Lawman 0 posted:

I just got a good look at the Balkans and jesus christ what a mess!
No wonder why they despise each other.

quote:

At the end of World War II, plans were made in the Netherlands to annex German territory as compensation for the damages caused by the war. In October 1945, the Dutch state asked Germany for 25 billion guilders in reparations, but in February 1945 it had already been established at the Yalta Conference that reparations would not be given in monetary form. The plan which was worked out in most detail was the one made by Frits Bakker-Schut, and hence became known as the Bakker-Schut Plan.

In its most ambitious form, this plan included the cities of Cologne, Aachen, Münster and Osnabrück, and would have enlarged the country by 30 to 50 percent. The local population had to be either deported, or, when still speaking the original Low German dialects, Dutchified. The plan was largely dropped after U.S. dismissal of it. Eventually, an area of a total size of 69 km2 was allocated to the Netherlands. Almost all of this was returned to West Germany in 1963 after Germany paid the Netherlands 280 million German marks.

Many Germans living in the Netherlands were however declared 'enemy subjects' after World War II ended and put into an internment camp in an operation called Black Tulip. A total of 3,691 Germans were ultimately deported. The UK responded by expelling 100,000 Dutch citizens living in occupied Germany.

Red_Mage posted:

The world weighted by alcohol consumption.

Smirr posted:

GreenCard78 posted:

Looking at DC, what's a general hate group? I understand black separatist in DC but not general hate. "We don't take too kindly to folks who don't take too kindly, round nah!"

Southern Poverty Law Center posted:

These groups [i.e. "General Hate"] espouse a variety of rather unique hateful doctrines and beliefs that are not easily categorized. This list includes a “Jewish” group that is rabidly anti-Arab, a “Christian” group that is anti-Catholic and a polygamous “Mormon” breakaway sect that is racist. Many of the groups are vendors that sell a miscellany of hate materials from several different sectors of the white supremacist movement.

A crazy person posted:

The sea is calm to the observer at the shore, but after miles and miles at sea, statistics dictate that you will encounter a swell that will block the ship. The sea is never, never ever, calm for miles and miles, it's a constantly moving thing that never calms to the point of perfect flatness. Personally, I wish it did calm like you seem to think it does. It would be one of the most undisputed proofs of a flat-earth available. Sadly, it does not.

Soviet Commubot posted:

quote:

The United States of Greater Austria (German: Vereinigte Staaten von Groß-Österreich) was a proposal, conceived by a group of scholars surrounding the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, that never came to pass. This specific proposal was conceived by Aurel Popovici in 1906.

As the twentieth century started to unfold, the greatest problem facing the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary was that it consisted of about a dozen distinctly different ethnic groups, of which only two, the Germans and Hungarians (who together accounted for about 44% of the total population), wielded any power or control. The other ethnic groups, which were not involved in the state affairs, were consisted of Italians, Romanians and a group of Slavic peoples (Croatians, Czechs, Poles, Ruthenians, Serbs, Slovaks, Slovenes and Ukrainians). Among them, only Croats had limited autonomy in the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia. The idea of the Dual Monarchy system of 1867 had been to split the previous Austrian Empire into two realms, one German-dominated, the other Hungarian-dominated. However, after various demonstrations, uprisings and acts of terrorism, it became readily apparent that the notion of two ethnic groups dominating the other ten could not survive in perpetuum.

Franz Ferdinand had planned to redraw the map of Austria-Hungary radically, creating a number of ethnically and linguistically dominated semi-autonomous "states" which would all be part of a larger confederation renamed the United States of Greater Austria. Under this plan, language and cultural identification was encouraged, and the disproportionate balance of power would be corrected. The idea was set to encounter heavy opposition from the Hungarian part of the Dual Monarchy, since a direct result of the reform would have been a significant territorial loss for Hungary.

However, the Archduke was assassinated at Sarajevo in 1914, triggering the outbreak of the First World War. After the war Austria-Hungary was dismantled and several new nation states were created, and various Austro-Hungarian territories were ceded to neighbouring countries by the victorious Entente powers.

Frostwerks posted:

Do you have a super huge version of this? It looks right in most places but where I'm at it looks completely wrong. Problem is it's far too small even at 1240*826 to discern.

Smirr posted:

What's that long, dark stretch running north-south in eastern Kansas (assuming it's not just Kansas being Kansas)?

Kainser posted:

They are way beaten by the Vatican State with 15625 police officers per 100000 people

Koramei posted:

and regarding border chat, it can't have been so crazy in places that weren't Europe? land had been getting divided up under colonialism for centuries before Napoleon; or was it a different sort of thing

Guildencrantz posted:

Electoral map of Poland in the 2007 election. Orange is center-right liberals, blue is national-conservative hard right:



The interesting tidbit comes from the black lines through the middle. These indicate the Partitions of Poland, which ended in 1918. The western part was Prussian/German, the eastern and southeastern belonged to Russia and Austria(-Hungary) respectively. Outside of Warsaw voting liberal, modern electoral geography ends up following the borders between 19th-century empires almost perfectly.

