|
Cyrano4747 posted:I want to write a book about them titled "The Worst Generation." Mine will be called "The Greatest Generation ('great' meaning large or immense, I use it in the pejorative sense)"
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 16:55
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 23, 2024 20:01 |
|
|
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 17:00
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/spectator/status/935098939522633729 Setting aside that divorce was the reason for the CofE existing, I feel like there was something else worse than that about Wallis Simpson 
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 17:05
|
|
|
That's a pretty great map. I'm Sweden and her sister clearly running a book on who's going to win. Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Mine will be called "The Greatest Generation ('great' meaning large or immense, I use it in the pejorative sense)" Der Grossest Generation.
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 17:05
|
|
|
zoux posted:https://twitter.com/spectator/status/935098939522633729 The fact that she was American? That doesn't help here...  (However - Charles, the literal heir to the throne, is divorced and married to a divorcee. I think uh that that horse has bolted at this point!)
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 17:07
|
|
|
Tias posted:FDR was by all accounts pretty concerned about the French blundering in Vietnam, but the discourse against communism had him between a rock and a hard place, policy wise. I don't know enough about him to speculate.
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 17:10
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:That's a pretty great map. I'm all the fauna in Finland.
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 17:20
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:The fact that she was American? That doesn't help here... What's wrong with divorce? I thought the whole point of the English royal family starting its own church was that they could do divorcing.
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 17:22
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:What's wrong with divorce? I thought the whole point of the English royal family starting its own church was that they could do divorcing. I have a feeling a lot of these outlets publish these pieces and columns by morons because they tend to get a lot more page views than normal takes.
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 17:26
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:What's wrong with divorce? I thought the whole point of the English royal family starting its own church was that they could do divorcing. They're fine with divorce but it has to be because of adultery. Or, at least it did in the 30s, I don't know what the deal is now.
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 17:27
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:What's wrong with divorce? I thought the whole point of the English royal family starting its own church was that they could do divorcing. There's a pretty wide space between the CofE as it was established by Henry 8 to basically get his way and what people made it into over the next couple hundred years. A lot of the 17th/18th century fights in ENgland were over whether it was going to lean more in a protestant direction or a catholic direction theologically. In the end it came down more on the catholic side of that line, with a very heavy emphasis that it was Not Catholic At All because of political fears of catholic dynasties on the continent. It's still not Catholic, but on religious matters it's closer to that than Lutheran or any of the various Calvinist offshoots. bewbies posted:They're fine with divorce but it has to be because of adultery. Or, at least it did in the 30s, I don't know what the deal is now. It also gets super wonky with the royals because they're nominally in charge of the church. I'm hazy at best on the details, but that was a big part of why marrying a divorcee was such a big deal in the 30s - it's one thing for Bob who runs the pub to do it, it's another thing for your king/pope to do it. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Nov 27, 2017 |
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 17:30
|
|
|
zoux posted:I have a feeling a lot of these outlets publish these pieces and columns by morons because they tend to get a lot more page views than normal takes. Columnists are basically paid trolls at this point and their job is to generate hateclicks. Pay attention to how often poo poo that will make people angry is paywalled.
