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twerking on the railroad posted:I've finally made it through more than half of this. It's... Very rambling in the Singapore section. It feels like he took an hour to say what he could have in five or ten minutes Just wait till he gets to MacArthur, Dan spends like an hour grinding the story to a halt to make sure you understand how quirky MacArthur is. I normally don't mind the more rambling aspects of HH, but for some reason Supernova Part 3 really burned me out with how little Carlin managed to get across in such a huge chunk of time. webmeister posted:Thanks for the Fall of Civilisations rec btw, three episodes in and it's been a great listen so far!  Slowly working my way through it during my commutes, this is good poo poo.
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Jan 6, 2020 18:46
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Yeah didn't mean to open up a can of hate on Carlin; like I said I'm usually a pretty big fan of HH. He focuses a lot on creating a narrative for his episodes and I'd wager when he sat down to script he knew he wanted to end with the evacuation of the Philippines so the episode was focused on the Allies getting absolutely dunked on by Japan at the outset of war. My problem was more that he bloated what really should have been a 2-3 hour podcast up to 5+ hours, and instead of it being because he had a lot of interesting tangents to go on he was instead just rehashing the same couple points over and over and sucking MacArthur's dick for an hour. I'm still going to listen to Part 4 whenever it comes out, I just think 3 was one of his weaker episodes. 
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Jan 7, 2020 23:24
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My favorite HH is the one about the Anabaptist Munster Rebellion because it's the perfect event for Carlin's love of going into lurid detail over the most hosed up aspects of a story. The whole story is so wild it sounds made up, so it fits absolutely perfectly with Dan's usual dramatic narrative style.
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Jan 8, 2020 03:04
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Yeah I've already almost completely run through Fall of Civilizations (~1 hour into the Aztecs) just by listening to episodes while commuting. I already chew up podcasts at way too fast a rate to want to speed them up.
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Jan 14, 2020 18:18
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Welp, as of my drive to work today I've officially burned through all of Fall of Civilizations. Will definitely toss them some Patreon money, their podcasts are great and I love the presentation style. Aztec episode was really good, I learned that I actually knew jack poo poo about them or the actual minutia of their war with Cortés.
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Jan 16, 2020 20:30
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The Glumslinger posted:Its been posted Just an FYI to those who haven't listened yet, this episode isn't really all that focused on Olympias even though Dan claims it will be at the start of it. It's more of a brief rundown of Alexander the Great's rise to power, and the immediate aftermath and consequences as a result of his death. Olympias jumps in and out of the story and by Dan's own admission that's because he's working from sparse historical record where Olympias will just up and vanish for huge chunks of the story, but still bear it in mind.
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Feb 4, 2020 20:56
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Really made me want to pick up another campaign of Total War Three Kingdoms not gonna lie.
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Feb 29, 2020 00:16
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Kazak_Hstan posted:History of Rome is I think a must listen if you're into this kind of podcast. Revolutions by his own admission radicalized the hell out of Duncan and it rules.
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Apr 3, 2020 07:26
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SlothfulCobra posted:I did kinda lose a lot of interest in the History of Rome after the emperors consolidated their power away from the rest of the public and you only occasionally got to hear what normal people's lives were like because everything is either dynastic politics dealing with the whims of the emperor and the small circle around him or career military officers having their go at making their own dominion. Check out Drachinifel on Youtube. He does naval history mostly centered around WW1/WW2, but also sometimes covers more broader stuff and even recently had an episode where he brought in an aviation expect to breakdown all of the myths about the A6M Zero for two and a half hours. There is a visual component to it but it's usually just stills and the occasional diagram, so you can afford to just listen to it.
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Apr 3, 2020 21:32
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Firstscion posted:His April Fools episode about the HMS Thunderchild was great. lol I didn't see this, that's fantastic.
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Apr 4, 2020 03:14
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Zyklon B Zombie posted:I liked the early Super Nova in the Easts because they were coming at it from the Japan side of things society-wise which was pretty interesting, but was really bored hearing Carlin talking about how bad rear end marines were for 2 hours in the new one. Yeah somebody complained about it earlier in the thread but I actually really appreciated that Carlin took the time to really explore just what Japan was as a nation by the time the dominoes for WW2 started to fall. Honestly the most fascinating part of the whole Supernova series to me was the details on how Japan went through one of if not the most comprehensive and rapid societal overhauls in recorded human history. Like, a late medieval equivalent to a modern imperialist nation in <100 years, how a people endure that and how it in someways strengthens them but in others warps them is fascinating. I was kinda hoping the series was going to be more about that: WW2 from Japan's perspective, with more of a focus on the parts of the war that were considered crucial to them (China, Russia) but as soon as we got to Pearl Harbor it just became the US Pacific Theater show, which is a story I've hear told and retold a billion times. I was worried after he spent like an hour and a half of the last episode jerking off MacArthur, and this new episode has at least so far locked the rest of the series firmly into "Grandpa tells you a story about how brave and valiant and badass the US Marines were in the Pacific."
