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Kemper Boyd posted:Take this with a grain of salt, as this is something I read somewhere around 2008 or so, but I was under the impression that for much of the 1990's, Belarus was actually okayish compared to a lot of the other post-Soviet republics, mostly owing to the fact that Lukashenko more or less kept the Soviet-era stuff working, which meant that there was no wholesale industrial collapse and the heavy industries of Belarus contracted instead of completely disappearing. It only starts to look worse later, when the other republics like the Baltic ones are having some serious economical growth, but as I understand, Belarus was a lot nicer in the 1990s than most of Russia proper. It's more that Belarus and Ukraine continued to recieve subsidies from Russia in the form of discounted oil&gas for purchase as well as getting transit fees that could be used to subsidise the rest of the economy in the old Soviet style. On the plus side that meant less economic disruption, on the downside... it meant less economic disruption.
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Jan 9, 2022 11:27
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Nenonen posted:Cavalry or dragoon? I didn't know there's any units called ratsuväki left but rakuunat still exist. I dunno. It was a ratsujääkäripataljoona and the rank was ratsumies.
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Jan 9, 2022 11:55
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Nenonen posted:Cavalry or dragoon? I didn't know there's any units called ratsuväki left but rakuunat still exist. I won't pretend my french is great, but it's "Chasseurs à cheval" (hunters on horse, or mounted hunter), not chasseurs à chevalier (hunters on knights  )
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Jan 9, 2022 12:15
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Cyrano4747 posted:This is actually a very real thing. I mostly know the German context but it’s going to be broadly the same in other parts of continental Europe. Is this why "Dr" is a formal title, like "Sir" or "Lord" is aswell? because the granting of a titled form of address is a mark of respect compared to the common man?
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Jan 9, 2022 12:50
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Xakura posted:I won't pretend my french is great, but it's "Chasseurs à cheval" (hunters on horse, or mounted hunter), not chasseurs à chevalier (hunters on knights I think my phone did that 'correction' on its own, but I will still claim credit on the mental image!
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Jan 9, 2022 13:12
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So a French fighter chassis, a Russian motor and a German cannon arrived in a Finnish plane hangar and... the result was "The Groke-Morane". New interesting video from Satunnaista Sotilashistoriaa about this pinnacle of European fighter design and Finnish State Airplane Factory! Turn subtitles on if you don't understand Finnish. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzL85X3brJ8
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Jan 9, 2022 17:20
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Nothingtoseehere posted:Is this why "Dr" is a formal title, like "Sir" or "Lord" is aswell? because the granting of a titled form of address is a mark of respect compared to the common man? I don’t know for certain but yeah there are a lot of similarities in usage now that I think about it.
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Jan 9, 2022 17:31
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Nothingtoseehere posted:Is this why "Dr" is a formal title, like "Sir" or "Lord" is aswell? because the granting of a titled form of address is a mark of respect compared to the common man? “Sir” was used as a title for priests/doctors/educated people until the 17th century. (This being before there was too much of a distinction.) It ties into forms of address generally which is a whole complicated thing in its own right, e.g. Mr and Mrs are “master” and “mistress”* that just got tweaked. I’d have to do more actual research if you cared, but keep in mind that the forms of address we have now are a small fraction of the total number that used to exist, in Old English a bunch are just [Any Random Descriptor From Occupation to Having a Limp]. *In the old sense of like Latin domina i.e. exact same as master but a woman, raunchy senses didn’t pop up until Early Modern.