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 17:32
|
|
|
"The liberation war of 1914-1915", loving lol
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 17:37
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:
This is true in 1945, not so true even two years later. Britain was a model of decolonization later on, mostly because Attlee was too concerned with the domestic economy to bother paying for foreign wars and was handing the keys off to whoever wanted them. India was the big one, of course, but you also have the UK ingloriously GTFO'ing from Palestine and then OK'ing Burma's independence right after India. By the time you get to 1947-48 there really isn't much in the way of English pressure to maintain old colonial holdings for fear of destabilizing their own empire as they were well on their way towards cutting everyone loose and hoping to stay relevant via the commonwealth. The important thing is that France was aware of all this poo poo and was actively negotiating with the Vietnamese about their post-war relationship. Ho and everyone else thought that they would get something along the lines of what India and Burma did - total independence with some nominal membership in a confederation of former French colonies. These talks culminated in France officially recognizing an "independent" vietnam under Bao Dai in 1949, but it was kind of bullshit. They still retained control of Vietnam's foreign policy, for example, and there was some economic shittery in there too. This was the proximate cause of the war between the Viet Minh and the French - Ho & Co. realized that the French weren't negotiating in good faith for an arrangement similar to what the Indians and Burmese had gotten from the British and took to the field to press for true independence. This didn't have to be a total disaster, because just a few years earlier a similar situation in the Dutch East Indies resulted in everyone telling the Dutch to cut that poo poo out and grant Indonesia independence. Of course that's the same year that Mao finally wins his war which drastically changes the American cold war calculus. There probably was a window of opportunity between '47 and '49 where the French could have either gone all in on an actual commonwealth-like status for Vietnam or Ho could have forced the issue and led to something along the lines of what happened in Indonesia. As it stands the French dragged poo poo out just long enough for China to fall and the whole issue to become hopelessly entangled in Cold War containment policies. edit: there's also a side line on the Greek Civil War that has to be taken into account if you're looking at it from the American perspective. That plus China is what really made containment policy a big deal
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 17:43
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:This is true in 1945, not so true even two years later. Britain was a model of decolonization later on, mostly because Attlee was too concerned with the domestic economy to bother paying for foreign wars and was handing the keys off to whoever wanted them. India was the big one, of course, but you also have the UK ingloriously GTFO'ing from Palestine and then OK'ing Burma's independence right after India. By the time you get to 1947-48 there really isn't much in the way of English pressure to maintain old colonial holdings for fear of destabilizing their own empire as they were well on their way towards cutting everyone loose and hoping to stay relevant via the commonwealth. There's a difference between decolonising voluntarily on your own and watching your fellow colonial power being browbeaten into it by someone else, knowing you could be next, though. Attlee might have been cool with it personally, but the people of Britain as a whole were still pretty heavily attached to the Empire and being forced to divest it would have been seen as a national humiliation, which would be a good way to see him lose the next election by a landslide (see also: why that very same Attlee spent a poo poo ton of incredibly broke postwar Britain's money to get an independent nuclear deterrent after being pushed around by the US).
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 18:01
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:There's a difference between decolonising voluntarily on your own and watching your fellow colonial power being browbeaten into it by someone else, knowing you could be next, though. Attlee might have been cool with it personally, but the people of Britain as a whole were still pretty heavily attached to the Empire and being forced to divest it would have been seen as a national humiliation, which would be a good way to see him lose the next election by a landslide (see also: why that very same Attlee spent a poo poo ton of incredibly broke postwar Britain's money to get an independent nuclear deterrent after being pushed around by the US). Again, the example of Indonesia shows that wasn't that huge an issue. The Netherlands tried to fight a war to keep from losing the colony right after WW2 and eventually gave up in the face of widespread international pressure, including the US. The calculus of whether to support or squash post-colonial independence movements changed drastically after 1949. edit: Indonesia is also a great example where you have both what could be described as a nationalist wing of the revolutionaries and an unabashedly left-wing/communist component. If Indonesia had gone down even 3 years later it's very easy to imagine it working out like Vietnam did with an enforced division and western patronage of the anti-communist forces. It really, REALLY can't be understated just how much China changed everything and how bad the timing of Vietnam's final push to break away from France was. Not that they were to blame for that, the French basically dragged it out for fear of having exactly what happened to the Dutch happen to them. edit x2: of course Indonesia gets its own flavor of Cold War unpleasantness when it comes time to clean up those old left wing elements. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Nov 27, 2017 |
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 18:09
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:Again, the example of Indonesia shows that wasn't that huge an issue. The Netherlands tried to fight a war to keep from losing the colony right after WW2 and eventually gave up in the face of widespread international pressure, including the US. The calculus of whether to support or squash post-colonial independence movements changed drastically after 1949. I'm talking about Britain's reaction rather than America's, and I will note that even in 1945 Britain is a leeeetle more of a world power than the Netherlands. I agree that Russia and the US between them could have pulled a Suez a decade early if they so chose, but my point is that Britain wouldn't just shrug and say 'ok then' over it, and there would be serious political consequences in both the UK and France (with all sorts of interesting knock on effects in the Cold War, I guess).
