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This is like if you rewrote The Gernsback Continuum as The Hammacher Schelmmer Continuum
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Mar 1, 2018 00:36
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In the early days of christianity people actively sought martyrdom because they believed that martyrs went straight to heaven, unlike all the others who had to wait until judgement day. Because of this a group of christians approached the proconsul of Asia, Arrius Antoninus, in 185 and demanded to be executed. The proconsul executed some of the christians and told the rest that if they wanted to die there were plenty of rope available or cliffs they could jump off.
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Mar 1, 2018 19:56
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Alhazred posted:In the early days of christianity people actively sought martyrdom because they believed that martyrs went straight to heaven, unlike all the others who had to wait until judgement day. Because of this a group of christians approached the proconsul of Asia, Arrius Antoninus, in 185 and demanded to be executed. The proconsul executed some of the christians and told the rest that if they wanted to die there were plenty of rope available or cliffs they could jump off. I imagine they got like halfway through the group and then sighed at each other. "Goddammit, its just not fun when they want to be crucified!" 1stGear has a new favorite as of 21:10 on Mar 1, 2018 |
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Mar 1, 2018 20:30
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Alhazred posted:In the early days of christianity people actively sought martyrdom because they believed that martyrs went straight to heaven, unlike all the others who had to wait until judgement day. Because of this a group of christians approached the proconsul of Asia, Arrius Antoninus, in 185 and demanded to be executed. The proconsul executed some of the christians and told the rest that if they wanted to die there were plenty of rope available or cliffs they could jump off. I probably learned this from this thread, but there was an entire sect of early christianity that would literally attack strangers on the road in order to provoke them into killing their attacker, thereby guaranteeing "martyrdom"
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Mar 1, 2018 20:51
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It's worth mentioning that this was only one part of the Cirumcellions' ideology; the other was that they were basically a weird mixture of religious fundamentalists and radical communist revolutionaries, targetting, robbing and even murdering everybody they considered to be part of the rich and powerful; reportedly they liked to stop carriages in the middle of the road, forcing the drivers to take a walk while their slaves got to drive in the carriage instead. Also virtually all of what we know about them we got from their enemies' writing, i.e. the Catholic (as in opposition to the Arianist movement, not today's Catholic Church) establishment, whose members liked to write about the horrors perpetrated by the Circumcellions towards Catholic clergy, ranging from looting churches to mutilating priests and raping nuns. How much truth there is to these allegations is however totally unclear.
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Mar 1, 2018 21:22
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Sounds fun. “...In an effort to distract him, the kaiser’s entourage decided to put on an entertainment, the kind that amused him: a ballet spectacular performed by the middle-aged members of his various cabinets. The climax was a performance by Field Marshal Count Dietrich von Hülsen-Haeseler, the hefty, fifty-six-year-old chief of Wilhelm’s military cabinet. Described in some sources as wearing a pink tutu (”not for the first time,” Zedlitz-Trützschler wrote), in others a pink ball gown – what was undisputed was that he was in drag – with a large feather in his hair, he performed a series of energetic pirouettes, jumps and capers, flirtatiously blew kisses to his audience, stumbled off the stage and suffered a massive heart attack that killed him instantly. It was reported that by the time the doctors arrived, rigor mortis was so far advanced that it was extremely difficult to get Hülsen out of his tutu and into his military uniform. The story made Wilhelm look even more irresponsible and odd; in the French, Italian, and British papers there were gleeful screeds about German moral degeneracy.” – George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I http://deadpresidents.tumblr.com
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Mar 2, 2018 07:27
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The seige of Tyre, where Alexander The Great had a goddamn road built to take an island city is well known, but thanks to the meme thread, I looked up some details and Jesus wept it's like they wanted a dude who was really good at conquering good and offended:quote:Alexander knew of a temple to Melqart, whom he identified with Heracles, within the new city walls and informed the inhabitants that they would be spared if he were allowed to make a sacrifice in the temple (the old port had been abandoned and the Tyrians were now living on an offshore island a kilometre from the mainland). The defenders refused to allow this and suggested he use the temple on the mainland, saying that they would not let Persians or Macedonians within their new city. A second attempt at negotiation resulted in Alexander's representatives being killed and then thrown from the walls into the sea. Alexander was enraged at the Tyrian defiance and ordered the siege to commence. Do not taunt Alexander The Great, what the gently caress is wrong with you?