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Jan 9, 2022 19:35
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Cyrano4747 posted:I don’t know for certain but yeah there are a lot of similarities in usage now that I think about it. In Britain at least if you're given the options to put a title it will be one of the following; 1. Some kind of aristo title (Sir, Lord etc.) 2. Military rank 3. Professor or Dr. 4. Reverend So yeah, certainly holds up with what you said earlier
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Jan 9, 2022 20:56
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MikeCrotch posted:In Britain at least if you're given the options to put a title it will be one of the following; The fun bit is that in German both the holding of a doctorate and the holding of a professorship are considered two different and worthy titles. So Herr Doktor Schmidt and Herr Professor Schmidt mean two different things. But of course you have a great many professors who are doctors, so there's a lot of Herr Doktor Professor Schmidt running around. Where it gets really fun is the people who land multiple doctorates, because you're allowed to drop each doctor separately. I've known a couple of Herr Doktor Doktor Professor <lastname>'s in my life. I forget if they have a separate title for people who have done their Habilitation (and I really should know that), which is basically NG+ for PhDs. You go through all the trouble of doing your dissertation and becoming Herr/Frau Doktor and then you have to write an even bigger book about a subject that's significantly out of your field. I do know that the people who have gotten their Habis will have a different string of letters after their name on their business cards and CVs. At that point you're a Privatdozent and get to put PD Dr. on poo poo, although I've also seen variants on Habil. and other poo poo. The very best part is that Germans will put that poo poo on the name plates on their doors. I visited a German prof who lived in Wannsee (yes, that one - it was and continues to be a very nice neighborhood, the conference everyone thinks of was held there because of the status of the location) and he had the "Dr. Prof. <lastname>" door plaque.
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Jan 9, 2022 23:08
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I think Iron Sky became my favorite movie ever for the duration of the film because of all the German title jokes.
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Jan 9, 2022 23:15
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Nothingtoseehere posted:Is this why "Dr" is a formal title, like "Sir" or "Lord" is aswell? because the granting of a titled form of address is a mark of respect compared to the common man? Not the origin of the phrase "a gentleman and a scholar", but I'd say they're closely related - you'd have th best chance at an education with an aristocratic background.
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Jan 9, 2022 23:16
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The best part about the title narcissism in the German influenced area is the ongoing struggle over which Dr. titles are considered above other Dr. titles, and the total loving chaos introduced by the introduction of PhDs, which completely destroyed the existing system and led to the loss of purpose in life among many a Dr. by relegating old Dr. titles to the role of "small doctors" while only PhDs are "proper doctors" Also nobody has mentioned Dozents / Docents yet, which, like, why the gently caress do you even exist.
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Jan 9, 2022 23:19
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Quick question beyond the Memes and everything else what are peoples opinions on Downfall? I was thinking of giving it a watch. Also are there any books or articles about the immediate American reaction of Pearl Harbor like in the first 24 to 48 hours after the attack? Same for the USSR and Barbarossa, if something exists written in English about it.
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Jan 10, 2022 02:00
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Marshal Prolapse posted:Quick question beyond the Memes and everything else what are peoples opinions on Downfall? I was thinking of giving it a watch. downfall is absolutely incredible and is probably my favorite world war II movie Ian tolls recent trilogy went into a whole lot of really fascinating detail about what happened after Pearl harbor, locally and nationally and internationally. I'm sure there's probably a more focused book just on Pearl harbor but I learned an awful lot just reading that one.
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Jan 10, 2022 03:28
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mllaneza posted:Not the origin of the phrase "a gentleman and a scholar", but I'd say they're closely related - you'd have th best chance at an education with an aristocratic background. I always wondered if it was a slight on scholars, as the gentleman bit indicates being well-mannered.
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Jan 10, 2022 03:58
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Siivola posted:Okay thanks, I guess that makes sense. the soviets had a lot of practice trying to reduce nationalism through idealistic (after all, Communism is nominally about class based solidarity rather than nationalism, and many subject minorities did do better under the Soviet Union than the Czars, not that it's saying much) and pragmatic means (secret police, disappearing people, internal exile, etc). i don't think they saw it as a hassle in the way you are viewing it, more of a necessary component of empire and just an extension of existing practices and capabilities. everyone's strategic calculus, for good reason, is based around "fight the next war on territory that isn't ours" because war is pretty bad for the neighborhood. the extent to which you pursue this varies (eg France's plans to fight the Germans in Belgium in WWII vs the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact vs Sweden's plans to fight the Russians to the last Finn vs France's dissuasion du faible au fort)
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Jan 10, 2022 04:04
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"Gentleman and a scholar" was coined as an emphatic of quality, so it's actually evidence of them not being related. It's a classic "not only an X, but a Y" kind of construction, so they can't be perfect synonyms : e.g. "not only a dog but a canine" is garbage. First attestation is 1607 in Merrie Conceited Jests by George Peele, "He goes directly to the Mayor, tels him he was a Scholler and a Gentleman”. Also both the words "scholar" and "gentleman" by themselves are waaaaaay older. ("gentleman" is Middle English and some form of "scholar" has been kicking around since Medieval Latin at the earliest) They are not even vaguely related terms.