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Jun 6, 2020 23:50
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Count Roland posted:I haven't listened to the newer episodes of HH because the start of the series wasn't all that great in the first place. I'm not giving up on it though, once he moves on to another topic I may take it up again. Trouble is he spends years on big series. Yeah it's this for me. WW2 has been done to death, particularly from the perspective of the oh so brave and valiant and noble USA, so Carlin taking actual years to pump out a bunch of five hour episodes where he meanders though dad stories about how wacky MacArthur was or how badass the marines were just isn't great. I didn't even finish his most recent Supernova episode: I got up to the part where decided he needed to stop and both-sides the Japanese internment camps and decided nah I'm out. Appoda posted:I feel like he does best when he describes a unique moment in history, like stalingrad, munster or the one with all the sharks. There isn't much interesting to gain from "the Japanese had this very narrow win condition, aaaand... They hosed it up, here's four more hours of podcast" Also this, he does really well with one-off obscure events that can be structured with a clear beginning-middle-end arc that fits his "dad tells you an old story" style.
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Jul 28, 2020 19:24
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webmeister posted:Revolutions is back on November 1. Not long now comrades Duncan's recent tweets about how he and his wife watched Emily in Paris out of obligations and how he can't get over the unrealistic portrayal of American sports fan culture is  and makes me look forward to the continuation of Revolutions all the more.
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Oct 15, 2020 08:35
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ketchup vs catsup posted:New hardcore history is up Does the episode finally wrap up the series or does Dan meander enough to end on yet another cliffhanger?
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Nov 14, 2020 10:23
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First couple episodes are good at least, particularly the first one where Dan gives a really good run down of the absolutely insane do or die situation Japan faced after being forced open, and how crazy it is that they managed to speed run societal changes that took Europe 400-500 years in 40-50 years. Hopefully once Supernova is over next year he'll move on to shorter and/or farther removed from modern times.
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Nov 16, 2020 09:48
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Yeah it's weird how bad he is about getting help with non-English sources. As good as Dan's storytelling is about the Anabaptist Munster rebellion he makes a point that he's constrained to only one or two sources because those are the only ones he could find in English, and apparently there are a ton of German sources that contradict a lot of what he asserts about the whole incident. It doesn't seem like it would be that difficult for somebody of Dan's renown to get assistance in finding and translating international sources, but
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Nov 16, 2020 17:50
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Dan's problem is the same problem he's always had with his Common Sense takes, which is that he's opining for a specific political climate that simply does not and cannot exist in this country right now, which makes his both-sidesing at the best naïve and at worst incredibly problematic. Dan genuinely believes that sensible people should be able to sit down for sensible negotiation and compromise, irrespective of the divide between their held political beliefs. Since extremism of any kind is diametrically opposed to such a worldview, he holds both the far left and the far right as equally culpable in political dysfunction. I disagree that he's fallen for right wing propaganda, I think he's simply clinging to an out of touch idealistic view of how he thinks politics should work.
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Jan 14, 2021 19:00
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The Glumslinger posted:It doesn't help when he when spends several years on an extremely well worn and drops the interesting lens (the Japanese perspective) a third of the way in Yeah it's this, WW2 has been done to death but a retelling that focuses specifically on the war from the Japanese perspective is interesting. Everything up to Pearl Harbor in Supernova was interesting, but as soon as it happens Carlin shifts back to the same old and tired MURICA OOH RAH poo poo you've heard a billion times.
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Jan 26, 2021 20:52
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A story I'd really like to hear is the impact of the Age of Imperialism, WW1, and WW2 on Africa and the Middle East, from the perspective of Africa and the Middle East. The scramble for Africa, post WW1/Ottoman Empire partitioning of the Middle East, and the Africa campaigns in WW2 largely shaped the geopolitics of those areas up through the modern day and something other than a bland retelling from an Imperialist western perspective would be fascinating.
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Jan 28, 2021 05:37
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He's also on record that were he to do the American Revolution over, he'd take a completely different approach to it.
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May 10, 2021 04:13
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CommonShore posted:If you're tempted to listen to Malcolm Gladwell download a podcast on a topic you know a lot about and then count how many times he says things that are wrong in the first 10 minutes and then delete it. Could pretty much say the same thing about Carlin lol. The perfect HH guest host.
