Nebakenezzer posted:

Phanatic posted:

I love the Latvian jokes. I have no idea why Latvia was chosen as the butt of them, but they're great. And dumb.

Telsa Cola posted:

That Jewish dudes mother is loving insane, god drat.

Nebakenezzer posted:

Nebakenezzer posted:

Major Major Major posted:

When the guy in the story "Fourteen and a Half" says he lost his "fork", which body part does that correspond to? Just curious.

echopapa posted:

After the Six Day War, Leonid Brezhnev asked Nasser, “How could you possibly lose the war so quickly? Didn’t you listen to your Soviet advisors?”

Nasser said, “We did exactly what your advisors told us to do: retreat and wait for the winter!”

-------------

On July 21, 1969, Brezhnev called his leading cosmonauts into his office. He said, “The Americans have landed on the moon. We will do better: you are going to fly on a mission to land on the sun.”

The cosmonauts said, “But Comrade, we will burn!”

Brezhnev said, “Don’t be ridiculous! You will fly at night!”

quote:

The Egyptians themselves reacted with ill-concealed delight at the outcome of the engagement. They had previously suffered intense criticism of their own performance and boasts of superior Soviet skills, when in fact the Soviets had fallen for tactics the Egyptians were already familiar with.

Rocko Bonaparte posted:

Yeah I kind of want to make one with the "my children like to hear about the time their father was exposed to atomic radiation" and have it just kind of scrolling through the faces.

Chopstix posted:

Coincidentally I just heard an interesting ancedote about Egypt and Russian advisors.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rimon_20


It got so bad that the Egyptians were laughing at the advisors and the pilot’s death, and Nasser had to give them orders to stop

Hazzard posted:

I've heard similar things in the US Civil War. But the impression I got was the soldier is under so much stress that they're only thinking about loading and aren't even thinking to fire.

Speaking of, does anyone know anything about Firing Drills in the Civil War? I've never heard anything specific, but guessed they were basically non-existent and were more or less free fire like Revolutionary France attempted for a while.

Hexyflexy posted:

That's all awesome, what's the book I desperately want to read it.

quote:

A sign of King's true feeling about the war came in April 1943, when the mass grave of the Polish officers massacred by the NKVD in Katyn Wood was discovered, which lead King to write in his diary that it was the Poles who caused the outbreak of the war in 1939 by refusing to give in to Hitler's demand that the Free City of Danzig be allowed to rejoin Germany, and as such it was the Poles' own fault for the Katyn Wood massacre and everything else they had suffered since 1939.[7] The British historian Victor Rothwell wrote that King's "spiteful" remarks about the Poles causing the war reflected his own resentment at having to declare war on Germany because of public pressure despite his own inclinations towards neutrality.

quote:

In June 1940, the government adopted conscription for home service in The National Resources Mobilization Act, 1940 (NRMA), which allowed the government to register men and women and move them into jobs considered necessary for wartime production, and allowed for conscription for the defence of Canada, but did not allow conscripts to be deployed for overseas service.[16] The French-Canadian nationalist mayor of Montreal Camillien Houde in a speech urged all French-Canadian men not to register under the NRMA, which led the Dominion government to use the suspension of habeas corpus under the War Measures Act to send the RCMP in to arrest Houde, who was held without charge until 1944.[17] From 1940 onward, the Defense Minister James Ralston and the Navy minister Angus MacDonald were seen as the advocates of the armored forces in the cabinet, favoring winning the war even at the price of domestic disunity vs. King who argued that domestic unity could not be fractured as the price for victory.[18]

The NRMA men who refused to "go active" were derisively called "zombies" both in Canada and overseas. The "Zombies" were so-called because they were soldiers who could not fight in the war, making them like the reanimated corpses from Haitian mythology who were neither alive nor dead, but rather somewhere in-between. The "Zombies" were widely hated by the men who had volunteered for overseas service and were referred to as cowards.[19] The Canadian military was divided into classes: the A men who volunteered to go overseas and the R men who were the Zombies.[20] At training camps, officers and NCOs constantly belittled, insulted and humiliated the Zombies to pressure them to "go active", making for a tense relationship at the best of times.

quote:

Acceptance of French-speaking units was greater in Canada from the start of the Second World War in comparison to the first. While the creation of the 22nd Infantry Battalion (French-Canadian) required large rallies of French-Canadians in 1914 accompanied by political pressure to overcome Minister Sam Hughes' abhorrence of the idea, this greater acceptance of French-Canadian units as well as informal use of their language diminished the ferocity of Quebec's resistance to the war effort.[citation needed] Opposition to conscription was not limited to Quebec. In British Columbia, where the fear of the "Yellow Peril" was a major issue, many were opposed to conscription as conscripting Chinese-Canadians and Japanese-Canadians would lead to the demand for Asian-Canadians to be given the right to vote, which the white population of British Columbia were adamantly opposed to.

zoux posted:

People are real upset that historically, women existed.

zoux posted:

People are real upset that historically, women existed.

quote:

Creative Assembly's historical strategy game Total War: Rome 2 came out in September 2013, and in the five years since it's notched more than 21,000 user reviews on Steam adding up to a "mostly positive" overall rating. Yet over the past couple of days, more than 660 reviews have rated it "overwhelmingly negative." What could have so suddenly and dramatically reversed the fortunes of a five-year-old strategy game that's still in the thick of the Steam Top 100?