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Jan 10, 2022 04:11
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I always thought calling someone a gentleman and a scholar was pointing out how rarely one is also the other.
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Jan 10, 2022 04:15
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it's saying someone is well mannered and learned as a double compliment, not a backhanded insult.
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Jan 10, 2022 06:04
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In fairness, the history of universities can get pretty brutal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Scholastica_Day_riot
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Jan 10, 2022 08:16
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How did officers in early and mid modern armies avoid dying from the infectious diseases that were so prevalent? Or were nobles also making GBS threads themselves to death and it just doesn't get brought up that much
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Jan 10, 2022 08:55
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Stairmaster posted:How did officers in early and mid modern armies avoid dying from the infectious diseases that were so prevalent? Or were nobles also making GBS threads themselves to death and it just doesn't get brought up that much Henry V, warrior king and self-titled scourge of god, died of dysentery, blasting hot blood-shits. Yes, nobles also got sick and died. A lot. Ninja edit : was a likely contributing factor, can’t actually diagnose people 600 years ago, etc. But definitely it was like the prom scene from Carrie out of his rear end. Xiahou Dun fucked around with this message at 09:03 on Jan 10, 2022 |
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Jan 10, 2022 09:01
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Yeah, they died all the time. At most they probably had better odds since they'd probably eaten well growing up and might be able to get surgical care to some extent.
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Jan 10, 2022 09:03
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Nessus posted:Yeah, they died all the time. At most they probably had better odds since they'd probably eaten well growing up and might be able to get surgical care to some extent.
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Jan 10, 2022 12:58
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I mean, trepanation has been performed for at least 9000 years, so it's a pretty good bet. I have no idea, though
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Jan 10, 2022 13:09
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Tias posted:I mean, trepanation has been performed for at least 9000 years, so it's a pretty good bet. I have no idea, though
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Jan 10, 2022 13:13
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:the soviets had a lot of practice trying to reduce nationalism through idealistic (after all, Communism is nominally about class based solidarity rather than nationalism, and many subject minorities did do better under the Soviet Union than the Czars, not that it's saying much) and pragmatic means (secret police, disappearing people, internal exile, etc). i don't think they saw it as a hassle in the way you are viewing it, more of a necessary component of empire and just an extension of existing practices and capabilities. I mean the Soviets nationalities policies sort of explicitly emphasized national identity ahead of (or perhaps rather as a prerequisitie for) class consciousness, particularly in what was regarded as the less developed Asian regions of the former Russian Empire. As the Soviet authorities conceived of it nations were essentially "natural phenomona" though people still could have more or less developed national consciousness. Nations were tied to their territory, and within a territory a titular nation (for instance the Uzbek nation within the Uzbek SSR) would be favored for employment, recruitment (into party and other organizations) and education, with its language and culture promoted, ideally these national territories should be ethnically homogenous so you didn't have multiple nationalities within one territory fighting over who was the titular and favored nationality. Within the Soviet Union this was primarily pursued by drawing borders so as to achieve this homogeneity (while also paying heed to the national groups claim to the territories), with education and such expected to do the rest. Especially in the 30s and 40s there was also a tendency to fordibly move national groups seen as troublesome as I'm sure most are aware of, though it gets more complicated than that and isn't necessarily strictly tied to the nation-building aspect of Soviet nationalities policy. With that policy essentially the local communist parties became vessels for national projects of education and especially language and culture promotion (the latter IIRC most prominent in cinema and literature in the 50s and early 60s when censorship wasn't as strict and expression relatively free, and again in the 80s). So essentially nationalism is "disarmed" because its projects largely are incorporated