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May 13, 2021 22:39
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The problem with creating historical content about the native civilizations of the Americas is that there is incredibly sparse historical record to work from. Many of them didn't keep written records in the traditional sense (ie: quipus) or if they did the conquistadors systematically hunted them down and burned them because they considered them heretical. So you're primarily left with archeological findings, first hand accounts from the Europeans who invaded and destroyed the native empires, and a handful of interviews of native survivors by curious Europeans about what their life was like after it was mostly already destroyed. That's a really shaky and potentially unreliable base to start from, and there are only more gaps to fill in from there. I'm not saying any of this justifies the huge leaps in logic and sweeping generalizations historians tend to break out when talking about the Aztecs, Mayans, Inca, etc; I can see though how it would be really difficult to create a three hour podcast about the history of the Aztecs without doing so though.
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May 16, 2021 20:03
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Yeah Duncan is sympathetic towards a lot of figures who were assholes or didn't really end up serving the cause of revolution that well. He liked Lafayette enough to write an entire book about him even though he was ultimately never more than a (well meaning) liberal at heart, he loving loves Talleyrand who is like the textbook scheming chancellor character, and more recently he's pretty up front about his view that Tsar Nicholas wasn't really a bad guy personally and what happened to him is pitiable in a sense, he was just a woefully under equipped ruler for the times he was in and too attached to absolute authority that was very clearly not long for the world.
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May 18, 2021 22:47
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webmeister posted:“Woefully under equipped ruler for the times” is pretty much the catchphrase of every revolution One of Carlin's better analogies was his idea of the "monarchy dice" representing the random chance of hereditary monarchs. Sometimes you roll an 11 or 12 and get a Cyrus II or a Louis XIV who is just absolutely a cut above, sometimes you roll a 1 or 2 and get a Caligula or a Charles VI. But the vast majority are 4's, 5's, and 6's: not great, even arguably substandard, but usually fine in times of peace and stability. Charles I, Louis XVI, and Nicholas II all kinda fall into this bucket: monarchs who probably would be relative historical footnotes had they ruled in more stable times, but lacked the ability to handle the upheavals of their respective eras.
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May 19, 2021 01:39
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Vagabong posted:Nicholas II probably evokes more sympathy than Charles I or Louis XVI simply due to how badly things ended not just for him but his immediate family, even if his own actions played a major role in landing them in that cellar. I'd actually argue Louis XVI is the most sympathetic of the three. He inherited a really lovely situation thanks to France's patchwork of old and new laws + his predecessor squandering the state treasury, and as CharlestheHammer mentioned he actually was trying to reform France for the better, but it was just too deep a quagmire for somebody of his meek and indecisive character to handle and it all eventually blew up on him. Charles I either could not or would not read the room in regards to the very obvious religious tensions he was enflaming, and trying to impose the common book of prayer on Scotland during a time that he knew he couldn't afford to go to war at pretty much any cost is so monumentally stupid a decision it defies description. He was then also given like every loving chance possible to keep his life and his crown and stubbornly refused at every turn until there was quite literally no other option but to lop his head off. I sympathize with Nicholas II insofar that he was a genuinely loving family man and would have been happier living with his wife and kids somewhere far away from the levers of power, but yeah otherwise he was a terrible ruler, and incredibly fickle person to work under even if you were sycophantic towards him, and comically racist/anti-semitic.
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May 26, 2021 03:09
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Also it was less "shot in a basement" and more "shot at in a basement by a bunch of drunks who missed most of the time, and then had to go around and awkwardly try to bayonet and fatally shoot them." The only one who died quickly was ironically Nicholas II himself since the one sober guy in charge opened the execution by nailing him in the chest a couple times.
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May 26, 2021 17:15
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Even ignoring the White Army you have to remember Nicholas II was directly related to like half the royal heads of state of Europe. I'm sure there was a very real worry that any living Romanov could eventually find their way to one of those other great powers ruled by a relative, and then their claim used as a pretext by those powers to swoop in and crush the revolution. I'm sure they were particularly worried about British and French intervention since by the time of the execution Russia had already bowed out of the war via a backdoor treaty with the central powers that absolutely ticked the remaining Allies off something fierce.
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May 26, 2021 21:06
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Oh I agree, I'm not arguing that the kids deserved to die. I was responding to the post above mine arguing that I don't think it's correct that the children were not politically dangerous to the Bolsheviks.
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May 26, 2021 22:25
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Count Roland posted:I stopped in supernova... at some point. I liked the first episode and wish he'd kept the Japanese perspective. I quit in part four when he tried to both-sides the issue of the Japanese internment camps. Don't really have any interest in finishing the series after that.