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Mar 4, 2018 05:13
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MisterBibs posted:The seige of Tyre, where Alexander The Great had a goddamn road built to take an island city is well known, but thanks to the meme thread, I looked up some details and Jesus wept it's like they wanted a dude who was really good at conquering good and offended: Ala ad-Din Muhammad II posted:Let's kill Genghis Khan's messengers, I don't see how that could backfire.
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Mar 4, 2018 12:16
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I mean we do have the lake thing sort of, with the hamster balls of clear plastic.
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Mar 4, 2018 14:27
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I always feel bad for the various historical envoys who get killed for the equivalent of one rich dude flipping off another
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Mar 4, 2018 16:43
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I always feel bad for the various historical envoys who get killed for the equivalent of one rich dude flipping off another If it makes you feel better, they'd probably be dead by now anyway.
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Mar 4, 2018 16:55
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RagnarokAngel posted:If it makes you feel better, they'd probably be dead by now anyway. This is also true of everyone who was killed during world war 2. Makes u think In seriousness that joke made me consider how weird it'll be 20 or 30 years from now when I'm (hopefully) still alive and predisposed to every other grandpa being a vet but in fact that war will be all but erased from living memory, just like what's already happened to WW1.
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Mar 4, 2018 19:15
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:This is also true of everyone who was killed during world war 2. Makes u think Boy do I have good news for you, mister! I see no end to being at war somewhere in the world for the rest of our lives.
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Mar 4, 2018 20:25
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:This is also true of everyone who was killed during world war 2. Makes u think
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Mar 5, 2018 02:04
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System Metternich posted:It's worth mentioning that this was only one part of the Cirumcellions' ideology; the other was that they were basically a weird mixture of religious fundamentalists and radical communist revolutionaries, targetting, robbing and even murdering everybody they considered to be part of the rich and powerful; reportedly they liked to stop carriages in the middle of the road, forcing the drivers to take a walk while their slaves got to drive in the carriage instead.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_anarchism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_communism
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Mar 5, 2018 03:25
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MisterBibs posted:The seige of Tyre, where Alexander The Great had a goddamn road built to take an island city is well known, but thanks to the meme thread, I looked up some details and Jesus wept it's like they wanted a dude who was really good at conquering good and offended: He was actually known as Alexander the Up and Comer at that point, but hindsight is a bitch
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Mar 5, 2018 03:35
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Milo and POTUS posted:He was actually known as Alexander the Up and Comer at that point, but hindsight is a bitch Man, I woulda gone with Alexander the Contender.
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Mar 5, 2018 04:01
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He started out as Alexander the Ok, I guess. Then once he had done a bit of conquering he was Alexander the Pretty Neat then Alexander the Bitchin' and then Alexander the Niiiiiiice. It wasn't until after he had conquered Persia that he became the Great.
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Mar 5, 2018 04:12
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anonumos posted:Boy do I have good news for you, mister! I see no end to being at war somewhere in the world for the rest of our lives. Nessus posted:You can probably look forward to more Holocaust revisionism I'm gonna try and stay positive and hope for an end to all wars around the same the zeppelin-watermill-unicycle, hover variant, is invented. We have time.