into Soviet communism. There are some quirks to do this, owing to a trend towards Russification that starts in the 30s and lasts until Stalin's death (being most intensive following WWII and not letting up until Stalin's gone) you have stuff like the cyrillic alphabet being introduced for alot of languages that did not previously use that, for instance the national projects (which includes the ones under the communist umbrella) in the Turkic speaking republics had previously not advocated for this but had focused their efforts on either introducing a Latin script or an adapted Arabic one with full vowels. History writing/education also gets a little bit weird, and this I think persists after Stalin dies, in that Russia is no longer presented as having conquered any of its neighbors, but always expanded through peaceful annexations and helping the various other nations now part of the Soviet Union defend themselves against foreign aggressors to preserve their autonomy and culture. That's of course not getting into (though I already mentioned deportations as collective punishments against national groups) the real tricky parts of Soviet history as regards non-Russians, particularly non-Europeans, which really is a mixed bag, especially if you're a nationality without a titular republic, and then there's also stuff like the Kazakh famine and the resettlement of deported groups (alongside the development of what can almost be called a GULAG-based economy from the 30s to 50s) into Kazakhstan which reduced that titular nationality to a minority within its own republic. You also have some groups like the Kazym essentially having the boarding school type treatment you see in North America and Australia (and many other places in regards to their indigenous populations) applied to them. TLDR (and very summarized reply to a specific statement): I wouldn't say the Soviets worked to reduce nationalism as much as they worked to channel and develop it in a way that was useful both from a governing and ideological perspective. Randarkman fucked around with this message at 13:53 on Jan 10, 2022 |
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Jan 10, 2022 13:31
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Xiahou Dun posted:Henry V, warrior king and self-titled scourge of god, died of dysentery, blasting hot blood-shits. 
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Jan 10, 2022 14:38
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VostokProgram posted:Don't forget that Eastern Poland in the 30s is now part of Belarus. Probably has even fewer indoor toilets than modern eastern Poland As already mentioned, spectre is mispelled and there are also a few other red flags. The name is an Eastern European root name and Britain tended to use Russian instead of Communism as part of the Cold War. The use of "we British" is also a little off. So this could be a 2nd/3rd generation imigrant who is using an American spellcheck and has been fed a hatred of Communism from relastives or online but Occum's Razor puts this down to bots. There are a few other standard gammon responces but this seems too much.
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Jan 10, 2022 14:59
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Antonia Leitz, good traditional ango saxon name there. e: also 'the colonies' in common vernacular would usually be taken to refer specifically to North America, everywhere else would be 'the Empire'. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Jan 10, 2022 |
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Jan 10, 2022 15:14
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How do you do, fellow Britishes
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Jan 10, 2022 15:30
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Randarkman posted:I mean the Soviets nationalities policies sort of explicitly emphasized national identity ahead of (or perhaps rather as a prerequisitie for) class consciousness, particularly in what was regarded as the less developed Asian regions of the former Russian Empire. As the Soviet authorities conceived of it nations were essentially "natural phenomona" though people still could have more or less developed national consciousness. Nations were tied to their territory, and within a territory a titular nation (for instance the Uzbek nation within the Uzbek SSR) would be favored for employment, recruitment (into party and other organizations) and education, with its language and culture promoted, ideally these national territories should be ethnically homogenous so you didn't have multiple nationalities within one territory fighting over who was the titular and favored nationality. Within the Soviet Union this was primarily pursued by drawing borders so as to achieve this homogeneity (while also paying heed to the national groups claim to the territories), with education and such expected to do the rest. Especially in the 30s and 40s there was also a tendency to fordibly move national groups seen as troublesome as I'm sure most are aware of, though it gets more complicated than that and isn't necessarily strictly tied to the nation-building aspect of Soviet nationalities policy. good post, and you've put it much better in the TLDR than I did - reduce almost certainly the wrong word.
