[Modern History] Guns Condoms and Electricity

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Some Guy TT: Aug 30, 2011

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9KFAhn1sgM

# ? Oct 2, 2022 23:48

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# ? May 23, 2024 19:16

Teriyaki Hairpiece: Dec 29, 2006; I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.

I assumed it was just a cool grate for making toast over a fire but now I want one

# ? Oct 3, 2022 02:53

Maximo Roboto: Feb 4, 2012

https://twitter.com/MacroPancakes/status/1576721208149962754

# ? Oct 3, 2022 16:50

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

Hi2tory

# ? Oct 3, 2022 18:26

Firstscion: Apr 11, 2008; Born Lucky

Finally time for Herstory

# ? Oct 3, 2022 20:49

Dr. Jerrold Coe: Feb 6, 2021; Is it me?

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

I assumed it was just a cool grate for making toast over a fire but now I want one

Might hook it up to mains, there was lots of that craziness back then

# ? Oct 4, 2022 02:00

Maximo Roboto: Feb 4, 2012

Is this a Dark Brandon sort of thing

https://twitter.com/NeilPHauer/status/1576904405550772224
https://twitter.com/rylefou/status/1574891374888947713
https://twitter.com/KarnesKarnes2/status/1574797333681868801/

# ? Oct 4, 2022 05:31

Danann: Aug 4, 2013

https://twitter.com/redfishstream/status/1576875980576415746

germany shock therapied its eastern half :stare:

quote:

Today is "German Unity Day" marking German reunification in 1990. While the elites celebrated the creation of a single German state for the first time since the end of WWII, for the citizens of the German Democratic Republic, it marked a turn towards neoliberal disaster. 🧵

Up until 1990, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the east of the country, described itself as a "workers' and peasants' state" which upon reunification was dismantled and turned into a neoliberal experiment cooked up by neoliberal economist Hans Willgerodt.

Willgerodt advocated against regulation and to leave the integration of the GDR into the capitalist west German state "to the market".

Together with the abolition of the GDR constitution and currency, the June 1990 Treuhand Law's first paragraph read: "privatize the people's owned property."

In 1989, people-owned companies hired almost 80% of all GDR citizens and the official unemployment rate was zero. By 1994, three-quarters of those jobs had been lost as the "free" market took over the people-owned companies.

Swathes of workers were unemployed and the authorities purged the GDR's academia, research and scientific establishments. 50% of professionals deemed linked to the workers' state lost their jobs, creating in the east the highest level of professional unemployment in the world.

The capitalist takeover of the former people-owned companies and the threat of unemployment sparked huge protests. Pictured: At least 2,000 Berlin workers protesting in front of the Treuhand Institute. The banner reads "Colleagues, fight back!"

Ultimately, four years after the end of the GDR, East Germany's industrial production crashed by 52% compared to 1989. East German unemployment was twice as high as in west Germany.

More than 30 years after reunification, the average home in west Germany is more than twice as wealthy as the average home in the east, and people in the former earn 997 euros more per month than those living in the latter, according to an inquiry of the German "Left Party".

# ? Oct 4, 2022 06:04

Some Guy TT: Aug 30, 2011

ok but did u know that angel merkel is from east germany that proves that east germans can overcome their economic backwardness if they leave east germany which is probably filled with filthy racists anyway just like all those places in the united states im quite sure are filled with subhuman vermin who deserve to die

# ? Oct 4, 2022 07:24

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

https://twitter.com/xruiztru/status/1576961814105313282?t=YA9Umc6oAUMJPpyhBbGVPg&s=19

# ? Oct 4, 2022 07:28

Some Guy TT: Aug 30, 2011

what did those stats look like forty years ago

# ? Oct 4, 2022 07:31

mawarannahr: May 21, 2019

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/xruiztru/status/1576961814105313282?t=YA9Umc6oAUMJPpyhBbGVPg&s=19

lol that it�s black :black101:

# ? Oct 4, 2022 07:35

Venomous: Nov 7, 2011

note that the data is from 2011, and 11 years later, there's probably a lot less red and blue in the west lmao

# ? Oct 4, 2022 07:49

Chamale: Jul 11, 2010; I'm helping!

East Germany was very poor before the reunification, having paid heavy reparations to the USSR. Their economy seems to have recovered better than the countries in the former Soviet Union.

