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Credit where credit is due, Phone is the one who actually used "Everything is hosed, with an emphasis on everything" in reference to North Carolina's redistricting ruling out anything ever getting better. I just quoted it in a national political context, and put the thread title before it.Phone posted:Fried Chicken: you have an url tag wrong in the OP and you didn't accredit me with the thread title Solidarity forever, fellow despairposter. Captain_Maclaine fucked around with this message at 15:26 on May 7, 2014 |
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May 7, 2014 15:20
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silvergoose posted:Dang, man, making me want more books. Never read Foote's, and after Grant's memoirs, I'm hankering for an epic history. Be forewarned that Foote's narrative is three volumes long, and they're not short volumes either. Also, Foote is very sympathetic to Jefferson Davis, though he doesn't cross the line into Lost Cause apologia. It's a good read despite this, but seriously you're going to need to invest a lot of time to get through it.
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May 7, 2014 18:05
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Raskolnikov38 posted:The Jefferson Davis stuff is weird, he opens volume 1 by talking up Davis and it almost made me want to stop. I put it down to Foote being a Mississippian, and if I remember right from an interview he gave for Ken Burn's The Civil War when he was growing up in MS Davis was still a very-much admired figure.
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May 7, 2014 18:12
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Cimber posted:Not sure if this was mentioned or not, but have you read "Battle cry of Freedom"? Its an excelent read, and was my textbook in my civil war class. Anyone needing a high quality basic history of the war could do far worse than Battle Cry of Freedom. I had the luck, man years ago, to see a panel discussion in DC between McPhearson (author of Battle Cry of Freedom, for those that don't know), Eric Foner (Marxian author of Reconstruction, among other things), and a third guy who's name I forget because he wasn't McPhearson or Foner. Specifically, they were discussion the Confederate naval efforts and their drive to build river ironclads, at the expense of their already-inadequate rail network (lacking many ironworks, they couldn't roll new armor-grade plate and instead used salvaged rail iron). It was pretty amazing, makes me wish I'd stayed an Americanist some times. McDowell posted:As for Jefferson Davis, if Ken Burns' 'Civil War' is anything to go on, the dude had a really hard time managing the Confederacy because it was made up of State's Rights idiots who didn't understand how a centralized government is vital during a war. Also, by all accounts Davis was something of an abrasive prick in person, and never felt he needed to justify his actions so long as they were internally consistent and he believed them to be right. EDIT: you're right, we should stop derailing. Sorry, the Civil War's a weak spot for me.
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May 7, 2014 18:29
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socialsecurity posted:This really seems like the kind of thing the Republican's should not be fighting Obama on, seems like a good way to piss of both minorities and the military It's not going to piss off anyone in the military that they care about, and GOP minority "outreach" has for quite a while been firmly set at tokenism and trying not to openly call for re-segregation too often. This is, predictably enough, just about riling up the base.
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May 7, 2014 21:39
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Samurai Sanders posted:How exactly was Hillary supposed to "handle" a militant group in another country, which afaik made no direct or indirect threats to us? The same way Obama was supposed to prevent things from going nuts in Ukraine and Syria. Which is to say that there's nothing Hillary could have effectively done as SecState means precisely nothing to those making such accusations, it's just "BAD THING, HER FAULT!!!"
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May 8, 2014 17:56
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Tharizdun posted:How come Sorkin take-a-stand liberals like Andy in The American President never inspire anyone Too few explosions.
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May 8, 2014 18:57
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zoux posted:Oh non-patrician Romans always felt like that. Hey, at least they got bread with their circuses from time to time.
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May 9, 2014 17:51
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AstheWorldWorlds posted:Yeah, good point there actually. I guess one of the biggest problems is how widespread this system is, making it difficult/impossible to run away from. I mentioned a desire to leave the country a couple of months ago but on further reflection I don't even know if there is a place to move to that won't have similar issues given the global scope we are dealing with. Around here? We swap drink recipes, and complain.
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May 9, 2014 17:56
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tbp posted:It is not what people do anyway. You can see in this very thread that most folks, even supposedly politically active ones are uneducated as to where to place the culpability for the biggest economic decline in a long time. Well then big guy, enlighten us: Where should we place culpability for the biggest economic decline in a long time? 
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May 9, 2014 18:13
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Wraith of J.O.I. posted:Christ, this is real? How the hell... In short? The Civil War is one of those uncommon instances where the losers, rather than the winners, wrote the histories (for quite a while, at least).
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May 9, 2014 20:05
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DACK FAYDEN posted:We should start calling it that, the same way you occasionally hear "War of Northern Aggression" down South. I'll admit it: Sometimes when I'm feeling particularly vindictive I refer to it as the War of the Slaveholder's Rebellion.
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May 9, 2014 20:22
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Jesus christ, I come back from a lovely weekend with my girlfriend and this thread's gone straight-up Joy Division on me. All jokes aside it ain't that bad, guys. 
