrated the occupied chunks of the CSA, like New Orleans or Nashville. Even then I'd hesitate to call them dictators; their administrative roles were pretty minimal and they were really only there to secure the territory. In national terms the CSA was pretty profoundly anti-autocratic, at least in a federal sense. Davis never had anywhere close to the power or influence of Lincoln, as best illustrated by his VP going around calling him nasty names for much of the last two years of the war. Remember, these guys were pretty....shall we say, hardline? about states' rights and they took their democracy pretty seriously right up until the very end of things. I suspect what Grant was alluding to with the "armed camp" comment was directed at one specific place and time, that being the ANV during the sieges of Petersburg and Richmond. The army there basically ran the show and did what it wanted, but that wasn't substantially different from how any other army in a similar situation behaved throughout the war. Regarding the newspapers, he's again about half-right, but kind of accidentally. There was plenty of censorship in the press on both sides; in the north it was much more official and often violent. In the south, it tended to be more accidental and or voluntary. Remember that reporting on battles was dependent on a combination of on-site reporters and government press releases, both of whom were obviously incentive to mislead, or at least to exaggerate in the CSA's favor. The North had a similar situation but it wasn't nearly as pronounced, namely because there were a lot of very loud anti-war, anti-government, pro-southern papers throughout the northern states. To that end I suspect that the US government did a lot more censoring of the press than did the south...not because they were more autocratic, but because they had a lot more active dissent in their population. This is speculation though. With regard to politics, the southern press was just as loud and angry as anyone in the north, and maybe moreso. The Richmond Examiner in particular was pretty much obsessed with ripping on Jeff Davis that it turned into something of a tabloid over time, publishing everything from private correspondence to outright lies. Things were even worse in Georgia....Georgia in general really, REALLY hated the CSA federal government and most of their press, not to mention their governor, spent most of their waking hours writing and speaking to that end. He's also about half-right about the draft: the south did initiate the draft earlier and they made it more comprehensive (by the end it was like "are you a dude? can you walk? you'll do!"), but that wasn't because they were a "military dictatorship", it was because the war in general was a whole lot more politically popular in the south than in the north. The draft was unpopular on both sides, but Davis had far more political willpower to spend in the prosecution of the war than did Lincoln: Lincoln had to walk a VERY fine line between military efficiency and political expediency; Davis had a bit more latitude in this regard. Even then the draft in the south was widely denounced and it was a whole lot less effective than it ever was in the north....there were whole counties, and even big chunks of states, especially out west, that basically said "no gently caress u" and didn't respond to any of the draft laws. This didn't really happen in the north, at least on a wide scale. All that being said, manpower was never really the biggest issue the CSA armies faced: throughout the war and particularly towards the end they had far more men than they did food and equipment, so the draft was never really a huge enabler for them. So anyway in summation Grant was probably right that with widespread censorship and a comprehensive draft earlier on the North probably would have done better militarily, but those measures likely would have spelled the end of the Republican party and Lincoln's administration, if not resulting in a couple more border states seceding. He's not right in the way he characterized the CSA government or press, basically, at all.
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Apr 10, 2016 14:58
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If you want to see for yourself what was actually printed in Southern (or Northern) newspapers during the war, go here: http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/search/titles/ Pick a state, or a specific newspaper, and see what it printed from 1861-1865. You can also compare newspapers from a specific date in multiple cities, if you like, and see the differences in how they reported on a particular event.
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Apr 10, 2016 18:53
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Panzeh posted:Why the gently caress does everybody get infantalized and told to go get locked up again? Let people be weird, drat. That's not really my point. People in my family have schizophrenia, and the issue is not that it turns you 'weird' (way to stigmatize non-neurotypical people, there), but that you get powerful irrational impulses, often to do things that make you a danger to yourself and others. To clarify, he needs to get well so he doesn't travel into an active war zone and start picking fights again, then he can be as weird as he wants to.