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Mar 5, 2018 04:12
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Most people know about the Navajo Code Talkers, but they were neither the only, nor the first, code talkers. The first American Indian code talkers (though that specific name wouldn't come into vogue until WWII) were Choctaws, after an American commander heard two of them talking to each other and realized the potential. There ended up being at least 19 of them, spread out individually across companies of the 142nd Infantry. Though there's some debate that a group of Cherokee soldiers might've been the first deliberate use, during the Battle of the Somme. The Navajo code talkers served with the Marines in the Pacific War theater of WWII, but Indian code talkers were rarely used in the European theater because US intel was aware that the Germans had sent a team of 30 anthropologists to the US between the wars to study indigenous languages. And even though clearly 30 guys aren't going to gain enough fluency in every language to be useful, since they couldn't know which languages the Germans were strongest in, it was thought best to not use that technique against the Germans. That said, on a less-organized basis members of the Assiniboine (Montana), Cree, Meskwaki (Iowa) were used in the fight in Europe. Also some 14 Comanches were used for the invasion at Normandy, and taking their cue from the Navajo they not only used their language, but used code-words even within the language to avoid detection. For those only slightly aware of the Navajo program, since there was still some danger of the Japanese somehow finding someone with a knowledge of Navajo, the Code Talkers underwent a training program where they learned a large number of code terms for military vocab. This turned out to have been a seriously good idea, because in 1942 the Japanese captured Joe Kieyoomia in the Philippines, and though initially they thought he was Nisei Japanese and beat him for being a traitor, once they realized he was Navajo they were thrilled that they'd found a code-breaker. The problem was once they got him listening to the radio, all he could interpret was a bunch of nonsensical terms jammed together, so the code-wording within the language itself kept the Code Talker program secure. Other than the US, some other countries have had similar programs. During the Arab-Israeli War, the Egyptians used Nubian speakers to send some transmissions. And during the Yugoslav War, British peacekeeping troops used Welsh for non-sensitive routine communications, since any decent-sized unit is going to have some Welsh speakers in it. This may be apocryphal, but I read somewhere that the Brits briefly considered using Welsh code talkers during the Falklands War, but then someone pointed out that was a bad idea because Argentina is the second-most Welsh-speaking nation on earth. Counter-intuitive, but in the 1800s Argentina had a Welsh immigrant colony in Patagonia, and even in the 1980s several thousand of them still spoke Welsh, so it would've been really easy for the Argentine government to grab a few of them to serve in military intel offices for the conflict.
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Mar 5, 2018 04:21
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Kanine posted:
Wonder if the weird detail "Red Beard" is a reference to this book written under the pseudonym of Ragnar Redbeard. Though I'm pretty sure Jesus wouldn't be too happy to have many of the ideas in it associated with him.
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Mar 5, 2018 05:34
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:Code Talkers Awesomeness That's some cool info. What period were the Choctaws operating in? I've often wondered if anything like this happened with Commonwealth forces in WWI/WWII. Indigenous culture wasn't exactly promoted in any part of the Empire at that time but it seems like something that makes sense operationally.
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Mar 5, 2018 07:02
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slothrop posted:That's some cool info. What period were the Choctaws operating in? Wikipedia says the Choctaw were during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in WWI. For Commonwealth, WP also says the Canadians used Cree speakers in WWII. I'm pondering what other Allied nations could've used Code Talkers but apparently didn't (or did and it's just not as publicly known). The French had a lot of African troops in their colonial forces, so you'd think that they could've puzzled out which communities' languages were unlikely to be known by the Germans or Italians. But I suppose given the Vichy and Occupied French were on the German side they could probably rustle up former missionaries or traders who'd worked in those areas. For the Brits, I started to ponder whether they could've used Indian troops for code talkers since India has a huge array of languages. But then I recalled that there was that whole Indian National Army group that fought for the Japanese in hopes of getting an Indian homeland after the Brits were gone. Plus the Japanese captured a ton of Indian troops when they seized Singapore and Malaysia, plus plenty of Indian civilians living in diaspora there, so if they'd started hearing Indian languages on the radio it wouldn't have taken them too long to figure out which language it was and who they had either induce/bribe/coerce to translate for them. No idea if the Japanese would've had any shot at finding Maori translators to snag intercepts of New Zealand radio. And Australia has a massive array of Aboriginal languages, to the point there's no way the Japanese could cover even a fraction of the possibilities, but given that white Australians didn't have a very high opinion of the Aboriginal people, they likely overlooked that possibility.