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 18:13
|
|
|
Didn't France have real messy decolonization even past Vietnam? I know that they've been through a hell of a lot of wars in Africa because of it. There's also something I've read about the later decolonization that France has done being paired with a forever tax on the "benefits of colonization" on the countries it left, but I've had difficulties digging up good corroborating resources, so I'm not sure about that.
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 18:15
|
|
zoux posted:I have a feeling a lot of these outlets publish these pieces and columns by morons because they tend to get a lot more page views than normal takes. Britishnewspapers.txt
|
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 18:26
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:I'm talking about Britain's reaction rather than America's, and I will note that even in 1945 Britain is a leeeetle more of a world power than the Netherlands. I agree that Russia and the US between them could have pulled a Suez a decade early if they so chose, but my point is that Britain wouldn't just shrug and say 'ok then' over it, and there would be serious political consequences in both the UK and France (with all sorts of interesting knock on effects in the Cold War, I guess). Eh, I think we just see the situation differently. Even if Britain had decided to throw a fit over it I don't think it would have mattered. A huge part of the reality in SE Asia from '45-49 was that the traditional colonial powers didn't have the resources to get stuck in and the US had a whole different set of priorities. Attlee might not have been popular back home if he'd just washed his hands of the matter, but then he wasn't all that popular to begin with. British reaction to the crumbling of the empire, the suez crisis, and it becoming increasingly obvious to everyone that the US was the hegemonic western power now is a big part of why we got a second helping of Churchill. The core of it is that it's the US's reaction to indonesia and vietnam that mattered, and the US reacted very, VERY differently before and after the CCP took over China. Before it was an anti-colonial struggle that if anything would see the US's position strengthened as it could befriend the former colonies at the expense of the European powers. After it was framed in the larger context of the struggle to contain communism. It's a very important shift in American foreign policy that underpins a LOT of how the first half of the Cold War shook out.
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 18:26
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:Didn't France have real messy decolonization even past Vietnam? I know that they've been through a hell of a lot of wars in Africa because of it. So yeah, French decolonization was a bit of a shambles. EDIT: The Fourth Republic had a lot of problems other than Algeria, but Algeria was definitely the thing that pushed it over the edge.
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 18:32
|
|
|
WW2 Data Back to the small stuff with 20mm Projectiles! There's a variety of rounds on display as well as some markings that only apply to certain families of 20mm ordnance. On top of that, we see examples of "New Series" vs "Old Series" projectiles. What's different about them? How were certain 20mm projectiles loaded, and how did a tracer affect that? Check out the blog to find out!
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 19:15
|
|
|
Jobbo_Fett posted:WW2 Data Do you know if the Polsten used Oerlikon ammo or if they had their own?
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 20:19
|
|
|
Ensign Expendable posted:Do you know if the Polsten used Oerlikon ammo or if they had their own? I'm not sure, I'd have to see if any of my other books might mention interchangeable ammo. Seems like the Polsten was just a cheaper version of the Oerlikon and, apart from a difference in magazine use, the wiki for it doesn't mention any supply issues caused by it.
|
|
#
?
Nov 27, 2017 20:38
|
|
|
Does anyone have reading recommendations about the espionage in the cold war, especially in Berlin?
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2017 01:52
|
|
|
zoux posted:I have a feeling a lot of these outlets publish these pieces and columns by morons because they tend to get a lot more page views than normal takes. how amazing must it be to just only enjoy reading the exact same poo poo that pops into your head while showering "Hmm she's divorced I think, isn't that a problem?"