# ? Oct 4, 2022 09:16

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

The Treuhand deindustrialized the east to make sure western companies like Krupp and Siemens didn�t get competition.

Reparations lol

# ? Oct 4, 2022 11:27

Suplex Liberace: Jan 18, 2012

whats some good books on post ww2 germany?

# ? Oct 4, 2022 13:49

Fish of hemp: Apr 1, 2011; A friendly little mouse!

Orange Devil posted:

The Treuhand deindustrialized the east to make sure western companies like Krupp and Siemens didn’t get competition.

Competition with what? Trabants?

# ? Oct 4, 2022 14:28

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

https://ideas.repec.org/p/cpr/ceprdp/892.html

quote:

The great majority of East German SOEs have been privatized and are now genuine capitalist firms with an owner with the incentive and the power to change management behaviour. Meanwhile East Germany has been deindustrialized with employment in mining and manufacturing falling to one quarter of its pre-unification level.

This is a paper from 1993. Just casually losing 75% of your mining and manufacturing in less than 5 years, no big deal. Must be because of lovely quality Trabants right? gently caress you.

Orange Devil has issued a correction as of 17:09 on Oct 4, 2022

# ? Oct 4, 2022 17:06

Danann: Aug 4, 2013

https://twitter.com/primarycatdad/status/1570739141918457857

quote:

For some few days in July of 1877, the city of St. Louis was held by a revolutionary Commune. You fancy yourself a communist but don't know about the only self-organized commune in the territorial U.S.? Sit right down and listen.

It began, as revolutionary actions often do, with a depression.

Beginning in 1873, the world capitalist economy was struck with stagnation and contraction. It was kicked off by the Panic of '73; a series of bank failures in Austria soon spread to the rest of the world economy. Industrial production in the U.S., which had been growing at a rate of 3x each year, slowed to 1.7x between 1873-1890. There was a 10% decline in manufacturing output during that period, with most of this being in consumer goods, iron, and construction.

On July 14, 1877, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad cut its wages again - for the third time that year. The railroad workers had no unions, but they spontaneously broke out into a strike. The strike started on July 14, 1877, with B&O railroad workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia. They blockaded the town, a critical rail juncture, and prevented all rail traffic from rolling through, demanding that the wage cut be revoked.

The governor of West Virginia dispatched the National Guard to clear the lines and resume rail service, but the guardsmen refused to fire on the strikers. At the same time, the B&O workers in Maryland took up the strike and closed the railroad center at Cumberland. Albany, Syracuse, and Buffalo New York, all major railyards, closed. The strike spread from the B&O to other lines. In Pittsburgh, the Pennsylvania railroad baron Thomas Alexander Scott recommended the strikers be given a "rifle diet."

On July 21, the Pennsylvania National Guard bayoneted strikers and then opened fire, killing 20 railroad workers. The strikers did not disperse; they retaliated, trapping the guardsmen in a roundhouse and razing 39 buildings. Striking railroad workers in Pennsylvania burned 104 locomotives and 1,245 freight and passenger cars. The Pennsylvania National Guard fought their way out of the roundhouse, shooting and killing over 20 people as they cut their way out of the railyard.

This was the background of the strike action in St. Louis. As the country seized in strikes and transport actions, the Workingman's Party (the first Marxist party in the U.S.) and the Knights of Labor gathered in St. Louis. On July 22, one day after the massacre in the Pennsylvania railyards, train workers held a secret meeting to call for an increase in wages and determined to strike. They then held a public outdoor meeting, which was steered by 200 members of the Workingmen's Party.

That night, a third meeting was held, and the rail workers adopted a resolution that read:

WHEREAS, the United States government has allied itself on the side of capital and against labor; therefore,
RESOLVED, That we, the workingmen's party of the United States, heartily sympathize with the employees of all the railroads in the country who are attempting to secure just and equitable reward for their labor.
RESOLVED, That we will stand by them in this most righteous struggle of labor against robbery and oppression, through good and evil report, to the end of the struggle.

The demand was put to the bosses who rejected it immediately. The strike began at midnight in East St. Louis and within hours of announcement, the strikers controlled the city uncontested. In the morning, the rail strikers announced they would permit passenger and mail trains to pass through the city, but all freight traffic would be stopped. The rail companies waited. Chicago & Alton tried to start a freight train, but it was stopped and turned back to the yard. The Union Railway & Transit Company removed their wage decrease, but the Transit workers continued to strike in solidarity with their brothers, stiffened by militants in their ranks.