It's a review bombing, of course, and the reason (equally of course) is women, specifically a claim that the recent free Ancestral update dramatically increased the likelihood of generals in the game being female. It's not clear what specifically started the uproar: Questions about female generals date back to March but it didn't seem to really gain traction until mid-August, with a screen courtesy of a Steam user named Erick showing five out of eight "Available Generals" as women, followed by predictable complaints about "historical accuracy." Around the same time, a Patriarchy Mod that purports to reduce the percentage chance of female politicians and general appearing in the game turned up on the Steam Workshop.

Eventually, a Creative Assembly developer declared the original thread on the topic "a mess" and locked it. "As has been said previously: Total War games are historically authentic, not historically accurate," they wrote. "If having female units upsets you that much you can either mod them out or just not play."

That seemingly inspired a drawn-out user review from a Steam user named Chaos Puppy (with a link to Erick's screen), who claimed, among other things, that Total War: Rome 2 is "historically inaccurate, like over 50% of your generals [are] women." He also claimed to be upset that the developer response was to tell people not to buy the game if they don't like it, which isn't actually what was said at all, but never mind that—the story began to make the rounds, outrage mounted, and the review bombs began to drop.

bewbies posted:

i do not understand what the issue is there

quote:

In an "off-the-record" interview with two journalists from The Winnipeg Free Press in February 1942, King stated that the purpose of the Canadian expeditionary force then training in the United Kingdom was only to defend Britain in the event of a German invasion, and he would not sending the five divisions of the expeditionary force to the Middle East as the British were requesting.[30] King told Grant Dexter of The Winnipeg Free Press on 28 February 1942 stated the purpose of the Canadian Army in Britain was "to defend the heart of the Empire", and criticized Ralston for saying in the House of Commons that he wanted "to build up a strong striking force in Britain because we would ultimately use Britain as the springboard for our thrust on the continent".[30] King told Dexter "the trouble was with Ralston and the general staff. Ralston stood up for the generals, fought the cabinet on their behalf".[30] King expressed the view that Ralson was too much under the influence of the generals and that "Generals are almost invariably wrong".[30] In the same interview, King stated his belief that Japanese would invade British Columbia "just as soon as the Japs could muster the men and material".[31]

The successes of the Japanese in the Asia-Pacific theatre led to widespread fears in early 1942 that soon the Japanese would be landing in British Columbia.[22] The Japanese planned to annex British Columbia once the war was won, but in the spring of 1942 the Japanese were largely preoccupied with plans for the invasion of Australia and Hawaii, and the continuing war with China.[32] Responding to a racist hysteria that Japanese-Canadians were a "fifth column" loyal to Japan who would soon be waging a campaign of terrorism against whites, the King government interned all Japanese-Canadians; the RCMP had in fact reported to the government that most Japanese-Canadians were loyal to Canada, and there was no need for internment.[22] The same fears of a Japanese invasion led King to create two divisions, the 6th and the 8th, largely composed of Zombies, that were stationed to guard the Pacific coast while another Zombie division, the 7th, was created to guard the Atlantic coast against a German invasion, just to show that the government was not indifferent to the Maritimes, through the military had advised the government there was little danger of a Japanese invasion and even less of a German invasion.[33]

Cessna posted:

"Icky girls getting all over my clubhouse."

Rockopolis posted:

Huh, that's kind of cool. Guess I got to buy it next time a sale rolls through.

Isn't Rome II the one with the catapult that shoots bees at people? And scorpions, and snakes, and spiders, depending on faction? Was that ever a thing?

feedmegin posted:

Why would you assume this? Here's a manual for Texas, for instance -

https://archive.org/details/manualofinstructtxgilh

zoux posted:

https://twitter.com/seldo/status/1044611211130679296

zoux posted:

https://twitter.com/seldo/status/1044611211130679296

zoux posted:

https://twitter.com/seldo/status/1044611211130679296

bewbies posted:

is this descended from the 1st minnesota? because that would be absolutely bad rear end

edit - it sure as gently caress is. that is their goddamn flag, they earned that the hard way

Agean90 posted:

The flag should he shown in it's original context, being pried from the dead hands of some dumb slave owner officer haha eat poo poo virginia

Ice Fist posted:

It also pleases me greatly that Minnesota is telling them to get hosed.