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Jun 9, 2021 17:56
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buglord posted:I’ll admit I am not super well read on Carlin’s sources and I didn’t catch the both-sidesing of things (unless this is from the new episode which I haven’t listened to it.) His (paraphrased) stance was basically that it's easy to look back on Japanese internment as morally reprehensible, but doing so ignores the unfathomable sense of fear and paranoia among Americans after Pearl Harbor, so can we *really* so cleanly say the people who carried out and supported internment were bad? Besides the answer being ABSO-loving-LUTELY he manages to undermine his own mealy-mouthed bullshit by making an offhand comment of "Now you could ask why we didn't also intern German-Americans and Italian-Americans", a thought if explored even a little bit reveals that the truth is that climate of fear was exploited by those in power to pursue racist policy that ultimately benefited a lot of rich white people. But instead of exploring it he just drops it immediate and goes back to his "maybe the truth is in the middle" garbage. I'm generally able to just roll my eyes at Carlin's politics and move on, but it was such an ignorant and reprehensible take I haven't been able to pick up HH since.
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Jun 9, 2021 20:22
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Personally I am very glad the Holocaust shocked the world so deeply that no systemic genocides have taken place since.
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Jun 12, 2021 23:30
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Carlin basically hates extremism of all kinds because he's obsessed with some fantasy ideal of politics where compromise always exists if we'd just get over ourselves and come together for sensible discourse. Even if he acknowledges the injustice of police brutality vs minorities protests can't be the answer, because those just inflame tensions on both sides.
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Jun 13, 2021 22:48
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Karanas posted:Listening to the latest episode of Revolutions, I think pointing out Nicholas' hypocrisy in saying how the Dumas would choose ministers incapable of doing their job is the first time I've heard Mike raising his voice or sounding genuinly angry. https://mobile.twitter.com/mikeduncan/status/1421975713238953984
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Aug 2, 2021 19:18
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a pipe smoking dog posted:But with Nicholas you really feel the contempt he has for this stupid arrogant racist rear end in a top hat who thinks he literally doesn't have to bother trying to do anything because God will provide. It's even worse than that: Nicholas genuinely believed he was divinely appointed, placed on Earth in his role of Tsar by God in order to enact His will. His thinking wasn't just "I don't have to make any concessions because God will save me", it was "I can't make any concessions because doing so would be a betrayal of God's divine plan for myself and the people of Russia."
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Aug 3, 2021 08:13
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AnEdgelord posted:What exactly do people in this thread think Nicholas's 'good intentions' were? As far as I can tell his entire motivation was "God told everyone I was in charge so now its a sin to not like and respect me". He was a spoiled brat in the body of an adult man who couldn't stand to not get his way and unleashed proto-fascist militias and loyal military units on his own people. I mean, I think it's safe to say that Nicholas didn't really harbor ill-will towards the majority of his subjects and from his perspective genuinely tried his best to lead and guide Russia. You see this even from the very beginning where he tried to take a very active hand in the day-to-day minutia of government. The problem was that he just wasn't particularly bright or well suited to ruling, but was also stubborn as a mule in regards to using and maintaining his absolute rule. So the more he tried to more he mucked things up, which caused more people to call for him to delegate or cede power, which caused him to double down on not giving an inch. It also didn't help that he and his wife were largely surrounded by sycophants who continuously whispered in their ears that the majority of Russia's citizens actually loved and adored them, and it was just this minority rabble that wanted to lead the country astray that hated them. I definitely see it all as a "road to hell paved with good intentions" scenario, albeit acknowledging that the one paving the road is as dumb as the bricks he's laying. The whole thing definitely gets to a point though where there was just no excuse remaining for Nicholas to refuse to acknowledge his situation - even taking his upbringing, beliefs, and circumstances into account.
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Aug 3, 2021 18:01
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It's stretching the definition of monarchy a bit, but Edo Period Japan is a potential example. There was nothing approaching even a veneer of popular representation, and in fact the population was rigidly controlled in terms of both social and actual physical mobility. At the same time it was a ~250 year period of stability, peace, economic growth, and flourishing of the arts and culture. Quality of life was also pretty good relative to most other nations of the time, even for peasants. Generally you only saw isolated popular uprisings caused by local magistrates deciding to hike up taxes.
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Aug 4, 2021 02:06
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Back when I had a less-dim view of Carlin I bought a package of all the HH's to date during a winter holiday sale he was having, it was just a link to download a bunch of .mp3's that all had unclear file names that I manually had to rejigger to be easily navigable. But that's Carlin who's a dinosaur so I assume most other podcasts have a cleaner way of handling it.
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Aug 10, 2021 21:05
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Arrhythmia posted:"Of course I'll read the audiobook. I write things, and then read them to you. That's the nature of our relationship" - Mike Duncan, paraphrased, talking about the Lafayette book somewhere down the way Somebody on twitter asked if he'd also read the audiobook for the French version and Mike's response was "lol no."
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Sep 2, 2021 19:45
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I totally get why after so many years he'd like to put a bow on things after Russia and move on to another project, but it is a drat shame Duncan isn't going to cover the Iranian Revolution.
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Nov 11, 2021 02:41
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Gaius Marius posted:Carlin's got an episode with Elon musk on ahahahahahaha 
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Dec 14, 2021 03:07
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