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Apr 10, 2016 19:08
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I'm going to disagree a little bit. You're right from a modern perspective, but Grant lived and wrote before any of the modern attempts at a totalitarian state. At the time it wasn't Democracy vs Dictatorship, but Democracy vs Monarchy or Democracy vs Aristocracy. I suspect it's the latter that he was thinking about. There was the belief that the South was ruled by planter aristocrats who effectively took away all the poor peoples' voice. I'm not qualified to say how close that was to the truth, but it was widely believed. Both governments arrested editors, shut down presses, and censored news. What was different was that the North had a loud and organized political opposition, while the anti-administration voices in the South never formed into a coherent party. It was partially that the Confederacy didn't last long enough, and partially that the Confederate Congress was famously bad, composed of nobodies who accomplished nothing. The South was very effective at mobilizing its manpower, and started the draft relatively early in the war (April of 1862). They also kept extending the time of service for those who enlisted voluntarily, while a Northern soldier whose enlistment ran out could go home (though he was certainly encouraged to sign back up). The North had a manpower advantage, but it wasn't that overwhelming; for most of the war the number of men actively enlisted was 2-1, and the North could bring less of it to the battlefield. In the last year the advantage went absurdly in the North's favor. Playing up the manpower disadvantage was one of the Lost Cause writers' favorite things; they were failed Southern generals who were trying to explain why they failed. I doubt either one was a major reason for the war's length. People tend to forget just how big, physically big, the Confederacy was, and it had bad roads and railroads (if the Confederacy reformed today, it would be the 13th largest country by land size). Before the war, one pro-succession argument was that the South was so large it could never be occupied. The Southern generals look great, if you focus on Lee and his army, but out west they look almost incompetent. Even with that, it's not until the summer of 1863 that the North has the Mississippi under control. Just too much territory.
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Apr 10, 2016 19:25
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All interesting stuff - if anyone has more to say about this, I'd love to hear more.bewbies posted:it was because the war in general was a whole lot more politically popular in the south than in the north. Interesting side note about that - partway through his memoirs Grant apparently thought it was worth spending a few paragraphs making GBS threads over European soldiers, basically saying "We Americans (Union and Rebels alike) have thinking men who know and love what they're fighting for, which makes for better fighting men than the Europeans with their poor brutalized robots that fight for a salary and nothing else." Leaving aside the question of whether it made for better fighting men or not, DID European soldiers of the Civil War period know or care much about the causes they were fighting for, as far as we know? For that matter, how far were the American soldiers motivated by their causes, as far as we can tell? The volunteers would go without saying, but I imagine the draftees were a good deal less enthusiastic. Related note to that, it's interesting that Grant's memoirs focus mainly on the preservation of the Union and the treason of the South as his view on why the Union cause was just. I'm not sure how much traction such a viewpoint would gain in the modern day. BurningStone posted:I doubt either one was a major reason for the war's length. People tend to forget just how big, physically big, the Confederacy was, and it had bad roads and railroads (if the Confederacy reformed today, it would be the 13th largest country by land size). Before the war, one pro-succession argument was that the South was so large it could never be occupied. The Southern generals look great, if you focus on Lee and his army, but out west they look almost incompetent. Even with that, it's not until the summer of 1863 that the North has the Mississippi under control. Just too much territory. That's an interesting point - Grant takes great pains to note, repeatedly, that for all the Union's numerical advantage a lot of it was tied down in holding down territory and guarding supply lines from guerrillas, so that the Union battlefield advantage was usually pretty slim when it existed at all. He also talks a lot about the divided commands of the North, contrasting this with the South's more unified command structure and interior lines which allowed the South to shift troops around and concentrate forces on weaker Union forces while the Union generals were squabbling about who had the right to order who around. He seemed to think that the most important part of his being assigned to command the Union armies was just the fact that there was now one general in charge of everyone who could now devise a coherent strategy that didn't allow the Confederates to just divide and conquer at will. Question - did the Confederacy actually have a more unified command structure, or did it just seem that way to him at the time?
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Apr 10, 2016 19:50
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Tomn posted:Interesting side note about that - partway through his memoirs Grant apparently thought it was worth spending a few paragraphs making GBS threads over European soldiers, basically saying "We Americans (Union and Rebels alike) have thinking men who know and love what they're fighting for, which makes for better fighting men than the Europeans with their poor brutalized robots that fight for a salary and nothing else." Leaving aside the question of whether it made for better fighting men or not, DID European soldiers of the Civil War period know or care much about the causes they were fighting for, as far as we know? For that matter, how far were the American soldiers motivated by their causes, as far as we can tell? The volunteers would go without saying, but I imagine the draftees were a good deal less enthusiastic. In The Glorious Cause, Robert Middlekauff contrasts the motivations of American soldiers and their British counterparts similarly. It makes sense for the Revolution, but I think that Grant's view of Civil War soldiers might be somewhat idealistic here.