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May 12, 2014 17:29
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Prester John posted:Wow! I really appreciate you recognizing me and asking. Well, my situation is complicated but my life is much better now. I'm out of the shelter and living with some friends in an apartment now. My only source of income is food stamps and 60 bucks a week from donating plasma, so things are kind of tight but I'm managing. My place is quiet, my roomates are actually people I know from PCY so we all kind of "get" how nice it is to live drama free, we have a killer internet connection, and although food is tight at times we still eat everyday. I take the perspective e that for a person in my position I'm living in a relative golden age so I'm pretty happy. I'm a bit late but I'll chime in too that it's good to hear your situation is improving. Have you had a chance to read that Orwell book I recommended back when your thread was still live?
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May 12, 2014 22:15
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Slickdrac posted:Isn't being Ted Cruz enough reason for Canada to want to sever? No doubt, but making Ted Cruz squirm is enough reason to make him go through the formalities.
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May 13, 2014 03:13
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Joementum posted:Hold on guys, Karl Rove is saying there's still a chance that Hillary has brain damage.... You know, I don't think there has been enough investigations into such affairs. Someone name a(nother) special investigator!
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May 13, 2014 03:15
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Rexicon1 posted:gently caress. Guess were all republicans. We have won the victory over ourselves.
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May 13, 2014 22:14
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sean10mm posted:Or quote the official proclamations of secession by the various states since pretty much all they do is Not that surprising, since Mississippi was vying with South Carolina at the time for the title of Most Obnoxious Slave State.
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May 17, 2014 04:27
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A Winner is Jew posted:This is the stupidest thing. You only really need 4 guns max. A semi-auto shotgun because gently caress going trap shooing with a pump. A 10-22 as a target practice rifle because ammo for them is comically cheep. A high caliber rifle for hunting / long range shooting. A black power rifle because they're loving awesome. And if you really want, a hand gun or two. Uhh excuse me, last I checked it was important to have an AK around, if only to measure the quality of one's day.
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May 18, 2014 03:36
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Solkanar512 posted:So that means black dildos are considered tactical now? Much, perhaps all, of TFR exists to answer this specific question.
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May 18, 2014 04:54
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greatn posted:Great now we have two Benghazis. Two Benghazis that we know of.  Sounds like we need another investigative committee just to determine how many there really are!
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May 18, 2014 19:59
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mdemone posted:Holy poo poo what the gently caress is that thing, it looks like a Warhammer 40K cover. That, unless I mistake my WWII railroad cannons, is either Schwerer Gustav or Dora, two 800mm superheavy artillery pieces that are among the most extreme examples of the Nazi mania for gigantism in weapons systems.
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May 18, 2014 21:05
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mdemone posted:Good sweet Lord. Wouldn't ten 80mm pieces have done the job without having to spend years making something so...ridiculous? It was pretty much too much gun for anything reasonable, yes. I mean sure, the Maginot Line did present a formidable challenge to existing artillery, Gustav was a bloated overreaction that owes more to Hitler liking any weapon project if it was big enough than to anything else. The resources wasted on building it would have been much better used in conventional artillery/tank/aircraft production. They did fire Gustav during the siege of Sevastopol, where unsurprisingly it demolished everything it hit. Unfortunately it only fired about fifty times since it took about half an hour to forty-five minutes just to reload the drat thing, and after the siege it'd burned out its barrel liner (from that and test firings) and had to be refit. I don't know if Dora was ever employed successfully, since it was built later and both took so much time to transport, assemble, and prepare before they could open fire that outside of siege work they really weren't all that useful, for all their considerable power.
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May 18, 2014 21:34
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Luigi Thirty posted:I'm pretty sure the Nazis had prototype radar-guided surface-to-air missiles in like 1943 but they weren't seriously developed because they were considered a defensive weapon and saying Germany needed defensive weapons was I don't know that they ever built guided ones, but I do know they developed the shoulder-launched Fliegerfaust late in the war, thought it wasn't particularly successful as it was too short-ranged to hit high fliers. Raskolnikov38 posted:The nazi war machine was literally run by a heroin addict until 1944 with a meth addled Hitler ordering increasingly dumber and dumber things made. That only two were built is a minor miracle. Two others were on order, but never got completed. Your larger point about the Nazi economy being a slow-motion trainwreck from start to finish is, of course, entirely correct.
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May 18, 2014 21:40
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able.
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mdemone posted:Just from perusing pictures, Dora also seems somewhat smaller, but maybe that's a problem of my perspective not being able to handle a photo of a gun that fires a shell the size of a VW Beetle. Oh, its shells were a bit larger than a  That's a T-34 next to it, for those who aren't as conversant in tankchat.
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May 18, 2014 21:46
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Dystram posted:Can anyone explain to me why LOLbertarians don't just identify as Republican? They are pretty much the exact same thing. Weed and goldbug paranoia, from what I can tell.
