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Nessus posted:However, as far as the spaghetti thing goes, I hadn't heard it. It does make some sense that if they ate a lot of dishes derived from dry pasta they would have somewhat higher water requirements, but you would think it might come out in the wash given that they would be able to tote around relatively large volumes of it. Of course you do also tend to discard pasta water, as opposed to having it incorporated in the dish like rice or soup. The spaghetti thing is a lovely meme and has no basis in reality.
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Jul 12, 2019 05:24
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Italian pasta in cans came in tomato sauce, and were/could be cooked without removing the contents from the can. Last I recall, anyways.
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Jul 12, 2019 05:25
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Oh and as for Italys desire to fight and the troops rah rah rah Fascist Italy getting dunked on by inferior opponents has a proud history going back to the corpo truppe volontarie at Guadalajara in 1937 Hell, maybe even Ethiopia in 1935
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Jul 12, 2019 05:27
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Italian pasta in cans came in tomato sauce, and were/could be cooked without removing the contents from the can. chef boyardee is not a primary source
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Jul 12, 2019 05:27
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Never a bad time to bring up this anecdote from a Rolls Royce engineer talking to a counterpart from the Ford Manchester plant: Soviet engineers visiting the Nuffield plant reported workers using chisels to make their parts fit, so I believe it. Although the Merlin and later the Meteor were somehow passable engines. Jobbo_Fett posted:*looks up from his book on Kursk that details how Stalin covered up everything about the war right after it so the public never knew how badly he sucked and hosed up most of the poo poo he touched* Khrushchev poo poo on Zhukov basically nonstop to try and erode his popular support so he wouldn't get couped.
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Jul 12, 2019 05:27
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HEY GUNS posted:chef boyardee is not a primary sauce
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Jul 12, 2019 05:28
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HEY GUNS posted:chef boyardee is not a primary source Ffffffuck. That's why my advisor hasn't been returning my e-mails. Edit : ^^^^^Nicely done.
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Jul 12, 2019 05:29
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Fascist Italy getting dunked on by inferior opponents has a proud history going back to the corpo truppe volontarie at Guadalajara in 1937 When the Ethiopians are blocking roads with rocks and tipping over your tankettes, youre officially getting clowned on, so yeah. HEY GUNS posted:chef boyardee is not a primary source gently caress you it is! Ensign Expendable posted:Khrushchev poo poo on Zhukov basically nonstop to try and erode his popular support so he wouldn't get couped. The book also mentions that, amd also also has an extract of a letter from Zhukov basically saying "You shut your bitch mouth I remember in July 1943 when you couldn't be bothered getting out of the car while I commanded armies, you sob." And its great
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Jul 12, 2019 05:30
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HEY GUNS posted:chef boyardee is a primary sauce FTFY
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Jul 12, 2019 05:35
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Ok, but what about reading a book exposing how poo poo Stalin was? How well do Stephen Kotkin's books about Stalin measure up in this? I've seen a lecture by him on youtube about the subject, and it mostly seemed to be about stripping the layers of propaganda and myths off a murderous dictator. But I think that might have been mostly for the audience, as talking about the contrasts of Stalin's human side and what he did as a murderous dictator makes for a better one time lecture promoting a book.
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Jul 12, 2019 05:43
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Jobbo_Fett posted:The book also mentions that, amd also also has an extract of a letter from Zhukov basically saying "You shut your bitch mouth I remember in July 1943 when you couldn't be bothered getting out of the car while I commanded armies, you sob."
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Jul 12, 2019 05:43
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Grimnarsson posted:How well do Stephen Kotkin's books about Stalin measure up in this? I've seen a lecture by him on youtube about the subject, and it mostly seemed to be about stripping the layers of propaganda and myths off a murderous dictator. But I think that might have been mostly for the audience, as talking about the contrasts of Stalin's human side and what he did as a murderous dictator makes for a better one time lecture promoting a book.
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Jul 12, 2019 05:44
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TK-42-1 posted:why are russians so nihilistic? i assume it’s due to their weather et al but the nordic people seem pleasant enough. Personally, I'd think the living under pretty oppressive governments for generations that have a habit of being arbitrary probably does a number on people. Authoritarianism works around making everybody internalize a constant potential threat at all times, which seems very stressful if you don't learn to just...accept it. It's a hell of a thing when you look at the numbers.  source
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Jul 12, 2019 05:50
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Wtf is up with belgium haunted by the ghosts of congoese past
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Jul 12, 2019 05:54
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How do you explain Bulgaria, Romania, and most of former Yugoslavia under that theory? Not to mention the huge contrast between Czechia and Slovakia?