City officials wired frightened messages, warning that this was a repetition of the Paris Commune of '71. The second day of the strike, July 24, the strikers determined they would expand their blockade to passenger trains. A train was decoupled from its passenger cars and only permitted transit when the locomotive was bare.

At 11:00 AM that morning, twenty-five strikers led by an Ohio and Mississippi Railway engineer seized two Missouri Pacific Railroad locomotives, took the Missouri Pacific engine shops, and tried to persuade the workers there to cease work. They refused. 3,000 - 4,000 people gathered at the depot as unrest increased. It was announced by the city authorities that six companies of infantry were marching to put an end to the blockade and clear the rail lines. Police began to sweep the streets.

At 4:00 PM that afternoon, flatcars from other striking yards arrived, loaded with more strikers. The word had gotten out that St. Louis was the hub of a powerful solidarity movement across all railway lines. At 6 PM, six companies arrived from Fort Leavenworth. Their commander stated that "I have been ordered here with general instructions to protect the property of the United States" but declined to take action except to hole up in an army barracks.

That night, Communist leaders held meetings throughout the city. Processions of people marched through the streets. The city government, paralyzed by the fear that they were not heavily armed enough to act, did nothing. The police remained "inert."

On July 25, 1877, at 9 AM, the Communists gathered a crowd in a downtown marketplace. There, they convinced wire manufacturers to join the strike. At 10 AM they marched to Turner Hall where the executive committee of the Workingmen's Party was meeting.

By now, Black workers had joined the white strikers. An air of solidarity prevailed throughout the city. The Workingman's Party declared that all work within St. Louis would soon come to a halt.

On the morning of July 26, a mass meeting of coopers agreed to join the strike. Smelter and clay workers joined the strike. 35% of the workers striking were U.S. born; 29% were German; 18% Irish; 12% English or Welsh. A full 12% of strikers were Black.

The strike was entirely controlled by the Executive Committee, a group of 47 or so men that appear to have been elected or appointed by unknown processes. The most prominent were clerks, a student organizer, a doctor, a drug and bleach maker, a newspaper seller and a boot fitter.

On the evening of Wednesday, July 26, in Carondelet, six miles south of the city center, as ironworkers called on the Martindale Zinc Works to enter the strike, the foreman of the works struck a striker with a crowbar. The police tried to step in, but were driven off with rocks. The ironworkers took control of the zinc works and unfurled the red flags of the International. By the end of the day, there was not a single manufactory in operation. The strike had shut down the entire city. It was all in the hands of the Workingmen's Party.

That evening, there was another mass meeting at Lucas Market of over 10,000 people. Peter Lofgreen, a workingman's delegate, harangued the crowd and told them that if the managers could not restore their pay, it was time for the railroads to be in the hands of the workers.

Thomas Curtis declared that the demands of St. Louis must go all the way to the president of the United States. This, he said, was "not a strike - but a social revolution!"

On Thursday barbers, wagon-makers, painters, blacksmiths, and mills closed. Only a few remained open to process bread. The mayor met with the Executive Committee repeatedly, begging for more shops to be opened.

In Carondelet, 18 metal workers were organized into a makeshift police force that patrolled the streets. In East St. Louis, the railway workers held a parade with a brass band and banners that said "We Want a Peaceful Revolution" and "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity."

Then the Executive Committee faltered. At the close of the 26th, they stated that "in order to avoid riot, we have determined no large procession until our organization is so complete as to positively assure the citizens of St. Louis a perfect maintenance of order". When a group of Black workers asked to join the party, the Executive Committee "replied that we wanted nothing to do with them."

Reaction was not asleep. Merchants were raising $20,000 behind closed doors (close to $1 million today) to arm the militia. The St. Louis Gun Club supplied shotguns. 1,500 rifles and 2 cannon were sent by the governor. 11,000 volunteers were mustered into service.

On July 27, the governor sent a missive demanding the disbandment of the Executive Committee and its strike committees. The Workingmen's Party replied "Nothing short of compliance to the [just demand for wages] will arrest this tidal wave of revolution." The papers were now referring to St. Louis as the "St. Louis Commune."