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Mar 5, 2018 10:53
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I just recalled a story about the *opposite* of code talkers. Apparently during the Algerian War (1945–1962 war that kicked the French out), the Algerians rebels had a mix of people who didn't all necessarily speak Arabic, like left-wing white French people, and Berber-speaking Algerians. Also a lot of the leadership of the rebellion had a solid education and a tendency towards being very organized and official. The net result of which is that the rebellion ended up excessively-documenting everything, and when they did it tended to be in French. So if a courier got picked up and their papers taken to French military intel, it'd be a nice neat organized packet of names and itineraries, all written in standard French with no need for translation. So yeah, that was not the most strategic set of decisions. As a tangential point, I also enjoyed reading about the experiences of Cajuns in WWI. They were apparently in high demand because they were the largest US source of reliable French translators, and per the stories they were absolutely blown away by being in France. They'd grown up hearing there was such a place, like a full civilized country that spoke their language, unlike back at home where all the people with money and technology were English-speaking and all the French speakers were poor and rural. Apparently it was a watershed moment in Cajun identity when the troops returned home with a strengthened sense of pan-Francophone identity.
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Mar 5, 2018 11:01
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:I just recalled a story about the *opposite* of code talkers. That reminds me of a story that during Overlord, when the franco-canadian Rgt de le Chaudière arrived in Normandy, covergent evolution had apparently made their accent similar enough to the local one that some norman villages thought this was a resistance unit of local boys come to rescue them, just in tommy uniforms. About Joe Kieyoomia being taken for a japanese-american, where there a lot of japanese-americans deployed in the pacific? I'm guessing not for obvious reasons, but if there were, I can only imagine how brutal being taken captive would be given how brutal the japanese treated... all PoWs.
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Mar 5, 2018 15:04
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:For those only slightly aware of the Navajo program, since there was still some danger of the Japanese somehow finding someone with a knowledge of Navajo, the Code Talkers underwent a training program where they learned a large number of code terms for military vocab. This turned out to have been a seriously good idea, because in 1942 the Japanese captured Joe Kieyoomia in the Philippines, and though initially they thought he was Nisei Japanese and beat him for being a traitor, once they realized he was Navajo they were thrilled that they'd found a code-breaker. The problem was once they got him listening to the radio, all he could interpret was a bunch of nonsensical terms jammed together, so the code-wording within the language itself kept the Code Talker program secure. Was Japanese codebreaking that bad that they couldn't figure out a simple substitution cypher? Have him listen to a lot of talking, write it down, correlate it to facts you already know - if you're routinely hearing the word for "fish" before an assault, maybe fish is something assault related.
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Mar 5, 2018 15:11
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CoolCab posted:Was Japanese codebreaking that bad that they couldn't figure out a simple substitution cypher? Have him listen to a lot of talking, write it down, correlate it to facts you already know - if you're routinely hearing the word for "fish" before an assault, maybe fish is something assault related. There's a lot of different things it could be. Let's say you hear "Fish" before an assault. Is it the code word for an assault, a type of vehicle, a tactic, a time? One example where code breaking did work that way was the US figuring out that the Japanese were going to attack Midway. They easily intercepted the messages and knew enough of the code to know that the Japanese target was codenamed "AF", but didn't know what it actually was. So as a test, they broadcast a fake unencrypted radio message that Midway's desalination plant had broken down. Sure enough, the Japanese promptly sent a coded message that AF's desalination plant had broken down.
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Mar 5, 2018 15:51
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chitoryu12 posted:One example where code breaking did work that way was the US figuring out that the Japanese were going to attack Midway. They easily intercepted the messages and knew enough of the code to know that the Japanese target was codenamed "AF", but didn't know what it actually was. So as a test, they broadcast a fake unencrypted radio message that Midway's desalination plant had broken down. Sure enough, the Japanese promptly sent a coded message that AF's desalination plant had broken down. edit: holy poo poo, Joe Kieyoomia spent three and a half years as a POW and it ended when they bombed Nagasaki. Dude had a rough life. DACK FAYDEN has a new favorite as of 16:57 on Mar 5, 2018 |
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Mar 5, 2018 16:47
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:I just recalled a story about the *opposite* of code talkers. 