ComradeCosmobot posted:

Northwest, Northeast Caucasian, and Kartvelian/South Caucasian are recognized families, with a number of linguists concluding that Northeast and Northwest Caucasian are related. Others unify even Kartvelian into a larger Caucasian family, but this "Ibero-Caucasian hypothesis" is not usually accepted, even by the lumper Greenberg (who used the questionable mass comparison technique to propose that all Native American languages other than Na-Dené and Eskimo-Aleut belonged to a single family: Amerind and grouped Indo-European, Altaic, and Uralic languages into a dubious Eurasiatic family)

MrMenshevik posted:

English uses 'Germany' by drawing on Greek and Latin for the place name instead of the Germanic roots of either the local language or English itself. English just loves to muddle its etymological roots and sometimes does really odd stuff with foreign names. The Arabic philosopher ibn Sina becomes Avicenna (ah vi senna), which makes sense as a corruption, but ibn Rushd becomes Averroes (ah vare oh ees). Why? Because English says, "gently caress you!" that's why.

quote:

Germany has actually a lot of different names depending on what language you're speaking. The country calls itself Deutschland, coming from the Old High German adjective diutisc, "of the people". All Germanic languages with the sole exception of English (and Scots, I guess) derive their name for Germany from that, along with Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese. The demonym "Dutch" actually stems from that. The English Germany comes from the Latin Germania, which was the collective term for all Germanic tribes used by the Romans (and later on by the tribes themselves). It isn't entirely clear where it comes from, but English shares that origin with lots of other languages like Mongolian, Hebrew or Esperanto. The Spanish derive their name, as you said, from the Alemanni tribe which was the direct neighbour to the Galloromanes of France in the time before the formation of the Frankish kingdom; it entered the French language through that and spread from there throughout the Iberian peninsula, eventually reaching the Arab, Turkish and Persian languages as well. While the Slavic languages have different names for Germany, their adjectives all come from Old Slavic němьcь, "foreigner", which in turn comes from the word for "mute" (as they couldn't speak Slavic). The Hungarian and Romanian languages adopted that term as well. The Finnic languages derive their name for Germany from the Saxon tribe (e.g. Finnish Saksa), Lithuanian and Latvian call it Vokietija and Vacija, respectively - this probably comes from the Skandinavian Vagoth tribe. The Navajo say Bééshbichʼahníí bikéyah ("iron helmet"), as this was the code name for Germany during WWII. Medieval Latin and Greek derived their name from the Teutons and Franks, and in Rwanda and Burundi the names for Germany comes from "Guten Tag" ("Hello"), as this was what they heard the Germans saying to each other during the colonial era.

Wikipedia posted:

The first official published description of [Danubian endemic familial nephropathy] was made by the Bulgarian nephrologist Dr. Yoto Tanchev and his team in 1956 in the Bulgarian Journal Savremenna Medizina, a priority generally acknowledged by the international nephrological community. Their study was based on a wide screening of inhabitants of the villages around the town of Vratsa, Bulgaria. Their contribution to the understanding of this unusual endemic disease of the kidneys was their description of symptoms which were not typical of common chronic nephritis, i.e., incidence only in adults (no children affected), absence of high blood pressure, xanthochromia of palms and soles (Tanchev's sign), early hypochromic anemia, absence of proteinuria, and slow progression of kidney failure.
A striking feature of the disease is its very localized occurrence. There are approximately ten small areas where it occurs, all of them more or less rural, but nothing seems to connect those areas other than the occurrence of this illness. Tanchev and colleagues suggested that the condition was sui generis. Their initial tentative hypothesis for its cause was intoxication with heavy metals, because the affected villages were supplied with water coming from nearby Vratsa Mountain, a karst-type mountain.
The disease was originally called "Vratsa nephritis," and became known as "Balkan endemic nephropathy" later, after people living in Yugoslavia and Romania were found to be suffering from it as well.

The etiology of DEFN is not certain, although chronic exposure to dietary aristolochic acid has been identified as a major risk factor for DEFN and other, related disorders.
In the Balkan region, dietary aristolochic acid exposure may come from the consumption of the seeds of Aristolochia clematitis (European birthwort), a plant native to the endemic region, which are thought to comingle with the wheat used for bread. This theory has recently been further supported by the research of cancer biologist Arthur P. Grollman, director of the chemical biology lab at Stony Brook University in New York, and his colleague Bojan Jelaković, an associate professor at the Zagreb University School of Medicine. Aristolochic-acid-containing herbal remedies used in traditional Chinese medicine are associated with a related—possibly identical—condition known as "Chinese herbs nephropathy". Exposure to aristolochic acid is associated with a high incidence of uroepithelial tumorigenesis.

VitalSigns posted:

This actually happened, briefly. I give you the Bavarian Soviet Republic!


In the aftermath of WWI, a Communist revolution deposed the Bavarian monarchy and declared independence. [...]

VitalSigns posted:

I'd not heard that before; those stories were awesome. The Bavarian Wittelsbach monarchy always seemed pretty cool (even the crazy one just wanted to be left alone to build sweet palaces ). I still don't understand what made them change their minds about their historical Prussian enemies and agree to call the Hohenzollern "oh hey has it been 30 years already, welp, time to drown Europe in blood again" family their Emperors.

Jedi Knight Luigi posted:

Servus, native German speaker! I hate to be that guy, but I thought you might want to improve on your English grammar a bit: replace every instance of "an" in that sentence with "its" (without apostrophe).

cheerfullydrab posted:

You should really have some more nostalgia for the Germanic languages of the 6th-9th century. Why, in the 8th century, you could travel from the SW of the Iberian peninsula, up into Italy through Pavia, straight East all the way to the Dnieper, up north to the Baltic, west to the British islands, and then back down south through what is now France back to either Iberia or Pavia, and you could meet Germanic speakers who would be intelligible to you. Gosh I wish we could go back to the 8th century.

Boiled Water posted:

Which has the highest?