At 3:00 PM on Friday July 27, municipal and federal forces arrived downtown. Police cavalry led the way, riding abreast to cover the entire width of the street. They were followed by foot police with rifles and the two cannon from the armory. Half a block behind the city police there marched the federal troops, all with fixed bayonets. The cavalry plunged into the crowd outside the Hall where the Executive Committee met. One of the officers shouted "Ride 'em down! Ride 'em down! They have no business here."

Within hours, several members of the Committee had been arrested. 73 rank-and-file workers were arrested in the chaos.

The Executive Committee had failed to act to arm its revolution against the counter-revolution. It had rejected the aid of the Black workers that made the seizure of the city possible. The remaining members of the Committee were isolated and the strikers at the mercy of police. By August 1, 1877, leaderless, the strikers were forced to return to work as seven companies of Illinois National Guard troops entered St. Louis. But the threat of a renewed strike kept the capitalists aware that they had to tighten their grip.

From July 22 until August 1, the strike Executive Committee had controlled the city. It had failed, utterly, to establish the necessary self-defense required for the revolution. It had dealt with the mayor and business interests in the city as cold allies. What if they had not suspended the mass meetings? What if they had armed the workers? What if they had not broken the solidarity of Black and white workers and instead expanded their demands to include those of the Black toilers?

What if what if what if indeed. We cannot know what if, merely study their obscene failings at a moment when the power was in the hands of the people and their leaders refused to act. Remember the Commune. Do not repeat its mistakes.

Sorry one more thing to highlight here: those petty-bourgeois merchants who armed the militia and brought in weapons? They were puffing and blustering with the Committee the whole time, begging to be allowed to open their shops. Just like the Paris Commune, the committee should have EXPROPRIATED THEM and made SURE their material wealth did not pour into the counterrevolution

rip st louis commune :smith:

# ? Oct 4, 2022 21:48

Teriyaki Hairpiece: Dec 29, 2006; I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.

I've started reading a book about the start of the American Revolution. It's only the prologue and things are already not looking good.

quote:

More than two thousand mature oaks had been felled to build a ship like this, the biggest, most complex machine in the eighteenth-century world, the steam engine and spinning jenny be damned. The king admired the massive oak balks, the knees chopped from tree forks, the thick planks wider than a big man�s handspan, the gun decks painted bright red to lessen the psychological shock of blood spilled in battle. Twenty or more miles of rope had been rigged in a loom of shrouds, ratlines, stays, braces, and halyards. Masts, yards, spars, tops, and crosstrees rose overhead in geometric elegance. Even at anchor this wooden world sang, as timbers pegged and jointed, dovetailed and mortised, emitted creaks, groans, and squeals. Belowdecks, where each sailor got twenty-eight inches of sleeping width for his hammock, the powder monkeys wore felt slippers to avoid creating sparks in the magazine. The smells of tar, hemp, pine pitch, and varnish mingled with the brine of bilgewater and vinegar fumigant and the hog-lard pomade sailors used to grease their queues. All in all, it was the precise odor of empire.

# ? Oct 4, 2022 22:55

mawarannahr: May 21, 2019

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

I've started reading a book about the start of the American Revolution. It's only the prologue and things are already not looking good.

how was the smell situation below deck? also was there more pegging and jointing, dovetailing and mortising, emitting creaks, groans, and squeals..

# ? Oct 4, 2022 23:01

Azathoth: Apr 3, 2001

mawarannahr posted:

how was the smell situation below deck? also was there more pegging and jointing, dovetailing and mortising, emitting creaks, groans, and squeals..

in an era when the thames was an open sewer and animal poo poo was everywhere, everyone still remarked on the smell. i genuinely cannot imagine what the smell would be like and i live near industrial hog farms

# ? Oct 5, 2022 00:11

War and Pieces: Apr 24, 2022; DID NOT VOTE FOR FETTERMAN

Danann posted:

https://twitter.com/primarycatdad/status/1570739141918457857

rip st louis commune

at least they got a creepy pagent out of the whole thing

# ? Oct 5, 2022 00:56

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/britain-secretly-backed-mussolinis-march-on-rome-pzsr2hpb8

https://archive.is/HPrga

# ? Oct 5, 2022 08:12

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

Danann posted:

https://twitter.com/primarycatdad/status/1570739141918457857

rip st louis commune

Here's a song about the railroad strike:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds4cHgzN-S8

Orange Devil has issued a correction as of 11:30 on Oct 5, 2022

# ? Oct 5, 2022 11:23

Teriyaki Hairpiece: Dec 29, 2006; I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.