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Jan 10, 2022 15:36
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mllaneza posted:Not the origin of the phrase "a gentleman and a scholar", but I'd say they're closely related - you'd have th best chance at an education with an aristocratic background. This gets into a whole other thing - the growing importance of what we, today, would consider a "real" education for nobility etc. The tl;dr is that prior to, say (and this is extreme dart throwing on my part) 1500-ish-kinda-around then skills like literacy and numeracy were considered kinda superfluous for European nobility. Literacy was nice but not required. A young noble's tutors in that era are going to be focusing on courtly behavior, whatever martial skills are needed (ranging from full out how to knight on through not looking like an rear end during a duel), language, what I guess we'd call theology today, etc. Basically their job is to run the affairs of their household and frankly it's going to be more important that they know how to behave at court so they can get a good marriage for their son than it is that they know how to calculate the hypotenuse of a triangle. Of course you'll find odd people here and there who are just interested in that poo poo and really get into it, but for the most part what we would considered academic pursuits are done by the clergy and a lot of every day engineering and math etc. poo poo is being done by tradesmen. Beginning - again in a very "plus or minus a century I guess this number isn't real" kind of way - around the early 17th century you start to have a growing realization that a lot of those academic skills are really loving useful. By the time you get into the mid-late 18th century it's also become a fashionable mark of distinction, and everyone up to and including kings want to have the status of being a scholar as well as a person of high and noble birth. There's an argument (See La Vopa, Grace, Talent and Merit) that this is part and parcel with the growth of independent trades, a middle class, and staggeringly wealthy merchant elites who are for all intents and purposes the new nobility. You get a lot of thinking about meritocracy and the example of all these self-made men doing incredible things is an implicit challenge to the traditional noble, who only got there by dint of birth. Then you have the poo poo going on at the major royal courts playing into it, and part of it comes down to the fancy of individual kings which then becomes something that you, a mid-level noble courtier, also need to get interested in to curry favor. A good example of that is Frederick the Great and his interest in philosophy and doing poo poo like corresponding with Voltaire and having him out to live with him for a few years. All of this is ALSO happening against the backdrop of a professionalizing university system that's becoming, while not identical to today's institutions, something we'd at least recognize. This was in large part driven by the need for educated professionals and portable (i.e. not tied to a specific city's guild) certifications, which is in turn driven by growing administrative and economic complexity. Put simply, if you have 500 ships in your navy and you need to do the book keeping that is involved in building them, supplying them in colonial ports half way across the world, and all the other poo poo attendant on being a major early modern naval power you need to have a small army of bookkeepers, and just grabbing the nearest literate monk isn't going to cut it any more. Oh, and you need to raise taxes to pay for all that poo poo, which is also going to give a major kick in the rear end to the growth of the early modern state, which in turn is also going to require more bureaucrats. If anyone is interested in this kind of growth of the modern state poo poo I'm basically (badly) rehashing the argumetns made in Brewer The Sinews of Power and Ertman Birth of the Leviathan. What this means is that you have a growing professional class that is going to the universities and university attendance as an attractive way to get into that professional class, which also means that you have a poo poo ton of poor students who are educated but still waiting on that academic appointment or bureaucratic position. This means that you have a pretty big body of people who are able to work as tutors for both the monied bourgeoise who want get their kids into a school and the nobility who are increasingly seeing education as a mark of distinction and social prestige. Of course, these student tutors tend to be paid quite poorly. As an aside, La Vopa makes the argument that the raucous, rioting, debauched students who we think of as stereotypical of 18th century university life are actually a pretty distinct minority who stand out only for the chaos they create. They're the ones privileged enough to both have the means to go carousing and terrorize the town and also the leisure time to provide the opportunity. He paints a picture of a more typical university student who is struggling to pay for tuition, rent, and books and takes whatever low-paid tutoring work he can get in order to make ends meet. That sort of person simply doesn't have the time for the sort of antics that make university students viewed with suspicion by respectable society - basically the ones we think of today are 18t century frat bros. Anyways, all that to say that the phrase "gentleman and a scholar" as it develops by the early 19th century is kind of a summation of an incredibly complex and intertwined series of histories that make some degree of intellectual achievement (or at least the appearance thereof) something that your typical noble should aspire to.
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Jan 10, 2022 15:42
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Randarkman posted:
This is true, but I would also point out that a lot of critics of Soviet policies towards their ethnic and national minorities would argue that it was a neutered nationalism that destroyed a lot of the cultural traditions that made those peoples distinctive. I don't know enough to talk at length about it, but I know poo poo gets complicated when you start talking about cultural and religious traditions among non-Russian Soviet groups, and a lot of them are resentful of it to this day. Basically you were expected to have "Soviet" as your primary identity rather than whatever local identity you had, and parts of that local identity that didn't mesh with the larger national identity that they were cultivating were suppressed.
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Jan 10, 2022 15:46
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Also, it is nonsense posted on Twitter. We've got plenty of sources of 19th and 20th century people saying dumb poo poo about the British Empire, with a former prime minister leading the charge.