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Jul 12, 2019 05:57
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Agean90 posted:Wtf is up with belgium e: On the other hand I guess living on the med makes life worth living.
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Jul 12, 2019 05:57
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SlothfulCobra posted:Personally, I'd think the living under pretty oppressive governments for generations that have a habit of being arbitrary probably does a number on people. Authoritarianism works around making everybody internalize a constant potential threat at all times, which seems very stressful if you don't learn to just...accept it. It’s kind of a chicken and the egg question I guess. Does living in a place like Russia promote the kind of nihilistic ok with authoritarian rule kind of people? Or does being subjected to that produce Russians? I should probably read more about the Kievan Rus before I pass judgement.
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Jul 12, 2019 06:00
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HEY GUNS posted:he and getty are pretty good but kotkin hasn't finished his series yet I'll definitely try to loan the first two volumes of Kotkin's at the local library at the first opportunity. They have one of each and they are apparently at great demand.
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Jul 12, 2019 06:09
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TK-42-1 posted:It’s kind of a chicken and the egg question I guess. Does living in a place like Russia promote the kind of nihilistic ok with authoritarian rule kind of people? Or does being subjected to that produce Russians? I should probably read more about the Kievan Rus before I pass judgement. edit: i think without some solid reading or ethnography here we run the risk of becoming the kind of "explain ww2 by reading Tacitus" people i make fun of. remember these are real people who are suffering; their lives are worth just as much to them as yours is to you. also what the hell is up with hungary HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Jul 12, 2019 |
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Jul 12, 2019 06:10
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HEY GUNS posted:also what the hell is up with hungary Orban.
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Jul 12, 2019 06:15
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Agean90 posted:Wtf is up with belgium A country for clowns, divided by design and in a constant seesaw culture war between deviant Anglophilic hash-smoking Dutchness or miserable, but stridently arrogant Northern Frenchness. Every Belgian knows this, and feels a greater weight of the misery of existence. TK-42-1 posted:It’s kind of a chicken and the egg question I guess. Does living in a place like Russia promote the kind of nihilistic ok with authoritarian rule kind of people? Or does being subjected to that produce Russians? I should probably read more about the Kievan Rus before I pass judgement. The suicide rate is mostly just leftover from Yeltsin-era meltdown of the country. The worst years are past, it was like 40 per 100,000 in the 90s. Nessus posted:Y'all are operating contrary to the tenets of Scientific Posting. The Axis allies weren't all fascist countries, and the bigger factor for all of them was how poor they were. They were poorer countries than Italy by far. The Italians were okay, but they basically had an interwar army and it wasn't up-to-snuff. They couldn't do independent operations at the Army level but were generally fine lower than that. They jumped into the war thinking it would be over quick and they would score points with Germany, Mussolini really didn't plan ahead so nobody was prepared. The navy ran out of fuel instantly, 30% of the merchant marine were in British/French ports and immediately seized, the army got stranded in the Libyan desert and surrendered, whoops! Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 06:59 on Jul 12, 2019 |
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Jul 12, 2019 06:45
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Would it be uncharitable to say Grover Furr is to Stalin as David Irving is to Hitler? Both "historians" obsessed with exonerating the authoritarian tyrant they look up to, including misrepresenting facts or even outright lying? Irving has the leg up with Holocaust Denial, but Furr has lots of time to catch up.