To be clear, I'm not disgusted by the idea of the smell, which absolutely was disgusting, I'm disgusted by the turgid prose and possibly pro-British Empire slant of the author

# ? Oct 5, 2022 15:40

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

Azathoth posted:

in an era when the thames was an open sewer and animal poo poo was everywhere, everyone still remarked on the smell. i genuinely cannot imagine what the smell would be like and i live near industrial hog farms

Oh yeah? How about the smell coming from the Chincha Islands, where migratory sea birds stopped and took a dump for several millennia. The Andean natives figured out that guano could replenish soil fertility, and had llamas haul it from the islands up into the terraced agriculture lands of the Andes, and there were even "penalties for disturbing the birds during nesting or taking guano allocated to other villages."

But then Europeans figured out the value of guano, and you can probably guess what happened next:

(from 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann)

quote:

It was said that the islands gave off a stench so intense that they were difficult to approach. They were a clutch of dry, granitic mounds thirteen miles off the Peruvian shore, about five hundred miles south of Lima on the west coast of South America. [...] Predators and prey both are preyed upon by the Peruvian booby, cormorant, and pelican. All three have nested on the Chincha islands for millennia. Over time they have covered the islands with a layer of guano as much as 150 feet thick.

[...]

Supplying European farmers with guano would involve transporting large quantities of excrement across the Atlantic, a project that understandably failed to enthuse shipping companies. Within several decades, though the picture changed. Agricultural reformers throughout Europe had to begun to worry that the ever-more intense agriculture necessary to feed growing populations was exhausting the soil. As harvests leveled off and even decreased, they looked for something to restore the land: fertilizer.

At the time, the best known soil additive was bone meal, made by pulverizing bones from slaughterhouses. Bushels of bones went to grinding factories in Britain, France, and Germany. Demand ratcheted up, driven by fears of soil depletion. Bone dealers supplied the factories from increasingly untoward sources, including the recent battlefields of Waterloo and Austerlitz. "It is now ascertained beyond a doubt, by actual experiment upon an extensive scale, that a dead solider is a most valuable article of commerce,' remarked the London Observer in 1822. The newspaper noted that there was no reason to believe that graver robbers were limiting themselves to battlefields. "For aught known to the contrary, the good farmers of Yorkshire are, in a great measure, indebted to the bones of their children for their daily bread."

From this perspective, avian feces began to seem like a reasonable item of commerce. A few bags of guano appeared in European ports in the mid-1830s. Then Justus von Liebig weighed in. A pioneering organic chemist, Liebig was the first to explain plants' dependence on nutrients,, especially nitrogen. In his treatise Organic Chemistry in Its Application to Agriculture and physiology (1840), Liebig criticized the use of bone fertilizer, which has little nitrogen. Guano was another story [...]

Guano mania took hold. [...] In forty years, Peru exported about 13 million tons of guano, [receiving] for it approximately $13 billion in today's dollars. It was the beginning of today's input-intensive agriculture - the practice of transferring huge amounts of crop nutrients from one place to another, distant place according to plans dictated by scientific research.

Hoping to take maximum advantage of the guano rush, Peru nationalized the Chinchas. Soon it discovered that nobody wanted to work on the islands. Except for birds, their only inhabitants were bats, scorpions, spiders, ticks, and biting flies. Not a single plant grew on their barren slopes. Worse, the islands had no water, every drop had to be shipped in. Because the land was blanketed in guano, miners worked, ate, and slept on shelves of ancient excrement. So little rain fell that the soluble materials in the guano never washed away - it remained studded with crystals of ammonia nitrate, which broke in corrosive clouds around miners' shovels. Powdery an acrid, the guano went into miners' carts, which were pushed up rails to a depot atop one of the seaside cliffs. From the cliff,. men dumped tons of excrement through a long canvas tube directly into the bellies of the vessels below. Slamming into the hold, guano dust exploded from the hatchways, shoruding the ship in a toxic fog. Workers wore masks made from hemp, smeared with tar, one visitor noted:

quote:
but the guano mocks at such weak defenses...[T]hey are unable to remain below longer than twenty minutes at one time. They are then relieved by another party, and return on deck perfectly naked, streaming with perspiration, and with their brown skins thickly coated with guano.