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2017 02:05
|
|
|
Watching the Vietnam series and it is extremely good. I like the perspectives from both sides, which is not something you often get in English.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2017 02:19
|
|
|
Comrade Gorbash posted:Vietnam was bad, but the French don't spend much time lamenting it because Algeria eclipsed in every way possible. Losing Vietnam was a major embarrassment for French arms, the crisis in Algeria led to an attempted coup and caused the fall of the Fourth Republic. Bernard Fall sums it up: quote:The French in Algeria learned every lesson from the French in Viet-Nam. The troop ratio there was a comfortable 11-to-1; the French had 760,000 men, the Algerians had 65,000. The French very effectively sealed off the Algerian-Tunisian border, and by 1962 had whittled down the guerrillas from 65,000 to 7,000. But the French were winning at the expense of being the second-most-hated country in the world, after South Africa, in the United Nations. They were giving the whole Western alliance a black name.2 At what price were the French winning? Well, 760,000 men out of the about 1 million men of the French armed forces were tied down in Algeria. It cost 3 million dollars a day for eight years, or $12 billion in French money. No American aid was involved. The "price" also included two mutinies of the French Army and one overthrow of the civilian government. At that price the French were winning the war in Algeria, militarily. The fact was that the military victory was totally meaningless. This is where the word "grandeur" applies to President de Gaulle: he was capable of seeing through the trees of military victory to a forest of political defeat and he chose to settle the Algerian insurgency by other means.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2017 03:22
|
|
|
bewbies posted:They're fine with divorce but it has to be because of adultery. Or, at least it did in the 30s, I don't know what the deal is now. That was the case with all upper class English divorces in the 1930s. That said, the upper class was split in opinion on Wallis Simpson.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2017 03:54
|
|
|
What, half hated her for being divorced, the other half hated her for being American? BTW Meghan Markle's family tree has some serious titled bona fides on her English side.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2017 04:18
|
|
|
zoux posted:What, half hated her for being divorced, the other half hated her for being American? There definitely seems to be something coloring opinions.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2017 04:26
|
|
|
xthetenth posted:There definitely seems to be something coloring opinions. Yeah, this here probably explains it.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2017 04:37
|
|
|
Wasn't Wallis Simpson a Nazi? Huh, I wouldn't have guessed Markle was mixed race unless I saw the headlines on interracial marriage. Probably not a Nazi, then, which is a relief. I was confused at first, looking at the picture and wondering if it's some old-timey discrimination against like the Italians or something.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2017 04:53
|
|
|
quote:Research compiled in 1997 by historians including Markle's great-uncle, Mike Markle, revealed that her paternal great-great-great-grandmother was New Hampshire landowner Mary Hussey Smith (1823–1908), a descendant of nobleman John Hussey, 1st Baron Hussey of Sleaford, who was beheaded in 1537 at the order of King Henry VIII. Through Lord Hussey, Markle is a descendant of King John. Markle is also a descendant of Captain Christopher Hussey, Esquire (d.1686) who was appointed in 1679 by King Charles II to govern the Royal Province of Hampton, New Hampshire. He was a Founding Father of Nantucket.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2017 05:02
|
|
|
Rockopolis posted:Wasn't Wallis Simpson a Nazi? You know plenty of American white supremacists have at least one black ancestor from the 18th or 19th century for some unknowable reason, right? Ancestry is no guarantee. Not to imply that this means she is a Nazi, of course.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2017 05:29
|
|
|
Harry's the nazi
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2017 05:34
|
|
|
Rockopolis posted:Wasn't Wallis Simpson a Nazi? Yeah, I had to look at Wikipedia to find out, I had no idea. Though to be fair I had no idea who she was yesterday, either.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2017 05:42
|
|
|
Race is an extension of class, of course Harry would get more bothered seeing same curry shop in London than someone with 1/64 African ancestry. At this point, everyone in the English royal family outside the Queen herself comes off as complete scum.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2017 06:02
|
|
|
Here's a hot take, cut off the heads of all the "royals" like they should've a hundred years ago so I don't have to read about a bunch of inbred do nothing's and their tabloid escapades written by a bunch of chumps who think this is still the age of Victoria.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2017 06:03
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 23, 2024 20:01 |
|
|
Phobophilia posted:At this point, everyone in the English royal family outside the Queen herself comes off as complete scum. Why do you make an exception for the Queen?
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2017 06:14
|
|