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Jul 12, 2019 07:55
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A good microcosm of the problems with the Italian war effort comes in the Red Sea. They had a destroyer flotilla and a submarine squadron based here, to raid British shipping running through the Red Sea to Suez. This was vaguely sensible, except that they ran into trouble even before the war began. The British intercepted the message sent by the Italian high command warning the forces in the Red Sea that war was about to start, and sent more ships to the area. The sub force gets sent out to take up stations so they can be ready when the war starts; but then they start to have problems. The subs have been fitted with air conditioning, to keep their electronics at operating temperature in the warmer waters of the Red Sea. This air conditioning system doesn't use Freon, because that's expensive. Instead, it uses chloromethane, which causes intoxication when breathed in, and can be poisonous at higher concentrations; just what you want in a sealed metal tube. Chloromethane intoxication causes a couple of subs to run aground, one of which isn't recoverable. Another is forced to surface by it when trying to evade a British ASW patrol, and is captured. Two more subs were located and sunk by the British, either as a result of information taken from the captured sub, or from radio intercepts. The rest of the subs don't get up to much more, and end up leaving the Red Sea and heading for France after Italian East Africa falls to Allied forces. With the subs useless, it's the turn of the destroyer flotilla. This makes a whole bunch of attempts at raiding British convoys that go nowhere because they never locate the convoy. When they do run into one, BN 7, half their force never actually makes contact with the convoy, and the other half are forced off by the escort. One of the destroyers is then chased down and sunk by the British. This nearly repeats itself four months later; part of the Italian force locates the convoy, fires a wildly-aimed torpedo salvo, and heads home, having done no damage at all. With fuel running low and the Allies starting to close in on the base at Massawa, the flotilla plans to raid the British bases at Port Suez and Port Sudan. The force to raid Port Suez sets off, and one of the ships promptly runs aground and has to be abandoned. The rest of the force turns back and joins the squadron heading to Port Sudan. One of these ships has to drop out and be scuttled due to mechanical failures; the others get to about 30 miles from Port Sudan, but then the Fleet Air Arm turns up. The British, expecting the Italians to make such a move, have moved the air group from the carrier Eagle to the area. Two of the destroyers are sunk, the other two are beached on the Arabian coast. The last actions of the Italian fleet in the Red Sea is to scuttle a whole bunch of ships in Massawa harbour, and for one of the old torpedo boats based there to torpedo and heavily damage a British cruiser.
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Jul 12, 2019 08:57
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not gonna take sides in the incredibly divisive "was stalin bad" argument but i'd just like to note that the reason y'all are having trouble engaging with the pasta water thing is that it's a joke from a literal board game that AC posted as fact
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Jul 12, 2019 09:01
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Reiterpallasch posted:not gonna take sides in the incredibly divisive "was stalin bad" argument but i'd just like to note that the reason y'all are having trouble engaging with the pasta water thing is that it's a joke from a literal board game that AC posted as fact Ardent Communist posted:Of course, the funnier answer is that they required massive amounts of water to make spaghetti in the desert, so their supply lines weren't able to handle their operations and they collapsed like a tower of cards when pushed, but I'm pretty sure that "needs massive water to make spaghetti in the desert" was just a meme 
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Jul 12, 2019 09:12
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HEY GUNS posted:also what the hell is up with hungary Hungary has been pretty drat fash since before fash was a thing - even back during the 19th century they agitated for equal rights within the Austrian Empire then the second they got them they started oppressing their own national minorities. Then they become an authoritarian regime in the interwar period before it was cool, then they end up with an antisemitic fascist PM before Germany even gets around to it. For whatever reason, poo poo seems to just be hosed there. Also, what's up with Lithuania on that suicide map? Apparently it was twice as much an oppressive dictatorship for generations as anywhere else in the former Soviet Union? 
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Jul 12, 2019 09:20
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Acebuckeye13 posted:The long and the short of it was that they simply weren't prepared for the war, and didn't have the kind of industrial capacity necessary to catch up. More accurately they were prepared for a war - in about 1935. Mussolini came to power earlier than the rest of the expansionist dictators and consequently Italy rearmed earlier than everyone else. Trouble is, stuff gets obsolescent in due course, replacing it is expensive, and by 1939 tankettes and biplanes were a bit useless.