The government could have paid high wages to get workers to endure these terrible conditions, but that would have cut into profits. Instead it stocked the islands with a mix of convicts, army deserters, and African slaves. This arrangement proved unsatisfactory: the convicts and deserters killed each other, and the slaves were so valuable that their mainland owners did not wish to part with them.

In 1849 Peru gave up trying to run the mines itself and awarded an exclusive concession to Domingo Elias, Peru's biggest cotton grower and one of its principal slave owners. [...] In return for the monopoly, Elias was supposed to mine guano with his own slaves, but he, too, was reluctant to take them away from his cotton fields. He induced the government to subsidize merchants who imported immigrants. Prominent among these subsidized importers was Domingo Elias. By the time the law passed his agents were already in Fujian, waving labor contracts in the faces of illiterate villagers.

In standard indenture practice, the contracts promised the Chinese would pay for their passage by working, typically for eight years, in the newly discovered California gold fields. (The actual destination was not mentioned.) The ruse was plausible: agents for US firms were in Fujian at the same time, telling a similar lie as they sought indentured servants to build railroads. People who signed the bogus Peruvian contract were conducted to bleak human warehouses in Amoy (now called Xiamen, on an island across from the river from Yue-gang), and later, Macao. People who refused to sign were often kidnapped and shipped to the same warehouses. In these dark confines slavers burned the letter C - for California, their ostensible destination - into the backs of their ears. No longer were the men described as workers. Their new name was zhuzai, 'little pigs.' "None were let outside," wrote the Shanghai historian Wu, Ruozeng. "Those who resisted were whipped; any who tried to escape were killed."

[...] Peru represented the worst passage, the direst conditions, the most dreaded destination. Ultimately at least 100 000 Chinese were taken there. Conditions en route can be compared to those in the transatlantic slave trade. Perhaps one out of eight zhuzai died. As on the Atlantic slave ships, revolts were common. Eleven mutinies are known to have occurred on Peru-bound vessels; at least five bloodily succeeded.

[...]At any given time between one and two thousand were on the Chincha Islands. In classic divide-and-conquer fashion, Elias forestalled rebellion by setting his African slaves as overseers over his Chinese slaves and holding both to strict deadlines. Spasms of cruelty, slave upon slave, were the inevitable result. Guano miners swung their picks up to twenty hours a day, seven days a week, to fulfill their assigned daily quotas (as much as five tons of guano); two-thirds of their pay was deducted for room (reed huts) and board (a cup of maize with some bananas). Failure to meet the daily quota was rewarded with a five-foot rawhide whip. Minor infractions were punished by torture. Escape from the islands was impossible. Suicide was frequent. One overseer told a New York Times correspondent that:

quote:
more than sixty had killed themselves during the year,...chiefly by throwing themselves from the cliffs. They are buried, as they lived, like so many dogs. I saw one who had been drowned - it was not known whether accidentally or not - lying on the guano, when I first went ashore. All the morning, his dead body lay in the sun; in the afternoon, they had covered it in a few inches, and there it lies, along with many similar heaps, within a few yards of where they were digging.

So many Chinese died that overseers marked off an acre of guano as a cemetery.

Journalistic expos�s of guano slavery created an international scandal that gave the Lima government an excuse to eject Elias and renegotiate the guano contract with someone else, thus procuring a second round of bribes. Fulminating against the evils of official corruption, Elias sought to regain his lucrative concession by twice staging a coup d'�tat. Both attempts failed. IN 1857 he tried the legal route, running for president without success.

And then Europe went to war over the islands.

Dreylad has issued a correction as of 16:40 on Oct 5, 2022

# ? Oct 5, 2022 16:35

Casey Finnigan: Apr 30, 2009; Dumb ✔
So goddamn crazy ✔

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

To be clear, I'm not disgusted by the idea of the smell, which absolutely was disgusting, I'm disgusted by the turgid prose and possibly pro-British Empire slant of the author

yeah it's a history book bro what do you expect

you either get purple prose or you get a bone dry dissertation

# ? Oct 5, 2022 18:52

Teriyaki Hairpiece: Dec 29, 2006; I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.