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Jan 10, 2022 15:49
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Cyrano4747 posted:This is true, but I would also point out that a lot of critics of Soviet policies towards their ethnic and national minorities would argue that it was a neutered nationalism that destroyed a lot of the cultural traditions that made those peoples distinctive. Well, there is that old joke from either the Soviet Union or one of the Pact countries where the punchline is something like "under Communism all ethnicities dance." And yeah you are not wrong, though it's not always as simple as just Russians dominating and subjugating everything either which is something that one might get the impression of being the case on a more cursory overview. As for your last sentence for an example just read up on that Kazym rebellion article which explicitly banned expressions of the Kazym people's traditional culture and way of life, and also used boarding schools to isolate them from their culture and language. And there's the Kazakh case where collectivization coincided with a campaign to extinguish pastoral nomadism and settle the Kazakhs so they could be (the planners, many of whom were Kazakhs at the more local level, imagined) more economically productive*. *It was a disaster.
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Jan 10, 2022 15:55
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Cyrano4747 posted:As an aside, La Vopa makes the argument that the raucous, rioting, debauched students who we think of as stereotypical of 18th century university life are actually a pretty distinct minority who stand out only for the chaos they create. They're the ones privileged enough to both have the means to go carousing and terrorize the town and also the leisure time to provide the opportunity. He paints a picture of a more typical university student who is struggling to pay for tuition, rent, and books and takes whatever low-paid tutoring work he can get in order to make ends meet. That sort of person simply doesn't have the time for the sort of antics that make university students viewed with suspicion by respectable society - basically the ones we think of today are 18t century frat bros. One of the most revealing facts to look for in a biography of an early modern person is info about their education and especially how they managed to pay for it - whether or not there was a scholarship or patronage, where it came from, the criteria for securing the scholarship, occasionally if they managed to lose it or if that was threatened, etc. Those few facts will expose layers and layers of information about this person, their family, and their social connections. E.g. went to King's College under the patronage of a local aristocrat who happened to have a son the same age vs studied at Trinity via a parish scholarship tell very different stories.
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Jan 10, 2022 16:05
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Randarkman posted:Well, there is that old joke from either the Soviet Union or one of the Pact countries where the punchline is something like "under Communism all ethnicities dance." I'm glad you mentioned the boarding schools, because that's the angle that I'm aware of this from. The boarding schools were nightmares on the level of the American and Canadian versions used to destroy native cultures, but even the run of the mill public education system was also a powerful tool for eroding regional identities. Which, to be clear, isn't a uniquely Soviet thing. Tons of countries have used a national school system as the means to homogenize a country ,especially in the 19th century. France is the most notorious example of this in Western Europe. It's also why public education is such a fraught topic in areas that still have tensions between majority and minority languages/cultures/etc. For example, IIRC the local management of education in Catalonia and friction between what Madrid thinks the schools should be doing and what they Catalans think they should be doing is pretty much a perpetual, simmering issue.
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Jan 10, 2022 16:05
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Memento posted:I always thought calling someone a gentleman and a scholar was pointing out how rarely one is also the other. To this day the proper call of address to a formal gathering in Britain is "My Lords, Ladies, Gentlemen and Officers of the Royal Navy"...because RN officers were not considered 'gentlemen' by default as that term was understood in the early 18th century. Mahan has a whole bit in The Influence of Sea Power where he theorises that the RN's emphasis on technical skills and seamanship in its officers and the (somewhat) meritocratic way in which it trained and selected them actually put the British at a disadvantage in broad tactical terms because a British captain thought mostly in terms of the sailing and gunnery performance of his ship alone rather than his role as part of a fleet or a broad strategy - they were mariners first, warriors second. They lacked the 'soldier mindset' according to Mahan. Especially in contrast to the French with their emphasis on military science over pure seamanship. Before Mahan came McCauley, who noted that the Restoration RN had both gentlemen and seamen, but the seamen were not gentlemen and the gentlemen were not seamen. Not MilHist, but a very similar debate is still rumbling on in the RN today, with various opinions about how training does/doesn't prioritise 'green' or 'blue' skills enough.
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Jan 10, 2022 16:15
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