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Jul 12, 2019 09:28
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Just staring at the unadjusted numbers on that map is bad. You'd have to adjust for known external influences on suicide rate such as idk unemployment rate and then see how many of the differences even still are significant. e: like for example otherwise that might just be a map of formerly heavily industrialized regions that have not adapted well to losing that industry e: not saying that that's it but as an example of a confounder aphid_licker fucked around with this message at 10:20 on Jul 12, 2019 |
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Jul 12, 2019 10:10
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TK-42-1 posted:why are russians so nihilistic? i assume it’s due to their weather et al but the nordic people seem pleasant enough. Er, uh, have you visited us? Denmark is passably mirthy (because we've learned to ignore our politician and consume vast amounts of weed and alcohol), but Sweden is uphill, Norway rocky and Finland is best not mentioned. This is a trailer for a finnish art LARP that adequately explains the nordic mindset: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nckn2TCXGLo
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Jul 12, 2019 10:11
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Those suicide figures look like junk to me. This is the very scant methodology on the WHO site http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.wrapper.imr?x-id=4664 This is what they say about preferred data sources: "Civil registration with complete coverage and medical certification of cause of death" Take the UK. The process of determining cause of death is completely different in England and Wales from how it is in Scotland. I don't know how it works in Northern Ireland. In England and Wales, to actually put suicide as cause of death on a death certificate requires a very high standard of proof, equal to that needed to convict someone of a crime (because the system dates back to when suicide was a crime. So coroners very frequently record open verdicts (to the extent that most open verdicts are probably of suicides). Or they put "misadventure" because that has a lower standard of proof, or they record a narrative verdict where they describe the events but don't necessarily take a position the intention or state of mind of the deceased. So the system deliberately and systematically understates the frequency of suicide by a very significant margin. And I bet there's as much weird cultural and bureaucratic variation in how this stuff gets recorded in every country.
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Jul 12, 2019 11:05
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Ardent Communist posted:Alright man, we're getting to the crux of the issue. Why should Stalin be denigrated? Who benefits from dragging his name through the mud? This is supposed to be for intellectual conversation, so surely you can explain your views. I'm fairly certain all his purges would be one reason why Stalin should be denigrated. His military purges are a fine topic for this particular thread. Also his complete surprise that he had been betrayed by Hitler in '41. And his invasions of the Baltic's and Finland.
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Jul 12, 2019 11:25
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That gets me wondering whether anything (Sensible Stalin, Trotsky Sticks Around, etc) would have changed the ability of the Soviet Union to respond to Barbarossa.
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Jul 12, 2019 12:57
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where the gently caress did the word "tankie" come from? I kind of like that word in a vacuum, like I wouldn't mind being a tankie
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Jul 12, 2019 13:16
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bewbies posted:where the gently caress did the word "tankie" come from? People who were in favour of the USSR sending in tanks to crush the uprising in Hungary.
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Jul 12, 2019 13:19
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FAUXTON posted:That gets me wondering whether anything (Sensible Stalin, Trotsky Sticks Around, etc) would have changed the ability of the Soviet Union to respond to Barbarossa. At the very least the army would have been in better shape under someone who didn't purge Tukhachevsky
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Jul 12, 2019 13:20
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gonna make an excecutive decision and declare that alt history ussr is lead by Weed Stalin, who smoke a shitton of the highest quality kush imaginable and mellowed out
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Jul 12, 2019 13:24
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Agean90 posted:gonna make an excecutive decision and declare that alt history ussr is lead by Weed Stalin, who smoke a shitton of the highest quality kush imaginable and mellowed out Workers' and Peasants' Kush Army As long as there's a K word in Russian for weed I think we're good
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Jul 12, 2019 13:29
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FAUXTON posted:That gets me wondering whether anything (Sensible Stalin, Trotsky Sticks Around, etc) would have changed the ability of the Soviet Union to respond to Barbarossa. Let's not give Trots a reason to be more insufferable than they already are
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Jul 12, 2019 13:31
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Ensign Expendable posted:
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Jul 12, 2019 13:37
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Ardent Communist posted:What the hell are you talking about? I was only saying that I wondered what the history of colonialism would have been if there was a weak, divided nation in Europe during the "golden age" of colonialism. As for the Italian-Ethiopian war, you'll excuse me if I try to find a positive aspect to an African country courageously overcoming a European power, and the moral effect such a resistance might have have during the de-colonialist movement. I didn't condone or approve the Italian invasion, it happened before I was born, so taking a light-hearted approach does not do any damage to Ethiopians. If you think I support colonialism, you really don't understand communists. Communists support colonialism though. Just look what the Soviet Union did to its indigenous people and other minorities. Ardent Communist posted:Well, I guess I'd argue that it would be incredibly biased, because he was a polarizing figure and, as one of the most popular and promoted communist leaders (even in the west during WW2 and in Russia till this day) he was a prime target for anti-communists to denigrate. I hope you don't recommend a book by Robert Conquest or something like that. I'm assuming you know that Robert Conquest worked for a British anti-communist propaganda group before he "became" an author. Hitler and Stalin are one of the worst genociders who have ever lived and should be painted with the same brush.
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Jul 12, 2019 13:56
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