I read like two more pages and I'm already learning stuff

Apparently George III never left England. Ever. Not as a baby, not as a grown man, not as a crazy old person. He didn't even go to Scotland. This is the ruler of an advanced murderous Empire that spanned the whole globe. He just sat there like a spider in a web for his entire life. That's fuckin sad, man.

# ? Oct 6, 2022 02:56

Teriyaki Hairpiece: Dec 29, 2006; I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.

Crying Charles V.gif

# ? Oct 6, 2022 03:07

Slavvy: Dec 11, 2012

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

I read like two more pages and I'm already learning stuff

Apparently George III never left England. Ever. Not as a baby, not as a grown man, not as a crazy old person. He didn't even go to Scotland. This is the ruler of an advanced murderous Empire that spanned the whole globe. He just sat there like a spider in a web for his entire life. That's fuckin sad, man.

Imagine if he'd had the internet

# ? Oct 6, 2022 03:59

Weka: May 5, 2019; Can't post for 8 hours!

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

Not this, please

It's actually kinda relevant in that an innovation that helped the French militarily was allowing people to become French. Not the first to do it, Rome did it for instance, but maybe the first in the era of nationalism.

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

I read like two more pages and I'm already learning stuff

Apparently George III never left England. Ever. Not as a baby, not as a grown man, not as a crazy old person. He didn't even go to Scotland. This is the ruler of an advanced murderous Empire that spanned the whole globe. He just sat there like a spider in a web for his entire life. That's fuckin sad, man.

George III wasn't the ruler of the Empire.

# ? Oct 6, 2022 05:28

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHYu8XKJjt8

# ? Oct 8, 2022 15:53

Teriyaki Hairpiece: Dec 29, 2006; I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.

I've mostly come around to this book, though it definitely tries very hard to be fun

I particularly enjoyed this little tidbit from the Bunker Hill chapter, which I just finished.

quote:

A man five feet, eight inches tall and weighing 168 pounds had an exterior surface of 2,550 square inches, of which a thousand were exposed to gunfire when he was facing an enemy frontally at close range.

# ? Oct 9, 2022 20:15

i say swears online: Mar 4, 2005

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

I've mostly come around to this book, though it definitely tries very hard to be fun

I particularly enjoyed this little tidbit from the Bunker Hill chapter, which I just finished.

1775 clancychat

# ? Oct 9, 2022 21:04

Some Guy TT: Aug 30, 2011

https://twitter.com/IlvesToomas/status/1579326439035645952

# ? Oct 10, 2022 05:44

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

quote:

A minority of Whites hoped for a parliamentary democracy, but most wanted something like the old regime. Among their forces were the great majority of Russia�s Cossacks, who had long helped carry out the czarist empire�s infamous pogroms (Beevor assesses one of them as �probably the least murderous� of the Cossack leaders). The Whites also included a panoply of unsavory local and ethnic warlords, one of whom kept wolves as house pets. Joining these fearsome figures was an assortment of landowners, businessmen, czarist officials, and military officers�including my uncle Boris�who knew they would lose everything under Red rule. The widely separated White armies, top-heavy with colonels and generals, quickly came under the leadership of former czarist commanders such as Admiral Alexander Kolchak, whom Beevor describes as a man with �the expression of an angry eagle.� He headed the White regime based in Siberia, traveled with his 26-year-old mistress, and styled himself �supreme ruler.�

Some Guy TT really has a gift for finding the most infuriating garbage

# ? Oct 10, 2022 06:06

i say swears online: Mar 4, 2005

gradenko_2000 posted:

Some Guy TT really has a gift for finding the most infuriating garbage

quote:

The war ended, of course, with a Red victory and Leninist rule that brooked no dissent; within a decade it had evolved into Stalin�s dictatorship. Yet even if the Whites had won, their supreme ruler might well have imposed a dictatorship of his own. In any event,

# ? Oct 10, 2022 06:26

Some Guy TT: Aug 30, 2011

my uncle boris or as his friends called him the juiceslayer because he loved his juice

# ? Oct 10, 2022 07:04

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# ? May 23, 2024 19:16

Slavvy: Dec 11, 2012

The whites were evil but like, in a strong manly way, you know?

# ? Oct 10, 2022 07:24

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