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Apr 10, 2016 21:01
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Pop Quiz: At least one type of Imperial Japanese Navy practice bomb had a filling that consisted of glass disks, as well as titanium tetrachloride. The bomb in question was used against target ship(s) Why did the IJN practice bomb use glass disks for filling? The purpose was to lessen the damage done to the target ship, while still keeping the proper trajectory and ballistics of the bomb.
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Apr 10, 2016 22:00
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Pop Quiz: At least one type of Imperial Japanese Navy practice bomb had a filling that consisted of glass disks, as well as titanium tetrachloride. The bomb in question was used against target ship(s) I was hoping for  !
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Apr 10, 2016 22:08
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Tomn posted:He also talks a lot about the divided commands of the North, contrasting this with the South's more unified command structure and interior lines which allowed the South to shift troops around and concentrate forces on weaker Union forces while the Union generals were squabbling about who had the right to order who around. He seemed to think that the most important part of his being assigned to command the Union armies was just the fact that there was now one general in charge of everyone who could now devise a coherent strategy that didn't allow the Confederates to just divide and conquer at will. Question - did the Confederacy actually have a more unified command structure, or did it just seem that way to him at the time? As far as I know, Grant's wrong about this. The South had their armies act in concert exactly once, and the rest of the time the armies pretty much did whatever the army commander wanted. The South definitively didn't have a coherent strategy or a functionally unified command structure. When Lee was finally put in overall command of the South's armies, the war was essentially all but over.
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Apr 10, 2016 22:14
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Xerxes17 posted:I was hoping for That would actually be funny to see
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Apr 10, 2016 22:17
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Tomn posted:All interesting stuff - if anyone has more to say about this, I'd love to hear more. Yeah, Grant's full of poo poo on this. This is post-French Revolution and nationalistic recruitment was a BIG THING at that time. gently caress, the Prussian soldiers of Frederick the Great were certainly motivated and knew what they were fighting for during the 7 years war, although they were probably a bit more exceptional during that era. I really don't think you can call the Germans and the French in the Franco-Prussian war robots without a sense of national loyalty or cause, and that's the same general era as the ACW.
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Apr 10, 2016 23:03
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people who are like us do the good kind of war, as opposed to foreigners, who do the bad kind
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Apr 10, 2016 23:06
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HEY GAL posted:people who are like us do the good kind of war, as opposed to foreigners, who do the bad kind And then there are mercenaries, who do the worst kind because they have no loyalty other than to their purse.
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Apr 10, 2016 23:09
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Cyrano4747 posted:And then there are mercenaries, who do the worst kind because they have no loyalty other than to their purse. hey. you forgot "everyone else's purse too"
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Apr 10, 2016 23:11
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Kemper Boyd posted:As far as I know, Grant's wrong about this. The South had their armies act in concert exactly once, and the rest of the time the armies pretty much did whatever the army commander wanted. The South definitively didn't have a coherent strategy or a functionally unified command structure. When Lee was finally put in overall command of the South's armies, the war was essentially all but over. Look at Price's Expedition for a great example of this. People back east ask old Kirby Smith to help them out, he can't, but he comes up with this ridiculous idea of attacking Federal-held Missouri. He sends an incompetent popinjay named Sterling Price with a largely untrained, ill-equipped "army" and a set of nebulous goals, over the border. The whole thing goes very, very poorly. Price had a very wide mandate from Smith, who in turn was basically an independent satrap himself. Nobody in Richmond had the slightest authority over anything that happened by several degrees.
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Apr 10, 2016 23:12
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I started watching the Ken Burns Civil War documentary on Netflix. poo poo is legit - hopefully I actually develop a base for appreciating Sherman and Grant, aside from knowing they were people reckoned as failures until war came along.
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Apr 11, 2016 00:18
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Nebakenezzer posted:I started watching the Ken Burns Civil War documentary on Netflix. poo poo is legit - hopefully I actually develop a base for appreciating Sherman and Grant, aside from knowing they were people reckoned as failures until war came along. Cool, I'm doing the same thing right now and six episodes in I definitely feel like I could start reading up on those dudes out of honest interest.
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Apr 11, 2016 01:10
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HEY GAL posted:hey.
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Apr 11, 2016 01:28
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Geez, where's Trin Tragula. I had nothing to read on the bus to work today.
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