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Mar 5, 2018 17:43
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DACK FAYDEN posted:edit: holy poo poo, Joe Kieyoomia spent three and a half years as a POW and it ended when they bombed Nagasaki. Dude had a rough life. Hard to beat Tsutomu Yamaguchi: he was in Hiroshima in 1945 on a business trip, was about to leave from the train station but realized he'd forgotten his travel papers back at his office. He ended up being 3km away from Ground Zero when the nuke dropped, was wounded and spent the night in an air-raid shelter. The next day he made a dash for safety back to his hometown... which happened to be Nagasaki. So three days later he was back at work, telling his boss the crazy thing that happened, when the US dropped the second nuke, coincidentally also 3km from his office. Guy ended up dying of cancer, but in 2010 so apparently he was one lucky dude.
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Mar 5, 2018 18:20
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In the 18th century pineapples were the ultimate status symbol and if you couldn't afford to buy one you could rent one for the night.
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Mar 5, 2018 20:02
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:Hard to beat Tsutomu Yamaguchi: he was in Hiroshima in 1945 on a business trip, was about to leave from the train station but realized he'd forgotten his travel papers back at his office. He ended up being 3km away from Ground Zero when the nuke dropped, was wounded and spent the night in an air-raid shelter. The next day he made a dash for safety back to his hometown... which happened to be Nagasaki. So three days later he was back at work, telling his boss the crazy thing that happened, when the US dropped the second nuke, coincidentally also 3km from his office. Motherfucker, take some sick leave.
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Mar 5, 2018 20:02
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Alhazred posted:In the 18th century pineapples were the ultimate status symbol and if you couldn't afford to buy one you could rent one for the night. Which explains why you'd make the cupola of your elaborate 18th century hothouse look like one. 
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Mar 5, 2018 20:56
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Alhazred posted:In the 18th century pineapples were the ultimate status symbol and if you couldn't afford to buy one you could rent one for the night. Not only that but for at least one Pineapple rental firm in London, you had to get the accompanying insurance in case one of your guests ate it, presumably while drunk.
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Mar 5, 2018 20:58
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https://twitter.com/holland_tom/status/970703743393062913?s=19 https://twitter.com/holland_tom/status/970703985093918720?s=19
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Mar 5, 2018 22:26
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Technocrat posted:https://twitter.com/holland_tom/status/970703743393062913?s=19
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Mar 5, 2018 22:44
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:Hard to beat Tsutomu Yamaguchi: he was in Hiroshima in 1945 on a business trip, was about to leave from the train station but realized he'd forgotten his travel papers back at his office. He ended up being 3km away from Ground Zero when the nuke dropped, was wounded and spent the night in an air-raid shelter. The next day he made a dash for safety back to his hometown... which happened to be Nagasaki. So three days later he was back at work, telling his boss the crazy thing that happened, when the US dropped the second nuke, coincidentally also 3km from his office. The thing that's probably most worth repeating after all that is that he lived to be 93. Dude survived two nukes then died in his 90's. He basically laughed in death's face, kicked it in the balls, and gave it a wedgie.
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Mar 6, 2018 00:09
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Hell, isn't this why teenage nerds go through bdsm/libertarian/d&d phases? Who the hell gets into D&D thinking they're gonna get laid? What kind of weird bizzaro world are your from?!
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Mar 6, 2018 01:34
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Solice Kirsk posted:Who the hell gets into D&D thinking they're gonna get laid? What kind of weird bizzaro world are your from?! A fantasy one. So, y'know, you can see the connection there.
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Mar 6, 2018 01:37
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The thing that's probably most worth repeating after all that is that he lived to be 93. The oldest woman ever reportedly drank a bottle of wine every day and chain smoked. Genetics, like the french, are weird.
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Mar 6, 2018 02:50
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