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May 19, 2014 18:48
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Tigntink posted:I... I don't get it. She literally probably wouldn't be alive if it weren't for the assistance her family received growing up and republicans want to cut that. US Politics Thread for June: I Need a Drink
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May 19, 2014 22:33
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Amergin posted:At this point can we write off Christie as a 2016 contender? It's not because you're white, it's because you're a douche.
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May 21, 2014 00:41
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beatlegs posted:You see, it's all Obama's fault for having the nerve to be black and be elected president. He should have been more sensitive to nice white conservative Americans who are "sensitive" about race. He should have done the right thing and declined to run. Now we have "growing racialization". Thanks, Obama! You joke, but in the Freep thread and elsewhere the non-ironic argument has come up more than once that Obama forces white assholes to be racists somehow, so therefore it's his fault they can't stop making racist comments. I want to say there's even been some state-level legislators who've expressed such sentiments.
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May 22, 2014 00:36
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EDIT: I misread what you said, never mind.
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May 22, 2014 23:06
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Fried Chicken posted:"Guilty and Charged" was the broadcast, the column had a longer name. It was about how trying to make up revenues from top bracket tax cuts and the mentality of treating defendants as "consumers" had resulted in a massive shift downward of justice system expenses to a massive amount of fees that the poor often can't pay. So then they get tossed in prison even though debtors prisons are technically illegal I heard that broadcast and thought about posting either here or in the prison thread about it, but frankly I couldn't think of any comment to add to it that wasn't just a stream of frustrated profanities.
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May 27, 2014 17:29
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Pong Daddy posted:National Association for the Armament of Colored People? Similar things have been tried and for some odd reason neither the NRA nor anyone else who's usually so passionate in defense of gun ownership gave a peep when the Mulford Act passed and was signed into law by Governor Reagan.
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May 28, 2014 00:55
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zoux posted:My grandpa and his girlfriend confessed to me a few years ago that they have always hated the Japanese will never forgive them for Pearl Harbor. I don't know how widespread this feeling is among that generation but I suspect the answer is very widespread. My maternal grandfather was a seabee in the pacific and never really got over his distrust of the Japanese. His opinion on the Germans was not much better, and ran along the lines of "they tried it twice, we'll see if they go for a three."
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May 28, 2014 17:36
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zoux posted:You do in Russia. Which was even more of a vicious racial conflict than the Pacific theater, so I think the point stands.
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May 28, 2014 18:16
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computer parts posted:My grandfather was in the Pacific theater and he never talked about his experiences but supposedly my uncle has some pictures of him and his buddies carrying human heads around after raiding a Japanese base. That sort of thing was not particularly uncommon in the Pacific, and indicative of how both sides viewed each other.  From Life magazine, in case you're wondering.
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May 28, 2014 18:30
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zoux posted:Why would he, she had no way of opening the letters.  zoux posted:WW2 made even Dr. Seuss be a racist To his credit, at least, Seuss later sobered up and realized what a poo poo he'd been towards the Japanese and Japanese-Americans, and did a number of anti-racist cartoons in an effort to deal with his guilt. Not that that makes the buck-teeth, squint-eyed caricatures he'd done during the war any less cringe-worthy.
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May 28, 2014 18:50
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Joementum posted:Harry Reid turns the trolling up to 11. It's really what he's best at.
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May 28, 2014 20:08
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Munkeymon posted:To be fair, it wasn't intended to be a total sucker punch. The Japanese embassy in Washington just took too long to decode and translate the declaration of war. Can't find any decent sources online to back me up, though. This is correct. The 14-part telegram, which was a declaration of war in all but name, was supposed to be on FDR's desk about an hour before the planes hit Pearl, but due to its sensitive nature, the Japanese diplomats at the Washington embassy refused to let their professional typists (who were Americans hired for that and other secretarial work) handle the notes. As such, they had to do it themselves, and none of them knew how to touch-type, resulting in the message only getting to the White House after the bombs had been dropped.
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May 28, 2014 20:19
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Only technically, and the conclusion Enten arrives at: quote:In an increasingly polarized political atmosphere, the current lack of Republican commencement speakers at top universities and colleges makes a lot of sense; a decent number of people, including Democrats, don’t like to hear differing views. Presumes that college audiences are rejecting conservative speakers out of blind ideology, as opposed to, you know, not wanting to listen to the horrible poo poo they have to offer because they recognize it as horrible poo poo. Which strikes me as pointless both-sides-are-equally-polarized bullshit. Captain_Maclaine fucked around with this message at 20:52 on May 28, 2014 |
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May 28, 2014 20:46
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Way back when I finished undergrad, we had David McCullough as our speaker. This was not long after he'd published his John Adams bio, which history nerd that I was and am, I thought was pretty sweet.
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May 28, 2014 20:57
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